Children, Fairies and the Night

Simon and Chris venture, for this historic episode,* into the nursery at the witching hour to ask why so many children see fairies in bed, in the dark, and at the edge of sleep. Along the way there are tiny soldiers marching across eiderdowns, horse-trading fairy women in pointy hats, airborne night visitors in upstate New York, nasty little wolves running out of wardrobes, and the vexed question of whether these experiences belong to folklore, popular culture, the sleeping brain, or some more troubling corner where all three meet. Why do so many of these memories last a lifetime? Why do children so often feel singled out by them? And when angels and demons retreat, do fairies move in to fill the gap? Expect to learn how to speak in tongues, the truth about the tinkerbell syndrome and why lemon heads are to be feared.

*This was an early test episode and we thought it would be fun to release.

Transcript

Chris: We're going to talk today about children and fairies, and I really enjoyed reading your article on the subject. You quoted a lot of experiences of young children from the fairy census. I think it was all from the first fairy census, and it was just fascinating material. What sort of themes or patterns did you find?

S: Children, obviously, like adults, have every imaginable experience possible with fairies. But the one that I'm really fascinated by is the way that children have experiences at night when they're sleeping or when they're awake, but when they're in bed. And of course, I'm sure that's something that fascinates you too, because adults as well often have supernatural experiences in bed and not just fairies. I mean, it's enough to think about, I mean, how many ghost stories have someone in bed when they hear a creak on the corridor? It's something that's there in lots of different areas of the supernatural. To me, cutting to the chase or using Occam's razor is that it's all hypnagogic, hypnopompic hallucinations. They're awaking, they're not quite awake, their body is still paralyzed from the way we sleep, and yet their eyes are open and they're still seeing bits of that dream. So to me, it almost seems as though you could rule out all bedroom experiences just for those reasons. I think that if you, like say Marjorie Johnson, the great fairiest from the 50s to the 80s, if you're interested in proving the existence of fairies, I think that you're absolutely right, that this is not the best material available. But if like me, you're more interested in why people see fairies, when people see fairies, how fairies change people's lives, I guess it's a little bit immaterial. Perhaps immaterial is too much, but it doesn't make the phenomenon uninteresting. One of the moving things for me with the fairy census, and I'll come on to some other examples in a couple of minutes, one of the moving aspects of this is the way that you get people in their 70s and their 80s recalling something that happened 70 years ago, when they were eight years old in bed at Gran's house. I start off with this letter from the 1930s, and I'm guessing that this took place in the late 19th or the very early 20th century. Sir, when I was a boy of 10, we lived in Lanarkshire beside a large park with trees and flowers. At early dawn one morning, I awoke to see on a chair, which always stood beside my bed, two small old women of about 18 inches tall. Each wore tall conical dark hats and dark long gowns. It sounds to me almost as if they're dressed as witches. They looked at me for about 20 seconds and then smiled to each other before jumping in slow motion to the carpeted floor, where they passed from my line of sight. Very gently, I eased myself up into a sitting position, so we definitely have the child awakening, so as not to scare them, but they had disappeared. I got out of the bed, peered under all the furniture and into the cupboard, but could find no trace of them. The moon was full and red street showed in the sky. They were solid beings. I noted that their busts stood out clearly against the window across the room. This seems to me a pubescent detail, a boy coming of age. They seemed to appraise me as a... I love this line, sorry, Chris. They seemed to appraise me as a horse dealer might do a horse. So quite sinister. There was really no affection in their eyes. And the feeling I had, and this is almost as bad, was that I should have liked to catch them in my hands like birds. And this is from a Mr. W.J. Fraser in Bartonshire in Scotland. Again, probably late 19th century, early 20th century. It's the first or one of the earliest references we have to this new trend whereby children see fairies in bed. And we might want to talk a little bit later why before that we don't have these references. 

