Pixy-Led? The Truth about Fairy Disorientation!

Get lost in familiar places? You're not alone! Simon and Chris are bewildered by supernatural disorientation, including cases of people being pixy-led by  Newfoundland fairies and Balkan witches. Discover traditional defenses against non-human misleaders, from carrying bread to wearing clothes inside out (and yes, sometimes even stripping naked!). While our hosts consider scientific explanations - glitches in human compasses, they grapple with bizarre reports of impossible landscapes: gardens without paths, eighty foot hedges, and fields that trap their victims. Plus, one host recounts their own uncanny pixy-led experience in a car. Care to guess who?

Our readings from this month
Janet Bord, Fairies: Real Encounters with Little People

Dermot Mac Manus, The Middle Kingdom  [stray sod]

John Gregorson Campbell, Superstitions of the Highlands & Islands of Scotland, - Gaistig on the Island of Coll 

Jeremy Harte, Explore Fairy Traditions 

Mirjam Mencej, '‘Something Came Over Him’: Narratives on Being ‘Carried by Witches’ and Their Possible Connection to Altered States of Consciousness', Preternature 7 (2018)

Barbara Rieti, Strange Terrain: The Fairy World in Newfoundland

Chris Woodyard, http://hauntedohiobooks.com/news/the-lost-children/ - disorientation in the woods

S. Young, ‘Pixy-Led in the South West’, Transactions of the Devonshire Association 148 (2016), 311-336  https://www.academia.edu/35045282/Young_Pixy_Led_in_Devon_and_the_South_West

S. Young, ‘Four Neglected Pixy-Led Sources from Devon’, The Devon Historian 85 (2016), 39-49 https://www.academia.edu/33316277/Young_Four_Neglected_Pixy_Led_Sources_from_Devon

Any others to recommend?

Transcript

Simon: Chris, welcome to the new year. What's the big project for this year?
Chris: Well, I didn't get a book done last year that I wanted to get done very, very much. And life just got in the way, I don't know why. But this year, if I have to make a resolution, that's what's going to happen. And it's another book on mourning and death, naturally, because I'm all about being a little ray of sunshine. Fingers crossed, I've got all the notes. I've just got to put it all together.
Simon: I can't quite let you go just with that. It's a book about death, but death among the Babylonians, or is this more ancient Greece?
Chris: No, no, we're back to the 19th century. It's basically about mourning textiles and their cultural significance. I know I'm told that this will delight my dozen of fans. It's very, very niche.
Simon: It sounds a lot of fun. Do you think you'll actually be able to finish it in a year though, seriously?
Chris: Yeah, yeah. I had all the notes, for example, for my A is for Arsenic ABC book, and was able to put that together in six months. So, fingers crossed.
Simon: But I imagine this would be a longer book. It sounds a little bit more coffee table. Oh, yes, yes.
Chris: I'm hoping that it will be a coffee table type book with lots of illustrations. But yeah, that's my goal. How about you? What's on the plate?
Simon: Well, I think my first goal is finishing the Changeling book that I've been working on for the past several months with my co-editor, Davide Irmacura, and there we'll have to see if we kill each other because we're presently writing or rewriting the introduction. And this is a very tense moment. Other than that, I sense fairies on the horizon. You may be surprised to learn. It's a bit like learning that you're writing a book about mourning textiles. It's in the stars.
Chris: Yes, exactly.
Simon: Well, with this, I will introduce you, Chris, to today's rather unusual subject. It's my turn this time, and I have chosen fairy disorientation. And if you, dear listener, are disoriented, you will probably know this phenomenon as being pixie-led. And this is something that is found all around the world in different supernatural systems, and it's the idea that you go out in a place that you know, sometimes in the middle of the day, sometimes at midnight, but it's a place you know, a place you shouldn't get lost, and yet you get hopelessly confounded and confused. And at the end, you often have either a vision, which is brought by supernatural forces, or you hear a diabolical laugh and clapping, and we'll talk more about this in a I think there's no better way with this than just to jump in with one of your famous readings, Chris, to give us a flavour.
