Abductions by Fairies and Fairy Imposters

Fairy lore goes back centuries and can be found in a wide variety of diverse cultures. Although the modern image of fairies is that of benevolent glittering winged beings flitting and cavorting amongst the trees of a forest, the attitude towards fairies also varied greatly from tradition to tradition. In some accounts, fairies have a rather mischievous, even malevolent undertone, and in some lore, these entities are seen as being very real indeed. 

An early account of a fairy abduction involves a young woman named Anne Jefferies, of the parish of St Teath, Cornwall, in England. Born in 1626 to a poor laborer, she had always been a bright and inquisitive girl with a wild and active imagination. One of the things that really captured her attention and became almost a sort of obsession for her were all of the various tales of fairies that were all around her, the lore of her area was steeped in such tales, but for her, this was more than mere stories. As a child, she would spend much of her time out in the woods trying to find the elusive entities and commune with them, and this habit would continue right up until she was a young woman, when she came to live as a servant in the family of a Mr. Moses Pitt and his wife Joan, where she did domestic duties and also served as a nanny and nurse to the couple’s two young children. At 19 years of age, she was still going out into the forest all of the time after her chores in her free time, looking for fairies and pixies, singing out to them in the hope of some sort of response to validate her belief that they were in fact real. Little did she know that her efforts were not completely in vain and that she was being watched.

According to the tale, one day Anne was out knitting at the Pitt home when she suddenly went into a convulsive fit that left her ill and bedridden. Several days passed with her in an unconscious state, and when she woke, she would have quite the tale to tell. She would relate to her family and those around her that she had been out there knitting when she had heard laughter and had looked around to find six diminutive men in green outfits and hats and with unusually bright eyes, led by one with a red feather in his cap, had crawled out of the bushes to approach her. The leader of the group had been unafraid of her, jumping into her palm and then up onto her shoulder to kiss her neck and hair, and before long all of them were crawling all over her. That was when one of them had put his hands over her eyes, after which she had felt a prickling sensation and then all had gone dark.

The next thing she remembered was waking to someone shouting “Tear! Tear!” and when she looked around herself, she saw that she was upon a grassy knoll in an unfamiliar, fantastical land of palaces, temples, and lush gardens, as well as azure lakes and a plentitude of brightly colored birds and other animals frolicking about. She was then dressed in an ornate, flowing silk dress and led to a palace, where there were fairy folk everywhere eating, drinking, and dancing. It would seem that she was there in this strange land for many days, during which time she fell in love with the fairy with the red feather in his hat. This made the other fairy men jealous, and they followed them around everywhere they went. One day, a mob of these fairy men would surround them, and as her fairy lover tried to defend her, Anne once again found herself losing consciousness, fading to black as she was immersed in a thrumming vibration that shook her entire body and a buzzing in her ears. The last thing she saw before everything went dark was her fairy lover lying wounded on the ground.

When she woke this time, she was back where she had started, the fairies nowhere to be seen. She was at the time disoriented, and when her family members found her, she was going into convulsive fits. Oddly, although many days had passed for Anne, it seemed as if no time had passed in the real world. For the next few weeks, she would be ill in bed, moving between unconsciousness and lucidity, and she would demonstrate some side effects of her bizarre ordeal. It seems as though she had developed certain clairvoyant abilities, such as reading the future and knowing who was at the door. She also said that she frequently saw the fairies lurking about, although no one else could, and she had also gained the ability to heal people by touching them, on one occasion curing a person’s injured leg just by laying hands upon it, and soon people were coming from far and wide coming to be healed by her hands. Such was her purported powers that she was kept as a prisoner at the house of the Mayor of Bodmin for a time on charges of being a witch, although never formally charged with witchcraft, which was what the whispered rumors were saying.

Interestingly, another power she apparently had was to go without food for long periods, yet remain healthy and vigorous, insisting that the fairies were keeping her fed. The case made quite a stir back in the time, and Anne herself would go on to marry a man named William Warren and fade from the spotlight, refusing to talk about her experiences or perform any more healing magic. The story would go on to be spoken of throughout the area ever since, with a letter from Moses Pitt, her benefactor’s son, to the Right Reverend Dr. Edward Fowler, Bishop of Gloucester setting it in stone. Anne Jefferies would die in 1698, taking any secrets to the grave with her and having avoided talking about her experience for most of her life. What was going on here? Is this just a folktale, or is there something more to it? It is unknown, and the case has become embedded in local myth without a real answer in sight. Was this actual fairies, interdimensional interlopers, or possibly an alien abduction? Or was it just a hoax and the ramblings of a misguided young woman, or even just pure folklore? There is no way to know, and whatever the case may be, it remains one of the weirder tales of fairies there is.

