Fairies: A Dangerous History with Richard Sugg

Speaker A: Hi everyone, and welcome back to another episode of Haunted History Chronicles. Before we dive into what is coming up today, just a reminder that the podcast also puts out weekly content over on Patreon in the forms of mini podcasts, writings and lots more. It will also give you access to exclusive stickers and other perks. If you are interested in some additional content, as well as supporting the podcast, why not head on over to our Patreon page at WW dot patreon.com hauntedhistory chronicles. The link is also in the podcast description notes.

Speaker B: To make it easy for you, you.

Speaker A: Will gain the entire back catalogue of materials as well as future content. And now let's get started with the episode. Joining me today is Dr. Richard Sugg, an author of many books, who was featured in the podcast before when he came to talk about mummies, cannibals and vampires and the history of corpse medicine. If you haven't listened to that podcast already, I highly recommend taking a listen. It was a fascinating discussion around this whitewashed bit of history. Today, Richard's joining me to discuss something rather different. We're going to be exploring his book Fairies a Dangerous History. How dangerous were fairies, you might ask? Well, in the late 17th century, they could still scare people to death, little.

Speaker B: Wonder, as they were thought to be.

Speaker A: Descended from fallen angels and to have the power to destroy the world itself. Despite their modern image, the fairies feared by ordinary people were very different and caused them to flee their homes, to revere fairy trees and paths, and to abuse or even kill infants or adults held to be fairy changelings. Such beliefs, along with some remarkably detailed sightings, lingered on in places well into the 20th century. Often associated with witchcraft and black magic, fairies were also closely involved with reports of ghosts and poltergeists. In literature and art, fairies often retained this edge of danger. From the wild magic of A Midsummer Night's Dream through the dark glamour of Keeps, to the improbably erotic poem Goblin Market or the paintings inspired by opium dreams, the otherness of the fairies ran side by side with the newly delicate or feminised creations of the Victorian world. Richard Suggsbook dives deep into the history of the many fairy terrors which lay behind Titania or Tinkerbell. And with the anniversary of Arthur Conan Doyle's book, The Coming of the Fairies, first published on 1 September 1922, it seems the perfect opportunity to dive deep into the history of fairies the powers they were considered to have, as well as looking at their connections with ghosts and poltergeists and, of course, examine the Cottingley fairies. The incident that sparked Conan Doyle's book. So let's get started.

Speaker B: Hi, Richard. Thank you so much for being with us again today. The last time you were here, we were talking about the history of corpse medicine and your book Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires. We're going to be diving into the world of fairies today? Slightly different topic.

Speaker C: Yeah, it's possible. Well, I think it is actually a stranger topic, that's a pretty weird one, but this is actually stranger still and perhaps got a bit more range out of the darkness, as it were. There's a lot of lighter areas in this one.

Speaker B: Yeah, it was a fascinating one. And we're going to be looking at your book fairies. A dangerous history, too. How is it that you came to want to research and write about that, given that, as I said last time, we were talking about mummies, cannibals and vampires, how did you end up looking at fairies and the history of fairies?

Speaker C: Yeah, I'd been looking at witchcraft quite a lot, actually, in the years before I started on that book, around 2016. And Reaction came to me, having seen my work and said, would you like to do a book with us? They'd got a Supernatural series. And I thought, yeah, fairies are quite a lot more interesting than people think and a lot of association with witchcraft. They were taken seriously, they were allies or sort of familiars of witches, allegedly, and they were respected. They weren't really obviously good or bad. They were powerful, like a lot of things in folkloric or popular culture. And so I started researching and it was a beginning of a huge, huge adventure. I think any bigger adventure, really, I've had is researching ghosts and poltergeists. But actually there's a surprising overlap as we'll see there is this quite a genuine overlap. And, yeah, if anyone finds this subject a bit weird and is scowling and swearing under their breath, I don't blame them, because I had no idea what I was going to find. And it really opened my eyes across several months, and it continues to do so. I was just a few weeks ago at the sandwich shop getting some food, and there was a chap there with his dog waiting outside, having food at a table, and I spoke to him about what I did and the fairies, and I thought, poor chap's going to think this guy's bonkers. And he says, I own a bit of land out west, Wales by. And he said, when I bought it, a woman came to me and said, can I keep coming to this hill? I've been sitting here a long time and I sit here to watch the fairies. And he said, affably enough, yeah, just shut the gate, you can go and sit there when you like. He went out there and one evening he saw, he told me, fairies. He was about the most mundane, no nonsense sort of guy you could imagine, but he told me quite to my face that, yeah, he'd seen fairies dancing about in the grass on this fairy hill. That sighting was just about a month ago, I think.

Speaker B: And I think most people will find quite surprising, because belief in fairies and fairy traditions was once so important it was so prevalent. And I think that's kind of the place to really start. That's something, I think, to really help people understand just how important and prevalent that was. The belief in them kind of occupied every part of life, really. They were considered something that inhabited the land below the earth, the skies, bodies of water, and you see them cropping up, stories of them and sightings of them in history cropping up in every part of the country, but then other parts of the world. It was really, really quite embedded in people's consciousness, both personally, culturally and regionally. Do you want to just kind of explore that and explain that?

