Creepy Christmas Fairy Tale December 21, 2016
Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern , trackback
Here is a remarkable fairy account from Newfoundland. We are in Canada and the report appeared in the Evening Telegraph 26 Dec 1900. This, then, is a creepy Christmas story.
A resident of this city, who is subject to extraordinary hallucinations, was the other night, as he seriously states himself, ‘again carried off by fairies’. He left Water Street about 8 p.m., having done his Xmas shopping and turned up Adelaide Street to go home, but, before he had reached New Gower Street, was surrounded by an army of fairies who hustled him along eastward. Though he passed hundreds of people, he could not see anyone until he reached Mount Carmel Cemetery. At this point he saw two men approaching and asked them with tears rolling down his cheeks to be kind enough to accompany him home. Having heard the man’s story the good Samaritans saw him safely with his wife and family.
So we have a mentally unbalanced man who had a strange experience: fairy kidnapping here does not involve, as in other Newfoundland fairy stories, teleportation. But the invisible (?) fairies were presumably compelling our man through the streets and towards the cemetery: fairies and the dead are often associated.
Strange as these facts may appear, they are not the less true. But stranger still is the knowledge that the subject of these few lines is a steady, sober and industrious man, and in conversation expresses himself most intelligently, with sound, sensible remarks.
So he wasn’t mad. Does the ‘extraordinary hallucinations’ of the title refer then to the Christmas and this earlier fairy experience? Note that Newfoundlanders were still reporting being misled and kidnapped by fairies in the late 1980s, so this is not just a random act of insanity. At most it is an act of insanity allied with folklore traditions.
Some time ago, before the cold weather set in, he was similarly afflicted, being led away in the Black Marsh Road directions, through bogs, marshes, rivers and heavy woods. On that occasion he was found by a farmer in an exhausted state. On the last occasion he barely had strength to reach home.
Other fairy kidnappings from this late: drbeachcombing At yahoo DOT com Beach confidently challenges readers to find something from Britain or Ireland from this date.