In some cases it seems that the targeted victim of a fairy kidnapping manages to escape. In 1839 there was a woman by the name of Annie McIntire, who seems to have just been saved by her brother from being abducted by the fairies. Her report would read:

“Yes, by good luck my brother happened to be coming home from Carndonagh that night, and heard the fairies singing and saw them dancing round me in the wood at Carrowkeel. He had a book with him, and he threw it in among them. They then ran away."

One early and quite sinister account with alleged evil fairies happened in 1911, when Walter Yeeling Evans-Wentz published a book called The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries, in which there is interviewed 73-year-old Neil Colton, who claimed that as a youth in 1853, he had had a rather strange and frightening fairy encounter indeed. Colton claimed that one summer day he had been put with his brother and cousin gathering berries out in the countryside when they heard some inexplicable, ethereal music wafting through the air from beyond some nearby rocks. When the group went to investigate, they claimed that they had come across a band of fairies dancing in a clearing, and one of these little folk, a woman dressed in red, suddenly noticed they were being watched and rushed forward with decidedly aggressive intent.

The mysterious woman is claimed to have surged forth with a stick, or rush in her hand to strike the cousin across the cheek, after which she reached out to grab Colton’s brother’s arm to keep from falling. This sent the group scurrying away in a panic, and at some point, on their flight back to their home, Colton’s cousin collapsed to the ground seemingly dead. The girl’s father and a priest by the name of Father Ryan then came to the scene and Ryan said a prayer over her body, after which she slowly and groggily awoke. The priest would conclude that it had only been her grabbing Colton's brother that had kept her from being taken by the fairies “forever.”

In 1925, we also have a report of a woman who was “pixie-led” told by Mrs. G. Herbert, of Dartmoor, England. In 1925, Herbert was riding a horse on the moors of Dartmoor, England, on a fine sunny day in an area of the moors that she knew well when she suddenly and inexplicably became confused and lost her way. Oddly, she recognized her surroundings, but some persistent fog in her mind was befuddling her and preventing her from navigating any of it. She seemed to know that this was a result of fairies trying to lead her astray for the purpose of abducting her, so she tried a trick to protect herself, involving turning her pockets inside out. Apparently, this worked, and she was able to continue on her way without further incident. 

Indeed, some of the strangest reports of fairy abductions come from those who have managed to come back to tell the tale. A very weird earlier report also has to do with what is called a “Fairy Circle,” a sort of portal between the land of the Fae and our reality, which in this account supposedly existed near the farm of Llwyn y Ffynon, near the Vale of Neath in South Wales. In 1755, two servants on the farm, Rhys ap Morgan, and Llewellyn Walter, were walking towards the farm one evening when Rhys stopped and told his companion he could hear music playing, although Llewellyn could hear nothing. Rhys told the Llewellyn to continue back home while he went to search for who was playing the music and talk to them. It was all very odd since only Rhys could hear the alleged music, and Llewellyn suspected that he was just trying to get out of work, finally just leaving his friend to head home.

When morning came, Rhys was nowhere to be seen, and so Llewellyn told his boss what had happened the previous night. The area was searched, and they even searched the nearby alehouse, but there was no sign of Rhys, and suspicion began to fall on Llewellyn that he had done something to him. This would continue for a full year before the story found its way to a local farmer who thought it might have to do with fairies. He asked Llewellyn to take him and some friends to the exact spot where Rhys had disappeared, and the farmer claimed that it was a fairy circle and that Rhys had been snatched away within it. At that moment Llewellyn could allegedly hear harp music that no one else could, and the farmer noticed that the servant’s foot was partly within the circle. When all present placed their feet within the circle, they found that they too could hear the music, and they could also see little child-sized figures dancing about along with the missing Rhys.