Speaker C: Because that is something I think is pretty little known and really in much of Ireland, particularly in Scotland, in Wales, in parts of England as well. And from what we know also, according to Simon Young, who's conducted a global fairy census do look at that. If you put that in fairy census, I think it'll come up pretty freely and available all over the world as well in other versions. But yeah, fairies had a hell of a pedigree and they originally came about like this. If you asked an elderly Scottish man around about 1900, he would tell you that at the great rebellion, the angels Lucifer and Co were hurtling out of heaven into hell, and the father and son became concerned. Jesus told you, better stop this. So they shut up the doors of heaven, they shut up the doors of hell. But a fair number of angels got caught in the middle. And as you say, they were the ones that would later be denizens of the earth, the air or the water, this threefold division of fairies. So what we've got here is this colossal heresy which repeats itself in different variations throughout extremely pious cultures, whether they're Catholic or they're Protestant. Religion is the core of these people's lives. But at the same time, what startled me a great deal was realizing that this exists over and over again with magic and with heresies that would freeze the blood of your local parson, curate vicar in whatever country it was. And one of the big ones, along with that foundational heresy where they came from, was that if children died young, then they weren't in heaven, they weren't in hell, they weren't in purgatory, they were with the fairies. The fairies had care of the afterlife. And it's hard to think of a bigger heresy than this. And this was running on through the 17th century when in Cumbria there were reports of people actually dying of terror of fairies through the 18th century into the 19th century, when, of course, we start to get the whole spread of gentrification and protification of fairies in poetry, particularly in art, most especially these lovely, gorgeously polychromatic images by Fitzgerald and so forth. Sometimes miss summer night's dream. And even in the middle of the 20th century, there were many parts of Ireland where nobody for love nor money nor threats could convince a team of road builders or house builders to build across a ferry path, over a fairy tree or around a fairy fort or hill. And the fascinating thing is that we think now, perhaps a little bit loosely, sort of whimsically of a magical fairy place, perhaps in the woods, perhaps some little beck flowing down a hillside. And it's a solitary place, it's a place of wonder. A fairy place in the old days was very different. The problem was finding a place that wasn't a fairy place, because there was a kind of invisible network or grid of fairy rights of way and artifacts all across your landscape in the countryside. So there were fairy trees, fairy thorns. There was a farmer in Ireland who supposedly cut down one of these in a rage when he was drunk one night and was found the next morning with his head turned around backwards. And people have stressed again that if you look at a map of many parts of Ireland, you'll see roads continually running in fairly straight lines and then horseshoeing around a fairy tree. There was a big to do about one of these in the early part of this century in Ireland, where it had to be moved when a new motorway was being built. And then you've got your ferry paths. And in Ireland to the present day, I gather, you can still see houses with peculiar bits lopped off the side. So it'll be a detached house. There were no sort of building regulations, really, in the 19th or early 20th century. You basically decided where you're going to build your house. You staked out the plot, you got all your friends and a fiddler and you built and then danced and then built and then danced to the sound of the fidland and you got finished. So the problem was not the bureaucratic authorities, the problem was the fairies. If you happen to have accidentally built your house across a ferry path, you might get poltergeist racket going on. And this is where I say that the fairies overlap with poltergeist and ghosts in curious way. We can just say this is one underlying thing, but it would be called fairies. And you've got fairy problems. You consult the local wise woman and say, oh, yeah, well, look at that corner. You built that right across a ferry path. They don't like that. So you get a mason to slice the corner off the house and free up the ferry path. In other cases, you've got people again with a detached house. They got back and front doors giving on the fields and they'd throw them both open at a certain time of the evening to let the fairies invisibly march through. Or alternately, they'd call all the children in for a ferry curfew because the fairies were on the march. A fairy fort was not far from the house of Bridget Cleary and Michael Cleary in the notorious case in which she was actually murdered by her husband under the belief that she was not his wife, she was a fairy changeling. She was apparently suffering from some degree of mental illness, and the fairy fort was one of the factors that gave suspicions to Cleary. And he, in fact, was outside with a knife at the fort waiting for his wife to be given back to him for a couple of nights after the murder, which became called celeb across the world shortly after that. So, yeah, that's a very brief summary of how people's worlds were full of fairies. And we're very much in the minority in respect of this looking strange to us. It was powerful, it was supernatural, but it was kind of very ordinary.

Speaker B: As you know, the example that you just gave of Bridget Cleary is quite a horrifying case. I mean, it's considered the last witch killing in Ireland, but for Bridget, she received no burial. So to this day, she has no tombstone. She has an anonymous grave where nobody knows where it is. Her husband, who obviously went to trial, served very little time, and then was able to get on with the rest of his life, traveling to Canada, I believe.

Speaker C: I think he was sent away or went away didn't. I think he immigrated. As far as I gather, one of the reasons why he wasn't actually executed was that he genuinely believed that she was a fairy changeling. There was a fair deal of incredulity and fury from the kind of educated upper class QCs and so forth, but eventually the judge became convinced that, yeah.

Speaker B: There was merit to it.

Speaker C: Wrong. But he believed what he said, actually, and that's certainly plausible from what I've seen. I think there were other factors. There's a very good account of it by Joanna book, but she gives other factors to do with sort of social jealousy and the old guard and the new guard in different generations. But, yeah, that was certainly at the heart of it, that she was not his wife. In fact, I think he said that she was taller than his original wife.

Speaker B: And again, this is what makes this so fascinating, really. I mean, you mentioned the crossover with ghosts, with poltergeist, but this is something that really crossed over with so many other kind of magical elemental type figures hogoblins, Leprechauns, Selkies, Silkies, Brownies. I mean, the list goes on and on and on. And to some extent, these things now still feature very much in people's consciousness with slightly higher kind of regard than fairies. Fairies seem to be kind of bottom of the pile when it comes to a lot of people's perceptions about what it means to kind of think and believe in fairies or to hear stories of fairies. But at one point, that crossover between all of these different types of magical creatures was really really very much up there, and you can't really distinguish between them. And so when we're talking about brownies and selkies, we're really talking about fairies, aren't we, essentially. And that kind of notion of what a fairy could look like then compared to now, again, is just night and day. I mean, night and day just kind of explain and talk about that difference.

Speaker C: That's something I've got used to. But people perhaps aren't familiar with that, that in some ways, fairies were rather like the traditional image of the devil, who was a master of deception and of change, of course. And so fairies could look like almost anything. And what was said about fairies being everywhere, potentially, people would see a fox out in the countryside, and in certain circumstances, they'd become convinced it was a fairy fox. Fairies of the air could just look like flies. And of course, the fairies of the water were the traditional silkies selkies, the seal wives. And this, famously, was the myth of seal becoming human. The man on land that took this to his wife kept the skin, and so long as she couldn't get back in her skin, she couldn't get away from him. But there are other stories less well known in Ireland, parts of Ireland on the coast, people would suddenly suspend seal hunting, which is already quite a big part of local ecology back then, on the belief that such and such a seal was somebody's grandfather, in actual fact, and so they couldn't kill it. So, yeah, the different kind of categories that filled the world about the one thing they weren't likely to have, I suppose, in the case of flies you say they had was wings. It wouldn't really look like your modern kid or particularly girl would want it to look like. The brownie thing is an interesting one because they seem to have had this role of doing household chores for you if you treated them nicely. And this whole idea about putting out bread and milk at night for them and even having a kind of fairy curfew indoors whenever I go to bed quite early and leave the fairies to have their meal by the fireside. There's a case from, I think, the 1980s, but it's certainly well within living memory, where a couple, the Boltons, moved into a new house, and I think they were renting the house. The point being that there were various tenants who told different stories about place, had friendly brownies, and they weren't a problem. They mainly did nice chores for you as long as you humored them. Okay, so they'd been forewarned about these brownies and found that, yeah, OD, things happened. Their washing got folded up and put away without them doing it. Things got moved about in the kitchen, and presently the wife of the couple got pretty annoyed with things not being arranged the way she wanted them in the kitchen, and swore about this, shouted about this, I'm not sure. But there was such a storm of poltergeist violence that evening, they called the police and abandoned the house and spent the night in a hotel. A few months later, the next residence of the place said it was all fine. Sometimes the brownies opened the windows for them, did this and that, but it wasn't anything problematic. And there was a similar case, a place called Denton Hall, around the turnover of the 19th into the 20th centuries. The place was first inhabited by a couple of elderly sisters who lived there, were quite happy about the silky or brownie that left little bunches of flowers around for them, made up the fires, swept the crate and so forth. But a family with a young son, and the young son, being a kind of typical age for being a poltergeist agent, unfortunately moved in, I think it was around the Second World War, and there was such a storm of violence, kent hammering noises towards the son, particularly his bedroom, that they gave the place up and moved out. What's interesting about this is that Denton Hall is quite definitely known to be haunted. There are abundant detailed stories from the days when it was a big socialite venue with actors like Charles McCready and Co staying there, kind of salon style, as it were. But recently I rang the place now under, I think, the National Trust, and they said, yeah, quite a matter of fact, yes, it's still haunted. It's not a big deal, but things do happen that we can't explain. So, yeah, in both of those cases, you've got a kind of almost neutral being entity, paranormal creature that can tilt very violently either way, or certainly tilt either way, whether it's doing pleasant chores for you and being domestic familiar, or it's trying to terrify you out the house and succeeding.