Chris: Okay, this comes from Strange Terrain, the Fairy World in Newfoundland by Barbara Rietty. In March of 1991, an 82-year-old Spaniards Bay man told a university student how he once found himself disoriented in a small thicket of woods a five-minute walk from his house. Never lost my cool at all, he said, and I turned my cap inside out, and of course I said, I must be in the fairies. He emerged from the trees onto the barrens and saw a man several hundred feet away. So he sat down on a rock to contemplate the land, which looked different than any he'd ever seen. I didn't recognize the ground I was on, so I said, I must be astray. I went down to the gentleman, knowing he was a fairy that looked like any human being. I went down in a casual sort of a way and said, good afternoon. He said, good evening. Not letting him know that I was astray, I said, can you tell me how far mainland is, going through New Harbor? Oh yes, he said, just up there, just straight up over the hill and you'll find the road. I said, thank you very much. Now I still had my cap turned inside out. As I was going up the hill, I figured like I could hear my father calling, which was only my imagination to be straight about it. After five or 10 minutes, I finally came to myself, whatever did happen. But I says I was led astray and in the fairies.
Simon: Good old Barbara Rietty, launching us on this adventure of being pixie led. I'll try and just set out for you the main range of pixie or fairy experiences from Britain that we have. And I'm sure as we go along, we'll find there are far more exotic ones, but essentially there's the spectrum. And the spectrum goes all the way from someone having to walk two or three miles through a wood at night, a wood that they know admittedly, but in the fog and difficult conditions and getting lost. And the natural reaction there is to say, well, is that so surprising? Two much more dramatic cases. And the ones that particularly have struck me over the years are where a farmer has entered a field through a gate to cross to the gate on the other side, a field that he walks through four or five times a day. He gets to the other side and suddenly there's no gate there. He can't leave the field. And so he starts to go around the field and he can't find any gates, including the gates he came in by. And this in the middle of the day in blinding sunlight. And I've given you this range just to give you a sense of really quite expected, unsurprising experiences, the person getting lost at night, all the way to these really much more difficult to explain experiences, people getting lost in small areas that they know extremely well. And often we have, at least in Britain, the idea that these experiences will end with someone falling in the mud because there is the idea that they're being led around essentially by their noses by some kind of supernatural being. And when they fall in the mud, again and again in our records, we have reference to two things happening simultaneously. The fairies or whatever supernatural being it is that caused the misleading to start laughing and also simultaneously clapping their hands at the dismay of the person who has gone crashing into the bog.
Chris: The clapping of the hands, isn't that also something that Banshees do?
Simon: I can't remember that.
Chris: Yeah, they knock and they also clap their hands because it's part of keening.
Simon: Right, sorry. I'd forgotten about this with Banshees and perhaps I never knew it, but in medieval Irish, clapping your hands is the sign of keening. It makes absolute sense that they would clap their hands.
Chris: Okay, you told a story of a boggart that laughed when people fell in the mire as well. So they just seem to be having a really good time leading people astray.
Simon: Yeah, and there's a lot of this around. For instance, I've just finished a project on British horse spirits, and I'm sure you know there are all these legends about these horse spirits either leading people into the bog or even letting them go on their backs and the horse spirits throwing the person into the mud. And what happens when they do that? They can't clap, but they wicker, which is a verb I didn't know from Southern dialects, from the Southern counties, that means to neigh. And in the North, we say to knicker. And so it's the horse laughing essentially going, at the misery of these people. So it's even cross supernatural species.
Chris: Is there any geographic range to these?
Simon: Right here, I'm going to come out with my single biggest point of confusion about this phenomenon, and I don't know if there's any way you can help me unpick this. But when you look at our records from Britain, they're overwhelmingly from one part of the country, and that is the Southwest. And to some extent, the marches with Wales, this is the English border with Wales. When you leave that area, there are very few references. There are some from East Anglia, and in fact, there's a dialect term there to be will-led, which means led by Willow the Wisp, which is a very similar phenomenon. But over most of England, and indeed most of Scotland, you just don't really get these legends. And what I don't understand is why it seems to exist as a legend in some places and not in others, not least because if you travel around the world, there are many, many supernatural systems where this exists. So why is it that in England, we don't have a special term and perhaps even the phenomenon in large parts of the country? Maybe it happens and it just goes in the fairy miscellanea box. I'm not sure.
Chris: You've mapped boggarts before, so you've seen regional places where they don't exist. Is that correct?
Simon: Yes.
Chris: Okay. Well, I don't see why this would be any different.
