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‘I was probably just a month or two shy of fifteen at the time this happened. It was the summer school holidays and I was visiting with my grandparents at their seventy-five-acre farm by the river on the mid-north coast of New South Wales, about a four-hour drive south of where my family and I were living at the time. The land was mainly cleared as my grandparents ran dairy cattle and had a market garden, but there were pockets of Eucalypt here and there, and two old China Pear trees where the old farmhouse once stood. My Nanna was an avid gardener and grew a cottage garden around the ‘new’ farmhouse (it was built in the nineteen thirties), which she tended to when she wasn’t helping with the farmwork, or running around after the grandkids. She was also a conservationist, and when her youngest child of six, my aunt, died of a rare cancer at the age of twenty-two in 1986, my Nanna set aside an acre and began to plant a forest of trees native to the area in her honour. That acre is a full-grown forest today. About fifty metres behind the house was a large thicket of bush, probably about thirty metres by ten metres, which as a small kid freaked me out. I was sure something big and hairy and not cow-related lived in there, and so I’d wander all over the farm, but I’d steer well clear of that thicket. (By this time, I was well aware of yowies – Australian Bigfoot – and although they were in my dreams often, I don’t recall seeing one by that stage. We had lived in the State Forest at one point, and a friend of the family who had lived in the highlands of Papua New Guinea, and had encounters there, had told my parents to be mindful of letting my brother and I play in the bush unattended). I never understood why my Nanna and Pop never cleared this thicket though. Still, for my entire life, I had always felt a Presence on that land, centred in that thicket, although I couldn’t articulate what it was. When I was much older, I did go exploring in there and only managed to find a Satin Bowerbird’s nest – these Australian native birds are famous for their proclivity for acquiring blue objects which the males fill their nests with in order to attract their mate, including numerous plastic blue clothes pegs stolen no doubt from my Nanna’s clothesline. The particular night this incident happened everyone had gone to bed, and I had also drifted off to sleep. I remember waking up to the sound of a low, consistent hum coming from outside in the yard. The house was in darkness, and I could hear the gentle snores of the more nocturnally vocal members of my family coming from the other bedrooms, and my younger brother was sleeping soundly in the bed next to mine, but this hum, this deep and reverberating purr caught my attention. At first, I thought it was the old refrigerator on the veranda singing its tired, ancient song, but I soon realised that this hum that I was hearing was coming up from the earth itself. I could feel it vibrating throughout my whole body. It was a hot and sticky, midsummer night, so we all just slept with a light cotton top sheet covering us, yet the sound felt ominous to me, so I pulled my sheet and a blanket up over my head. Sweating like anything, I lay there under the covers with all of my senses on high alert but willing myself to go back to sleep. Well, I couldn’t sleep now. Particularly then as I heard the front door open. And then I heard the screen door open. At the front of the house was a bathroom with toilet and shower that had been added on when my aunt got sick. Previous to that, the toilet and shower were in the laundry/outhouse about twenty metres up the garden path. The new addition was built as an enclosed porch. To enter the house, you came in through the screen door (which usually got locked at night), and the door to the new bathroom was on the left, a wall with a window in it to the right, and then you came through the front door (which never got locked). I hope that makes sense. Well I heard the front door open, and then the screen door as if someone was going out, but I didn’t hear anyone moving about inside or walking to the front door to go out. It wasn’t until after I heard the screen door open, THEN I heard the footfall of someone coming inside the house! I remember thinking that was really weird, so I very gingerly poked my head out from under the covers. The bedroom that my brother and I slept in was in the middle of the house, an enclosed veranda ran two sides, so we had the main bedroom door which opened onto the loungeroom, and a sliding door (which we left open) and a window that looked out to the veranda. This is the veranda that you step into when you come in the front door. Farmhouses were built with some odd designs back in the day, although I suspect this one just kept being added to with each generation. I suspect it probably only began as a two-room cottage. Anyway, when I poked my head out from the covers and looked out the window, I could see a soft green glow outside. It wasn’t moonlight, or some other lights, just a strange eerie soft green glow, coming out of the ground, illuminating the garden, as if there were millions of glow worms out there. This, along with the hum, and the weird sounds of someone either coming into or leaving the house were a bit much for me and I threw the covers back over my head and willed myself with all my might to go back to sleep. I guess I did. The next thing I remember was hearing my family in the kitchen having breakfast. I got up, feeling very groggy and foggy, and a bit disoriented and went out to join them. I asked if anyone had gotten up during the night to go outside. No one had. My mum asked me if I had been chewing on a pen. I said ‘no, I just woke up. Why?’ She told me that I had a small blue dot on my bottom lip, and also one on my chin. That’s weird, I thought. She then started brushing my hair to braid it, and asked me again, ‘Are you sure you haven’t been playing with ink?’ Again, I said no, I’d just woken up. And anyway, where would I get ink from? I did like to draw and had brought some art supplies with me, but I only ever used pencil. My hair was long, down to my hips, and my mum held up the bottom end and said ‘look, the bottom three inches of your hair has blue strands running through it. You better go and wash it out.’ My Mum and my Nanna thought I or some of the cousins were playing a joke. But there were no bottles of blue ink, or blue pens, or any ink stains on my pillow or my clothes, or anywhere else. And I couldn’t wash the blue out of my hair, or off my face. Mum ended up cutting that part of my hair. The blue dot on my lip has however remained. The one on my chin is still there but has faded a little. To this day, no one knows how they got there or what happened during that night. I do remember one dream of that night where three very tall luminescent beings were standing next to my bed. I called them Elves. They seemed to me to come out of the Earth rather than outer space. I don’t recall any other details, except they look like those Australian indigenous rock art paintings of spirit beings.’ ‘I only saw these beings in my dream (of which I have always had many, and have also experienced long-term sleep paralysis, and other supernatural experiences). But I have a strong sense that what I saw in my dreams was a memory from that night. The beings were very tall and luminous.’ ‘Members of my family have had other experiences there, and someone once told me that there had been aboriginal presence on that land.’ ‘I felt it was fairy because it felt very connected to the Earth.’ Fairies are ‘the other, inter dimensional beings, neither inherently good nor bad’. ‘I often get asked about the blue dot on my lip and what its significance is or why I chose to get a tattoo there. With most people, who ask or comment, I am very reluctant to tell them the real origin of its appearance, but it does trigger an emotional response. I feel a bit on the fringe of things as it is, so it’s nice to be able to share my experience without judgement. So thank you for providing this platform.’