Fairies, Folklore and Forteana

SIMON YOUNG FILES A NEW REPORT FROM THE INTERFACE OF STRANGE PHENOMENA AND FOLK BELIEF

OLD BELIEFS IN A NEW WORLD

There is a long-standing idea that European fairies did not make it to the Americas. The immigrants crossing the Atlantic may have had, at home, their duendes, their fate, their pixies and their trolls, but ‘the other crowd’ never got through Ellis Island. North American folklorists tend to go along with the fairyfree claim, and articles on American fairies concentrate on Amerindian fairy traditions.

I, too, used to take the absence of European fairies in the 13 colonies and their successors as a simple fact. However, I kept a file for those rare instances when European fairies turned up and – in the way of things – the file grew. I then pooled resources with fortean historian Chris Woodyard (who had an even larger file) and we put together a hand-list of Europeanstyle fairies recorded in North America prior to World War II. Our only rule: we ignored Newfoundland, where fairy traditions had been amply documented by the brilliant Barbara Rieti.

The list took a couple of years to write but it will soon be published and hopefully, at that point, added to by forteans and folklorists alike. There are just over 150 entries: if you have any obscure references to share there may still be time to slip them into the first edition. The most impressive thing about the list, at least to me, is its variety. We have an Irish mother in New York burning her baby because she believed that he was a fairy: the changeling tradition brought from the west of Ireland to the ‘fresh green breast of the New World’. There are the supernatural dancers circling around a tree, seen by the celebrated journalist William Allen White in Kansas: were they on their way to Oz? There were the fairies who ‘pixilated’ travellers and sailors on the coast of Massachusetts. There was the girl in San Francisco who saw two gnomes at her bedroom window. There were the imps that lived in a cave in Oklahoma. There was a fairy well in New Jersey. There were knockers in a mine in Utah (and several other western states). Then there were the banshees howling or playing dirges on ghostly instruments.

Having read and reread this catalogue, my impression is that it is not that there weren’t European fairies in the western hemisphere. There demonstrably were. It is that European fairy beliefs went undocumented. Folklore collectors in Canada and the United States, for the most part, ignored anything to do with the fey. Even in Newfoundland where fairy traditions were an important part of life, they were barely recorded before the 1960s. Most of our reports come from incidental mentions in newspapers.

Simon Young’s new book Magical Folk: British and Irish Fairies is out now from Gibson Square.

THERE WAS THE GIRL IN SAN FRANCISCO WHO SAW TWO GNOMES AT HER BEDROOM WINDOW