Fairies, Folklore and Forteana
VERY SCARY FAIRIES
It is perhaps the single scariest British fairy encounter. The year is 1757. Four children are playing in a field in Denbighshire. The children (three girls and a boy) are aged seven, eight, 10 and 15. The experience was recorded by the youngest, Edward Williams (1750-1813). Williams – who would become a celebrated Methodist preacher – wrote two difference accounts: one for the proto-fortean collector Edmund Jones, when Edward was in his early twenties; and the other as an autobiographical reminiscence much later in his life. The two accounts are remarkably similar.
The children were playing in a field outside Bodfari when they became aware that, about 70 yards from them, a group of humanoids were dancing. The account begins jarringly with these figures suddenly turning up out of nowhere. As to the appearance of the interlopers: “They seemed to be little bigger than we, but of a dwarfish appearance.” “They were cloathed in red all over like soldiers, with red handkerchiefs, sprig’d, and spotted with yellow about their heads, all alike in everything… with the knot behind.” Usually, fairies dance in a circle and invite humans in. Here the figures seemed to be involved in manic “morris dancing” (Jones’s words). There was “something uncommonly wild in their motions.” The children had real problems
“I LOOKED BACK AND SAW HIM JUST BY ME; UPON WHICH I CRIED OUT, MY SISTER ALSO CRIED OUT”
establishing how many there were – which suggests a lot of movement – but decided in the end that there were about 16.
So far so creepy. But things are about to go from deeply weird to unaccountably bad. “Presently we saw one of them coming away from the company in a running pace; upon this we feared and ran to the stile.” The kids were being chased by an angry fairy dancer: he had a “slow running pace”, but “with long steps for a little one”. The older children heroically went first over the stile and poor Edward was left last. He remembered the order of the girls going over that narrow piece of wood 15 years later: this suggests that the terror burnt the whole sequence into his mind. While “I was creeping up the stile, my sister staying to help me, I looked back, and saw him just by me; upon which I cried out, my sister also cried out, and [she] took hold of me under her arm to draw me over; and when my feet had just come over, I still crying and looking back, we saw him reaching after me, leaning on the stile; but [he] did not come over.” The man had a “grim countenance, a wild and somewhat fierce look”; his complexion was “copper-coloured”.
All four children (now grown) were still alive in 1772 when Edward wrote his first account: “They remember it as well if not better than myself.”