Simon: This leads back to earlier disagreements of ours. I would say that boggarts exist everywhere, but just by different names. And so when I mapped boggarts, what I was really doing was mapping one of the names for the solitary supernatural in England. You can do a beautiful map of England where you show the interlocking solitary supernatural beings according to their name. Now, you can do something similar for being pixie-led. For instance, it's Mab-led in the Midlands. It's pixie-led in the Southwest. It's Will-led in East Anglia. But there are whole big blanks, the North of England, particularly in the Northwest that I know very well. I only know a couple of related phenomenon, and there's no name that exists in dialect that I've ever come across. So again, I'm not quite sure it's right to say there's nothing there, but I don't know how to explain that. Not least because later in this episode, we'll be going to Slovenia. We've already been to Newfoundland. There are other places where these legends are alive and kicking.
Chris: In Ireland, of course, you've got the stray sod where people step on this particular piece of turf and suddenly they're lost. So, I mean, that's extremely similar.
Simon: I would say it's the same thing essentially. If I was to write a long article or even a book on fairy disorientation, the stray sod would get a chapter. For me, it's not very important how it comes about. It's more this fact of disorientation caused by supernatural beings. Maybe the answer is because, of course, people get disoriented everywhere and we'll be talking about some possible neurological explanations for this afterwards. But maybe the explanation is just something to do with people in certain areas not considering these experiences to be supernatural. It's not that they don't believe in the fairies or the boggarts or whatever else is out there. It's just when this particular thing happens, they say, oh, I got a bit confused and move on.
Chris: Yeah, they just take it for granted. You're talking about confined spaces and I was amused to hear that Island of Coal in the and they have a house spirit that disorients the guests who get up in the night and are led astray so they can't find their way back to bed again.
Simon: I've never come across this. Are they led astray within the house?
Chris: Within the house, yeah. And the spirit was in size like a lump of a lassie and had white hair like a tuft of flax down to her feet. She'd put the house in order when strangers were to come and then the guests would get up in the night and they couldn't find their way back to bed again. Oh my.
Simon: Clearly the trick is not to get out of bed during the night. This leads me to another general point. When I was growing up, I was vaguely aware of these traditions and I think in various pulp novels and pulp films, I'd come across it as this idea that supernatural beings would lead you off your track to a terrible death in the bogs and marshes. And I just want to speak up here, not for the first time, for our fairy friends. I have been studying fairy disorientation now for several years and I don't think I have ever come across an example where it ends. Okay, I'm thinking of exceptions now, but I've rarely come across examples where our fairy friends have used fairy disorientation to kill people. So I just want to say it's usually about mischief. It's normally about clapping at someone when they fall in the bog or when they can't get out of the bog and get back to bed. It's this kind of a thing. So please respect for the fairies. They kill people, but not disorienting them, usually.
Chris: I want to hear the exceptions.
Simon: There is one that just runs through my mind. This is from Donegal, I think, where a farmer was found on a hillside where he shouldn't have been dead. And the one thing that was noted when he was discovered was that his pockets had been turned inside out. In other words, he got lost and he'd taken his pockets inside out. We'll talk about this as a countermeasure in a minute, and he died for whatever reason on that hillside. And he clearly believed that the fairies were leading him astray, hence he'd taken this measure. Or unusually, there was a pickpocket on the side of a very obscure Irish mountain. So take your pick. Chris, I've got us to countermeasures now. You're out and about, suddenly you're disoriented because of these knavish fairies. What can we do to protect ourselves from their wiles?
Chris: In many parts of the world, you put bread in your pockets. And I'm not sure what this refers to, whether it's just part of your home. It was baked at your home, and so it's part of your domestic scenery. Or is it a representation of holy bread, the host? I'm really not quite sure. I've also seen places where you pull the bread out of your pocket and divide it with whoever's chasing you, and they leave you alone. So I've seen just one story about that. So that's a big one, bread is. And of course, the usual religious rites, holy water, crossing yourself, using the holy name, that will often, even in profanity, will sometimes chase away and reduce, take away the disorientation. My favorite one though, is turning clothes inside out. Like you've mentioned, the man turning his pockets inside out. And people talk about turning their waistcoats or turning their caps, like the one gentleman did. I've heard it said that campers and even soldiers who find themselves lost should sit down and turn their socks inside out. Now, that's ostensibly to just refresh your feet, but who knows? Maybe it's just some sort of remnant of the idea that turning the clothes back inside out will reverse whatever spell has been put on you.