C: What strikes me is that late 19th, early 20th century, pointy hats, sort of witchy looking, that's Kate Greenway and Arthur Rackham's Mother Goose, also witches, but very popular imagery. 

S: And again, we find something being influenced perhaps by popular culture. What I think sometimes of the Tinkerbell effect, which is people will write to you about an experience where they saw a fairy who was exactly like Tinkerbell. And you always have, this is one of the great questions. Are you dealing with someone who's just taken a point of popular culture to make sense of their inexperience? Or do you actually have popular culture somehow leeching into supernatural experiences? And then we're back to this whole question of, well, to what extent was this a dream, a waking dream? Or to what extent was it something else, deeper, something perhaps a little bit scarier?

C: Well, there's that theosophical concept, or perhaps it was just popularized by the theosophists about tulpas, where if you believe enough in something, it somehow materializes. And I've always wondered what kind of a role that might play. If that were the case, why don't we see more Santa Claus apparitions or Jolly Green Giant apparitions if you're seeing a lot of things in popular culture or in advertising?

S: Yeah. I mean, the tulpa theory, I think tulpa is ultimately a Tibetan word, one of the Tibetan languages. It was borrowed into theosophy. And it's really mind over matter on steroids. It's the strongest version we have of that. The idea that if you believe something strongly enough, you can actually create something that effectively is independent of your imagination and becomes real.  I've always found the idea of tulpa, let's say, intriguing. And I can't resist hitting back at your low blow over Santa Claus and the Green Giant. There are lots of sightings of Santa Claus, particularly two fairies. And I always think that would make a fabulous, fabulous, well, perhaps a fabulous podcast, but a fabulous article, a fabulous study. Looking at children who have these visions of these very strong forces in children's lives and children's imagination. I mean, somewhere, Chris, I've never come across them, but there will be children who had bizarre encounters with the Easter Bunny.

C: Oh, that would be interesting. Well, terrifying, I imagine. Terrifying.

S: But my youngest daughter last year woke up in the night because she thought she'd seen a beard outside the room. This is on Christmas Eve, of course. And I mean, could we expect anything less given the extent to which we pump them full of all this excitement about Christmas morning and the visits on the night? I mean, she was five then. I think it's a very, very understandable reaction. To be honest, I have far fewer problems with this than I do with poor Mr. Fraser waking up however old in his bed and seeing these two horse trading fairies at the end of his blankets. 

C: One wonders what would have happened if he hadn't woken up. He'd never been seen again. I also like this letter because I think it is pretty much the letter or the account that we read again and again. And they're very vivid. They're remembered very clearly. And they're sometimes they have this slight overtone of something threatening. It's never really articulated. It's the stuff of the very best horror short stories. It's never quite articulated, but it's often there in the background.

S: It definitely is. I've read a lot of those from the census and yeah, it's a very disquieting theme. But something about the fact that I remembered this from 70 years ago, or I remember this from when I was very young. 

C: I wonder what percentage of people have really good childhood recollection. I've read something about generally we don't remember things from before say age five, but there's a certain percentage of people who remember things earlier. I, for example, remember my sister's baptism and I was two or three at that point. And it's not from people telling me there were no photographs or anything. I was there. So I know there's a certain percentage of people have earlier, but in general, most people don't recall things from before age five and maybe even age eight. But most of these memories are children, I would say from six onwards, and then going up as well into teenage years. And that in itself is just striking that these made such an impression that they stuck that long. It's almost a defining moment, it sounds like for some of these children.

S: Yeah. I think this is something which is true of fairy experiences and you'll know better than me, Chris, but I think supernatural experiences generally is that some people who have these experiences in their childhood or in their teens, often think of them as being a turning point in some way in their lives. I mean, perhaps not in the way we would expect, not necessarily that they became born again occultists or anything like this, but it was a moment of awakening. I don't want to use really the word initiation, but nothing else quite comes to mind. It was a moment when they saw different aspects of life and they see themselves as becoming a different person. And I think often these memories, they're like a little green gemstone that people return to constantly and polish their treasured memories. 

