Fairy Lands of North Carolina

of North Carolina

Those with “the Sight” claim there are wee folk among us. Do you believe?

By John hood Illustr atIon By h a r ry Bl a Ir

hat rock in the river was a big one. Big enough to sit on. T hat’s what the woman did, in fact, while her husband spent the af ternoon fishing upstream. She waded out to the rock, found a comfor table seat, and took out a book to read. W hat happened next was like something out of a book — but not the one she was reading.

Hearing footsteps and voices, the woman glanced up and saw t wo boys cavor ting along a trail, their distracted father tr udging along behind. As the boys approached the water’s edge, something else entered her field of vision. “It star ted coming up the river,” she later recalled.

W hat was “it”? A “pale-sk inned, water-logged-look ing” creature, she said, “with black hair and sharp, serrated teeth showing in a smile.” Paying no attention to the woman perched on the rock, it “focused on the boys” and moved rapidly through the water toward them.

She wasn’t the only one who saw it. T he boys did, too. T hey picked up sticks and pointed them at the mysterious swimmer. T he woman never found out if their makeshif t weapons would have done any good. A lthough apparently unable to see the creature that was now just a few feet away f rom his boys, the father never theless decided they were playing too close to the water and ushered them back to the trail.

T hat the boys were br iefly in per il, though, the woman never doubted. “It watched them move up the trail away w ith a creepy look on its face,” she said, “and then moved on upr iver out of sight.”

Maybe you think you know what was really in that river. A bullf rog. A bottom-feeder. A bumpy log conver ted into something sinister by an overactive imagination. But the woman in question is convinced she saw a fair y. Just a few years ago. R ight here in Nor th Carolina.

It’s not our state’s first fair y sighting. It won’t be the last. Oh, it’s easy to scof f at those who claim to see wee folk wading in r ivers or slink ing through forests or dancing on hilltops. How childish. How back ward. How unscientific. Well, sure. But I bet you k now someone who still car r ies a luck y char m or wears a luck y sweatshir t whenever the Wolf pack play the Tar Heels. I bet you k now someone who watches A ncient A liens or Ghost Hunters, hits up psychics for adv ice or think s Big foot just might rea lly be out there somewhere, camera-shy but f ur tively flat tered.

By the way, what’s your sign? Generations ago, all the smar t people thought universal schooling would disabuse the masses of such fancif ul superstitions. T hey thought the relentless march of science would muscle old faiths and folk traditions aside — confining them, conver ting them into historical curiosities. “R ationalization and intellectualization,” the sociologist Ma x Weber famously predicted a centur y ago, would bring “the disenchantment of the world.”

T hen a great many of these same smar t people went out and got their palms read. Or sat in seances. Just for the experience, you know.

T he magical, the paranormal, the supernatural are not so easily banished. According to a recent Harris Poll, 42 percent of us believe in ghosts, 36 percent in UFOs, 29 percent in astrolog y and 26 percent in witches. Fairies — by which I mean the broad swath of legendar y little people, not just tiny Tinker Bells with translucent wings — rarely get included in American polls. But sur veys in other countries find significant minorities still believe in fairies. In some places, such as Iceland, believers form a majorit y.

Among the believers is the woman I mentioned earlier. I wish I could tell you more about her and the fair y encounter she claimed to witness f rom that big rock. Unfor tunately, I can’t

even tell you her name. Anonymit y was the promise made by folk lorist Simon Young in 2014 when he began soliciting first-person accounts of fair y sightings. Published four years later as The Fairy Census, Young’s research spans hundreds of stories f rom around the world — including several f rom our state.

I can tell you the woman says it wasn’t her first sighting. “I have seen them since childhood, dif ferent ones,” she told Young. “My granny f rom Ireland says I have ‘the Sight’ like her.” T he woman describes fairies as “beings f rom another world ” that can have good or bad intentions. “I was always taught to never talk to them or let them know I see them.”

I can also say that, if you believe her stor y and hope to see your own fair y one day, there are plent y of places in our state wor th exploring. W hile researching my new historical-fantasy novel Mountain Folk, largely set in Nor th Carolina during the American Revolution, I learned a great deal about the fair y lore of our ancestors. Some of it developed locally, tied to specific Carolina landmarks. Other beliefs were brought here f rom afar — f rom the British Isles, f rom Nor thern Europe and the Mediterranean world, f rom West Af rica. It turns out that almost all cultures have stories of wee folk. Accounts var y, of course, but a surprising number of them converge in key details: creatures t wo to three feet tall, invisible to most if they wish to be, inf used with magic, attuned with nature, prone to pranks but also willing to trade favors for something they covet.

