Paranormal Investigator Magazine Issue I | Page 11

Touching the Other World
tree lines. Spindly limbed figures dart like feral
creatures around children and animals. Gnomelike beings are reported in British Columbia.
Children draw pictures of what they believe to
be the “Tooth Fairy” upon waking at night. A
quick check of the Internet shows accounts of
encounters with what might be termed elementals or Fairies by both adults and children.
In all cultures, the Fey have been a generational part of mankind’s heritage. Native Americans
believed in the “Little People”. Their versions
of the wee folk are highly protective of nature,
and woe betides the person who defiles or destroys the land. Sightings of small, dark, redeyed creatures are related to property in Missouri where Native Americans met for trade and
nearby cliff paintings were recorded by Lewis
and Clark before being destroyed to make way
for the railroad.  
Non-believers, naysayers of ghost photos,
claim matrixing, or pareidolia, (Word English
Dictionary-the imagined perception of a pattern
or meaning where it does not actually exist, as
in considering the moon to have human features) for seeing the simulacrum thought to be
of the Fey
Granted, images may be interpreted in our mind
to resemble objects familiar to us, but the tales
and legends of otherworldly beings existed
long before the advent of the modern camera.
Fairy tales live with their own pulsating life in
many cultures. Meetings with the Other Crowd,
“Shee-folk,” (“people of the hollow hills” - literal
meaning of Irish word “sidhe.”), “denizens of Faerie”, Germanic –“ Hidden Folk” (“Hulder Folk”
in Swedish, meaning Hidden People), Tuatha
Dé Danann, Shining Ones, all are encounters
with a particular being who are to a degree “hidden.”
Cultural anthropologist for Durham University, Dr. Jamie Tehrani, studied 35 versions of Little Red Riding Hood from around the world. “The
oldest tale we found was an Aesopic fable that
dated from about the sixth century BC, so the
last common ancestor of all these tales certainly
predated this. We are looking at a very ancient
tale that evolved over time.”
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