And of course, that's another reason for being suspicious of them because it's those memories we return to again and again, where actually often we begin to distort the memories through time. The feeling of specialness or being singled out seems to be sort of another theme that I notice. As I say, it's interesting that this remembrance of this magic persists so long, but is that why it persists so long?

C: Because it makes people feel they were singled out, they were special in some way, which you find that a lot among what you would term alien abductees or experiencers. First of all, alien abductees, you're absolutely right. There it really is a question that people, I think, see themselves as having had this special experience and being in some senses singled out for good or for bad.

S: What I would say with fairies is that I think there's another division which perhaps is closer, which accounts for this more. There's a division between the children who had weird one-off experiences and the children that then have a succession of experiences over a number of years. I'll just give you one of these. It's always fascinated me. This is from the fairy census. It's a modern description. I think it was from the 90s. This is someone who's now in their 20s, if I remember correctly. She said that when she was seven, eight years of age, perhaps six, seven, eight, it was in that bracket anyway, younger than 10, there were these special creatures who used to come to her in a room and they were able to fly. They were kind of semi-nude as fairies often are. They would come down into the room with her and they would then invite her as a special kind of treat to fly with them. Her memory is of leaving her bed and going off and flying with these special entities around New York State.

Now, New York State, this isn't the city, it's out in the sticks, out in the countryside, but she had this vivid and very pleasurable memory of going and flying. Of course, we could be very rational and a little bit boring and psychiatrical about this and say, well, yes, dreams of flying are often associated with joy and this all makes sense, but she had serial experiences and they died out in her very early teens. This is another pattern that repeats itself. People who have these repeat experiences, but at a certain point, they kind of start to go down the drain hole. They just start to drain away and they become memories rather than things that lift, precious memories.

C: But I think there, we can talk about someone being singled out in their own mind. I think it makes more sense there. Whereas often with some of the other fairy accounts, you have people who are kind of, God, that was weird, but they never really assimilated it to any belief system. They're not sure what to make of it. I find those one-offs where it's just the ordinary person in the street and they're like, what the hell was that? I find those most convincing as opposed to someone who has repeated experiences. I've run across this in ghost seers and they'll say, oh, well, everywhere I've lived has been haunted. 

It's like the ghost has followed me. And I think in one of your anecdotes from the Arctic, someone said, fairies have followed my family for years. Yes. People say, oh yes, my parents were abducted and now me and then my children. And it's this long generational idea of contact. So what that means, I don't know, but I am intrigued by the one-offs where people are just totally shocked as opposed to feeling it makes them special. And I'm not sure why that is. I don't know. It just seems like the calling yourself special, somehow you're inventing this.

S: I'd be much more generic about it and say, they're two different categories. I agree with that. I think it's almost worth getting 40 people who've seen fairies and splitting them immediately into two categories. The people who've had serial experiences, and not necessarily just with fairies, because of course, if you have serial experiences with fairies, you probably will with ghosts and aliens too, or you might do. And those people who just have these one-off experiences that they are simply unable to assimilate. You also have people who have serial experiences when they're young, but then become very sober growing up about it. But in other words, they cease to have these experiences, but they remember these experiences. And I dug up, and if I could read this out, Chris, this is another account. And this one was sent to Marjorie Johnson in 1951. This is from Dr. Victor Purcell, who was a lecturer at Cambridge, at Cambridge University after the war, a very serious person. And this is someone who I think probably, reading between the lines, didn't have constant supernatural experiences as an adult. But as a child, he'd had serial experiences with fairies, and I'll come to the details in a second. And I like very much the way he's loyal to this experience. This is someone who moved in a very serious sphere of British life, but he was not going to betray these experiences. So this is Purcell's words. In the year 1900 to 1901, during the South African war, when I was about five years of age, there's that magic number, I lived in Gillingham, Kent. Every night for some months after my mother would kiss me goodnight and shut my bedroom door, there was a short interval, and then I would begin to hear distant masked Lilliputian bands playing. The music, lovely, the music grew louder and louder as it came nearer and nearer. There was a nightlight burning on the mantelpiece, and by the light of this, I saw column after column of tiny soldiers marching up from the right of my bed over my eiderdown. I remember its pattern and color clearly. A lovely detail again. And across to the other side where they disappeared over the bedside. Now, when I read tiny here, I think I misinterpreted how big they would be. But listen to this. Each soldier is about nine inches high. So hell, I mean, these are not tiny by my use of that word. No, these aren't boy soldiers.