Simon: But why? You gave us a valiant attempt to explain bread. Can you explain to me why turning any item of clothes should help you in this situation?
Chris: Again, I think it's reversing a situation. It almost is like turning back something. Going back to the beginning of the disorientation and turning back time almost by turning something. You can't turn your watch, but you can turn your clothes inside out. So that's the best I've got.
Simon: My rationalist approach many years ago was told of an Indian rope trick. This is the famous thing where someone puts a rope and begins to climb into the sky. And a British officer in the Indian Army was watching this Indian rope trick, and he just watched absolutely disbelieving as this man began to climb up the rope. And at that moment, he felt at the back of his neck a buzzing. There was a mosquito, and he felt the mosquito land on his neck. And he reached his hand back and slapped the back of his neck. And at that moment, the hypnotism, because that's what it actually was, was broken. And he saw this rope being held up and the man not climbing up it. And I wonder if in a way, we're back to soldiers sitting down, turning their socks inside out. It's not a way just to actually take a moment, come back to yourself, make sure the panic hasn't seized you because of course maybe you're getting lost. Just take a deep breath. I wonder if it's not a version of that. Now, I know that doesn't explain the symbolism of it, but maybe that explains where the idea comes from.
Chris: Yeah, it's like just doing a reset. And you're right about the panic because we always make bad decisions when we're stressed. So calm down, take a breath, turn your socks inside out. You'll feel better.
Simon: My favorite example of counter exchange relates to clothes. And it's about a crowd of people who found themselves on, I think it was Dartmoor, walking from one Paris to the other, and they got hopelessly lost in the mist. But luckily for them, they were with a cunning woman. So there was this party of six or seven people. And she said, well, it's easy. We just have to turn our clothes. And the rather shocked Victorian writer who describes this episode explains how they stripped naked in the middle of Dartmoor, in the middle of the mist. Now talk about a reset. If my next door neighbor and I were crossing the moor and we had to strip naked, I can tell you there'd be a reset. I'd be in shock. Any other counter measures that we can take if we find ourselves in these situations?
Chris: Those are pretty much the major ones. And even so, those don't always work. I've seen several people comment, yes, I turned my coat inside out, or I turned my cap inside out, and it didn't work. I was still lost. So it's kind of interesting that something that's so widely advocated, people admitting that it actually didn't work.
Simon: And one thing that comes up again and again is people seem not in a way to realize that they're lost, that they're so confused, so pixelated, so bewildered that they haven't really said simply in their brain, oh my God, I'm lost. And often you have this comment where someone says, and then I thought, I'm lost. I need to actually turn my pockets inside out. Or they say, how did I not think of that before? And this comes up again and again. And this, for me, comes back to this sense that these people seem almost to be in a slight trance-like state. And we can perhaps talk about this a little bit later. But look, another important part of the experience is glamour. I think no one better than you, Chris, to explain what glamour is.
Chris: Oh, dear. Well, it's not what we think of when we think of Vogue models. We've encountered the notion of glamour before when we were talking about fairy food in an episode where the woman was bringing back the visions of the dead. The table always looks like it's laden with wonderful things to eat. But after the spell is broken, all of this is just revealed to be excrement and ash and vile, vile things. So the fairies have a power, to use a phrase from M.R. James, they have a power over your eyes where you see things that aren't there or you see things that look much, much better than they are. Some of this relates to the time slips that we talked about in a previous episode. I talked about Ivan Sanderson in Haiti and his wife suddenly seeing buildings by the side of the road that looked like they were from medieval Paris. So it's that kind of glamour that people see when they're trapped by the fairies.