Llewellyn then grabbed his friend and pulled him out of the circle, after which Rhys said he wanted to dance a little more, as he had just gotten there. When asked what he meant, Rhys claimed to have been there for scarcely 5 minutes, even though a whole year had passed. Indeed, he had no inkling at all that he had been gone so long, and he also found himself unable to clearly remember his time with the little people in that circle. The next morning the circle was checked to find that it was trodden down and filled with tiny footprints the size of a person’s thumb. Oddly, after leaving the circle Rhys’ health would rapidly deteriorate, and he would die not long after. What happened here? Some of these cases can be quite harrowing, such as an account also written in the 1910 book The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries, by W.Y. Evans-Wentz. The case revolves around a witness who says that when he was a boy he was out with his brother and cousin when they were almost abducted by a group of fairies. He says of the bizarre experience:

“One day, just before sunset in midsummer, and I a boy then, my brother and cousin and myself were gathering bilberries (whortleberries) up by the rocks at the back of here, when all at once we heard music. We hurried round the rocks, and there we were within a few hundred feet of six or eight of the gentle folk, and they dancing. When they saw us, a little woman dressed all in red came running out from them towards us, and she struck my cousin across the face with what seemed to be a green rush. We ran for home as hard as we could, and when my cousin reached the house she fell dead. Father saddled a horse and went for Father Ryan. When Father Ryan arrived, he put a stole about his neck and began praying over my cousin and reading psalms and striking her with the stole; and in that way brought her back. He said if she had not caught hold of my brother, she would have been taken forever.”

In the same book is the story of a man who tells of his frightening encounter with what he calls the “gentry,” another word for fairy. One day as he was out near a place called Ben Bulbin he had a curious encounter with a fairy that seemed about to abduct him. He says of the rather odd series of events:

“When I was a young man I often used to go out in the mountains over there to fish for trout, or to hunt; and it was in January on a cold, dry day while carrying my gun that I and a friend with me, as we were walking around Ben Bulbin, saw one of the gentry for the first time. I knew who it was, for I had heard the gentry described ever since I could remember; and this one was dressed in blue with a head-dress adorned with what seemed to be frills. When he came up to us, he said to me in a sweet and silvery voice, "The seldomer you come to this mountain the better. A young lady here wants to take you away." Then he told us not to fire off our guns, because the gentry dislike being disturbed by the noise. And he seemed to be like a soldier of the gentry on guard. As we were leaving the mountains, he told us not to look back, and we didn't. Another time I was alone trout-fishing in nearly the same region when I heard a voice say, "It is ------ bare-footed and fishing." Then there came a whistle like music and a noise like the beating of a drum, and soon one of the gentry came and talked with me for half an hour. He said, "Your mother will die in eleven months, and do not let her die unanointed." And she did die within eleven months. As he was going away he warned me, "You must be in the house before sunset. Do not delay! Do not delay! They can do nothing to you until I get back in the castle." As I found out afterwards, he was going to take me, but hesitated because he did not want to leave my mother alone. After these warnings I was always afraid to go to the mountains, but lately I have been told I could go, if I took a friend with me.”

In some cases people have been reported as being gone for a length of time, only to somehow find their way back, usually dazed, confused, and with no clear memory of what has happened to them. One report from The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries speaks of this and explains how something about what it calls “Fairyland” is a place in which time runs differently, and which has a way of preventing the abductee from being able to speak of it. It explains:

“Persons in a short trance-state of two or three days duration are said to be away with the fairies enjoying a festival. The festival may be very material in its nature, or it may be purely spiritual. Sometimes one may thus go to Faerie for an hour or two; or one may remain there for seven, fourteen, or twenty-one years. The mind of a person coming out of Fairyland is usually a blank as to what has been seen and done there. Another idea is that the person knows well enough all about Fairyland, but is prevented from communicating the knowledge. A certain woman of whom I knew said she had forgotten all about her experiences in Faerie, but a friend who heard her objected, and said she did remember, and wouldn't tell. A man may remain awake at night to watch one who has been to Fairyland to see if that one holds communication with the fairies. Others say in such a case that the fairies know you are on the alert, and will not be discovered.”

Similarly, we have a case that relates the bizarre ordeal of a woman who disappeared near a “Fairy Fort,” usually a mound, cairn of rocks or a boulder that draws in fairies and has great significance for them. The report reads:

“Finally, as an example of this darker aspect to fairy encounters this account from the Irish folklore archives demonstrates the upset and the confusion which many feel before they can even speak about what they believe happened to them. In this case a family happen to live close to an ancient fairy fort and one morning as a woman is using a spinning wheel she noticed a tiny person standing by the door of the house. When the woman stood up and walked to the door to investigate she was taken away by a group of small people. When the family arrived home and noticed their aunt had vanished they searched everywhere in the vicinity but found no sign of her. They searched the drains, the ditches and even the fairy fort itself. It was on the third day of her disappearance that one of the family was walking by the fort when they saw the aunt kneeling next to it. She had vanished while holding a carving knife and this was stuck in the ground next to her. The aunt could not speak for days after her return and it was only then that the family learned of her fairy abduction.”

