Tag Archives: fairies

by jfwknifton | September 2, 2016 · 12:48 pm

The Gateshead Gnomes, and more Little People

Liverpool and the leafy parks and graveyards in its suburbs was not the only place to be involved in the Great English Fairy Flap of 1964.

In June 1964, strange things started happening in Gateshead, a very ordinary, humdrum town in the north east of England. It is a suburb of Newcastle-on-Tyne, where polar bears and walruses (or should that be “walri” ?) roam regularly in colder winters. Look for the orange arrows:

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At ten past four in the afternoon of June 2nd 1964, four boys were playing together in Leam Lane Estate, Gateshead. This looks a fairly desolate site, right on the shores of the freezing, windswept North Sea:

Looking at the map, though, as it does have one or two of the features that would link it with Celtic fairy sites, and indeed, with the old idea of dimensional portals out of which ghosts, goblins, UFOs and lots of other exciting beings may emerge:

First of all, it is (or was then) heath covered waste land with gorse and bracken, the very landscape beloved of fairies in Cornwall. It also has a very ancient Roman road, which would have been built directly over a Celtic track. Indeed, the reason that Roman roads across Western Europe are so unbelievably straight, is that Celtic tracks were. Quite a link, therefore, with times long, long ago.

Another indicator of pathways into other dimensions is the presence of any natural water, such as streams, and, for me, what clinches the deal, a natural spring. (that is what the blue “spr” stands for, at the centre bottom of the map). You can’t tell from this map. but I have looked at some larger scale ones, and the area also has a couple of cemeteries, absolutely classic places for crossing over into other realities.

Back to those four boys who were playing together at ten past four on that early June afternoon. They reported having sighted:

“a silver domed object about the size of a table, with portholes around the top and three legs. It was seen falling like a leaf through the sky making a low buzzing noise descending approximately 120 yards away from where they were standing.”

Here is the closest the Internet has to offer. It is in actual fact, the new Smart Car:

At half past five in the evening, another, fifth boy, Mark Smith, aged 14, decided to walk down to the farm to collect some straw for his rabbits. When he arrived, he saw a group of around ten children, standing about twenty yards away from a haystack. This was followed by the startling sight of:

“around six or eight tiny human beings on top of the stack: they were about two and a half feet tall and dressed in bright green suits. They appeared to be digging into the haystack, as if searching for something. Their hands seemed like lighted electric light bulbs.”

Mark went home and told his parents what he had seen and decided to make his way back to the scene, but he was stopped by the farmer. Mark says that he was told by another child that:

“she had seen a circular silvery object take off from the ground with a spinning motion giving off an orange glow.”

On June 6th, 1964 several members of the local UFO Organisation visited the locality concerned and spent some considerable time speaking to many of the residents and children about the matter.

One child who admitted having seen “the little green men” told them:

“the leader of the little men was dressed in black and carried a baton with pink stripes.”

Another girl claimed:

“He was sitting on the roof of the barn watching us.”

Another girl told them that she had seen ‘him’ riding on the back of a cow whilst others claimed the whole thing was a hoax. The farmer who owns the land said

“All the claims are a load of nonsense. If anything has landed I would’ve known about it. I have a dog kept in the yard, he would warned me if anybody had been prowling around the farm.”

And that was not the end of it. Three months or so later…

It was claimed that a “Leprechaun” had been sighted in Tamar Street East in Belfast on or about September 10th 1964.

In fact, this particular Little Green Man was later identified as six-year-old Billy Knowles.

He was playing at Robin Hood, dressed in his nice new costume:

He was playing in a derelict house, something Belfast was not short of at the time:

Poor little Billy was soon chased away by police who were frightened for his safety.

Too late!!!

The hint of a real life Leprechaun, and a real life pot of gold, triggered off the local people’s imaginations. Vast numbers of them descended into the streets causing massive disorder. Ironically the crowds that gathered there included not just children, but many adults. The incident, which involved the police and the fire service in some numbers, also attracted the presence of David Bleakley, the Labour MP for Victoria, who handed over a hastily written petition to Belfast Corporation, demanding action to keep the crowds and children away from the embankment and the many derelict houses there. One senior police officer was quoted as saying:

“A grown man, cold stone sober, insisted to me that he had seen a leprechaun.“

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Filed under History, Humour, Personal, Science

Tagged as Belfast, Belfast Corporation, Cornwall, fairies, Gateshead, ghosts, goblins, Leprechaun, little green men, Newcastle-on-Tyne, Polar Bears, Robin Hood, Tamar Street East, UFOs., Walruses

by jfwknifton | July 28, 2016 · 12:41 pm

The School Leprechaun

After reading all about gnomes, elves, pixies, fairies and such like, it should come as no surprise to hear that Wollaton is not the only place around Nottingham to have played host to fairies in recent times. Marjorie Johnson, the lady who saw fairies in her garden in Carlton was to become very famous in fairy circles. She wrote this best selling book:

Here is a link to an account of fairies she saw in Nottingham, in Carlton to be more precise.