C: No.

S: Yeah. And they wore a red coat. So this is kind of action man size, a small barbie. There was battalion after battalion of them, and each was headed by a brass band. As these passed, they played minute martial music, far more exciting than any music I've ever heard in the daytime. The march past lasted for a few minutes, and then I fell asleep. There seems to have been then no interaction. The direction was always from right to left. I never tried to touch the soldiers, I think wisely, but they were completely real. I actually did see them, and this is the sentence I always remember from this letter, and I should be prepared to state this on oath if necessary in any court of law. So very serious Dr. Victor Purcell lectures on Far Eastern affairs, and I think also, if I remember rightly, Far Eastern languages. And this is a man who, in his 50s, writes a letter and says, yes, by all means publish, I saw fairies when I was a child. They regularly marched across my bed. And I should also say there are several examples of not girls, but boys seeing military formations in their bed or quasi military formations. There's one, for example, that sees a wagon train, a fairy wagon train driving across his bed. That's amazing. This reminds me, he's a respectable academic, and he's prepared to state this in public. I'm reminded of Field Doubting, who was putting his reputation on the line by saying, yes, I believe in fairies. So it really is quite startling almost to find people who have respectable positions, they're not considered crackpots, just putting it all out there and saying, yeah, I saw this. I mean, clearly Purcell was a very intelligent man. He will have thought about this a lot. I'm sure he will have thought about the connection between 1900, 1901 and the Boer War. I mean, a little boy, probably as many small boys are, very interested in military things, lying in bed at night, and then having these martial experiences, or at least witnessing a version of these martial experiences. Right.

C: And I'm assuming he would have seen troops marching or military bands in the parks. There was probably a lot of military activity, people disembarking and parading through the streets on their way to the war. So he did have that in his mind, but wow, what an interesting vision.

S: Often in fairy visions, there is this term that comes from neurology. I think it originally comes from psychiatry, but it's been borrowed in neurology, which is numerosity, that some people having visions tend to see large numbers of relatively identical figures. And so you can imagine soldiers are perfect for an exercise like this, doing very similar things, for example, all marching together. And I mean, that's something else to bear in mind, that numerosity is associated with particular types of, as I said, perhaps visionary experiences. But again, I mean, we've no reason to think that Dr. Purcell, when he was a child, had any kind of disturbances, but perhaps it's just worth putting down a little footnote there and saying that some visions do follow this pattern and maybe somehow he tapped into this. I don't know if I'm being too skeptical here about an experience that he clearly valued and clearly was absolutely convinced by.

C: I was reading some Oliver Sacks on hallucinations and there's visions of faces when people are falling asleep, there's crowds of faces. Or as you say, there's crowds of people. It also comes in with the Charles Bonnet syndrome, with the macular degeneration, but children shouldn't be experiencing that. People have hallucinations of tiny people and people in archaic clothing. Yes. Extraordinary, isn't it? So is there something in perhaps in the brain of children that is replicating what people with macular degeneration have, or is it just the whole brain notion of you have a gap and your brain fills in the gap somehow? But why would it fill it in with archaic clothing? That always makes me wonder.