In most cases the person is just sort of whisked away, and this often happens to the very young. Another case concerns a young woman by the name of Annie McIntire, also from Ireland. According to an account in a 1909 edition of the Preston Herald:

“Annie McIntire, a venerable county Derry woman, has a sublime faith in the fairies. When being examined at a meeting of the Limavady Pension Committee as to her age, she fixed the time of her birth as Hallowe’en in 1839 giving for her recollection of the fact the startling reason that she had been ‘stolen by the fairies’. In reply to the chairman the woman said she was as certain of her abduction by the fairies as the she was alive. After carrying off the infant, she continued, the ‘wee people’ indulged in revels and dancing, in the wood at Carrowkeel, which were fortunately overheard by her brother when returning from Carndomagh. The brother had a book [a Bible? difficult to see the fairies being frightened off by a penny dreadful], which he threw into the wood, and scattered the fairies when he lifted his baby sister in his arms and carried her back in triumph. Further questioned the witness said her mother relatives were overjoyed at her safe return and gave themselves up to feasting and merriment. This was the only incident by which witness was able to determine her age, of which no record appeared in the census of 1841 or that of 1851.”

Fairies have supposedly displayed an alarming habit of kidnapping human beings, in particular babies, and there are many such reports. One account listed on the Fairyist website details the report of a woman who in 1844 gave birth to a baby. Some time later, the infant was lying in bed with the mother and father when the mother awoke to find the baby gone. She would soon find that it had been taken by the Fairy-folk, and the report would say of the incident thus:

“Uttering an exclamation of fear, lest the fairies (or feriers) should have taken the child, she jumped out of bed, and there sure enough a number of the little sandy things had got the baby at the foot of the bed and were undressing it. They fled away through a hole in the floor, laughing as if they shrieked, and, snatching up her child, on examination she found that they had laid all the pins head to head as they took them out of the dress. For months afterwards she always slept with the child between herself and husband, and used carefully to pin it by its bed clothes to the pillow and sheets that it might not be snatched hastily away. This happened in the old house which stood where the new one now stands on the south side of the vicarage gate. A woman, as she heard tell, had a child changed, and one, a poor thing, left in his place, but she was very kind to it, and every morning on getting up she found a small piece of money in her pocket. My informant firmly believes in their existence, and wonders how it is that of late years no such things have been seen.”

Indeed babies are traditionally prime targets for fairies, and to protect their infants people would often sprinkle them with holy water or hang bars or rods of iron over their cribs, as iron was said to ward fairies off, with even adults often carrying around iron when venturing into a fairy’s territory. This was among many precautions mothers would take to protect both themselves and their babies from fairies. 20th-century fairy researcher W.Y. Evans-Wentz said of this:

“The fairies were wont to take away infants and their mothers, and many precautions were taken to safeguard them till purification and baptism took place, when the fairy power became ineffective. Placing iron about the bed, burning leather in the room, giving mother and child the milk of a cow which had eaten of the mothan, pearl-wort (Pinguicula vulgaris), a plant of virtue, and similar means were taken to ensure their safety. If the watching-women neglected these precautions, the mother or child or both were spirited away to the fairy bower."

This does not seem to always work, though, and in another account we have a case from the site Irish Central from a witness called “Grace.” She writes:

“Don’t believe in Fairy abductions? My Granny would have a sit down with you and soon set you straight. From the very day of her birth, Granny’s parents carefully lay their iron fire-poker across the basket she slept in. They were believer’s you see, in the Good People. Well, wasn’t everyone back then? But times have changed and now there are fewer who believe. Who knows, maybe the Good People like it that way. My Granny thinks so and she says she should know.

 "I’ve lived one foot in our world and the other foot in theirs” so she says. You see, when Granny was but a few months old, the Good People tried to steal her away. Without a drop of whiskey on her breath, she’ll tell you that she was asleep in her wee basket when there was a commotion out back of her parent’s cottage. They lived in County Limerick at that time, it was a farm, with mainly sheep she says, and anyway, all hell had broken loose tween sheep and dogs and Granny’s Mam and Pop upped and ran outside to see the damage. As it happened, there was nothing to see, nothing at all. It had been nothing but bluster, for the sheep and dogs were only calm and dozey. Which was strange in itself.