Belief in fairies persists still, even in our own time. When we went once to an isolated farm at Constantine in Cornwall, the farmer clearly believed that the huge ruined megalith in his bottom field was the home to fairy folk. He had seen their fairy lights on more than one occasion.

It is in Iceland that gnomes and fairies are taken most seriously. Over a half of Icelanders believe that these tiny entities are, at the very least, “possible”. They are thought to be from another dimension, usually making their homes inside huge boulders and outcrops of rock.

Known as huldufólk these beings are not regarded as trivial. Roads can be redirected on their behalf.

This report by Journeyman starts off in almost comic fashion, but does make some quite serious points:

This film by Torsten Scholl, aka “hatcast” has even more serious points to make:

This account by Richard Williams aka “rockuvages” is of the moment when the huldufólk seem to pop out of their own dimension:

Nowadays, we tend to see fairies and their like as something lovely and wonderful. This attitude has only come about since Peter Pan and Tinkerbell. Before that, fairies were considered by those who had regular contact with them to be malevolent beings who, if they were in any way annoyed, would readily kidnap adults, willingly do harm to them and, most of all, steal their babies, replacing them with changelings. This is why nowadays a lot of modern folklorists tend to equate ancient beliefs in fairies, with our current fondness for space aliens and little green men, who have continued in modern times to carry out all of these evil deeds:

Tales of fairies invariably involve abduction and poor innocent people forced to remain in Fairy Land, sometimes for ever. What difference is there between malevolent fairies holding people hostage in their realm and our modern tales of extra-terrestrial kidnap?

Other parallels are there. Some types of fairies, such as leprechauns and goblins, have green as their favourite colour, just as some aliens are literally “little green men”. Only medical experiments seem to be absent from the connections between the two groups, perhaps because in sixteenth and seventeenth century Ireland or Cornwall, there was no health care available and advanced medicine was not a subject on anybody’s mind. Only ointments and magic potions were on offer back then, and these simple remedies do figure from time to time in the more ancient tales of fairies.

Here is something more modern, a tractor beam, although some would argue that those fairy lights, leading innocent people out onto the marsh to drown or be abducted, did pretty much the same job:

This modern cartoon by “grackle” sums up best our ancient knowledge of fairies, who were by no means the magnanimous and well intentioned Peter Pan heroes of Walt Disney’s world.

Certainly, the Cornish and the Irish, for example, seem to view “piskies” or “the little people” as, at best, potentially tricky and at worst possibly, evil, and similar figures are met with in every human culture across the globe.

In North America, there are Ishigaq (Inuits), Jogahoh (Iroquois), Nimerigar (Shoshone) and the Yunwi Tsundi (Cherokee). In Hawaii, there are the Menehune, and for the Maoris, the Patupaiarehe. In Europe, there is a host of names such as the Brownies, the Kobolds in Germany, Goblins, Gremlins, Pixies, Leprechauns and the Swedish “Di sma undar jordi”, who are clearly almost identical with the huldufólk of Iceland:

Let’s finish with a quite extraordinary piece of film.

All over the world, of course, as well as “the little people” there are the enormously large people. In Nepal, the “yeti”, in North America, “Bigfoot”, in Western Europe “the Wildman” or “Wodewose”. In Iraq, he was represented by “Enkidu” the companion of Gilgamesh. In Israel, he was “Goliath” whom David slew:

In Australia, the enormously large person is called the “Yowie” and he is very fierce indeed.

The huge Yowie, though, has a tiny equivalent. To the white man he is “Brown Jack” but to the blackfella he is the “Junjudee”. He is tiny and here is a purported film of one:

Any film by TheRusty222 is well worth watching. He tries to film Yowies but most of all, he ventures deep into the realm of the thickest parts of the Australian bush, an environment of staggering beauty if you ever watch one of his films.
Talking of “Little People”, a few weeks ago, I bought a postcard of the High School taken in 1927. I was intrigued to see what is obviously the “School Leprechaun” busy guarding the front of the school:

You can see his right hand, his jacket of Irish Green, his little fawn breeches and his lovely top hat. Here he is, slightly enlarged:

Do you see his mutton chop whiskers? And what about little Pumpkin Head, next to him, with his tiny hat and his little legs and boots?

Both photographs, courtesy of the Pareidolia Brothers.