Speaker B: Yeah, it's again, just a really fascinating kind of thing to explore and to talk about. And it's certainly something that I want to really kind of pick your brains about a little bit later, because it was one of the most profound things that I found about the book. It was just so eye opening for me, especially someone very much interested in the paranormal to kind of reexamine some of the things that I think about the paranormal and look at it again with just a slightly different perspective.

Speaker A: Before we head back to the podcast, where Richard is going to explore the connection fairies had with witches, the dead, poltergeist and ghosts, as well as looking at modern fairy sightings, and, of course, the Cottingly fairies. Just a reminder that if you are enjoying the podcast, to check out the links in the description there you will find the social media links for the podcast as well as guests. Following the podcasts and guests over on Instagram, Facebook or Twitter is a great and easy way to support what we're doing. If you want access to behind the scenes, news teasers and spotlights and features. Why not sign up for the Haunted History Chronicles newsletter over on the website? Again, the link is in the description below. And now let's get back to exploring the dangerous world of fairies.

Speaker B: Some of the dangers of fairies and things that they could do. You mentioned kind of the aspect of poltergeist activity and how similarly these things cross over. And one of the quotes that really stood out for me from the book just kind of, I think, really epitomizes so much of what I kind of took from the book. And it was this. It was once it was dangerous not to believe in fairies, later it became dangerous to believe in fairies. And I think that shift, that cultural shift is really quite staggering. But to really understand just how far it kind of moved from thinking that fairies were dangerous and to not believing them, to not think about them in that way was dangerous, to suddenly it being dangerous to think about them in that way, to really understand that mindset, that shift, we've really got to understand just how dangerous people believe them to be. And I know you mentioned already witches and their connections with witch trials and changelings, but it goes so much deeper than that. At one point, the dangers of fairies were something pretty much everybody was going to believe in, right?

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker B: Thinking that they could cause illness, cause harm, cause death, they would be blamed for famines, they might be blamed for things going wrong, other things going wrong, and just a whole host of other things. Basically, there was nothing. Their powers were kind of limitless, which is what made them so scary, so potentially dangerous for people in what they thought that they could do. Do you want to just, again, just kind of explain that a little bit more? Because I think it's so important to understand that, to really understand how different the modern perception of the fairy with the little wings and the very tiny body is so starkly different.

Speaker C: Yeah. As you say, they were to excuse the tail end of COVID here. I'm sorry. So, yeah, they were a scapegoat. And what fascinated me about this research, alongside research on vampires and research, of course, on witches, was that it was a matter of choosing your scapegoat. And the witch and the vampire were very diametrically opposed because one of them was already dead and the other one was likely to wind up dead. Unfortunately, for being your scapegoat, for your animals being sick, your crops failing, your weather being bad, your children being ill or dying of cot deaths. And then you've got the fairy, which partakes of the supernatural nature of both of those to some extent, but is again peculiarly kind of poised, powerful rather than good or evil and has got this curiously kind of heretical quality. The fairies are everywhere, as you suggest. They're omnipotent, according to some people, they could destroy the world if they wanted to. One informant said they were omniscient, as far as you could tell as well, because people would always refer to fairies euphemistically or complementarily, on the belief that they were listening to you, although you couldn't see them. So you've got this kind of godlike quality about them. And as with vampires, as with witches, there was pretty much no problem in your house, your fields, your weather that you couldn't blame them for. And the one that I think focuses the fear of them best of all is the idea of the fairy changeling. It seems like a kind of mythical whimsy when it's there in Midsummer Night's Dream, but in fact, this was a subject of terror and horror. Terror for them and horror for us, reading about what they did to their own children on the belief that they had actually been switched by the fairies. The most kind of detailed basis for this woman called Susan Shun. Eberley studied a lot of the fairy changeling cases and found that children toddlers perhaps, who suffered from something called PKU. I won't try and pronounce this whopping great scientific name, but PKU is a standard acronym for a condition where the baby is born normally, looks normally and behaves normally, but after a few weeks or months, they start to look kind of oddly shriveled in appearance, and they cry a tremendous amount. They are constantly hungry and the moment you stop feeding them, they start crying again. So you've got a basic social problem here in a house with perhaps 1014 children, not a huge amount of food, and you've also got the belief that fairies tend to swap boys, particularly. Now, PKU picks on boys and also ones with certain kind of genes. So your classic fairy prize for them to pinch off you is a blue eyed boy. And in fact, this is how PKU tends to manifest in people of those genes. So, yeah, you've got people putting their poor toddlers over hot fires on seashores while with tide washes over them, bathing them in poisonous fox glove essence and generally tormenting them, but with a kind of awful, twisted love in. The belief that this is not their child and that if they torment them enough, the fairies being rather like us, kind of mirror image in many ways, and that's what's distinctive about them. Unlike witches or vampires, the fairies love their children too, so they're not going to see this happening and they'll give you yours back and take theirs before you kill it. And unfortunately, they did kill these children a tremendous amount. This tended to happen in less educated and poorer households, but it almost happened, apparently, to, I think it was the sister of the folklorist Westrop, who was an upper middle class Anglo Irish character. And you've got, of course, nurses and nannies, whatever you want to call them in wealthy families like that. And they might have these beliefs. And it was the nurse, I think, who decided that Westrop's sister was not Westrop'sister anymore and put her out on the doorstep for the Ferris to take her back. I mean, she was recovered in time, but that was probably not the only case. One of the most memorable and awful cases, which I think this Westrom recounts, was when a young boy of sufficient age to understand he was five, six, something like that, maybe older, overheard people discussing the fact that he was a fairy changeling and what could they do about it? And he probably knew the awful kind of tests and torments to which he'd be subjected. And he apparently died of terror of what was coming to him before anything did actually happen. So, yeah, at the kind of heart of fairy darkness, this is some of the darkest stuff of all. These people loved their children as much as we do, but they also feared things which they didn't understand and says.

Speaker B: A lot about kind of understanding of medicine and illness, disease, mental illness at the time. Because when you don't have a name for something or know how to treat something, it's very difficult and can be very problematic for these families, like you said, who may be living on the breadline with a large number of children to feed to really understand how and what's happening. And when you've got learned doctors questioning what's happening, you can understand how those with none of that scientific, medical understanding at all could very easily think about the changeling here and kind of see that as something of a positive thing in some ways. Because that meant that their healthy child would be under the care of the fairy. And this sickly child was not theirs. So in a kind of strange way, like you said, that was a way of kind of having their child continue to be loved, taken care of, that they were okay, and kind of a strange kind of duality to it, I think.