Simon: And it often seems to come at the culmination of the experience. Someone has been walking in circles for half an hour and at that point something happens. And I'll just give you two examples, one 19th century, one 20th century. There's one beautiful story. In fact, it's by Inis Tregarthen from near Padstow of a field where people got lost, and at the moment the person couldn't find the gate, they of course began to scramble for the gate, and at that point the hedges in the field would just start to grow and grow and grow. And so they were in this small field with hedges that weren't six feet high but 20 feet high, 40 feet high, growing and growing. I think that's a lovely example of glamour. One that I find far more chilling in its way is Marjorie Johnson, God bless her memory, the writer of Seeing Fairies, describes an incredible pixie-led experience at Nottingham Cemetery of all places, a place that she knew very well. And she describes going down a road that she knew wasn't there, and of course Marjorie was wise to the fairies, and she got to the bottom and there were a series of bungalows behind picket fences. And she says, but there's nothing like that there. She knew it wasn't possible. And the thing that confirmed it to her, and this is the bit that gives me chills, is that when she was looking at the houses, she realised that they had hedges, they had windows, they had doors, but there was no path to the door. And that means that they couldn't be real. And this reminds me very much of some of AI art creations where there are important bits missing. For me anyway, there seems to be something even slightly evil in it. I'm not sure why.
Chris: We find the same thing in the Newfoundland stories about suddenly there's trees where there weren't any trees before. This woman and her son put bread in their pockets because they had to pass someplace where they knew the fairies were. But even so, they came upon a forest of great trees which had never been there before and could not have grown up since she'd last been there. And they found themselves climbing over these huge fallen tree trunks and they look back and the trees were gone. So to me, that's terrifying.

Simon: I think that if you or I were to write a horror story about being pixie-led, it's the glamour that really gives the payoff because often, like you say, it really is rather chilling. I don't know if this is related, you'll tell me, but something that you often get in fairy disorientation experiences, not just in Britain but around the world, is that when people get lost in the dark, it is often associated with lights and lights moving around. And it's interesting that in the pixie experiences, there's sometimes this kind of confusion between the light that leads people off a track and the pixies that do their laughing and clapping afterwards. Now I imagine they're one and the same. In some later folklorists, you have them saying, ah, Willow the Wisp was working with the pixies, this kind of thing. But this idea of the is quite common. And here, if I can give you a little bit of science, I've often in my younger days walked in the woods nearby in the night in Italy. And I've frequently in the summer had this experience where it's a path I know very, very well that the fireflies are about. And it's incredible how a path you can normally walk down soberly in a normal way, not trip off the edge. As soon as there are fireflies, I just keep flying into the ditch. Because when you're walking and you see a speck of light, you start without realizing to follow it and you're suddenly stumbling into the brambles. There's nothing supernatural about that. But just to give you another example of how sometimes natural phenomenon can mess with us.
Chris: Absolutely. I know there's some sort of ocular phenomenon where you are in the dark and you have your eyes open. You will start to see lights just because the brain is doing something. I've had this happen myself.
Simon: But so the lights aren't there?
Chris: No.
Simon: Okay. Interesting. You've brought us into science here, Chris. Can you think of other phenomenon that are worth sharing like this that would explain some of these things?
Chris: Something that people talk about a lot in this disorientation is walking in circles. And that's a common, common phenomenon. But we know that you automatically turn right if you're lost. You just always veer to the right and you don't realize you're doing it. I remember I think Mythbusters or somebody doing a thing where they were trying to focus on and walking towards a tree and they couldn't get there. They were always veering off to the right. So there's certain patterns that people follow. The brain just automatically makes you follow these patterns. So I'm wondering how much of the walking in the dark in the circle is just a common pattern like that. I've also read books about tracking lost people. And there are certain patterns that different ages follow. And I wish I could remember the name of the particular book where I read this, but it was something like if you've got a lost child, they're going to be found 2.5 miles away uphill. It was that specific. So I find that fascinating. Also when people are lost, they become so bewildered that they often fail to recognize objects that they ordinarily know. There was a story about a man who got lost in the woods in the historical collections of Ohio by Henry Howe. And this fellow named Mr. Johnson wandered about in a bewildered state when he finally came to a stable in the yard of which was an old horse. Mr. Johnson wondered why in the name of humanity the owner didn't feed the poor creature and take better care of the yard. He moved on a little further, saw a log house and a woman who when she saw him asked, what have you there? It then dawned on him that this was his own wife talking to him and the house and the stable yard were his own. So they said it's a bewildering dazed mental state. Like you said, something like being in a trance.
Simon: I suppose we've all had that experience at some time in our life where we've walked a long way and you begin to go into autopilot a little bit. And often these very disorientation experiences seem to be a combination of going into autopilot perhaps just because you're so tired and also being a little bit panicked as well. And I wonder if there's some kind of heady brew of those two that can explain a lot of these experiences.