17 Comments

Filed under Cryptozoology, History, Literature, Nottingham, Personal, The High School

Tagged as Carlton, Di sma undar jordi, elves, Enkidu, fairies, Gilgamesh, gnomes, Goliath, huldufólk, Iceland, Icelanders, Irish Green, Junjudee, Leprechaun, Little People, Marjorie Johnson, Pareidolia, pixies, School Leprechaun, TheRusty222, Wildman, Wodewose, yeti, Yowie

by jfwknifton | July 13, 2016 · 12:13 pm

The Gnomes of Wollaton Park

I am sure that it would surprise a great many people to be told that there have been fairies, gnomes and elves seen in Nottingham in quite recent times. The most famous incident was in the late September of 1979. This took place in Wollaton Park, which is the extensive grassland, studded with trees, which surrounds stately Wollaton Hall, home of the Hollywood blockbuster, The Dark Knight Rises :

Wollaton Park is in the centre of Nottingham. Look for the orange arrow:

I do not know the exact place where the fairies and gnomes were seen, but I suspect that it was probably here. Again, look for the orange arrow:

This location fits in quite well with details I have found, namely, “near the lake”, “swampy”, “near an exit from the park” and “near a fenced off nature reserve”. The most frequently quoted directions are “in a rather wet area down by the lake”. Here is the Lake. The orange arrow points to the place where doting parents take their children to feed the ducks and fight off the Canada Geese:

The little elvish creatures were seen by a small group of children between eight and ten years of age who were playing in a swampy section of the park. The children were Angie and her brother Glen and her sister Julie. There was also Andrew and Rosie who were brother and sister, and Patrick. Here are just some of the sixty gnomes:

The children were playing just as dusk was falling, around half past eight. The light was deteriorating but it was still bright enough to see. The children’s attention was attracted by something that sounded like a bell. They saw a throng of around sixty little gnome like men coming out of an area of woodland and bushes which had been fenced off to prevent the general public from entering. The little men were riding in small bubble-like vehicles. These cars were completely silent but they were very quick and could jump and skip over anything in their way such as fallen trees or branches.
Down near the lake they seemed to be enjoying riding over the marshy swampy area, and a few of them chased the children towards the exit gate from the park, just in play, though, not aggressively.

The little men were just half the size of the children, around two feet tall. They all had wrinkled faces, perhaps with a greenish tinge and long white beards, tipped with red. Sometimes they laughed in a strange way. On their little heads, they were wearing what the children described as caps like old-fashioned nightcaps. They were just like what Noddy used to wear, with a little bobble on the very end:

They had blue tops and yellow or green tights or pants. Despite the encroaching darkness, the children were able to see them all plainly. Patrick explained to the Headmaster: “I could see them in the dark. They all showed up.”:

The children watched them for about a quarter of an hour, as the men drove round in their little cars. Each of the fifteen cars carried two little men. They did not have steering wheels but some kind of circular device with a tiny handle to turn it. The little men also were climbing up into the surrounding trees, going into and emerging from, holes in the trunk or branches. All of the children felt that they had somehow surprised the little men, who usually would only have come out after night fell. Eventually, the children all ran away, because it was getting late. The little men had not been threatening or aggressive.
The adults who subsequently heard their stories thought that the little group of children were all telling lies, but the children were completely unwavering in their belief that they had seen what they said they had seen. Furthermore, they had seen the little men previously, during the six weeks of the long summer holiday from school. Some were at the lake, but others were at the Gnomes Anonymous, anti-Alcoholism Group:

The day after they returned to school, their Headmaster questioned them all separately and recorded their answers on a cassette tape recorder. The children all told, more or less, the same story. Their drawings too, were all very similar:

The Headmaster’s opinion was that the children were all telling the truth, although, as might be expected, there were minor differences of detail and emphasis between their different accounts. His overall final judgement was that “The children do sound truthful”. Here is the Headmaster on the School Photo taken that year. You can see why he believed the children:

In actual fact, the Headmaster actually corresponded about the events with Marjorie T Johnson, the author of “Seeing Fairies”:

He sent her the cassette tapes of the children he had recorded. His letter said:

“I think the tape reveals the wide measure of corroboration between the children, as well as the fluency with which they were able to describe the events. I remain sceptical as to the explanation of what they saw, but I am also convinced that the children were describing a real occurrence.”

When the children’s story about the Wollaton little people became public, a number of claims were made that they had been seen before in the boggy area around the lake. Marjorie Johnson, formerly Secretary of the Nottingham-based “Fairy Investigation Society”, confirmed that she had “received a number of previous reports of Little People frequenting this locality”. They included Mrs C George of Stapleford near Nottingham, who, in 1900, had seen both gnomes and fairies by the Wollaton Park Gates as she walked past on the pavement. Here is one of their little cars, abandoned temporarily by the roadside, and taken into the police pound:

Just before the children’s experience, Mrs Brown reported that she had been led telepathically around the Park, from one beauty spot to another, by a group of gnomes. At each stopping place they had magically provided her with a feather to find.
The famous writer on mysteries, and expert on fairy sightings, Janet Bord, added an interesting extra detail to the story:

“Over six years before the Wollaton fairies were reported in the media, I had corresponded with Marina Fry of Cornwall, who wrote to me giving details of her own fairy sighting when she was nearly four years old, around 1940. One night she and her older sisters, all sleeping in one bedroom, awoke to hear a buzzing noise (one sister said ‘music and bells’). Looking out of the window they saw a little man in a tiny blue and yellow car driving around in circles’. He was about 18 inches tall and had a white beard and a ‘blue pointed hat’…he just disappeared after a while.”