Fairies may seem to belong firmly in the folklore of the past but the ‘little people’ continue to be seen by ordinary people throughout the British Isles. JANET BORD provides a fascinating field guide to modern fairies from her collection of first-hand reports.

Fairies have wings, don’t they?  The answer to that question is, Not usually.  The alternative name ‘the Little People’ is usually more appropriate, because very few ‘fairy’ sightings are of winged beings.  Having said that, wings are sometimes mentioned by witnesses. One such report was told to me by a personal friend, Nona Rees, who saw a tiny winged fairy when she was a child in St David’s, Pembrokeshire.

On a hot summer’s day in 1947 when walking home from the beach with her mother, they saw, ‘hovering over a gorse bush, a tiny pure white creature, with wings, like the traditional Christmas Tree fairy’ only an inch or so high.  It ‘hovered upright’ and was definitely not a moth or butterfly:  ‘To us, it was definitely a fairy.’  In 2004 a couple sitting in their garden in Croydon saw a female fairy around 12 inches tall, hovering horizontally over the house gutter.  She wore a flowing white dress, had almost white hair, and white wings.  People who see tiny fairies among flowers also describe seeing wings.

You can read the rest of this article in issue 29 of Paranormal Magazine

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