‘Now, I don’t know if this counts as fae, but the folkloric origins are so close that I feel like this may work. My parents were having a house party, and I didn’t want to be around all the people. I went out onto the back deck, where a single low light was the only thing, I used to see. Running alongside the yard is a long shed, which I could access the roof of with a bit of clambering from the deck. I sat up on the top to look at the stars, when I heard a noise. Let me reiterate. This was a shingled shed with only one possible roof access. It would be difficult for a HUMAN to get up there let alone a dog. But there it was. A big black dog. Staring at me from the other end of the roof. I froze, because listen, even as an eleven-year-old, I still had the common sense to know that this was not right. No one on our street had a dog like that, and even if they did, this guy was HUGE, and its eyes were bright golden. And then it began to run towards me. It ran, across a SHINGLED SHARPLY ANGLED NARROW ROOF, towards this horrified little kid who was too afraid to jump out of the way. I was pretty sure this was how I died. A big naughty puppy. It didn’t reach me, though. When it was only a few feet away, the dog vanished. It didn’t fall off the roof. I checked. It just up and disappeared. I did the reasonable thing and bolted. I tried to tell my mum, but she was distracted with her guests. By the way, this whole time, the dog made no noise. I looked it up the next day. I hadn’t known of Shucks/Grims beforehand, so I’m sure I didn’t imagine this.’ ‘Drifting off in thought, though my attention was extremely sharp (which is odd for me) when the dog appeared.’ ‘Big black dog, shaggy coat, glowing amber eyes.’ ‘It seemed more curious than malevolent now I think back. Just an excited heckpupper.’ ‘No death followed this, soon after I would end up falling into a spirit of depression and other mental health issues. I don’t know if the dog caused it, was just there to warn, or has no correlation, but I don’t want to risk writing it off, just in case.’ ‘I mean, the woods around my town definitely have something in them. It’s very likely that the European travellers brought some stowaways. There are definitely native spirits, though I’ve never encountered one. And as I said, I was not aware of this particular spirit until then. (No, not even through Harry Potter. Why does everyone keep saying that).’ ‘Again, not the traditional fae, but this kind of tale has always fallen into the realm of fae folk, at least when it wasn’t being taken by Christians.’ Fairies are ‘creatures and spirits that stem from the same type of origin, though they could be found in many different cultures. There’s some sort of criteria that seems to pop up all over the world, and it’s quite interesting that all these isolated cultures seemed to create such similar stories.’
§908
BC, Canada
2010s
Female: Age 11-20
occasional supernatural experiences
in a garden
6 pm-9 pm
less than a minute
on my own (‘alone outside but many people were inside’)
no special state reported
friendly, mischievous
loss of sense of time, profound silence before the experience, hair prickling or tingling before or during the experience, a sense that the experience was a display put on specially for you, unusually vivid memories of the experience, a sense that the experience marked a turning point in your life, a sudden chill before the experience