Speaker C: Yeah, that psychology, I think, has been quite well delved into by Eberley, and she talks about the guilt that people might know, why was this baby born normal? What have they done wrong that it was now behaving like this? And so, yeah, they had a kind of outlet for this guilt in a sense. And the other point you make about disability and being a bit different, being a bit strange, being a bit inexplicable. Something I realized when studying pretty much every paranormal phenomenon, certainly vampires, witches and fairies, was that it was never a good idea to stand out in traditional culture. That was risky.

Speaker B: No, you got to blend in. You cannot be part of the otherness, can you?

Speaker C: Well, I think what I realized with this is we look back on these people and it's become the kind of go to cliche for ridiculous superstition somehow. It's the absolute past, even if it. Was only the 19th century, and in fact, this is not remotely the case. People now have wildly, superstitious, madly irrational beliefs that are emotionally important to them. And the new witch is the immigrant people's, just visceral idiotic racism about anybody from another part of the world that comes into Britain. It's equally as irrational in many ways. It doesn't have the same kind of supernatural colorings. But on this basis, england has committed an act of national suicide in the last few years.

Speaker B: And I think it's important to also note that when we're talking about some of these superstitions that they had and beliefs around changelings, that this is not something that is 200 years ago, 100 years ago. We're talking up until the 1930s, you were writing in the book about how there were parts of Ireland where they would put pepper into the mouth or the nostril of the infant to force it to sneeze. Because the belief was that as soon as the child sneezed, that meant that they were safe from the fairy changeling from the fairies and becoming a changeling. And so you can see how this has really carried on for far longer, I think, than people might recognize.

Speaker C: Yes, I was startled by that when I first did the research, and I think it was around the 1950s that there was a big controversy about a new housing estate being built on a ferry fort, and the building crew just simply wasn't going to do this.

Speaker B: As I say, it's really quite profound when you dive into it. I mean, again, you mentioned witch trials. And I think we can all recognize and we might all be familiar with how kind of that other world that witches were believed to kind of be part of. The devil going. To places like if you think about blockula where these women might go to in order to commune with satan, with fairies, with these other being know, we can see that crossover.

Speaker C: Yes.

Speaker B: But again, the extent of that, I think, might surprise people. And one of the things that really blew my mind was you referenced Joan of Arc and how during her trial, that during that interrogation, they took a real interest in her kind of childhood home and how when she played there as a child, there was a fairy trin. And so you could see even in her trial where she was being tried for heresy, that beliefs in fairies and her connection possibly with the fairies and the fairy world was somehow part of that, too.

Speaker C: Yes, I think back in the 15th century, they took things particularly seriously and found them particularly dark. It does seem that Joan of Arc possibly had some kind of strange paranormal powers of her own. Actually, in reality, it's very interesting work done on her by Anthony Peak. If anyone wants to look at that, I recommend it strongly. But, yeah, the fairies had this dark power, and people would allegedly consort with them and come back with remarkable esoteric knowledge in medicine, in herbs. There were anonymous characters like this in Ireland particularly, but there was mostly Biddy early, absolutely extraordinary character who was associated with the fairies. But I think also, and various people have recognized this, did actually have some kind of genuine psychic powers. She was some kind of psychic healer. And she summed up this ambivalent relationship with religion and magic that so many ordinary people had. She was being denounced ferociously from the pulpit by the local clergy in her lifetime. She would have a minister trying to whip away her visitors to her cottage. I mean, she had a queue of dozens of people come for cures at her humble little cottage at times. And the clergy thought this was all dark, superstitious demonic, I suppose you could say they thought it was interfering with their prerogative as well. But a staggering number of priests actually attended her funeral when she died. And she didn't take money for her cures, she took just presence of meat or whiskey. She would say, sometimes, I can't cure this. It's not something I can cure. You have to try something else. So she did seem to be sort of genuine at her own level, but she did actually seem to have powers which cured people somehow. Matthew Manning would be a parallel in the modern day in terms of a psychic healer. And, yeah, she was reputed to have some kind of level of British royalty driving right over into the wilds of Ireland to see her. And she certainly reports her to be believed, and they're quite detailed. She knew what had happened to people, she knew what they were doing miles and miles away from where she was, and she'd report this to them, to their astonishment.

Speaker B: And again, it's one of the things that really fascinated me, reading your book, that kind of duality of how people associated with fairies could be treated. You spent time talking about the fairy doctor, these prophetic type people for whom would have visits from people from much further afield, who would travel great distances to consult with them on information about loved ones who were missing and so forth, and pay huge amounts of money at times when they would have found that very difficult. When Ireland, for example, with the famine, I know was something that you mentioned. And if they've lost their breadwinner and concerned that where is that person to then spend a huge amount of money to consult with one of these types of people was no kind of small thing to part with such huge amounts of money to do that. And so you can kind of see the reverence that they have, but also, at the same time, the persecution. It's so strange.

Speaker C: Yeah. It's important to remember that these people were practical. I think they didn't go a long way and wait a long time. Outside Billy earlier's cottage, for nothing. It was because she had a reputation that she could do this. And with these cunning folk, whether they're cunning men or cunning women of whom there'd be one or two within your reach probably for most of history, I think some of them really could do something strange. They had abilities of what we'd now call remote viewing which does seem well attested. There are a startling number of stories right now of people that can know where a stolen object is. This fascinating case of a stolen harp just a few years ago which was recovered when somebody 1500 miles away said yeah, I know it's still there, I can tell you where it is, et cetera. So the tricky thing with what's now sort of lost in the midst of folklore is how many of these people were actually gifted with these strange psychic powers which do seem to still exist and sometimes used by the CIA or the FBS or whatever it might be for covert spying.

Speaker B: I think, you know, you really did kind of add that element in the book explaining how these were people that were very much sought out for the talents that they had, the things that they might be able to give insight to. And yet at the same time the kind of real human suffering that could be brought about was profound. When we think of the changelings these children who suffered years of abuse, people who were persecuted as witches, thrown in prison, executed whatever kind of part of these types of examples and evidence you look at, you can see that element of human suffering. Whereas for the fairy, the kind of the elemental part of it, there wasn't anything you can do to them but for the person, the human. Very much so, yes.

