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  • The Wood Diva February 5, 2024

    Author: Beach Combing | in : Contemporary

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    ***I’ve been absent for a couple of months because I was locked out of the account! Just to let you know that Chris and I continue to do our podcasts and there has been an episode on medieval x-files and now bird spirits. This is a fragment of an article on Fairy Census 2 I’ve just published in Fortean Times. Numbers apply to FC 1 & 2.

    It is one of my favourite fairy experiences. In the 1990s two sisters and a dog were out exploring in the early afternoon ‘in the woods behind our grandparents’ house’ in Arkansas. At a certain point the younger sister (aged six) had run a few yards ahead and the elder sister, a teen, noticed that off to the side a woman had appeared among the trees: ‘She was wearing a long, white dress and was walking toward us but there was no noise of crunching leaves or anything. It was completely silent and still. The birds and wind didn’t even make a sound. She was beautiful and seemed to glow a little like she was a little brighter than everything else around her. She looked at me smiled and waved’. ‘Her hair was dark blonde and was long and loose… and seemed to be brighter than her surroundings like she maybe glowed a little.’ The dog was understandably upset by this mysterious presence and ‘made some kind of noise and pushed against me’. The elder sister looked down at her dog and when she looked up again the mysterious woman had disappeared (§217).

    It is a great account. But it needs to be read in association with two jarringly similar entries in the Fairy Census. Consider now this experience from Lancashire in the UK in the 2000s. A woman in her twenties and her friend are walking in a wild English wood in the late morning. Suddenly, down the slope, a lady appears ‘with dark hair and off-white long tunic… Almost a shining quality’ (§70). The young female hiker feels compelled to follow the woman into a small birch glade and there is some kind of (telepathic?) communication between them. ‘Her voice was almost like it was phasing in and out of our reality.’ Or consider, §198. We are in the forest of Nova Scotia after midnight in the 2010s. Two friends (a man and a woman in their twenties), are walking when ‘we both saw a woman step out of the woods… She had a long silver, purple and green gown and looong [sic] hair with seven stars in it. She seemed to be made of light with what might have been a crown on it’. The woman walks into a tree and then a shadow like a spider emerges…

    There are differences, yes, but consider the common elements. We have: i) woods; ii) two people walking (at least one female); iii) a human-sized female fairy appears; iv) she is luminous with billowing skirt and long hair; v) both people, or the dog and the sister in the first account, see the fairy; vi) there is some limited contact with the fairy in two accounts (hand wave/words); vii) the fairy then vanishes (or becomes a spider…). You could argue that in a thousand records you are bound to have ‘overlaps’ like this: fairies are seen in woods; many fairies vanish etc etc. But actually there are relatively few human-sized fairies; and most are male. Indeed, in our small sample of single human-sized fairy women these are half of the entries. Examples where two witnesses share an experience are, meanwhile, rare (17%). This is the kind of bean-counting you can indulge in when you have fairy records in Excel.

    Some of the few others in this category (single, human-sized female) have elements in common with the wood diva. Two young girls in ‘rural Pennsylvania’ in the 1990s (§853) are deep in the forest exploring. ‘[O]ut of nowhere we began to hear a woman’s melodic voice singing in the woods. It didn’t seem to be coming from any one direction, and it was quiet at first slowly creeping up to this very loud, haunting song ringing through the trees, filling every inch of the woods.’ The girls run home. No woman is seen but the voice suggests, to me at least, human-sized. Or there is §313 from Missouri in the 2000s. The witness in her fifties feels ‘compelled’ to get out of her car: as she is about to drive to work. She is in front of her house ‘in woodland’. A woman steps out from behind a tree. ‘She was dark haired… She was wearing some sort of headband that came around her forehead. After stepping out from behind the tree she seemed to look around the woods, as if she had just arrived and was getting oriented… she turned and looked at me.’ ‘A female with long hair in a long dress.’ There is then some missing time…

    Here we have not only a common vision of a fairy (as, say, with tresps), we have something far more powerful. We have a story. Two people meet a vanishing woman in a wood. There are other examples of these emergent narratives in the Fairy Census. For instance, §80 details a balloon of ‘fairies’ in bowler hats coming to take a child away in 1950s London. §525 has a hot-air balloon ‘full of tall, elegant, bejewelled beings with peacock blue skin and shimmering golden hair’ coming to take a child away from rural Dorset in the 1970s. All my instincts scream that these narratives, like, for instance, the men in black in UFO-lore, are important. The supernatural is congealing into useful forms.

    Any thoughts on the Wood Diva? drbeachcombing AT gmail DOT com

    The Dancing Fairies of Sennen Cove: December 12, 2023

    Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern
    The Dancing Fairies of Sennen Cove:

    This month Chris and I have been enjoying, on the Boggart and Banshee podcast, a fascinating fairy encounter at Sennen Cove, a hamlet, in Cornwall. In 1888 two young women go out to the well at midnight, up on the hill behind their house. I’ve put on this Victorian OS map a red line for […]

    The Modern Western Ghost and Its Zombie Origins November 1, 2023

    Author: Beach Combing | in : Medieval, Modern
    The Modern Western Ghost and Its Zombie Origins

    This month’s Boggart and Banshee podcast is on ghosts and shrouds (Shrouded in Mystery: The Origins of the Iconic Sheeted Ghost). As often with Chris’s choices I didn’t at first get the point: I can only get so excited about textiles… But my attention picked up as I realised (ever the slow learner) that the […]

    Horse Spirits: Colt-Pixy or Pixy-Colt? October 1, 2023

    Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern
    Horse Spirits: Colt-Pixy or Pixy-Colt?

