extraordinary%20encounters

took after a child and nearly caught him. Up
close, the children got, in Williams’s words, a
“full and clear view of his ancient, swarthy,
grim complexion.” During the chase another
of the male figures shouted at the pursuer in
an unknown language (Jones, 1979). Williams,
who went on to become a prominent
man of the cloth, never forgot the incident
but was never able to explain it. “I am forced
to classify it among my unknowables,” he
wrote (Jones, 1979).
The inherent implausibility of fairies
notwithstanding, “sightings” have been recorded
even in recent years. On August 10,
1977, while patrolling in the early morning
hours, a Hull, England, police constable came
upon a fog bank in a nearby field. When the
fog lifted, he saw three small figures dancing:
a man dressed in a “sleeveless jerkin, with
tight-fitting trousers” and two women clad in
“bonnets, shawls and white dresses”—hardly
late twentieth-century clothing. Assuming
they were drunks, the officer got out of his car
and walked toward them, only to see them
vanish in front of his eyes. Many fairy accounts
describe the beings’ love of dancing.
During World War II, for example, W. E.
Thorner, making his way with great difficulty
through a furious storm along a clifftop on
Hoy in the Orkney Islands, was startled to
come upon small creatures “with long, dark,
bedraggled hair.” They were dancing wildly,
“seeming to throw themselves over the cliff
edge” (Marwick, 1975).
An incident in County Carlow, Ireland, in
November 1959 claimed four witnesses. In
Dunroe, a man named John Byrne was using
a bulldozer to move a large bush when a man
no more than three feet tall abruptly dashed
out from underneath it. He fled across a field
and was lost to view after he jumped over a
fence. Three other men observed the peculiar
occurrence. As late as the early 1990s, fifteenyear-old
Brian Collins, vacationing with his
parents in the Aran Islands off west Donegal,
was taking an early morning walk when he
spotted two men fishing in the sea from an
overlooking bank. Three and a half feet tall,
Fairies encountered 101
dressed in green, and wearing brown boots,
they were engaged in a laugh-punctuated conversation
in Gaelic. Apparently aware of his
presence, they jumped off the bank and were
gone. As he looked for them, the youth found
a pipe that he thought was one of theirs. He
put it in a locked drawer, from which it subsequently
disappeared. He saw the beings again,
and this time he tried to photograph and
tape-record them, but nothing of them developed
on either film or tape.
A series of “sightings” in 1938, in West
Limerick, began when schoolboy John Keely
met a two-foot-tall man, dressed in red, on a
road. When Keely asked him where he was
from, the strange man snapped, “I’m from the
mountains, and it’s all equal to you what my
business is.” The next day Keely and friends
returned to the scene. The friends hid in the
bushes while Keely approached a group of
fairies. One took his hand, and they walked
together for a short distance. The fairies ran
away, however, when they saw the boys in the
bushes. Other men and boys reported their
own encounters in the same area at the same
time, and the Dublin-based Irish Press carried
stories. The men had chased the fairies, but as
one witness put it, “they jumped the ditches
as fast as a greyhound. . . . Though they
passed through hedges, ditches, and marshes,
they appeared neat and clean all the time.”
Witnesses said the beings had “hard, hairy
faces like men, and no ears” (Barry, 1938).
On a casual walk along the shore of a
peninsula in Scotland’s Western Highlands
one day in 1972, Artie Traum, an American
folk singer, heard unusual sounds. As he listened
more carefully, he realized they were
voices, though he could see no one around.
They were singing “run, man, run” in a weird
harmony while fiddles and pipes played behind
them. As the sounds grew ever louder,
Traum panicked and fled into a nearby
woods. Though he still saw nothing, he heard
crackling sounds and “great motion” as if he
were being pursued. As all this was happening,
“my head was swarming with thousands
of voices, thousands of words making no