Speaker C: It's been stressed, of course that Ireland which has been abused beyond all measurement really by the English down to the present day psychologically, physically and you name it and most of all as being the home of superstition, of Catholic darkness and magic and all the rest of it. Ireland had no witch persecution, basically. And there must be a link there with the fact that its supernatural familiar of choice was the fairy, not the witch in actual fact. So yeah, it's a very tricky area to pick your way through. You've got tremendous amount of actual ignorance, suffering, cruelty, whether it's malicious or simply misguided and yet you have also got the lack of the taboo which we've now created around paranormal entities. You want to call them that. There's abundant evidence that people do experience ghosts, they do experience poltergeist. So I was a bit fed up of being indoors during the heat wave trying to research. So I thought I'd take a little bit of research outside into the park. And I took the very simple, blunt, plain approach of just wandering up to people sitting in the sun and saying do you believe in ghosts. And about 70, 80% of them not only said yes, but sat me down and told me this story, that story, the other story, and these were things that added up with what I knew. So we've got here a kind of strange, open secret about which people are worryingly, embarrassed, actually, and what you said about it being a supernatural danger and now a social danger that applies with ghosts, with poltergeists, who seem to keep some kind of strange kinship with fairies. And this, in lots of ways, particularly across the last two and a half years, might well be the biggest thing that's ever happened to somebody. It might be the evidence that their dead relative is still around somewhere and is still kind of watching over them, communicating with them. But when you speak to those people about this, they do not talk to people about it. They do not talk to their closest friends about it a lot of the time. And it's impressive how we've battled and cut through so many taboos just in the last 2030 years, but we've really created another one in that area about what you could say is the biggest question of them all.

Speaker B: And like I said, I thought that the kind of question about ghosts, poltergeist, and the fairy and the crossover between them was startling for me. And just that notion and that concept that fairies were linked to the dead, as you mentioned earlier, caring for those that had passed, caring particularly for young children that had passed. There was beliefs that those that had actually passed away, those were fairies returning. And one of the sections that you wrote about was how they were believed to bring the dead back to the living. And you and you kind of cited cases of precisely that where people claimed to have been returned years later after they'd been declared dead and buried to be a particular person returning to their family. And you also cited cases of premature burial. And that's a fascinating one for me, having looked at that on the podcast before with Sarah Blake from Hushed Up History, where there were cases of people who had clearly been prematurely buried, had sat up in their coffins. Or sat up and escaped from their graves and then were stoned to death or whatever else because of the belief that they'd been returned in this manner. And somehow that was taboo and wrong, and it was just fascinating.

Speaker C: Yeah, if you woke up in your coffin in a lot of parts of Europe or Russia 100 years ago, you just keep quiet and wait till you've suffocated. It's the best fate in many territories.

Speaker B: And so, having just kind of mentioned that connection with death and dying, I think we really do have to explore the connection with ghosts and the poltergeist, because for anybody that really is interested in the paranormal and believes in ghosts or is researching or questioning that kind of side of things. When you look at the evidence and the example of the types of activities that were being reported that fairies were engaged in, the similarity with poltergeist activities and hauntings or ghost manifestations and ghost stories is so strong that to not see how implicitly linked they are is baffling to me. And that alone just warrants more research and more kind of people looking at some of this history of fairy belief and fairy culture and fairy traditions because of that connection alone.

Speaker C: Yeah. There's an extraordinary case in Ireland where a woman called Biddy Grant, she's 86 when she was interviewed, said that she habitually saw fairies and she believed them to be the spirits of our dead friends. Those are her words and most memorably of all. She stated, I once touched a boy of theirs and he was just like feathers in my hand. There was no substance in him. Now, what's extraordinary about that is that she doesn't quite say that hand went straight through him. She says, he was just like feathers in my hand. There's a famous case which you might know and a lot of listeners probably will know of a woman called Emily Sarge who in around the mid 19th century worked as a teacher at a girl's boarding school in central Europe. And she had a problem which some teachers will consider to be a blessing, but she considered to be a curse, which she was literally appearing in two places at once. And there would be her and then there would be her double. And at one point that's an incredible breathtaking moment. Two rather daring girls who'd seen her appear at the front of the class when they knew that she was actually, in reality, out in the gardens and sit through the windows they went and they put their hands in this apparition and stated that it felt like gauze or muslin. So in either case there with people who couldn't possibly have communicated to get their stories straight, you've got pretty much the same thing like feathers in my hand, like gauze or muslin. Now, the reason I make quite a deal of this is because I'm lately reading a lot of books about out of body experiences. And this is the kind of furthest limit of fury or incredulity for certain listeners. Perhaps some listeners may have had the experiences themselves. And I don't blame you if it's very hard to get your head around this, but a number of people do genuinely seem to have gone out of their bodies time and again and they've gone into other dimensions. The basis of this is that those dimensions are right here, right now, and it's just a matter of different frequencies. It's just a matter of bodies at different densities. So that the second body that comes out of yours when you're sort of sitting comatose there in your house but flying across other dimensions. The second body can go through windows walls, roofs, ceilings, et cetera. And this makes a certain sense if you've got different frequencies, different dimensions, different densities. So that's the kind of furthest twilight zone limit, I suppose, of this kind of thing. But yeah, there's simply the basic connection that if you ask people in Ireland about the banging, hammering noises, the things being thrown around their kitchen, et cetera, et cetera, it was the fairies doing it anywhere else. It was the poltergeist. And poltergeists clearly do exist. It's no good just saying that people are mad or attention seeking. Far too many people of every possible social type, temperamental type, et cetera, have talked about poltergeists. So yeah, something is there I'll get on to, if we get time. An extraordinary book I think I touched on at the very start called The Boy Who Saw True. And this child in the Victorian period had access to pretty much all of this from other dimensions. It was as ordinary to him as walking the dog is to anybody else.

Speaker B: When you look at just ordinary kind of examples of fairy manifestations, just unkind of source noises inexplicable movements being there, suddenly disappearing, invisible, pinchings, beatings, starting fires, the kind of the machiavellian, playful side of it, but then also possibly being helpful. These are all things that you see associated with poltergeist, ghost like activity. And just think about the word sprite, spirit, poltergeist, geist, ghost. You can see the connections in language. And for me, one of the kind of the profound kind of things that I thought about whilst reading the book was just how similar they were and kind of tying that with what I knew was happening in the victorian period with. If you think about the rise of spiritualism and how researching the paranormal, ghosts, poltergeist, these elements of parapsychology were really much more kind of prevalent than they ever had been, but it added a credibility to it. Science, something science based, something research based and at the same time we're being introduced to language for the first time. I mean, poltergeist didn't exist in the English language before 1848. It was introduced by Catherine Crow when she wrote The Night Side of Nature. Before that we didn't have that word. So suddenly knowing that we have these words, this language, it kind of raised the question of well, were these things there before? But now suddenly we have a frame of reference for it and is that the term poltergeist that's now coming kind of has made it more popular to use that term as opposed to fairy? And that was the kind of the thinking that I was having is it just the same thing, but being classed as something different and yeah, kind of having that moment was just quite profound.