S: Maybe it's worth taking a moment here just to talk about the things that sleep can do to the human mind. And I'm not by any means completely dismissing the supernatural, but we've talked about, if you like, these short circuits in the brain or the ability of the brain perhaps to see things that it doesn't normally see. And there were three examples, three cases of things that happen when humans sleep that fascinate me. And as I've read about this more over the years, I've become more and more interested in. The first is the phenomenon that particularly when you're falling asleep, you hear voices. Usually they're fairly inconsequential voices. They're typically voices of people you know, but as you're falling asleep, you hear these voices. The second is one that's very well known to the two of us, night paralysis, where people wake up in the night, or at least they believe they wake up, and they feel that they cannot move any part of their body. And they also have this overwhelming sense of menace that something is in the room and that something's coming towards them.

C:The hag, it goes by different names in different places, but this is clearly a universal, human universal. And then the third is the one that you've already mentioned, hypnagogic and hypnopompic visions, either that take place when you're falling asleep, and that's the hypnagogic, 

S: I always get my hypnos mixed up. 

C: Yeah, I can't keep them straight either. Hypnopompic when you're waking up in the morning. Again, it's not to say that these things don't have the potential to be supernatural, but it's also worth tying them down to things that are going on in our brain and in our body. One thing you mentioned in the article was something about, there's few equivalent or no equivalent records about children seeing fairies prior to the early 1900s. And I'm wondering if that just has to do with the lack of privacy while sleeping. In lower and even middle-class households, children slept many to a bed, and they didn't have the child with the soldiers marching, Purcell with the soldiers marching across his bed. He was alone in that room.

S: Yeah. Look, I've never thought of that explanation before. And it's certainly true that the two accounts we have here, which are the earliest accounts I know of, in that both of them are collected, one in the 30s, one in the 50s, but both relate to that period circa 1900. It's certainly true that these two come across very much as middle-class children going up in middle-class houses. They will have had their own rooms. They will have been favored boys, I'm sure, in the household. Look, I'm a little bit skeptical, though, about the mere presence of other children getting in the way of weird things creeping onto the end of your bed. And I think, for example, of Marjorie Johnson, who I've already mentioned, who was from Nottingham, and she was someone who saw fairies all her life. And she describes this experience of waking up, and I think she was four or five, and seeing a fairy in her room. And what's fascinating about that experience is that she shared the room with her sister, Dorothy. And Dorothy also woke up and saw the same thing. When we try and rationalize the supernatural, we also have to take into account these experiences where more than one person apparently sees the same thing. But I think children have been having supernatural experiences for 100,000 years since Homo sapiens became a thing down under. And I think that what changed is this. I think that in Western countries, in the 1700s and 1800s, if a kid said, oh God, these two nasty figures appeared on the edge of my bed last night, those beings would have been identified as demons. And if it was a more, let's say, a pleasant dream where some beautiful Disney princess flew in through the window circa 1850, then maybe an imaginative parent or a religious parent or a patient parent would have said, ah, an angel. My guess here is that this is another example where we categorize the uncategorizable. And what's happening? Supernatural experiences, maybe they're all in the mind, maybe they're not, but these constant futile attempts of ours to put them into angels, demons, fairies, ghosts, all these different brackets, that would be my guess.

C: You suggest that angels were being, quote unquote, washed out of Anglo-Saxon culture. Why was there this shift supposedly from angels to seeing fairies? Because guardian angels were still seen as viable at that time. Many of the evening prayers referenced angels at my head and around my bed and bearing my soul away. So children were still being taught about angels.