Based on the woman’s description, for example, you might find her rock y seat in some Piedmont river or mountain stream. T he original inhabitants of those par ts of Nor th Carolina of ten told tales of such creatures. Among the Cherokee, for example, they were called the yunwi amayine hi, or “water dwellers,” and had the power to boost fish catches and promote healing.

In one stor y, a water dweller disg uises herself as human to attend a dance. Smitten by her charms, a Cherokee man follows her to a riverbank and professes his love. He must be persuasive, for she agrees to become his wife. Eyes spark ling, she dives in the river and beckons him to follow. “It is really only a road,” she says. He takes a deep breath and leaps. Finding a wondrous world hidden beneath the river, he lives there happily as her husband. L ater, when he leaves to visit his parents, they turn out to be long since dead. Generations of Cherokee live and die during the few years he lives among the water-dwellers.

A lternatively, maybe what our eyewitness saw was not a diminutive humanoid f rom native folk lore but something scalier. T he place where the Haw and Deep rivers converge in Chatham Count y to form the Cape Fear is nicknamed Mermaid Point. Just before the Revolutionar y War, a man named Ambrose R amsey ran a tavern nearby. W hen the locals lef t R amsey’s tavern late at night to stumble home, they’d pass a sandbar. On numerous occasions, they spotted small fig ures luxuriating there in the moonlight. Fig ures with the heads, arms and torsos of beautif ul women and the lateral lines and shiny tails of a fish. If the patrons were quiet and kept to the shadows, they could watch the mermaids laugh, play, sing and comb their long hair. But if the men tried to speak to them, the fairies would disappear into the water.

R ivers are hardly Nor th Carolina’s only sites for fair y lore. Another folk f rom Cherokee legend, the Nunnehi, are associated with such locations as Pilot Mountain (both the famous monadnock in Surr y Count y and a lesser-known peak near Hendersonville) and the modern town of Frank lin, where the Nunnehi were said to have helped defeat a Creek invasion and, much later, a raid by Union soldiers. On the other side of the state, in and around the Great Dismal Swamp, the mytholog y of Iroquois and A lgonquin speakers mingled with European and Af rican-American legends to produce a rich folk lore of eerie lights, dark shapes and magical creatures.

Moreover, as the Fairy Census reminds us, our sightings aren’t limited to old tales preser ved in old books. T hey still happen. A 30 -something woman repor ted “staring at the foot of the bed at the light coming in through a large window when I saw a fair y suddenly appear on one side of the room and fly across the bed toward the window.” She described the creature as brown-haired and gaunt, about three-feet tall with sharp features “not ver y pleasant to look at.”

T he woman wasn’t alone. But her husband, lying next to her, never saw the fair y. “I think it is strange that I had this experience in my house in suburban Nor th Carolina, of all places,” she said.

Another Nor th Carolinian described an encounter she had in her youth with a fair y “about t wo to three feet tall, dressed entirely in red, with a solid red face, tiny white horns on the top of his head, and with a red, pointed tail.” He was standing next to the stump of a tree that had been his home until it was felled during the constr uction of the girl ’s house. She ran to get her parents. But they couldn’t see it.

T he more you study both folk lore and modern-day sightings, the more you come to appreciate the commonalities. I decided to include several in Mountain Folk, such as the extreme time dif ference bet ween fair y realms and the human world, the link bet ween fairies and nature and the idea that only those rare humans possessing “the Sight” can pierce fair y disg uises.

Do such commona lit ies suggest fa ir y t r adit ions aren’t pr ist ine, t hat t hey develop over t ime t hrough cross - c u lt ur a l exchange? Or t hat people cla iming to see fa ir ies are just mashing up dist ant memor ies of bedt ime stor ies w it h drowsy daydreams and opt ic a l i llusions? C ou ld be.

T here are many explanations for fair y belief. For some, it’s reassuring to believe that good and bad events aren’t just random. T hat powerf ul forces are at work, magical forces to be tapped or propitiated. For others, fair y belief is about rediscovering a sense of wonder — about reenchanting the world, as Weber might say, instead of settling for a cold, clock work version.

T hat’s how some of your fellow Nor th Carolinians feel, any way. W hether out explor ing their state’s nat ura l beaut y or just put ter ing around the neighborhood, they keep their minds open a long w ith their eyes. T hey suspend their disbelief. T hey dare to hope that something ut terly fantastic w ill happen. T hat something ut terly fantastic can happen.

Af ter all, it’s happened before. Or so they’ve heard. OH

John Hood is a Raleigh-based writer and the author of the historicalfantasy novel Mountain Folk (Defiance Press, 2021).