extraordinary%20encounters

means, ranging from naïve New Age nuttiness
to expansions and willed changes of awareness
involving techniques handed down within the
old traditions, but developed and applied in a
modern way” (Stewart, 1995). New Age
fairies are a gentler lot than their harsh counterparts
in tradition. Fairies are now incorporated
into such concerns as healing, gardening,
Earth awareness, ritual magic, and
personal transformation—matters far removed
from the often ill-tempered, impatient,
anthrophobic concerns of traditional
fairies.
See Also: Chaneques; Close encounters of the third
kind; Cottingley fairies; Fairy captures; Magonia;
White’s little people
Further Reading
Barry, John, 1938. “Fairies in Eire.” The Living Age
355 (November): 265–266.
Bord, Janet, 1997. Fairies: Real Encounters with Little
People. New York: Carroll and Graf Publishers.
Briggs, Katharine, 1976. An Encyclopedia of Fairies:
Hobgoblins, Brownies, Bogies, and Other Supernat -
ural Creatures. New York: Pantheon Books.
Davis, Isabel L., 1970. Review of Vallee’s Passport to
Magonia. UFO Investigator (June): 3.
Evans, Alex, 1978. “Encounters with Little Men.”
Fate 31, 11 (November): 83–86.
Evans-Wentz, W. Y., 1966. The Fairy-Faith in Celtic
Countries. New York: University Books.
Galde, Phyllis, 1993. “I See by the Papers: More
Fairies Seen.” Fate 46, 4 (April): 14–15.
Jones, T. Gwynn, 1979. Welsh Folklore and Folk-Cus -
tom. Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield.
Keightley, Thomas, 1878. The Fairy Mythology. London:
G. Bell.
MacManus, D. A., 1959. The Middle Kingdom: The
Faerie World of Ireland. London: Max Parrish.
Marwick, Ernest W., 1975. The Folklore of Orkney
and Shetland. London: B. T. Batsford.
Narvaez, Peter, ed., 1997. The Good People: New
Fairylore Essays. Lexington: University Press of
Kentucky.
Rojcewicz, Peter M., 1984. The Boundaries of Ortho -
doxy: A Folkloric Look at the UFO Phenomenon.
Ph.D. dissertation, University of Pennsylvania.
Sanderson, St ew a rt, ed., 1976. The Se c ret Common-
Wealth and A Sh o rt Treatise of Charms and Spels by
Ro b e rt Kirk . To t owa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefie l d .
Sheaffer, Robert, 1981. The UFO Verdict: Examining
the Evidence. Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books.
St ew a rt, R. J., 1995. The Living Wo rld of Fa e ry.
Gl a s t o n b u ry, Somerset, England: Gothic Im a g e
Pu b l i c a t i o n s .
Fairy captures 103
Traum, Artie, 1972. “Rollin’ and Tumblin’: The
Cambridge Festival.” Crawdaddy (November):
20–22.
Vallee, Jacques, 1969. Pa s s p o rt to Magonia: From Fo l k -
l o re to Flying Sa u c e r s . Chicago: He n ry Re g n e ry.
Wilkins, Harold T., 1952. “Pixie-Haunted Moor.”
Fate 5, 5 (July/August): 110–116.
Fairy captures
In 1907, Lady Archibald Campbell, a collector
of traditional lore, interviewed a blind
man and his wife who lived in conditions of
great poverty in an Irish glen. The man told
her, in all apparent seriousness, that once he
had captured a small being he called a leprechaun.
It was two feet tall, with dark but
clear skin and red hair. He was dressed in a
red cap, green clothes, and boots.
“I gripped him close in my arms and took
him home,” the old man related. “I called to
the woman [his wife] to look at what I had
got. ‘What doll is it that you have there?’ she
cried. ‘A living one,’ I said, and put it on the
dresser. We feared to lose it; we kept the door
locked. It talked and muttered to itself queer
words. . . . It might have been near on a fortnight
since we had the fairy, when I said to
the woman, ‘Sure, if we show it in the great
city we will be made up [rich]. So we put it in
a cage. At night we would leave the cage door
open, and we would hear it stirring through
the house. . . . We fed it on bread and rice and
milk out of a cup at the end of a spoon.”
At last the little being escaped, and after
that the family’s fortunes, never much to
begin with, declined even further. The man
lost his sight, and the couple sank ever deeper
into poverty and despair.
A happier story recounts not so much the
capture of a fairy as the domestication of one.
Lady Gregory and W. B. Yeats heard it from
an old couple, the Kellehers, who lived in the
Wickland Mountains of Ireland. The Kellehers
said the events had taken place years before,
when they were newly married.
One winter day, Mr. Kelleher encountered
a fairy and, in some unspecified fashion, got
him to stay in the house for the next week or