 Granny’s Mam was pretty canny, and she hightailed it back to the cottage to find Granny, still wrapped tight in her blanket, laying at the threshold at the front door. Fast asleep. Across the room from her basket. When she was older, Granny was told by her parents that the Good People had distracted them so they could steal her away for she was ‘touched’, having one blue eye and one green you see. Only they couldn’t get her out from the cottage on account she’d been baptized. Granny will tell you the iron bar did nothing to keep the Good People from reaching in her basket and what's more, it wasn’t true, her being baptized. It’s what her parents told anyone who asked, but in truth, she was yet to be baptized and only a day or two after the ‘visit’ as Granny calls it, her parents took her on the quiet to the Priest for to get the job done.

So we can only guess that the Good People dropped Granny to the ground when they heard her Mam approaching. I think Granny enjoys telling the story and wears it as a kind of badge actually. It is remarked by many who have known Granny that she has lived a charmed life on account of her touch by the Good People. There could be something to that, she is nearing 100 years old after all and as bright and feisty as ever before.”

There are also some traditions of fairy abductions in which the little folk were said to leave behind an entity called a "changeling," which was a fairy imposter who merely looked like the person who had been abducted to act like a placeholder and take the abductee's place. In the lore of numerous countries in Europe and beyond, a changeling was more or less a copy of a child left by usually fairies, but sometimes elves, trolls, or some other spirit, depending on the culture, to replace a human child that they abducted. The fairies would sneak into homes, spirit away the human child, and leave an imitation version, a changeling, in its place, and this would be done for several different reasons, depending on the lore of a specific region. Sometimes it was because fairies coveted human children and wanted one for themselves, and indeed some human children were said to live out the rest of their days in the fairy realm. On other occasions, it was to take a human child as a slave or servant, out of malice or revenge, or even as no more than a prank. Fairies might also take a human child if they thought they weren’t being cared for properly, or even because the changeling itself had requested to grow up in the human world, for instance, some older fairies supposedly requested to be made into changelings in order to become young again and start life anew in the human world. The children taken were almost without fail the most beautiful, which is why in some traditions, such as those of Ireland, it was seen as bad luck to look at a baby with envy or praise its beauty too much because this was thought to draw the fairies’ attention to it and make the child a target.

Although they looked indistinguishable from a human child, once a child was replaced by a changeling there were varying ways to tell if they were an imposter, again depending on the region. In many traditions, changeling children were likely to look pale and sickly, and may not grow up to be a normal size. They were often said to have long teeth, scraggly hair, or some hidden physical deformity or birth defect, such as extra toes. Changelings were said to have enormous appetites, eating far more than a normal human child of their size would, and they were also typically said to be more intelligent than a normal human child of their age. It was also said that they would demonstrate skills or abilities that their human doppelganger had not possessed, with psychic abilities often mentioned. They were often said to have an uncanny “offness” about their outward appearance, which was hard to put one’s finger on but would be unsettling to all who looked at them. Other traditions speak of the changeling becoming uglier with age. For instance, in Wales, it was believed that the changeling would start out beautiful, but become ever more hideous as it grew up. People around the changeling child might also suffer physical effects, such as being unable to move their limbs, which is called being 'fairy-struck.' Changeling children were also commonly described as acting very oddly, as well as never smiling or laughing when people were watching, although they would do so when they thought they were alone, and many times changelings were mute or spoke very little. The English poet and topographer George Waldron, who lived in the Isle of Man during the early 18th century, would claim to have seen a changeling child, and described it as follows:

“Nothing under heaven could have a more beautiful face; but though between five and six years old, and seemingly healthy, he was so far from being able to walk, or stand, that he could not so much as move any one joint; his limbs were vastly long for his age, but smaller than an infant's of six months; his complexion was perfectly delicate, and he had the finest hair in the world; he never spoke, nor cried, ate scarcely anything, and was very seldom seen to smile, but if any one called him a fairy-elf, he would frown and fix his eyes so earnestly on those who said it, as if he would look them through. His mother, or at least his supposed mother, being very poor, frequently went out a-charing, and left him a whole day together. The neighbours, out of curiosity, have often looked in at the window to see how he behaved when alone, which, whenever they did, they were sure to find him laughing and in the utmost delight. This made them judge that he was not without company more pleasing to him than any mortal's could be; and what made this conjecture seem the more reasonable was, that if he were left ever so dirty, the woman at her return saw him with a clean face, and his hair combed with the utmost exactness and nicety.”

