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‘I was thirteen years old when this happened. We were on a family holiday in France and stayed in an old silk mill. With the garden lay an acre of grassland that led to a ruined house and a water well. If you passed through the ruined house you’d reach a dried up river. It was clear that usually the water would flow through but extreme summer heat had reduced it to a slow trickle with several deeper pools. Me and my sisters would explore the area a lot, we saw strange burrows made out of thorned blackberry bushes. One time I thought I saw something big move on the bottom of one of the deeper pools but afraid it might be Pegpowler or Jenny Greenteeth I didn’t stay to investigate. One day I was walking far down the dried river alone. Slowly an uncanny feeling started to build up, the wind playing through the trees getting stronger and stronger as if blowing in warning. It got stronger and stronger and I decided I should go back. The moment I had turned around the wind started blowing even harder, on the riverbanks the trees were wildly shaking. I sped up walking back when I saw on the forested riverbanks figures shoot past. The way you see wolves circle someone in the woods in movies, they move through the thick trees and you can never quite see where they are but you know they are there. They were pale humanoid creatures, slightly shorter than a human would have been. They didn’t wear clothes but seemed to have a moss that grew over their bodies covering them. By now I had broken into a sprint feeling really scared and unwelcome. They kept hunting me from the river banks throwing sticks and rocks at me. I never quite got to see their faces, I was running too fast. It was very hard to see the entrance to the ruined house from the river bank and it was the only exit. When climbing back up the bank and into the house, the ruckus stopped. The wind stopped blowing and I couldn’t see the creatures. But somehow, not seeing them anymore was even scarier than seeing them. Especially because I could still feel them watching me. While carefully making my way to the exit a bright green snake dropped from a tree near me. I have no clue if this was in anyway related to the creatures but it made the experience all the more surreal. I later went back there, and while the place still had that mysterious aura it had had since day one, I hadn’t seen the creatures again. Still they did leave traces there, as the burrows seemed lived in and often things around that area would have moved.’ ‘Slightly smaller than an adult, shorter but not sturdy at all, long delicate limbs. They were very pale almost luminescent white. They could move through the forest at an incredible speed sometimes moving on all fours. They wore no clothes but their bodies were covered in moss that seemed to be growing there naturally. Their hair was also a white silver grey. Darker than their bodies.’ ‘[Why did you think they were fairies?] This completely depends on your definition of faerie, I go for the broader English ones which includes Goblins, Brownies, Boggarts and a lot of other unseelie creatures. (Certainly not just petal winged ones.) I believe them to stand in contact with nature, these creatures seemed to have a strong connection to the natural area [where] I found them.’