Fairies of New England: The Little People of the Hills and Forests

As with most issues of faith, people’s belief in fairies tends to be passed down generationally. For centuries, people in Ireland and Great Britain passed the “fairy faith” from one generation to the next, usually via the medium of stories and sayings.

Sometimes these sayings had a literal meaning, people claiming to have seen or heard the fairies in person. Other times, the sayings became idioms, not meant to imply the existence of fairies but suggesting some other meaning: for instance, the saying away with the fairies may refer to fairies, but it usually means someone’s a bit crazy or odd. Another example is the word banshee, which, according to the historian Chris Woodyard, was eventually stripped of its supernatural significance in Irish speech and became merely a sign denoting death.

Whatever people’s level of belief or non-belief, sayings and stories about fairies remain relevant and current only to the extent that members of one generation—say, a grandmother or a grandfather—are willing to share the stories with their descendants—for example, their grandchildren.

New England is no different to Ireland or Great Britain in that stories about fairies have been passed down generationally. While researching my book New England Fairies, I came across multiple examples of fairy beliefs being passed from grandmothers to grandchildren and from mothers to daughters.

Fairy beliefs in the New England states

Sometimes—for example, in early twentieth-century Connecticut—we see an immigrant coming to New England and sharing her belief in fairies with her grandchildren (in this case, indirectly, via a granddaughter reading her grandmother’s diary, in which she documented her observations of fairies). The granddaughter then shared this belief with her own daughter, who came to believe in fairies too (The Fairy Census 2014–17). As a result, we see four generations of New Englanders cultivating a belief in fairies.

The Irish, as one might expect, originated much of New England’s intergenerational fairy belief. During my research, I stumbled upon an Irish American family, established in Boston in the nineteenth century, passing down a belief in banshees from one generation to the next all the way down to the 1960s. Another Irish American family in Rhode Island passed down the spiritual gift of being able to see (or sense) fairies through multiple generations, beginning with the matriarch of the family in the 1850s and continuing into the present day. Some people call this a gift of the Irish.

British immigrants to New England have also contributed their fair share of intergenerational fairy beliefs. In New Hampshire, I found evidence of a woman (Mary Locke Woodman) who believed in fairies in the 1830s and who taught this belief to her children and, later, her grandchildren. Whether the belief died out with the grandchildren or whether they passed it on to their children too, only the family can say.

In Maine, too, I found records of a whole community of French Canadian Americans believing in fairies and other supernatural beings in the early twentieth century, all of whom must have learned their beliefs generationally.

Native American fairy beliefs

The Native American peoples, of course, passed down beliefs in supernatural beings for centuries. One example can be seen in the stories of the Mohegan tribal elder, Fidelia Fielding, who not only described her grandmother’s grandmother’s encounters with Little People but also passed down stories about these Little People to her nieces (who later passed the stories on to their nieces and daughters).

In his book Where the Lightning Strikes, Peter Nabokov also attests to intergenerational belief in Little People on Indian Island, home of the Penobscot Nation in Maine.

Do women believe in fairies more readily?

Based on the evidence, it seems to me that the fairy faith in New England is somewhat more common among women than men. This is not to say I’ve found no evidence of men receiving belief in fairies from their male and female ancestors, because I have. Perhaps the predominance of women in New England’s fairy folklore is simply because women in our culture have historically been more likely to care for children, giving them more opportunity to pass down stories to the next generation. I’m curious to know what your thoughts might be as to why women seem to believe in fairies more readily.

Read about more New England fairies in my book New England Fairies: A History of the Little People of the Hills and Forests.

“An Old Man Talks to Fairies” by Midjourney