S: I was quite excited by that prayer because that's a beautiful example of just literally inviting the supernatural into your child's bed. Right, to bear my soul away. As the 19th century progressed, every year it became more difficult for people to believe in a physical devil or physical angels. And I suspect that that was true of the further up you go in the social scale. And I suspect for that reason that middle-class children, whereas in some sink in one of the poorer parts of London, in one of the cuts or the dials, one of these awful places, the prototype of the Artful Dodger who had a bad dream. I mean, I can well believe his said, ah, it's just a demon. Whereas if you're in a middle-class household where you've got lovely colored books with illustrations of fairies, where already it's a little bit unfashionable, it's just not very convenient for parents to say at their latest soiree, oh, little Johnny saw an angel last night. I think it's in those kinds of environments where fairies stepped in as angels were well disintegrating. Having said that, we also have the Angels of Mons, 1914, where a whole nation got carried away with this wonderful idea of angels appearing. Still, I'd stand by that. I do think it becomes more and more difficult as the years go by to take angels and demons seriously. I think you're right, but I still maintain that at least the religious education of the children was pretty traditional and still emphasize, it's almost as though the parents didn't believe in it, but this is how we need to teach our children. That's just a theory. This is all very interesting. I mean, I think that neither of us have extraordinarily strong feelings here, but these are the variables that we need to play around with.

S: I'm just looking here at an account from Devon. Now, here I'm switching to the fairy census. My feeling with fairies generally, but particularly with children, is that fairy, and here I'm trying to link really to what we've been talking about before, but that fairies often become a kind of a catch-all category that when you see something hellishly weird, you just say, well, it can't be a ghost, certainly not an alien. I mean, it's not got a space suit on or anything. It's not the Loch Ness Monster. It must be a fairy.

I think that in the olden days, demons were pretty good at taking up this sort of bizarre area, but just listen to this account from Devon. This is Southwestern Britain. This took place in the 1990s, and the girl in question, she describes herself as zero to 10. I don't think she actually says her age, but as you'll see, this is another serial experience. I'll break this down into two parts. It's very short. Whilst in bed as a child, I was awoken on several occasions over several years to see what I described then as little nasty wolves coming out of an antique wood wardrobe. I think that in the same way that trees and gardens are very often associated with the supernatural in children's experiences, these old charismatic pieces of furniture perhaps handed down from a Victorian aunt or often become the center of the child's preoccupation. But listen to the second part. After drawing them for my mother, so the mother was clearly interested. Perhaps she was also concerned about her daughter, which I remember very clearly. So the child remembers very clearly drawing them. I can now say they look more like fairies. Now, what that suggests to me is this child had this experience of these nano wolves running out of the wardrobe and striking as being very unpleasant. Her mother talked to her, and to use a psychological phrase, more exactly a Freudian phrase, that secondary elaboration takes place. I mean, we don't have little wolves running out of wardrobes in our modern mythology. And so her mother assimilated them, I'm guessing, either on purpose or accidentally to fairies. And the daughter was convinced. 

So after drawing them for my mother, which I remember very clearly, I can now say they looked more like fairies. I mean, that could be read that as she grew older and she grew to know the world more, she recognized these for what they were, fairies. But my suspicion is that she just had these repeated supernatural experiences with these ghastly little black wolves. And in the end, she assimilated it to the closest possible thing that were fairies. And a little bit later in the survey, I asked her, what did they look like? And this was her description. And I think here we've kind of gone halfway. They were small men with lots of hair in brown suits, almost dirty looking. And then in brackets, she writes, imagine miners. They always looked nasty. And I think that's a lovely example of, first of all, how a miscellaneous supernatural experience, say seeing a huge giant lobster in your cellar, gets basically assimilated to fairies because fairies are weird and you can cover lots of bases with them. And Chris, I can't resist it, just giving you another description. This is from your own fair republic. And this is from someone who's in his teens. It's from Missouri. And he is suffering, there is no question, from night paralysis. He can't move. Now, that doesn't mean his experience isn't supernatural, but he can't move.He's paralyzed in bed. And this is what he sees. Now, why in God's name should this be a fairy? This is my question to you. Standing in front of me, almost directly in front of my face, was what can only be described as a little man. He was squat and probably about a foot or a foot and a half in height and had a head that was sort of football shaped. And then the guy helpfully puts in brackets, American football. So not a soccer, but what I would in the UK talk of as a rugby ball, an American football ball. His head looked kind of like the head on the Lemonhead's candy box. Now, I think many people will have that mentally in their mind. His mouth was very wide, traversing most of his face. He was wearing some kind of overalls. I obviously don't really know the gender. He just struck me as male, but who knows? That who knows seems to me to be a very sensible, a sensible rider for this whole experience. Now, why on earth would Lemonhead be a fairy? Again, it's because we've lost demons. We no longer have demons in Missouri, unless you're in very unusual evangelical circles. And so this kid, I think understandably, I would have done the same thing. It's not a criticism at all, but he assimilates this really quite bizarre supernatural experience to fairy lore. I would disagree that demons are gone.