Speaker C: For me, that thinking, yeah, it is hard to keep up with the facts. You think you know what's going on. I stopped off thinking poltergeist were just a very weird biophysics of some troubled teenager who feels better when some glass is shot across the room and hit the wall and they're almost literally letting off steam. But there's nothing actually supernatural about it. I realized eventually, when my own friends were telling me about ghosts in their houses, that I had to take a different view. And you keep learning, you keep getting new complications and strangenesses coming at you if you keep reading or just keep listening to people. And I think one of the big things with this is a bit of a fad for paranormal television and gadgets and infrared and electromagnetic meters, and they have their virtues and their uses, these things. There's certainly been some good science done on poltergeists, but actually, a big thing that doesn't happen enough is just to listen to what people tell you and perhaps ask them questions, but to listen to them, and to listen to them in a way that doesn't make them feel stupid, written off beforehand and so forth. Because then they will tell you absolutely astonishing things. And what's not the least astonishing is that those things match up time and time and time again. I can't keep track of the number of people that have told me these stories. I was in Barcelona airport before all the plate came down on us. I was coming back from Barcelona in October 2019 and waiting for the boarding queue. I got talking to a young woman in the cafe, and we were talking about what we'd been doing and what we did, and she'd been taking photographs around Spain. And I said, I write books and I've done this and that, but the most interesting research is ghosts, poltergeists. This is the weirdest of all. And she was quite quiet and sort of noncommittal. I thought, perhaps this poor fellow's mad. I'll just listen quietly till he goes away. Anyway, then she presently piped up and said, well, that's interesting, because when I was a little girl and she meant kind of one two, I think she said, this old lady used to come and read to me in bed. It was all just perfectly normal and pleasant. Happened each night for quite a while. And aged about 18, she said to her uncle, yeah, this old lady used to come read to me in bed all the time at night. I don't know who it was. Uncle said, Was it her points at a photograph? Yeah, that was her. She was the one. Well, that was your grandmother, and she died before you were born. I mean, I got that story in about eight minutes. Someone who I'd never met before. And there are countless of those stories waiting out there. If you just get hold of them and ask the right way and listen the right way, if you like, you just go to the pub and ask them, is it haunted? And about 70, 80% of pubs tend to be, to some degree or other, so, yeah, it's a big, strange, open secret. I think that's what I find the oddest thing about it is this great open secret of the absolutely weird right under your nose, right under your ears.

Speaker B: And for me, I just think it's fascinating to see how these two elements of the paranormal kind of diverged with kind of the rise of spiritualism. It being part of the national discourse. It really kind of helped elevate some things and made it more scientific. But for fairies, it was something more open to ridicule. And I think that kind of touches on that quote that I read out earlier from your book. It just wasn't okay to talk about fairies. And tied into that time frame. I think with photography being introduced, with the birth of cinema, when you look at some of the images that were being put out, women with women on film with their fairy wings dancing, obviously supposed to be very much fairy like, it made it much more romantic and whimsical and something less serious. Whereas ghosts and poltergeists and talking about that type of activity was something based in science with parapsychology and the rise of spiritualism. But fairies knew fantasy, childhood stories and all of those.

Speaker C: Yes, although there was just exactly 100 years ago, or almost exactly 100 years ago, September 1922, there was a place about six foot tall in which all of those extremely divergent, seemingly incompatible elements met. And that place was Arthur Conan Doyle. He lost a son and a brother in the First World War. He had tremendous appetite. Despite his seemingly ruthless scientific, forensic rigor embodied in Sherlock Holmes. He had tremendous appetite for mystery and romance. And it's sometimes forgotten that he didn't just produce this great myth of Sherlock Holmes, he produced the myth of what would become Jurassic Park, his dinosaur romance, The Lost World. It's a terrific story about a place where dinosaurs still exist in around 1910. And so he had this appetite for romance, wonder and mystery. And this was fed after the First World War when he'd lost a son and a brother to this ferociously, kind of utilitarian, masculine, mechanized slaughter by these two girls from Yorkshire, frances Griffiths, aged ten, and her cousin Elsie Wright, who was 16 in 1917, when this whole story of the Cottingly fairies kicked off the girls. The cousins were just playing, messing about in the beck at the bottom of the garden. But they managed to persuade Arthur Wright, Elsie's father, to lend them his new camera, midge camera, and they came back with an extraordinary photograph of Francis looking across the grass at various dancing fairy figures. And this could have just ended there. There are a couple of these photographs in 1917, July and September, they were taken, but they came to the attention of the local theosophical society, spiritualism being big across Britain at this point, as you indicated. And they then came to the attention of Edward Gardner who was a friend of Doyle. So in 1917, the girls were just out to trick their parents, respectively. And in 1920, when Doyle got gardener to go up and get more photographs and three more were produced, five altogether, they were out to trick the world. I'm quoting Simon Young here of the fairy census who's pinpointed that this thing happened in two different phases. And whatever really happened, we'll never quite know. But I think it got out of control. It got out of the control of these two young girls and it became too big for them to stop. So that, first off, it was in The Strand Magazine in Christmas 1920, so it was a bit of a sensation then. But next off, you've got Conan Doyle's actual book, and he talks in The Coming of the Fairies in Autumn 22 about this Victorian science which would leave the world as cold and hard and bare as a landscape in the moon. He talks about jolting the material 20th century mind out of the ruts in the mud. And you can hear overtones here quite easily of the devastation that was created across France and Belgium by the war. But I think also you can hear again that yearning for something that isn't kind of pinned down under the hard, cold grid of scientific analysis. And here it know to the nth degree, you've got these two seemingly innocent young girls. I mean, he was fooled here, but to him and Gardner, they were young, they were innocent, they were taught constantly about, if we don't get more photographs quickly, the girls are going to grow up, they're going to fall in love, and then it'll all be over. In actual fact, of course, they weren't innocent. They were very clever. And they had, and this is a kind of interesting footnote to the whole sort of power of fairies in traditional culture. They had a tremendous source of power. I can't think it was Francis or Elsie, but one of them would later remark, sort of well into the maybe 60s or 70s, I've heard somewhere that someone in the world makes a reference to the cottonly fairies at least once every hour. I mean, listen to that. This sounds like somebody kind of counting their hits on the Internet long before the Internet or computers were ever dreamed of. So they had this tremendous source of power that kept smoldering on in this sort of cat and mouse game. And media were interviewing them periodically right into the this, and they never quite came down on one side or the other. And Conan Doyle seemingly went to his grave in 1930 believing in this. But one reason he did believe in it was because spiritualism and the survival of his son, his brother, were bound up with he believed other dimensions. And actually, what's interesting is, although he fell for the biggest hoax of the century, essentially, I think, underneath it all, he got it right that, in fact, when a fairy pops out of nowhere and disappears into it, it is coming from another dimension and going back to it. The same is the case with ghosts, with Polargeists. How do they get through? Why do they get through these interesting questions? But they're both coming from other dimensions. There's certainly more than one, much more than one, from what I've read so far. And if anyone wants a book which is an absolute riot to read, it's utterly hilarious. It's written in kind of phonetic spelling, and it's also a great kind of social comedy of the appalling madnesses and hypocrisies of the Victorians anonymous account of a psychic child, the boy Who Saw True, which wasn't published until sometime in the 20th century, I think. But this account rings very, very true, that the child is constantly seeing ghosts. He says, don't sit in that chair. Uncle Hugo's sitting in it. You'll sit on Uncle Hugo's dead. He's baffled that other people can't see ghosts. He thinks his sister's playing tricks on him. He sees people's auras. And when I say that this is a great Victorian social comedy, I mean, the family is quite well off, but a vastly richer relative, bachelor relative, dies and leaves them his big house in Belgravia and lots of money. And he says it's very OD because everybody goes about in mourning and looks very sad, but their auras look really happy. So, yeah, this child sees auras, he sees ghosts, and he sees gnomes and elves and fairies in the garden in the Welsh countryside when he goes on holiday, he has visits from dead relatives. And if you want one place where it's kind of all there and it's spoken out of the mouths of babes and sucklings, that is the book that could well change your mind if you're open minded. At least.

