For ages, some people have believed in fairies — strange and otherworldly creatures often connected to nature. But that belief hasn’t always been mainstream in the United States.
Andrew Warburton is the author of New England Fairies — A History of the Little People of the Hills and Forests. He’s from the UK — where belief in fairies is much more mainstream.
WSHU: How did you become interested in the first place in researching fairy lore in New England?
AW: I think I was going to Cornwall one summer, in the southwest of England. They have a lot of fairy lore, and there sort of a lot to do with pixies, Cornish pixies, and so I started reading up a lot about pixies. And then, at the same time, I saw something in the news, where I saw that the Mohegan tribe in Eastern Connecticut was trying to prevent a housing complex from being built on their ancestral lands. And that was the first thing that really made me think at all about fairies being in North America. The Mohegans call them little people rather than fairies.
WSHU: I thought it was so interesting that a lot of this fairy lore in New England is Indigenous lore.
AW: Most of the fairy lore from the Mohegans actually comes from a woman called Fidelia Fielding. She was an elder at the end of the 19th century. Fidelia Fielding was the first to put Mohegan Little People folklore down in writing. So there's one anecdote: she was having dinner with her family, and she excused herself halfway through the dinner because she said that there was someone in a tree that she had to go and talk to. And everyone gathered at the meal. Obviously, they thought they kind of understood that this was one of the little people.
WSHU: We usually associate fairies with the British Isles or other parts of northern Europe: Britain, Ireland, Iceland. Why aren't fairy stories at least assumed to be as common here as they are there, given that this is quote-unquote, New England?
AW: There are definitely sightings of fairies in New England. But I think they are quite less than over the pond. Those traditions go back hundreds of years, whereas immigrants came from Europe and settled here. It was so different. They were disconnected from the land that the faeries were associated with. So I guess gradually they just kind of forgot. And it didn't seem as if it seems as if it only took a few generations for Americans to kind of lose any kind of trace of sort of fairy belief. There are strong records of them actually believing in fairies like in the 19th century.
WSHU: You also heard about this man in Sherman, Connecticut, who people said was actually a fairy. Is that right?
AW: That’s correct, yeah. Perry Boney.
WSHU: What was his story?
AW: I went into the book thinking he probably wasn't a real person, like it was a legend. So I went to Sherman, and I was thinking, I'll just take some photos, and maybe I'll just write up this story as a legend. But I went to the general store there and I asked a man if he'd ever heard of this Perry Boney. I kind of mentioned one thing: supposedly, this man had the world's smallest store. It was like a shack in the woods, and only two children could fit inside it at one time. So when I mentioned that, he suddenly rang a bell, and he said, 'Well, the person you need to go and talk to is this woman, Anne Price.' So Anne Price actually lives in the house that Perry Boney lived in. So I drove down the hill, and I went to this house.
She actually happened to be in her backyard. She told me everything. She showed me his old fireplace. She has photos of him on the bookcase. He was very strange. He had very bowed legs. He had a very squeaky voice. And the photo I have of him in the book shows that he kind of looks like he has little pointy ears. You can see why someone maybe would have come to the conclusion that he was sort of otherworldly. The children in the town said that he used to talk with fairies who lived in the mists above Greenwood's Brook. The other rumor was that he was actually a fairy. Oh, the other rumor was that he was taken by the fairies. So they say he just disappeared one day and never reappeared again, and no one knew where he went. And the rumors that started up were that the fairies had taken him or that he'd gone back to fairyland. And that's also not true, because he is actually buried at the center cemetery in Sherman, next to his wife.
WSHU: Last question for you, and I'm gonna get personal with this one. Do you believe in fairies?
AW: I mean, I think that every culture that has ever existed, every society, civilization, whatever, does have stories about these lesser beings. You could call them godlings, or you could call them fairies or little people. It's amazing that there are similarities between indigenous little people and European fairies; they have so much in common. So that makes me wonder why there seems to be this universal belief. I believe in spiritual realities. I have my own faith, I suppose. But I'm not exactly a literal believer in fairies.
Andrew Warburton is the author of New England Fairies: A History of the Little People of Hills and Forests. Now available from Arcadia Publishing.