C: That seems to be the main trend in ghost hunting these days is everything is demonic. People are always getting scratched and clawed and really threatened with deep demonic voices on their EVPs. So, I would disagree that. I mean, that may be why this child saw what he saw. He was assimilating that, but I disagree that demons are gone from our culture. I think they're trending as it were.

S: Chris, this is new for me. I mean, my snobbish British reaction to this is that here we have colonials doing their thing. Primitive colonials. But listen, in all seriousness now, can I counter? Are we talking about demonic ghosts or demons? Because for me, it's different. 

If you're talking about ghosts that have this diabolical dimension, this diabolical side to them, I'm all on board with that. I think that what you have is the, forgive me, Chris, but the boring 19th century ghost, the boring early 20th century ghost is being given finally a personality by people having experiences. Whereas, they're being said to be demonic. If you're saying that this thing is actually a demon, if you have ghost hunters going around and saying, this is not a dead soul, it's a demon, then I'm surprised and impressed. 

C: Well, you've got them in Britain as well. The ghost hunters who are running around saying, these are demonic. It's the thing. Since ghost hunting went on TV, it's not enough to just sit there and say, did you hear that? Did you hear that? You've got to up the ante. You've got to up the suspense. So what else? Demons, of course. And yeah, it's supposed to be real demons. It's not demonic ghosts. It's actual demons. All these people are sort of amateur exorcists. 

S: Well, Chris, yes, again, in my conversations with you, this is a revelation. I guess what I would say is you used the word trending. You accept that this is something new. I trust your judgment completely on this. But surely, was this a thing back in the 90s? For example, I'm ashamed to admit this, Chris, but I have never watched The Exorcist. 

C: Oh, I've never seen it either.  I have a weak stomach. Do we know? Is The Exorcist about a ghost or a demon? Because I just assumed it was a ghost. No, it's about a demon. It's based on an actual case of a child being exorcised by the Catholic church.

S: Maybe I've come down a bit hard on the poor old demons. Maybe even in the late 20th century, they had more authority than I recognized. I spent part of my childhood, well, really my late adolescence, I spent a year with a very evangelical family. I have very happy memories of this family. It did strike me coming from a very sophisticated or a family that believed itself to be sophisticated, middle-class British family. I remember being just blown away by this whole experience. The things that people believed in. I think it's always useful to remember, perhaps particularly for someone fairly anti-social like myself, that it's very easy to crawl into our boxes, but there are lots of other things that aren't in society that we can easily lose touch with. 

C: Yeah, absolutely. The evangelical world is a very tight-knit world and it's a very insular world. A lot of them believe they have the only true description of how things work. There's really not much that can be done with that.

S: I remember, it just came back to me, one of the first times I went to that church, and I remember a gentleman in the congregation who was actually one of the people I most liked, because I think that he was someone who was, he felt God within him. He was someone who was genuinely, how can I put this? He was really questing, let's say. In the middle of the service, he just started speaking in tongues. I suppose it was one of my first experiences at actually seeing, in a sense, the supernatural. But anyway, listen, we're getting away from fairies.

C: Yes, we are.

S: God bless the evangelicals, but that will be for another day. 

C: Yes. One of the other things I wanted to touch on from your article that really made, a lot of the children saw fairies in trees. What struck me was they always remembered what kind of tree it was. That struck me as remarkably specific. Why would you remember it was a peach tree, or it was an oak tree, or it was an ash tree? Why that? They were less interested in fairy flowers. The tree fairies seemed to be the main category.

S: Trees are charismatic in a way that flowers just aren't. Having seen three children grow up in my house, we have lovely roses in the garden every spring. I always take joy in walking in the garden and seeing them. It's always a triumph for me when they come out and I look after the rosebush. It struck me over the years just how entirely indifferent my children are to these roses. They just, it's as if they're not there. They don't really see them. Whereas we have one tree and it's a persimmon tree in the garden. This tree has been the center of our family life because it's there that the children climb. It's there that they try to hang a swing. They try to attach a hammock. The tree is almost part of the family. My suspicion is that kids growing up just don't register flowers. Flowers aren't really important for their survival. Whereas trees can make an impression. Remember that theosophists or many neo-pagans as well would say that flowers, trees have their elemental spirit, which is what we call fairies. A lot of accounts recall this, but you're absolutely right. Children focus them on trees, not flowers. Whereas when you get to adults, flowers start to really be a big deal. 

C: Perhaps it's because flowers are ephemeral and trees are still there, even when they lose their leaves. We've explored children and fairies and perhaps particularly the sleep part in quite some detail here.

S: You've talked frequently about this article that I wrote a couple of years ago based on the fairy census. It might just be worth saying that if people have had a fairy experience, if you type fairy census into Google, you'll very easily be able to find the relevant page. I'd be very grateful if you could put in your own fairy experiences. I hope nothing we've said today has put you off that. They'll be treated with great respect. As far as the article goes, I have a page on the internet on a site called academia.org. There are lots of articles I've written there and that article is called Fairies and Children. It is something that some listeners might be interested in, so I just mention it now. I mean, in desperation, send me an email, but if you can find it on the academia site, all the better.

C: Can we post a link to it on the Fairy Investigation Society Facebook page or something like that? 

S: Yes, we can also do that. 

C: Yes. I like that article and I like the hope that it will drum up more accounts. 

S: I had a lovely email about, well, it's quite a while, probably about six months ago now. In this email, a Canadian wrote to me about an experience, again, serial fairy experience. There was one fairy who was quite threatening, who repeatedly came to this boy's bed when he was small. He's now a grown man. This is many, many years ago. It was a very impressive account. What I most liked about it was this man who's now practically retired was really struggling with himself because he was convinced that what had happened was real. He sent me an email with five or six different points to prove, as far as he was concerned, that this had been a real experience. I thought it was fascinating that someone about to retire, remembering things from 50 odd years, if not been more before, framed things in that way. It was clearly an important part of his memories. 

C: Well, it also may be, if I found myself in that position, I would be thinking, oh, whoever I'm writing this to is going to think I'm crazy. So here's how I need to prove to myself that I'm not. 

S: He certainly came across as a very rational, reasonable person, ready to talk about all the points. He wasn't dogmatic about anything. I think probably the primary thing you get in an account like this, and I can think of many other accounts that fit into this bracket, is curiosity. I think this is just someone who is, as we go on in years, we try and make peace with our past. We try and sort things out that don't make sense in our memories or things that have upset us. I think this is just what he was trying to do. He was trying to finally put a label on this experience. Right.

C: Yes, absolutely. The most common thing that happened when I was going out to visit people in their houses was, I just want to know if there's something here. Am I crazy for feeling what I'm feeling? It was just a matter of, I need some validation as to what I'm experiencing. That's what it sounded like. He was just trying to, as you say, make peace with something that he couldn't explain.

S: Chris, yes. Well, a lot of us have this, I think, in our background, in our memories.