Speaker B: The Cottingly Fairies is a really interesting one to look at because it is much more complex, I think, than people realize. And it kind of reminds me of the Fox sisters and the rise of spiritualism just these young girls perceived to be very innocent, who, something gets started and it just gets bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger. But there is a mystery around both of them in the sense that, yes, in both cases, you've got admittance of, well, this wasn't accurate. This was something that we staged, we kind of created this hoax. But in both cases, you've also got elements of them saying, but it still happened for the girls in the Cottingly Fairies, there was one of the sisters who said all the way up until the very end that she still had seen something. And so, again, it just opens up that question of, well, does it mean that something didn't happen at all? Or was there still some element of truth? I think that's the kind of the mystery that will continue and will have people wondering forever more. Just the fact that some parts of it weren't real doesn't mean the whole thing was made up.

Speaker C: As you say, it's surprisingly complicated and quite hard to unpick. And it's a very rich story. Francis it was, I think, who told Joe Cooper, the best biographer of this story, that, yeah, she saw something very strange where there was no general breeze, but just one willow leaf was shaking down by the back there. And as she watched it, I think supposed to have been before the photographs were taken, this case anyway, she watched this little fairy man materialize and stare at her for a little while before he disappeared. And one of the other reporters, I don't think he was pulling his leg, he possibly could have been, but a forester who was an ex wrestler, a pretty hard headed, solid kind of guy, told Joe Cooper that he saw something out in the woods up in Yorkshire of a fairy type. And he said, I didn't sleep for the next few nights after that. And if we get time, certainly there's some very practical, no nonsense military types that saw things of a fairy kind in other contexts. The richness of this story, at another level I love, is that it was kind of real in a way that wasn't actually a fairy creature that appeared and did things and made a leaf shake or whatever, but had a reality that was very, very powerful for both the cousins. And it gave them this feeling, I suppose, of secret satisfaction for decades after Doyle had died and they'd grown apart and so forth. And amongst various ironies in it, the younger by some way, by about six years, was Frances. But she would state to Cooper, oh, Elsie was much younger than me, essentially. She used to play with my dolls. And in fact, Frances came from this quite glamorous upper middle class household in South Africa. Her father was a senior soldier and they had servants. They would go to the opera. She would wear a little fur cape she was very proud of. And then they came to Austere wartime Cottingly, and they were sharing a bed, which sounds a little romantic, cousin, sharing a bed, listening to the beck down below. But she complained about this, complained about the horridness of black bread and basically a lack of glamour. So what does she do in keeping with in kinship with Elsie, but make her own glamour out of cutouts from a picture book? And of course, they were at the time derided as looking suspiciously Parisian and up to date with their bobbed hair. And another wonderful irony was that it was having fooled their parents, to say nothing of Conan Doyle and all the rest of them, frances was caught out by her own son, who spotted these images that she'd used another version of that book and said to her, look, you better come out with this or I'm going to shop. You if you don't. So she then had her hand forced, went to Cooper, and he got this ominous phone call and there's something you need to know. Met her in a coffee shop opposite Canterbury Cathedral in I think this was 1981, and she said, looking at him with a wry smile, from where I sat, I could see the hat pins holding the figures up. Conan Doyle conjectured that these were fairies navals. And she said, I'm amazed that anybody ever took it seriously. And certainly Cooper had taken it very seriously. Talking of hard headed military types, he was a war hero, he fought in the RAF, and yet he did this research to a large degree, because he wanted to believe the reality of the fairies. And he said his whole world shifted under him and he was never the same again. In fact, his children would state quite recently that he had a nervous breakdown, basically, after she came out with it. So the truth came out properly in the papers in 1983, and the Times compared these girls to Bailey and Litchfield, or in fact said that Bailey and Litchfield didn't compete with them, really. So again, that sort of incredible power that they'd got. And the reality of this, the fact that when something has lived long enough in enough people's minds, and you can say the same thing about religion, it becomes real. It has a reality and a power to it. And this was summed up very neatly by Elsie, who was furious with Francis, and said to the papers, I'm sorry, somebody has stabbed our fairies to death with a hat. They were alive until the early 80s, but the funny thing was, they were still alive, I think in many ways after, and probably still are now, 100 years after Doyle's book. It was in the late ninety s, I think it was about 98, that Mel Gibson, who'd made a film fairy tale about the case, tried to buy the original camera, original midge camera. And Jeffrey Crawley, who then owned it, said, look, if you raise me this amount of money, half or a third of what Gibson's offering, it can stay in Britain. And it did. There was a crowd of, I think, 2000 people at the Bradford Museum chanting fairies coming home. So by this time, it had become a kind of British national treasure. It was associated with the First World War, but it's associated with Yorkshire, a very kind of powerful county in the British imagination, for all sorts of reasons. And it couldn't be let go, and it probably never will be, in actual fact.

Speaker B: No, I think it's part of the enduring aspect of the story. I think it's just going to run and run and run, even though the people involved just are no longer with us. It's a really intriguing one that I think if people haven't heard about or looked at in more depth, that they really should, especially with the kind of the anniversary September coinciding with Arthur Conan Doyle's book coming out all those years ago. It's one to really kind of invest some time in if you are interested in the paranormal or just fairies or just anything about this kind of topic, just to kind of have a look at and see.

Speaker C: Yes. Also, if you do sorry, the button. But one remember, if you do run a bookshop anywhere near Cardiff, let me know if you'd like me to come and talk about the subject, because it's the last chance to really make use of the Anniversaries Three, but this is the last one going by in September.

Speaker B: But I think alongside that, for people to kind of look and really recognize that we have so many modern fairy sightings and there are people really starting to research and look into this and carry out lots of different projects, which is really quite fascinating and exciting, I think. I mean, just thinking about things like the Wooliton Gnomes in the 1970s, just really interesting, intriguing, different events and things being talked about and looked at again, which is, as I say, it's really exciting. And I can think of people like Jo Hickey Hall, who runs the podcast Modern Fairy Sightings, but she's doing this project where she's collating examples of sightings from people all over the world. There's so many books being written about it now. I mean, Joe Hickey Hall herself contributed to two that I can think of looking at, the Woolerton Gnomes and the Book Fairy. You know, there's an awful lot of new material coming out about modern fairy sightings all the time, and so if people are interested, it is out there, and it's out there in more ways than people might think, really.

