A survey of modern fairy experiences by Dr Simon Young

§242

Carolina, US 1990s
Female: Age 11-20 occasional supernatural experiences
in woodland 9 pm-12 am one to two minutes with one other person who shared my experience
‘we had taken a small sip of wine, but not enough to feel any effects, and were wide awake’
wild, hard to compare to human emotions
loss of sense of time, hair prickling or tingling before or during the experience, a sudden chill before the experience

‘My friend invited me to go out into the woods to look for fairy rings. We took wine from her parents’ pantry as a friendship offering. We left at sunset, having been given permission to go camping. We walked a little way out into the woods, maybe fifty yards, stopping in a clearing among cedar trees. We each took a small sip of wine, toasting the good health of any spirits who happened to be about, left some in a sea shell which we had brought for that purpose, and poured the rest out on the ground. We then lit a small fire from deadwood since it was getting cold. When we got tired, we poured water on the embers and stirred them to make sure it was all out. We then wrapped ourselves in blankets and lay down to wait. What felt like hours past, and then, when the night was very dark, and my friend was talking about the dark spirits I had seen previously in another forest, there was suddenly a wild presence, a sense of something entirely outside the normal, safe, civilized world. And where we had left the wine we saw small, colorful lights hovering in a circle about a foot or two above the ground. They went round for a while as we stared in mute amazement (I don’t think either of us expected anything to actually show up) and then just as abruptly they vanished. We decided it might not be best to spend the whole night there and rushed back to her house, or at least tried to rush since the path which had been clear on the way seemed to lead us in circles and we were forced to cut through deep underbrush before reaching her back door all out of breath. My friend’s mother was at the back door and said she had been calling for us for the last hour, thinking it was too cold to stay out, but we never heard her.’ ‘Small figures glowing in many colors.’ ‘The feeling that accompanied them was distinctly not religious, human (as with ghosts) or extraterrestrial (although I have never encountered aliens, so I have no point of comparison there).’ ‘[Fairies are] spirits that inhabit the land and/or an overlapping spiritual dimension.’ ‘This sighting happened during a time from 1999-2001 when other strange things were seen by me, my sister, and another close friend, including mysterious cloaked figures that appeared in daylight (did not feel like fairies), black dogs, large black birds, and tracts of land in another forest which seemed to be there only some of the time.’