extraordinary%20encounters

Fairies encountered
Traditions of fairy folk can be found anywhere
in the world, but they are usually spoken of in
the past tense. What is less well known is that
such beliefs derive not just from distant folklore
but from perceived experiences of a sort
that are still reported from time to time even
today. British anomalist Janet Bord writes,
“Today the knowledge of and belief in fairies
has all but died out among country
people. . . . However[,] the changes that have
occurred this century have not resulted in the
complete extinction of the fairies: they have
survived, because people still see them” (Bord,
1997). Though Victorian popular culture perpetrated
the notion that fairies are gauzywinged
creatures, the fairies of tradition have
no wings. Beyond that, they vary in appearance
from region to region, though most are
small and humanlike, sometimes with brown
or green skin. They are of uncertain temperament
and, thus, best avoided.
Collectors of folklore—a notion and discipline
that came into existence around 1800—
came upon many firsthand accounts. These
can be found in any number of scholarly texts
on fairy lore. Though sometimes puzzled by
the apparent sincerity of their informants, few
folklorists were willing to take the leap of faith
required to embrace actual belief in fairies.
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One who did, however, was the well-regarded
W. Y. Evans-Wentz, an anthropologist of religion
who had a Ph.D. from Oxford University.
In the first decade of the twentieth century,
Evans-Wentz traveled through the Celtic
regions of the British Isles as well as Brittany
(on France’s northwest coast). The result was a
folklore classic, The Fairy Faith in Celtic
Countries (originally published in 1911).
Aside from its worth as a record of surviving
fairy beliefs and associated superstitions, it is
unique in its championing of an underlying
reality behind the tradition. Like the pioneering
Rev. Robert Kirk, a Scottish clergyman
whose The Secret Common-Wealth (1691) preserved
fairy lore in the Highlands, Evans-
Wentz deduced that fairies live in an otherworld
that overlaps with the human world.
He went so far as to claim that “we can postulate
scientifically, on the showing of the data
of psychical research, the existence of such invisible
intelligences as gods, genii, daemons,
all kinds of true fairies, and disembodied
men.”
Not all purported witnesses were the uneducated
rural folk stereotypically associated
with fairy beliefs and encounters. A seventeenth-century
Swedish clergyman, Peter
Rahm, gave this sworn statement to legal authorities: