‘Meeting with a Tree Spirit? One morning, I walked to the corner of my road where there is a green space; an old orchard with oak trees, rowans and hawthorns alongside the cider apple trees. Everything is overhung with brambles and footpaths created by constant dog walking. I was passing a very large oak tree which had recently lost a dead branch. It had split away and was almost as big as the tree trunk itself. Clinging to the tree trunk was a creature about the size of a man with a vaguely human face, webbed hands and feet, reptilian looking and with a damp frog-like skin of a blue tinge. It looked wary, startled and almost embarrassed that I had seen it. We communicated in a telepathic way. ‘Shouldn’t you be green?’ I asked, thinking of ***’s (my husband’s) recent sighting of the green man. I assumed that I was seeing a similar representation. ‘No, blue,’ it replied. Because of the creature’s discomfort, I continued on my way and convinced myself that I had imagined the whole encounter. It looked, for all the world, like Gollum in the film version of Lord of The Rings. I gave this encounter no more thought until my next copy of Fate and Fortune magazine arrived. (I still have the copy). There was a story of a young boy, disturbed in the night by a frog-like creature crying in distress. A medium was brought in who said this was a tree spirit who had recently lost its tree in a sudden and unexpected way. She successfully sent it into the spirit world where it would wait for a new tree to grow with. I already knew that trees have a consciousness but the existence of tree spirits who live with a tree until it gradually dies off was something I had not been aware of. If a tree is cut down without warning, it is a terrible shock to its spirit and there is no preparation for the return to the spirit world. A tree spirit can lose its way in these circumstances and hide in the nearest house. The boy described the frog like creature as looking like Gollum from the Lord of the Rings film. So, I really had seen a tree spirit! I believe that tree spirits are harmless but are so alien looking that that they can appear scary to us with their big eyes and round faces.’ ‘I believe I saw a type of nature spirit.’ ‘Fairy is a very wide concept, I have seen many beings but never the traditional fairy in translucent clothing and wings’
§116
Somerset, England
2000s
Female: Age 51-60
regular supernatural experiences
in woodland
3 pm-6 pm
less than a minute
on my own [‘with dog’]
you were undertaking a repetitive task (e.g. picking blackberries), you had just woken up or were just about to go to sleep, you were extremely happy
‘uncomfortable but benign’
loss of sense of time, unusually vivid memories of the experience