This is my article from a new publication The Cottingley Fairy Photographs: New Approaches to Fairies, Fakes and Folklore, edited by Dr Simon Young. This volume contains fifteen essays by faerie researchers and is accompanied by a separate volume The Cottingley Fairies: A Source Book compiled by Simon. My article below does take some familiarity ..read more

A version of this article appeared previously on Ancient Origins. While slightly peripheral to the faerie phenomenon, it does seem that the study of prehistoric rock art may provide some evidence that our ancient ancestors were interacting with faerie-type entities, and were doing so by altering their states of consciousness. Throughout the world, prehistoric and ..read more

This article is from Fairy Films: Wee Folk on the Big Screen, edited by Joshua Cutchin (published in 2023). The book contains a wide range of discussions on filmic representations of the faeries by some acclaimed authors. Thanks to Joshua and the publisher for permission to republish my piece here. Handmaidens of the Eternal: Consciousness and Death in Photographing Fairies Neil Rushton Introduction 
 “We humans are not alone. We share our planet with a quite different order of life. Fairies. They are spoken of in every culture of the world from New Zealand to the New Hebrides. Handmaidens of ..read more

I recently experienced a disembodied voice phenomenon, which correlated closely to a previous experience in 1994. Whether or not either of these incidents should be described within the remit of faerie encounters may be questionable, but I thought them interesting enough to recount here. There are a few similar occurrences in traditional folklore and modern encounters, which may be considered as faerie motifs, but I have been unable to find anything that fits as a close equivalent. This post is therefore as much a request for readers to respond with similar experiences (their own or from the l ..read more

The following article appeared in the most recent special edition of the Psychedelic Press journal, entitled ‘Folklore and Psychedelics’, edited by Jack Hunter and Peter Sjöstedt Hughes. Thanks to the Psychedelic Press for allowing me to republish it here in full. Faerie-type Entities and and the DMT Experience: An Ontological Survey Neil Rushton The recent study carried out by the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine surveyed 2561 people to record their experiences of contacting entities while using N,N-dimethyltryptamine (DMT).1 The study used a filtered dataset of people to categorise many aspe ..read more

The Faeries and Prehistoric Sites in Folklore and Modern Testimonies There is a deep connection between the faeries and prehistoric sites throughout Britain, Ireland and Western Europe. This connection is recorded in the folkloric record and in modern testimonies, suggesting a metaphysical linkage that may provide a deeper understanding of the faerie phenomenon. The oldest recorded story of human interaction with the faeries at a prehistoric site comes from the 12th-century chronicler William of Newburgh. In his Historia rerum Anglicarum, William chronicles the historical timeline of events du ..read more

Deadbutdreaming is delighted to welcome back David Halpin as a guest author. David is an Irish folklorist and author, who writes extensively about the faerie phenomenon from a Fortean perspective, and has produced a large corpus of work, much of which can be found on his excellent Facebook blog Circle Stories. The following triumvirate of articles originally appeared there, and are an investigation in to ‘the Otherworld around us’, looking at how the faeries interact with humanity via the landscape, the air, and through consciousness. Thanks to David for giving permission to republish these in ..read more

Deadbutdreaming is delighted to welcome guest author Mave Calvert. Mave is an experienced dowser and in this article she turns her attention to the perpetually mysterious case of the Wollaton gnomes. It is an incident that has been covered here in several previous posts, including Faeries, Children and Altered States of Consciousness and Revisiting the Wollaton Gnomes by Dan Green. And in 2022 Simon Young published The Wollaton Gnomes: A Nottingham Fairy Mystery, which includes all the known source material, as well as several articles from researchers. In the following essay Mave takes a dows ..read more

Ecology of Souls: A New Mythology of Death and the Paranormal (2 vols) by Joshua Cutchin (Horse and Barrell Press, 2022). ISBN 978-1-7339808-5-2 & 978-1-7339808-6-9. Ecology of Souls is a monumental work. Joshua Cutchin has pulled together many strands of traditional and modern folklore, UFOlogy and philosophy to produce a book that digs deep into the mythology of paranormal activity, while always linking it to the common thread of our most pressing concern: death. It is expansive, ranging over nearly 1500 pages in two volumes, with a separate volume of source references, which guide the r ..read more

Deadbutdreaming usually attempts to interpret the faerie phenomenon from as much of an objective viewpoint as possible. The complexity of the subject matter demands an uninvolved assessment if any sense is to be made of it. But as pointed out in a previous post, the entire substance of both historic faerie folklore and modern faerie experiences is made up of subjective anecdotal testimonies; and the plural of anecdote is data. This data allows analyses. The following article is a personal testimony of my own experiences – a series of data points reliant on my own subjective memory and percepti ..read more