Chris: Well, the heady brew, of course, is always the explanation.
Simon: Yeah. So surely, Chris, we can speak with one voice here that we're both very irritated when we read 19th century supernatural accounts from journalists who pun on the favourite local beer or cider. In fact, for example, often in Devon when someone got lost, instead of being pixie lead, they were cider lead and this kind of thing. There are lots of delicious puns, but I think in all seriousness, alcohol can have some unusual effects. A dear correspondent of many years ago, unfortunately no longer with us, Ray Girvin, he was quite insistent when I studied pixie lead sources that alcohol, particularly because of its effects on short term memory, it can have devastating effects on you finding your way through an area, particularly if it's in the dark. And so you could have someone who perhaps went to the pub, had a couple of drinks, no more than normal, but maybe left a little bit earlier when the alcohol was still taking effect. Short term memory crashed. And so I've already turned left, haven't I? Or have I? Well, I better turn left here. And suddenly before you know it, you're striding off with great confidence in the wrong direction.
Chris: That's a good point about the short term memory. I hadn't considered that particular thing.
Simon: But look, this doesn't help us with farmers in the middle of the day crossing fields. I think the one thing I'd say there is that there are very few of them. I have all of these accounts, and we're talking scores of accounts of people being pixie led, and very, very few of them are midday, a farmer going across a field and not finding the gate. There are a couple, but very, very few. Is it even worth really trying to explain that? What do you think?
Chris: I've found more than just a few with people in the daylight not being able to get out of a field. So I'm probably the wrong person to ask about that.
Simon: But so how would you explain it if we were going to go down the science road?
Chris: I don't know how to explain it, except getting into some kind of a trance and the panic overriding whatever rational thought you have. Can panic blind a person to what is right in front of them? I don't know.
Simon: Yeah, I like that bit at the end. I can imagine someone working on a farm, going through a gate into a field and just walking really on autopilot across the field, missing the other gate, just perhaps because they were thinking about wife possibly being pregnant or the debt with the bank, and then spiralling into a panic when they didn't find the gate, when actually, in the normal state, they would have taken two steps backwards, seen that a bramble had fallen across the gate, but it was there four metres away and this wasn't a big deal. It's one of those things where I think if you can get in a bit of a spiral there, I can imagine things being hairy for 30 or 40 seconds.
Chris: Then we also have to consider the idea that there just are certain places where perhaps there's some sort of geomagnetic influence in the soil or the ground that's somehow affecting somebody's brain, but that doesn't explain why this happens once and never again.
Simon: I was nodding along as you were saying that because one of the interesting things in the southwestern sources is there are places that are well known for being pixie-led. And for instance, I can think of one Devon town that in the 19th century had a lane on the western side, and it was notorious that people would avoid this lane because you would get pixie-led there. Whether it's your geomagnetism or some other explanation, I have no idea, but there you're moving the need for explanation off the person and onto the place. Right, right.
Chris: And I actually have a personal example of this.
Simon: That happened to you?
Chris: That happened to me, yes.
Simon: Oh, buckle up. I'm going to enjoy this.
Chris: Well, I first have to say that I have driven hundreds of thousands of miles around Ohio. I normally have a very good sense of direction. I can read maps, navigate by landmarks. I can wander off on strange terrain and find my way back normally with ease. But every single time I try to get to or from a town called Blanchester, Ohio, this is on the edge of Clinton County, I get lost. It should be straightforward. You go down Route A to Town B to Route C to Town D. I've been trapped circling the town for hours. It's just, I don't understand it. There was one time when I didn't hear any laughter, but I keep thinking, you know, any time now I'm going to see the right turn. Or I know there was a gas station there when I turned there the last time, but it's not there anymore. So the brain just sort of seemed to get into a loop. And I also find that ambiguous street signs can trigger it. You've got a sign that says go straight for Route 42 at a three-angled intersection. Which straight? None of them are straight. So pixie lead ensues. But there's just something odd about this area. And I was telling my husband about this, and he said, oh, yeah, there's a magnetic anomaly in Clinton County. It distorts the surveying instruments. So when they tried to set up a grid road pattern, all the roads were not squared, but are off by a certain number of degrees. So he, of course, never gets lost.
Simon: But do you know if anyone else gets lost in this area, or is this just an isolated experience that you've had?
