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‘I was just starting to browse the real-estate market when I found a house on line that looked right up my alley, the price and size was right, but it was also out of town, it had lots of land and it had a spring fed stream going through the property. It was listed as a private sale so I rang the vendor (a woman) and arranged to see the place on a Saturday afternoon. On my way out to the house that Saturday I decided to stop in at the boutique bakery and grab a hot pie for lunch (this particular bakery is famous for its slow cooked gourmet pies). Getting out of the car to go into the bakery a very definite, powerful thought sort of burst in to my brain, not really like a normal thought more like and impulse or the hard battering thoughts I get when I really need a smoke and my brain is saying ‘HAVE A SMOKE, WOMAN’. Well this thought said ‘you should take her something, a gift’ and then I sort of thought that’s a weird thought, ‘I haven’t taken any of the other vendors at properties I have been looking at gifts’ then with the same sort of force the thought: ‘Take her some fruit bread’ and as I walked into the bakery there on the shelves were beautiful fruit and nut loaves. So I bought my pie and I bought the bread. The Drive down from the city where I was living to the property took about thirty minutes and the whole way one part of me was considering how weird it was for me to be taking this woman some bread and the other part was trying to figure out a way to ask her to leave some of it outside. I pulled up, it was an early spring Saturday, where the sky is black and the wind is awful and the drizzle is constant and in that awful weather the peaceful little stream was wiping about all brown and churned up and the house looked like the hundred-year-old man that it was, in need of a HELL of a lot of work, the gardens were over grown and I already knew it would be too much work for me. But I went up to the door with my bread and knocked anyway. Needless to say the lady was very happy with the bread and showed me around the tiny house and the wild gardens and over the stream where she had kept pigs. She then took me back inside and I finally decide to ask as I thought by this stage that it wouldn’t matter if she thought I was crazy as I probably wouldn’t buy the house. ‘This is weird’ I said ‘But are there fairies here?’ She looked fascinated but not surprised or weirded out like I thought she might. ‘Yes’, she said, ‘well there is a Taniwha’. (According to the mythology of the native people of New Zealand the Maori, the Taniwha are shapeshifting water spirits.) ‘The stream is spring fed, it comes down from the silver springs up in the hills behind us and he is here to protect the water I think’, she carried on as though she was very familiar with him ‘He’s much older than the Maori people though so he was probably called something else before they got here’. While she carried on explaining the Taniwha it was like there was a happy old man sitting behind me nodding his head muttering ‘yes that’s right’ and ‘ah ha’ and when she spoke of the Maori people visions of tribally dressed people drinking and fishing from the stream sort of filled my mind, while at the same time I received a tirade of information about how he was of the land and of the water as old as the earth and how he was formed and why he was there. I could not see him but I could see him in my mind a shifting thing of water then like a lizard, then like an old man in a gray cloak, then like a beautiful young woman in no clothes at all… All while I watched a film in my head of how the land had changed around this stream and heard his voice and felt him grinning, that is still the overwhelming sense I have when I think about that day is his grinning satisfaction and this sense of awe that he knew I was coming and was capable of telling me to do something when I was miles away like time and distance and just the physical world was no barrier to him. And I got all this while he painstakingly explained that he was the land and the water. I don’t know if that makes any sense but that’s what it was like a flood of information and feelings and things not really seen or really heard but as if they were being seen and heard. The woman talked about how occasionally other people picked up on his presence. I explained that I was now sure it was him who had told me to bring the bread. When I think about him now, I think he is still aware of me, though I think now I’m probably as significant as a fly would be to a person. I didn’t buy the house, though I do think he would have liked me to. I did go back for one more viewing and felt something but nothing as strong as that first time. I am a believer. I have a passionate academic interest in folklore and mythology and religion. But other than maybe one group ghost sighting as a young teenager I haven’t experienced anything like this. I never litter, not because I’m a great conservationist but because I have always felt like it might upset fairies and I don’t step into mushroom circles. But other than that I am normal, not a spiritual hippy new agey person. But someone with a mortgage and a day job ha ha.’ ‘Like an old man, and a lizard and a lake and a young woman.’ ‘I think it was an experience with something that is as much a part of the earth as water or dirt is.’ ‘[Fairies are] manifestations of creative energy of the earth not limited by the physical world.’