Speaker C: Yeah. The walleton one is terrific, I think, because that kind of playfulness of them zooming about in little kind of noddy cars and so forth in a pretty public place, and the children being grilled over and over again at school by their head teacher. I think there were tape recordings of what they said. They stuck to their story. And I don't think we mentioned him in the course of this, but a guy called Hodson, who was instrumental in accompanying the girls in 1920, I think, 1921, he was a psychic and he's written his own book on fairies and Jeffrey Hodson. Yeah, it was summer, 1921. He was up there in Cottingley. The girls thought he was a phony, as they say. But I'd look for yourself at his work, actually, if you can, because Hodgson talks about seeing gnomes and fairy creatures all over the place, and he talks about them making themselves something if they want it. Now, this would sound completely nuts to me if I'd heard this kind of ten years ago, but he's got a pair of boots on and he sees these gnomes making themselves boots, like his out of thin air and pulling them on with great satisfaction. If you read enough about out of body experiences and people like Robert Monroe, William Bullman and so on. In other dimensions, they all say the same thing, which is that other dimensions respond to thought in a way that our own world doesn't. If only it did, if the right people could think the right thoughts and sort this mess out. But in these other dimensions, you think about something and it takes you there, it puts you there. Thought creates things. And so, yeah, these little funny gnomes creating themselves cars and zipping about in them. There's quite a few other stories about fairy cars, fairies shooting about in little kind of UFO, tennis balls and so forth, in wonderful books. Seeing fairies again. Edited by Simon Young It's a big treasure trove of fairy sightings. And, yeah, in terms of very no nonsense men of the world seeing some kind of fairy creatures in around about 19 one time, of the Bur War in Gillingham in Kent. Young boy, he's about six or seven then, I think, used to every night go to be put to bed by his mother and sit there with his lie there with his nightlight. And every night, hordes of fairy soldiers about eight inches high would march from left to right, always from left to right, across his bedspread for quite some time. There would be wonderful military music was much better than anything he'd heard in this life. Now, you can see that during the Buer War, kid in that age would want to believe about fairy soldiers. That kind of fits culturally what you'd expect. But if you then overlay with the fact that somebody in another dimension wants to please him by showing him the kind of fairies he'd like, you get another level of possibilities again there. And this man was Victor Purcell. He would later be a colonial administrator in what was then Malaya, and he would later still be an Oxford don in history, might have been Cambridge. There was another character who was an Oxford don and saw fairies or heard fairies, but, yeah, he was about as worldly as you could get. And another character in Wales in the mid later 20th century, was one day fishing for trout, quite on his own, in a stream, in open fields, and he was casting away, enjoying his fishing, summer day, I think it was, when suddenly heard this voice not far away down the stream, shouting at him, catch them, Tommy. Catch them, Tommy. I like trouts. And gaveling away in English, but with a Welsh accent. Terse to see this strange looking character, quite small and maybe about five foot tall, elderly human humanoid, if you like. A beard. I think he remembers the color of his trousers and shirt or roughly how he was dressed. And he got quite cross. He like being disturbed in his fishing. Where the hell did this guy come from? And he says, I'll be like, yeah, okay. Hang on, hang on. I've got to catch it.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker C: Guy is line entangled in weed. So turned his back on this character once he got the line free, turned around, and this figure had disappeared in few seconds in completely open countryside. There was nothing to hide him. There was no way he could hide. He said his heart missed a beat. This man whose military tone you can kind of hear in the account, first person account, was Commander Tommy Powell. And as he says, most memorably of all in this pretty startling account said, how did he know my name? Which he did. So, yeah, those are just two of huge range of sightings, every possible place, every type of witness, and every type of fairy as well, ones that are not very nice, they're pretty ugly, that are rather sinister, not many Disney type ones, but no, thankfully, big range.

Speaker B: Yeah, it is. And again, I think that's why it's so exciting to see so many people looking again at this, because it does ask that question, though. Is this a cultural remnant or is it something real? And if it's something real, is it just the same kinds of behaviors as I mentioned, but just now being referenced with different terminology? Is this just something that has always existed and therefore look at it again, really think about it and see it and be open to kind of what it might be that you're kind of looking at. Don't be so close minded and think that the Disney version of Tinkerbell is it? It's not. And we can see that the more you look at cases and evidence and eyewitness examples and multiple eyewitness examples, in some cases, it's fascinating. It's so open, it's so you know, now, I think is pretty exciting because, as I said, more and more people really are starting to look at it. And your book is definitely one that I would sign post people to kind of start that if they're interested.

Speaker C: No, that's great. And it's appreciated. Most people actually, reviewers of people who got in touch with me have been very pleased to have this connection. May you one or two who just sort of troll you and get furious about it. And I can see this because there's no way for you to fit this information into what you have made a system of knowledge. When that happens, we realize how much we rely on smoothly slotting a piece of incoming data into this system we've created by the time we're 25, 35, whatever it is. And so when something smacks you in the side of the head like that, it's irrational. And you respond irrationally. You get angry or you laugh or you do a bit of both, but those are actually irrational responses which fit the supposedly irrational nature of this unacceptable piece of data. But I do think that when I've talked about taboos and us challenging taboos. It really was a long way into my lifetime. I grew up with Jimmy Savile who was a terrific fun, lovely character on the TV when I was a know for a long time after I was grown up. It was unthinkable, it was inconceivable that somebody like that, with that status and the kudos of the BBC could have done what they did. But they did it. And it took a kind of critical mass of enough people having the courage to talk about it, which changed things and changed things multiply across the world through to the Hollywood scenarios and me too. And I do think there's a similarity, I don't make that point lightly, but when you've got something awful happen to you, it's the worst thing that's ever happened to you and then no one believes you. And not only do they not believe you, but they give you a great lot of abuse for daring to be so mad, stupid, neurotic, attention seeking a liar, in short and poltergeist cases can be the very worst thing that's ever happened to you. If you get a poltergeist harassing you for ten years, as has happened to Keith Linda in bothell Hell House is a seminal case of our century. Or you just get a poltergeist that starts fires, it's pretty rough. It will burn your house down eventually.

Speaker B: And again just incredible to chat with you. I mean it's really one of those topics that you could just keep going and keep going and keep going because there's just so much to it. I mean, it's just so intriguing and so, like I said, if anybody hasn't read your book then they must take a look at it because it's really worth reading. It's so insightful and it covers the whole history, so you get a really good understanding of the historical context all the way through up until now. And so I think it would really kind of open some people's eyes. So take a look if you haven't. Thank you and I'll say goodbye to everyone for now and thank you Richard, for your time.

Speaker C: Thank you. Thanks.

Speaker B: Bye everyone.

Speaker D: If you like this podcast, there's a number of things you can do. Come and join us on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter. Spread the word about us with friends and family. Leave a review on our website or other podcast platforms to support the podcast further. Why not head on over to join us on Patreon where you can sign up to gain a library of additional material and recordings and in the process know you're helping the podcast continue to put out more content. On a final note, if you haven't read it already, then you can find my piece In Search of the Medieval in volume three of The Feminine Macabre over on Spookeats.com or via Amazon. Links to the book will also be in the episode description. Thank you everyone for your amazing support.