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‘Myself and a friend were spending the night with a couple who lived in a cabin on the edge of ancient woodland. We were having a party. Although the cabin owners, and others who have stayed there, claimed to have experienced odd things (natural drumming heard from the woods playing along with their recorded music and continuing after the tape player was stopped and a fire ball shooting through the hut) no one present heard, as I did, echoed children’s babbling in the woods, all around and dismissed my claim to hear it. In going outside to pee (it was still pitch black at this point) I heard a voice (naming my favourite DJ in my ear) and ran back inside in panic. Later, once it was light, I went for a walk in the woods and, to my dismay and irritation (I didn’t WANT to see fairies: they weren’t ‘cool’ like UFOs) I kept seeing small, pixie-like folk out the corner of my eye and parts of a twee, medieval-type world, as if this other world was overlapping ‘reality’. For instance, in pushing past a low, leafy branch, I glimpsed it as the decoratively painted end of an old fashioned cart, the bit that attaches to the horse. I really didn’t want to be seeing this, so I went back to the hut, but grew bored again, so ventured back out into the woods. I once more glimpsed pixies around and about and, convinced I was hallucinating them, determined to prove my eyes wrong by focusing on what I thought of as an ‘elf queen’ standing on the far river bank (about six metres away). She was standing in profile with her lower body obscured by undergrowth. Her top half was robed in a tight fitting cream garment with copper-coloured trim and she had brunette hair pulled into a matching, ornate head dress. ‘That elf queen,’ I thought to myself, ‘is really a broken tree stump. If I look at her through a crack in my fingers (an eye focusing technique I’d learnt from a medical TV show that combats my mild short sightedness) ‘I’ll clearly see the tree stump as it is.’ So I peered at ‘her’ through a crack in my fingers and – lo! – there she was, in perfect focus, a beautiful elf queen! I now felt extremely spooked and stumbled back through the woods to the hut as fast as I could without running. I insisted my friend drive us home to the city immediately. On returning to the same woods a few months later with some friends from ***, to whom I’d said nothing, they commented that they could hear children’s voices babbling in the trees. Again, my hut-dwelling friends said they couldn’t hear these voices.’ ‘Dressed in classic, corny even, red and green elf-type wear (though I didn’t get a good look at these fairies). The ‘elf queen’ wore fine clothes of fine cream silk like material trimmed with copper-brown and a head dress.’ ‘[Fairies because] I saw the pixie-like folk, their artifacts and ‘elf-queen’’. ‘[What are fairies?] Unsure, perhaps woodland spirits.’ ‘Although I was tired and a little inebriated, I don’t think I imagined my encounter, it wasn’t what I wanted or expected to see and I feel my mind state had been rendered more perceptive by tiredness and inebriation. An account of this was published in Fortean Times in about 1996.’