The Fairy Census: End Game August 1, 2023
Author: Beach Combing | in : Actualite , trackback
In 2014 (inspired by Marjorie Johnson’s Seeing Fairies, which I had just edited) I started the Fairy Census. The aim was to gather together first-hand encounters with fairies; or unusual supernatural experiences that could be understood in fairy terms. It took me to 2017 to get to 500 encounters, which were then published freely online. I’m now, in 2023, getting ready to publish the second volume Fairy Census 2 (2018-2023) with another five hundred encounters and Chris and I dedicate this month’s podcast on Boggart and Banshee to the survey.
What is the end game? When I started my intention was to get to 1000 encounters in a year (how I laughed when I reread this). My ambition was to study not fairies (a hopeless but beautiful endeavour!), but rather the people who saw them and to understand better under what conditions fairies were encountered. Respondents have to go through a frankly tedious battery of questions. Some answers are then published above the experiences as the ‘rubric’. Take this example that will appear (with associated experience) in Fairy Census 2.
England (Cheshire). Female; 2010s; 11-20; in a garden; on my own*; 3 AM-6 AM; one to two minutes; no fairy mood reported; never or almost never has supernatural experiences; no special state reported; unusually vivid memories of the experience.
Here we have sex; decade; age at sighting; place; company (with other people); the time; the duration of the experience; what the fairies were like; frequency of supernatural experiences; any special emotional state; and unusual reactions to the experience.
I’ve now almost got to 1000 encounters and about half a million words after nine years. I hope to continue slogging up the hill and reach, in the end, 2000 encounters ‘with rubric’. I specify ‘with rubric’ because I often get emails or third-person experiences that go in the FC but that cannot be reduced to these rather narrow confines. If I continue to publish 500 encounters every five years or so, it will take me another fifteen or perhaps twenty years to get to 2000 with rubriks and 2500 overall. As my continued existence is not assured I’ve put together a death protocol for the Fairy Census! If everything goes according to plan and death doesn’t intervene I’ll be sixty-five to seventy when I finish.
Fairy Census 1 (2017: 1-500)
Fairy Census 2 (2023: 501-1000)
Fairy Census 3 (2028?: 1001-1500)
Fairy Census 4 (2033?: 1501-2000)
Fairy Census 5 (2038?: 2001-2500)
Ninety to ninety five percent of the records are from the English-speaking world, perhaps unsurprisingly. This is disappointing in that the wealth of experiences from, say, Latin America or Asia are largely missing. But it makes comparison much easier. Nebraska and Surrey (England) are very different places with rather different people, but they both belong to a recognisable Anglophone culture. Sometimes in moments of optimism I wonder whether I might not get eventually to 2,000 Anglophone records with rubrics.
With Fairy Census 1 I published freely online, though I have since also published the census as print-on-demand in three volumes (1 UK, US; 2 UK, US; and 3 UK and US – should come out next week). With Fairy Census 2 I will publish in three formats: as a freely available pdf; as a freely available excel or csv sheet; and as three print on demand volumes. These should be out in September or October?
The excel sheet especially will include all FC entries with rubrics to date. They should considerably facilitate research. You want to know about the fairy sightings of men, aged 21-30 from English-speaking countries? It should just take two or three minutes to isolate all the relevant entries.
If Cylons (chatgpt and friends), mushroom clouds or Martians do not intervene then the finished Fairy Census will be one of the biggest freely available supernatural surveys online. It will also answer, I hope, the question of what happened to fairylore after Marjorie Johnson stopped typing in the 1990s. Thanks to Marjorie and the respondents to the Fairy Census for the first time we’ll be able to trace in great detail, in one culture the changing consciousness around a supernatural being over four generations. Exciting.
I’ve written above that FC 2 will have 500 entries. I’m presently at about 490. If you have had a fairy experience please do then write in. Anonymity is taken incredibly seriously, so don’t worry on that score.
