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 literature) as it is a description of my own encounters.
Glastonbury Tor, October 2023
I recently attended the Faery Fayre at Glastonbury, which is organised by Karen Kay. Along with my colleagues, Kate Ray and Jo Hickey-Hall, I was giving a presentation on the Saturday about the famous Wollaton Gnomes incident. In the evening, they both attended the Faerie Ball at the Town Hall, and I decided to walk up Glastonbury Tor. It was a clear night at about 10 o’clock, and on my way up the path (from the town side), as well as when I reached the top, there were no other people. For those who know the Tor, this is very unusual, especially on a Saturday night. I have been on the Tor hundreds of times, day and night, and I have never been totally alone there. This was preying on my mind somewhat as I sat down by the SW-facing elevation of St Michael’s Tower, but I decided to relax into the luxury of having the place to myself. After about twenty minutes the solitude was broken by voices, which appeared to be on the other side of the tower. I thought there were three (adult) people, two male and a female, but my main thought was that my isolation was over and that I had best make my way around the other side of the tower, so as not to shock them when they found me lurking on the Tor. The voices continued. They were in no language I recognised and appeared to be talking quickly. I gave it about thirty seconds then got up and walked around the tower. The voices abruptly ceased completely and there was nobody on the Tor. I circumnavigated the whole of the top (c.50ft x 30ft) and investigated the two pathways – there was nobody on the Tor. I walked around on the Tor for another ten minutes, then made my way down the NE path, encountering no other people until I made it down to the edge of the town.
The incident was not frightening or creepy, as it could have been, but it left me in puzzlement as to what could have happened. I immediately went through all the most rational explanations, such as the voices travelling on the breeze from the bottom of the Tor, or some people hanging out below the top, on the terraces that form a labyrinth around the natural hill. Nothing seemed to explain the exact circumstances of the experience, which had definitely involved voices in an unknown language passing close by me but unseen, without any evidence of actual people being present. It was only hours later as I continued to ponder the incident that I remembered I had had a remarkably similar experience almost thirty years previous.
Langdon Hill, Dorset, April 1994
Langdon Hill is located just to the north of the Dorset coastal path, near to the famous landmark of Golden Cap, about five miles west of Bridport. It is a wooded hill, and for that reason I chose it to wild camp during a three-day backpacking trip through the hinterlands of Dorset in 1994. I chose an obscure spot in the woods well away from the path, set my tent up at dusk, cooked, ate and read, before settling down for the night. I’m a light sleeper when in a tent, and always wake up at regular intervals. After waking up several times I checked the time, which showed it was 3am. Shortly after I heard the voices of what I thought were two women. These voices continued as they came closer to the (unlit) tent and passed by it at close vicinity. They continued to chatter, did not seem to slow down as they passed, and continued away to the SW until I could no longer hear them. When the voices had completely disappeared, I extracted myself from my sleeping bag, got out of the tent and wandered about, but there was only silence. As with the Glastonbury experience I could not make out the language they were speaking, and neither was I particularly perturbed by the experience. I was definitely awake and did not fall back asleep before the dawn, when I packed up my tent and moved on.
This incident at Langdon Hill was a long time ago, but I was able to consult the journal I kept of all my backpacking trips at this time to confirm the details. And anyway, the experience is one of those that hardwires itself into memory in a visceral manner. What were the chances of two women being in the woods (well away from the path) at 3am, walking quickly past my tent without apparently noticing it, and speaking an obscure language? It was only years later that I read Louise Hodgson’s Secret Places of West Dorset, where she suggests a coven operates within the woods, and has done so for at least two centuries. She also mentions the folk tradition of the hill being a place to ‘whistle up the faeries’ – where a whistling sound will be repeated back. This does not explain my experience there, but it does give some folkloric layers to a place I had spent the night without any knowledge of the potential specialness of the location. While different from the recent incident on Glastonbury Tor (for which the specialness of the location is a given), the intrinsic components are the same – I was alone, it was night, disembodied voices passed close to me for a short time, they were talking in a language I did not recognise, and I could not account for them being there.
Faerie Voices?
Whatever phenomenon I experienced on these two occasions, it might be a stretch to suggest they were (audial) faerie encounters. Fortean audio experiences are most often associated with ghosts, sometimes recorded in the form of Electronic Voice Phenomena (EVPs), but as the boundaries between various parapsychological experiences blur, it may not be unreasonable to allow them to be classified as a faerie-type encounter. The folklore does not yield much in the way of audial-only experiences or testimonies related to faeries, apart from the hearing of faerie music/singing (Stith Thompson Motif Index F262), which is relatively common. There are several accounts of disembodied faerie voices in the new Fairy Investigation Society Census (2017-23), compiled by Simon Young, but they are of a different narrative quality to my own experiences described above. And Claire Casely has recorded several incidents of disembodied voices that may relate to faerie activity at Emsworthy Barn in Devon in her podcast series The Faery Whisperer. But I have not found direct correlates to my two encounters in traditional or modern folkloric records.
Of course, coming from a Fortean or esoteric perspective allows a variety of interpretations as to the possible cause and source of such a phenomenon. A materialist/reductionist overview, however, will simply label the experience as an audial hallucination, likely related to increased hippocampal activity in the brain. While such interpretations based on fMRI studies of brain activity are interesting, and may indeed explain some types of disembodied audio phenomena, they are locked within an Overton Window of materialism, where voices of unseen beings simply cannot exist, and must therefore be epiphenomena of the brain. The word hallucination has become a reductionist get-out clause to explain any visual or audial phenomenon that does not fit within the parameters of mainstream understanding of physical reality. But direct experience of this type of phenomenon will often bypass the rationalistic explanations, because there is simply a more elemental component to the encounter that is clearly not being generated by some malfunction in the brain. There is a gnosticism in these types of experiences that transcends normative, materialist explanations, even if the end interpretation remains indeterminate, subjective and unresolved. This does not mean my experiences were necessarily faerie encounters, but they were paranormal in the true sense of the word, and were, at the very least, intriguing and mysterious.
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I would very much like to hear from anyone who has had a similar experience to those described in this article. Please leave a comment below, or if you would rather send me a private message, my email is on the landing page.
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