Chris: I've never inquired to ask anybody. I don't know who I would ask.
Simon: I would set up a subreddit group. Sorry, I can't help myself.
Chris: There's like a certain invisible line I cross into what I think of sort of fancifully as a zone of influence. And there's just odd things going down there. For example, I was looking for a particular monument in a cemetery. I couldn't find the cemetery, but I found another one where there were 15 fresh graves, all with 1970s to 1980s tombstones with different dates. So it wasn't like it was a common disaster or epidemic. And I'm like, hmm, that's a little odd. So it's a strange place. And I haven't been back, and I don't really want to go back because I'd be caught there for hours and hours and hours.
Simon: It's fascinating that you brought up the idea that you can be pixie-led driving. I don't see there's any reason why that couldn't be the case. And in fact, I've come across several references over the years, and the fairy census is a rich place to look for these accounts. I think in the second fairy census, there's a really interesting account of a British family on holiday in France who have a nightmarish experience in a car trying to drive between two Pyrenean villages where there's only one road, but they find themselves on various different roads. And in the end, they seem to be chased. And it really conforms very well to the model of being pixie-led, that you have this culmination with glamour at the end. We've talked before, I think, about the way that driving often seems to be associated with supernatural experiences, with seeing things out of the window. And of course, the queen of supernatural experiences with driving is the vanishing hitchhiker. And there have been various explanations there that drivers perhaps enter a trance state. Any driver will have had that experience where they get to place B and they cannot remember going from place A to B, this kind of thing. So there are lots of jigsaw pieces that perhaps eventually could be made to fit together there.
Chris: I'm wondering if with our GPS systems, can you still get pixie-led with a GPS system? And here's something that just happened. Apparently in May and October, there were solar storms and farmers noticed that all their GPSs on their tractors went haywire and they couldn't drive a straight line. So I'm wondering, do solar storms affect our brains, our own personal GPSs? And if you have one, can you rely on it not to get pixie-led?
Simon: It's a nice question though, isn't it? Are there situations in which our own sense of direction just becomes befuddled for whatever reason? I imagine that panic would certainly do it, alcohol would certainly do it. Chris, I think here I owe it to a colleague, a Slovenian colleague, Mircea Mensic, who is a very fine scholar in the Balkans. I've never had contact with Mircea. I've never met her, but she's someone that I admire from a distance. And she wrote, I think about five years ago now, an article on being witch-led in the ex-Yugoslavia. And there, there were a series of people who had experiences where they got lost. This very familiar thing we've been talking about, but locally it was explained as the witches that did it. And what I found interesting was Mircea went down this road, which is quite familiar to me from Southeastern European folklore writing, of trying to explain experiences like this in terms of mystical flights, out-of-body experiences, this kind of thing. And I personally am a bit sceptical about this because she describes some really fascinating experiences and ones that you or I would recognise from the accounts we know from Britain and Atlantic Canada and elsewhere. But she talks about the way that in some accounts, people actually had the experience of flying or felt that they were flying or felt that flying was the only way to explain how they could have got from point A to point B. They also talked about seeing lights, which perhaps goes back to what you were suggesting before and My Will O' the Wisp. I think my problem with this is an explanation is that in the accounts that I know anyway from Britain, there is not a hint of flying. There are other kind of supernatural experiences, sometimes involving fairies where people fly, sometimes involving the devil, but they really seem to have different characteristics. And I think from what I can see in Mirjam's article, and we'll reference this properly in our show notes, we're professionalising I should say, that there were very few references actually among the witnesses to convincing experiences of flight. And so for me, this idea of a mystical out-of-body experience, and absolutely positive people have these experiences, I just don't think it's a very good explanation for what's going on with fairy disorientation specifically.
Chris: I find it interesting that there's a different kind of disorientation brought on by witches, or it's a similar type of thing, only the agent is witches. And I was trying to think of, do ghosts do the same thing? And I couldn't think of a single case where people were led astray by a ghost, unless you consider a Will O' the Wisp a ghost or a boggart.
Simon: Careful, careful. When I began studying folklore, I would have taken the agent very, very seriously. Whereas now I just think it's the phenomenon that matters. And whether it's a ghost, a witch, a fairy, a pixie, it doesn't really matter that much. Having said that, I cannot think of any examples where the undead do this. And that also I acknowledge is interesting.