For a long time, changelings were seen as a very real threat, with many families constantly on guard against their child being abducted and replaced by these doppelgangers, and as with many other supernatural creatures, there were various methods to keep the changelings away. A common theme in many regions was the use of iron, thought to have a powerful repelling effect against the creatures, with iron objects such as knives and scissors left around the child’s cot to keep them at bay. Other ways included constantly watching the child, laying the father’s clothes on the bed, keeping a fire constantly lit in the room, baptizing the child, and other strange customs such as placing urine around the bed. Most traditions also feature various charms, amulets, herbs, or salves that could be used to keep changelings away as well, but despite all of these precautions, there was never any certain guarantee that a child wouldn’t be taken and replaced by the fairies.

In almost every tradition of changelings, they were not seen as a desirable or benevolent presence, mischievous at best and portents of misfortune, death, and ruin at worst. For this reason, if a changeling was spotted in a family, besides the parents just wanting their child back, it was in their best interest to get rid of it before problems came their way, and there were various traditions for how to do this. In many countries, it was thought that torturing a changeling until it laughed would do the trick, causing it to leave and bring the human child back. In Ireland, it was thought that throwing the changeling into a fireplace would cause it to jump up the chimney and return the human child. Indeed, many countries had the tradition of using fire or otherwise heating the changeling, such as in an oven in order to banish it. They could also be beaten and mistreated to force them to admit their true nature. In other traditions, it was enough to simply trick the changeling into speaking or laughing by any means necessary, and there were certain rituals that could be carried out as well. If a family was lucky, the changeling would just get bored and go away on its own, although there were no guarantees that the human child it had replaced would ever be returned.

Yet, even with all of these deterrents and weapons against the changeling threat, many families felt compelled to care for it simply because they were afraid that something bad would happen to their real child if they did not. On occasion, this could lead to the thankful changeling giving back the human child as a reward for their kindness, but usually, the changeling would remain. In some cases, the changeling would be raised as the family’s child through to adulthood, with the changeling sometimes even forgetting what they really were and believing themselves to be human. In this case, the human child that they had replaced would live with the fairies forever, and would sometimes themselves forget that they had ever been human at all. There are many historical tales of changelings that grew up in human society. King Charles I of England (1600 - 1649) was reportedly rumored to have been a changeling, and there is also the tale of a woman named Bridget Cleary, who was murdered by her husband in 1895 when he suspected her of being a changeling.

In this particular case from March of 1895, a young woman by the name of Bridget Cleary disappeared in Ireland, and after an extensive search for the woman her body was finally found not far from her home. Police would finger her husband Michael Cleary, her father Patrick Boland, her aunt Mary Kennedy, her cousins Patrick, William, James and Michael Kennedy, and John Dunne as the killers, but under questioning they would weave a very strange tale indeed. According to them, the real Bridgette had in fact been abducted by fairies, who had then left behind a changeling in her place, a fact they uncovered when the creature became very ill for no reason. They then tied up the changeling and tortured it to find out where the real Bridgette had been taken to, but it died from its injuries. According to them, the police had found the changeling’s body and not that of the real Bridgette. It was a colorful story, but the police weren’t buying it and they were charged with murder.

The stories of changelings reverberate throughout the lore of many European countries, including the United Kingdom, Scandinavia, Poland, Spain, and others, and similar tales stretch out to Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. Why is it that such similar stories have managed to worm their way into these far-flung lands? One of the main theories in modern times is that this was a way of explaining and dealing with infants born with birth defects, or deformed, developmentally disabled, or neurodivergent children, as well as those with autism. In an age when there was little to medically or scientifically explain such things, this could have perhaps been a way to rationalize such children. The parents would see these defects and convince themselves that this couldn’t possibly be their child, but rather an imposter left by supernatural forces. It is horrifying in a sense, as such folklore and beliefs likely led to countless instances of innocent children being mistreated, tortured, abandoned, or even killed. We may never truly know how such stories evolved, or why they remain so eerily similar across geographical and cultural divides, but they certainly play into every parent's fears that something might happen to their child, and remain a curious area of strange lore with deep roots in mystery.

Here we have looked at just a small selection of the many accounts through the ages of fairies with decidedly dark agendas. Is there any truth to the tales or are they strictly mythical constructs confined to spooky lore and legend? Whatever the case may be, it all adds extra layers to the phenomenon of fairies and shows that they are not always of the kind and benevolent type.