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‘Me and a friend aged nineteen and seventeen, had been hitching for two days in May 1983 and were pretty tired on our second night without sleep. We were on our way home and had walked from the M4 at *** to Bath as we were unable to get a lift. Coming down from *** to *** we both started hallucinating from sheer exhaustion, seeing shapes and figures in trees but sort of knowing they weren’t real. As we got closer to *** the imagery was getting stronger, we weren’t sure which way to go when a Victorian lady pointed us in a direction down a lane which led to a toll bridge crossing the river Avon. This was about four in the morning and the Victorian lady was actually a waste basket and signpost with a lamp above. This is when the hallucinatory experience stepped up a notch. As we walked down the hill towards the bridge we became aware that a large party was going on. Coming onto the bridge it was all around us, fairies and elves and music. There’s a weir under the bridge but the party seemed to be almost floating above the water. The participants were quite indifferent to us I felt, in the way that we would be to cattle that might look at us from over a hedge. There were a couple that I became engrossed in, a fairy and an elf sitting in the forks of some plant like a foxglove or something. They were drinking out of very delicate flower shaped glasses and looked at me almost malevolently but were too engrossed with their party to bother with us. They both had a very child-like quality due to their size I suppose which was between six and twelve inches but very hard to judge and their skin was quite leathery which gave them a very ancient quality. Both dressed very delicately, the fairy had very fine wings like a daddy longlegs. I wanted to stay and observe them but my friend was very nervous and kept telling me to come along. So we walked off. Just down the road we sat in a pub garden overlooking a grave yard where we talked about what we had just seen before vivid hallucinations started happening. The ivy on the graveyard wall turned into Christ with loads of cherubs and a large oak tree behind that turned to us and proclaimed the end of the world tomorrow. We both saw this and ran for hell, but the hallucinations continued for the next hour or two through the twilight of morning. There seemed to be a very obvious difference between the hallucinations and the fairy party. The hallucinations seemed like a mind trick but the fairies seemed an otherworldly or extra dimensional experience almost seen through a fish eye lens as the sizes of things could not be well discerned. Another thing, thirty years later I revisited the place in the day to try and regain a sense of it all. I got a pint from the pub and went to sit on the same bench me and my friend had sat on. As I got to the bench my feet became twisted around each other very strangely and I stumbled onto the bench luckily saving most of my drink. I felt like something had tripped me and was laughing at me. Very strange.’ ‘There was music which I was aware of but can’t remember hearing.’ ‘The memory of this is stronger than most other memories from that time, the experience seems to have really stuck with me for some reason.’