Chris: Okay, good.
Simon: Well, I've really enjoyed this rush through pixie disorientation. I hope you're not too pixelated yourself, Chris. But if you are still up for it, perhaps we could go through some reading on the subject.
Chris: Some places I've found some stories about either being pixie-led or the straysod are, of course, Strange Terrain, The Fairy World in Newfoundland by Barbara Rietty, Explore Fairy Traditions by Jeremy Hart, The Middle Kingdom, Dermot McManus. There's a few examples in Fairies, Real Encounters with Little People by Janet Board, and some in Meeting the Other Crowd by Eddie Lanahan.
Simon: Right, so those are some great books. I particularly take a nod at Barbara Rietty there and The Middle Kingdom. All of the books you've mentioned are fabulous, but I seem to remember The Middle Kingdom has some just stupendously weird experiences.
Chris: Yes, it's got a whole chapter and it's brilliant, yes.
Simon: But even the experiences that aren't in that chapter that sound like fairy disorientation, but as you've never seen it before, the iris doing everything better. For example, there's one extraordinary case where a young woman, she's a maid in a house, goes out for a walk and she gets stuck behind what she says is like a glass wall, and she can actually see the rescue party coming out and looking for her and coming close to her, but she's trapped within this. It's a kind of version of fairy disorientation. What a fabulous book. All the other books you've mentioned are fabulous too, but I think for fairy disorientation, that has to be near the top. I brought out a couple of articles on being pixie-led in the southwest about six, seven years ago now, and I read them again for this podcast. I'm usually embarrassed when I read my old stuff, but one of these articles, the more general one, I thought was really quite spiffing. These are available on Academia. Merjam Mensahj has this great article. I hope, Merjam, we've got your name correct here. This is on being witch-led. Again, we'll put this in the show notes. If you're lucky enough to have a £1,000 subscription with one of the great databases, or if you have a friend in the know, you'll be able to read this very enjoyable, very interesting article. Chris, that's about it. Any other?
Chris: When is your book coming out on the subject?
Simon: A fairy disorientation book. I would love to sit down and write a book like that, but that's the great thing about what we're studying. There's just so much to do. I think that probably those articles I wrote six or seven years ago will be as close as I ever get to the truth on these matters, regrettably. Chris, are you ready to play us out with a final reading?
Chris: I am. This is another example from Seeing Fairies by Marjorie Johnson. It happened in the autumn of 1933. My father and I had been visiting friends and dark was falling as we set off for home around 5pm. We had to cross a small mountain lying between Westport and Drummond near a village called in County Mayo. To a person who was unfamiliar with the place, it would be very easy to get lost or drowned, but my father and I knew the way home blindfolded. Under normal circumstances, the journey itself would take only a half hour. We left the cart road and entered what should have been a rough and marshy land, but suddenly the area changed and the ground became solid. It was very strange. My father and I tried to get back to the cart path, but we couldn't see any familiar landmarks. Father studied his position and came to the conclusion that the fairies had got us. We carried on walking, but we hadn't a clue where we were. Father put his fingers to his mouth and gave a sharp blast like a whistle. Immediately, little brick and slate houses sprang up in all directions about a quarter of a mile away from us. Little people came out holding storm lamps and running around. I cannot recall the dress they wore, but they were approximately two feet six inches in height and there seemed to be eight or twelve little people to each house. I remarked to father that maybe they'd come to help us. We would change our direction to one of the houses, but when we thought we were almost upon it, it would disappear and spring up elsewhere. This went on for some time and I began to get afraid, but father said they were only having fun and they would not let any harm come to us. He told me to bend and pull up turfs of grass to make sure we were not on a lake. There were two on our normal way home, as he would stop the little people if we were not on water. I found out we were still on solid ground, so my father took his coat off, turned his waistcoat inside out. As quickly as they'd appeared at his whistle, they now disappeared. We looked around us and found a familiar landmark, so we knew where we were. How we had arrived at this particular spot without getting muddy, wet, or even drowned is still a mystery. Although the journey under normal circumstances would have taken only half an hour, on this particular night we'd been walking for several hours, yet had not felt tired until the spell was broken, and I was exhausted when we arrived home about 11 p.m. My grandmother was waiting for us and before we explained what had happened, she remarked, it was a very strange and eerie night.