    The latest episode of Boggart and Banshee is on horse spirits and Chris and I disagree on, well, just about everything… There is also a fun accompanying book with seventeen different tales of horse spirits (UK, US). However, you can listen to the podcast for that. I’ve, instead, been caught up with one very simple […]

    The When of Levitation in the West September 1, 2023

    Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern
    The When of Levitation in the West

    Fun and games on the latest Boggart and Banshee podcast with almost an hour given over to questions of levitation and teleportation. As always when I talk to Chris there were revelations, things I’d not realised before. The point that really blew me away was the chronology of levitation. I had assumed that people had […]

    The Fairy Census: End Game August 1, 2023

    Author: Beach Combing | in : Actualite
    The Fairy Census: End Game

    In 2014 (inspired by Marjorie Johnson’s Seeing Fairies, which I had just edited) I started the Fairy Census. The aim was to gather together first-hand encounters with fairies; or unusual supernatural experiences that could be understood in fairy terms. It took me to 2017 to get to 500 encounters, which were then published freely online. […]

    Immortals and Itinerants July 1, 2023

    Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern
    Immortals and Itinerants

    This month’s Boggart and Banshee Podcast concerns the immortals in our midst: the men and (in some rare cases) the women who are supposed to live for ever. I’ve long been interested in the most famous of these, the Wandering Jew: the individual cursed by Christ who traipsed from place-to-place imparting wisdom or (in some […]

    Devil at the Wedding (Ritual) June 1, 2023

    Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern
    Devil at the Wedding (Ritual)

    Chris twisted my arm this month to do a podcast on wedding superstitions. I was rather pessimistic about how interesting this would be (dresses, jilting…), but after a couple of weeks of reading I’d changed my mind. As one folklorist explained things to me ‘it’s all about sex and death’. Here just to give you […]

    The Voodoo Soldiers of Arthur’s Seat, Edinburgh May 1, 2023

    Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern
    The Voodoo Soldiers of Arthur’s Seat, Edinburgh

    In 1836 some children discovered a hidden niche on the edge of Arthur’s Seat. In this niche were three shelves, two with eight and one with one miniature coffin and body. Each ‘unit’ had four elements: a coffin, a coffin lid, a doll and clothes. These coffins are the subject of this month’s Boggart and […]

    Zombies and Shapechangers in Medieval Yorkshire April 1, 2023

    Author: Beach Combing | in : Medieval
    Zombies and Shapechangers in Medieval Yorkshire

    There are twelve medieval supernatural tales in Byland collection, which I’ve just published in a booklet for Pwca press (UK, US)* and which Chris and I discuss on this month’s podcast. And there are four important questions to ask about their author and how they came to be written: the ‘Where’, ‘Who’, ‘When’, and ‘Why’ […]

    Pitchforks and Witchcraft in Nineteenth-Century Warwickshire March 1, 2023

    Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern
    Pitchforks and Witchcraft in Nineteenth-Century Warwickshire

    In this month’s podcast we are looking at the last of the American witches. We also talked a good deal though about their British cousins and particularly witch killings. Here is an especially nasty nineteenth-century witch attack where an individual took it upon himself to do away with a neighbour because she had overlooked his […]

    Early New Fairy Wing Reference February 1, 2023

    Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern
    Early New Fairy Wing Reference

    Regular readers will know that I have long had an interest in fairy wings. There have been several posts and even an article in 2019. I have tried to defend a position that fairies get wings i) in Britain; and ii) that this happens in the late eighteenth century. Certainly, when I did my research […]

    Do You Feel Lucky, Historian? January 1, 2023

    Author: Beach Combing | in : Contemporary, Modern
    Do You Feel Lucky, Historian?

    I had the great pleasure to start the year with a podcast episode on luck and lucky charms (with Chris Woodyard and her extraordinary free source book). We spoke about the psychology of luck, Italy as the dinosaur valley of fortuna, corpse magic (golly), the Great War and talismans, burying St Joseph to sell your […]

    The Fairy Witch of Carrick-on-Suir: A Nineteenth-Century Fairy Resurrectionist December 1, 2022

    Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern
    The Fairy Witch of Carrick-on-Suir: A Nineteenth-Century Fairy Resurrectionist

    James Hayes in court 2 Sept 1864 : ‘It is not so extraordinary… for persons to be raised from the dead’. Introduction Mary Doheny (1820s-1870s?), the subject of our latest podcast, was a nineteenth-century Irish ‘fairy woman’. She began her career as a herbalist. But Mary had too much talent and too much personality to […]

    Ghosts and ‘Our Own Dear Dead’ November 1, 2022

    Author: Beach Combing | in : Contemporary
    Ghosts and 'Our Own Dear Dead'

    I’ve always struggled to love ghosts. The only accounts that I find even half convincing have phantoms on a perpetual carousel of tedium: walking up that road, jumping off that bridge, creaking through that door… Then when ghosts are more daring – Chris in our podcast this month introduced me to an Icelandic housewife zombie […]