The Wood Diva February 5, 2024
Author: Beach Combing | in : Contemporary , trackback
***I’ve been absent for a couple of months because I was locked out of the account! Just to let you know that Chris and I continue to do our podcasts and there has been an episode on medieval x-files and now bird spirits. This is a fragment of an article on Fairy Census 2 I’ve just published in Fortean Times. Numbers apply to FC 1 & 2.
It is one of my favourite fairy experiences. In the 1990s two sisters and a dog were out exploring in the early afternoon ‘in the woods behind our grandparents’ house’ in Arkansas. At a certain point the younger sister (aged six) had run a few yards ahead and the elder sister, a teen, noticed that off to the side a woman had appeared among the trees: ‘She was wearing a long, white dress and was walking toward us but there was no noise of crunching leaves or anything. It was completely silent and still. The birds and wind didn’t even make a sound. She was beautiful and seemed to glow a little like she was a little brighter than everything else around her. She looked at me smiled and waved’. ‘Her hair was dark blonde and was long and loose… and seemed to be brighter than her surroundings like she maybe glowed a little.’ The dog was understandably upset by this mysterious presence and ‘made some kind of noise and pushed against me’. The elder sister looked down at her dog and when she looked up again the mysterious woman had disappeared (§217).
It is a great account. But it needs to be read in association with two jarringly similar entries in the Fairy Census. Consider now this experience from Lancashire in the UK in the 2000s. A woman in her twenties and her friend are walking in a wild English wood in the late morning. Suddenly, down the slope, a lady appears ‘with dark hair and off-white long tunic… Almost a shining quality’ (§70). The young female hiker feels compelled to follow the woman into a small birch glade and there is some kind of (telepathic?) communication between them. ‘Her voice was almost like it was phasing in and out of our reality.’ Or consider, §198. We are in the forest of Nova Scotia after midnight in the 2010s. Two friends (a man and a woman in their twenties), are walking when ‘we both saw a woman step out of the woods… She had a long silver, purple and green gown and looong [sic] hair with seven stars in it. She seemed to be made of light with what might have been a crown on it’. The woman walks into a tree and then a shadow like a spider emerges…
There are differences, yes, but consider the common elements. We have: i) woods; ii) two people walking (at least one female); iii) a human-sized female fairy appears; iv) she is luminous with billowing skirt and long hair; v) both people, or the dog and the sister in the first account, see the fairy; vi) there is some limited contact with the fairy in two accounts (hand wave/words); vii) the fairy then vanishes (or becomes a spider…). You could argue that in a thousand records you are bound to have ‘overlaps’ like this: fairies are seen in woods; many fairies vanish etc etc. But actually there are relatively few human-sized fairies; and most are male. Indeed, in our small sample of single human-sized fairy women these are half of the entries. Examples where two witnesses share an experience are, meanwhile, rare (17%). This is the kind of bean-counting you can indulge in when you have fairy records in Excel.
Some of the few others in this category (single, human-sized female) have elements in common with the wood diva. Two young girls in ‘rural Pennsylvania’ in the 1990s (§853) are deep in the forest exploring. ‘[O]ut of nowhere we began to hear a woman’s melodic voice singing in the woods. It didn’t seem to be coming from any one direction, and it was quiet at first slowly creeping up to this very loud, haunting song ringing through the trees, filling every inch of the woods.’ The girls run home. No woman is seen but the voice suggests, to me at least, human-sized. Or there is §313 from Missouri in the 2000s. The witness in her fifties feels ‘compelled’ to get out of her car: as she is about to drive to work. She is in front of her house ‘in woodland’. A woman steps out from behind a tree. ‘She was dark haired… She was wearing some sort of headband that came around her forehead. After stepping out from behind the tree she seemed to look around the woods, as if she had just arrived and was getting oriented… she turned and looked at me.’ ‘A female with long hair in a long dress.’ There is then some missing time…
Here we have not only a common vision of a fairy (as, say, with tresps), we have something far more powerful. We have a story. Two people meet a vanishing woman in a wood. There are other examples of these emergent narratives in the Fairy Census. For instance, §80 details a balloon of ‘fairies’ in bowler hats coming to take a child away in 1950s London. §525 has a hot-air balloon ‘full of tall, elegant, bejewelled beings with peacock blue skin and shimmering golden hair’ coming to take a child away from rural Dorset in the 1970s. All my instincts scream that these narratives, like, for instance, the men in black in UFO-lore, are important. The supernatural is congealing into useful forms.
Any thoughts on the Wood Diva? drbeachcombing AT gmail DOT com
