‘I had just returned home, and it was probably around 10 to 11 pm at night. I was lying in my bed just thinking about some things because that night I had a near incident involving a vehicle while my friend was driving. I was wide awake at the time, and I was not experiencing sleep paralysis. I was simply lying on my side with my eyes open looking at nothing in particular in my room as I was thinking. Again, I was certainly not asleep or anywhere even near it. I was, in fact, lost in thought at the time. I noticed movement in my field of vision in the middle of my room where I had some articles of clothing laying [there]. I saw the clothes stand upright and start moving or wiggling around about. For a few seconds I started squinting my eyes trying to understand what was happening. I was initially completely convinced it was just my eyes playing tricks on me. The movement lasted for what I would think was something like fifteen to twenty seconds. Then the longer I looked, the longer I started to realize that it looked like something really is moving, and I jumped up in my bed and turned the lights on. I went up to the clothes to examine them to see what was going on, but there was nothing out of the ordinary.’ Why a fairy? ‘I think primarily due to the somewhat playful/mischievous mature of the encounter. I don’t think aliens or ghosts would pick up my clothes and wiggle them around for me, but it sounds like something fairies would do.’
§825
New York State, US
2000s
Male: Age 11-20
never or almost never has supernatural experiences
inside a private house
9 pm-12 am
less than a minute
on my own
you had just woken up or were just about to go to sleep (‘I had had a somewhat stressful experience that night’)
friendly, mischievous, aloof
loss of sense of time, profound silence before the experience, a sense that the experience was a display put on specially for you