Interview: Dr Simon Young
Talking with British historian and folklorist Dr. Simon Young on the enduring presence of supernatural experiences in human life, with a focus on his folk lore project, the Fairy Census—a vast collection of contemporary fairy encounter accounts.
We explore the shifting nature of fairy lore across time, the interplay between cultural perception and the supernatural, and the deeper psychological and sociological dimensions of these experiences.
Young shares insights from his research, addressing theories of altered states, memory, and the collective unconscious while tackling criticisms of his work and methods. He discusses the history and revival of the Fairy Investigation Society, its eccentric origins in the early 20th century, and its modern role in documenting encounters that defy conventional understanding.
The conversation extends to the broader role of folklore in human consciousness, the evolution of belief systems, and its relevance to human society.
From fairies to the mechanisms of belief, from historical patterns to personal narratives, Dr Young provides a fascinating lens to understand myth and reality, exploring why stories of the otherworld persist—and what they reveal about us.
Dr. Young is a Cambridge-educated historian based at the International Studies Institute in Florence.
Excerpts:
“In terms of human evolution, there seems to be a certain number of people who have very frequent supernatural experiences. Suppose that somewhere deep inside me, I have a conviction that the supernatural matters, that it's not an embarrassing part of Paleolithic society that sometimes somehow made it through to the present. It is something that to some extent to have healthy lives…
What I mean by that is that supernatural experiences, I think, are just part of human programming and increasingly in a rational age, we've started to edit this out leave it to one side. It's become an embarrassment on many levels. I think the experience that people have has a real importance in their lives, and I think it also has real importance in our species…
Individuals and society more generally have to be able to absorb and particularly in an age when religion is being rejected and ridiculed these more personal versions of spirituality I think become incredibly important…
And I think it's useful to look and ask ourselves, well, what is this really for? What does it do?
Timestamps
- 02:23 - Exploring Fairy Lore and the Fairy Census
Dr. Young describes his background in medieval history and his transition into folklore studies, particularly his fascination with fairy lore and the creation of the Fairy Census. - 04:32 - Transition from Medieval History to Folklore
He explains how a serious illness in his 30s led him to reevaluate his academic focus, eventually leading him to folklore and supernatural studies. - 05:48 - Understanding Fairies Through Time
Dr. Young discusses how the concept of fairies has evolved over centuries, influenced by cultural shifts, religious ideas, and artistic depictions. - 13:37 - Contemporary Views on Fairies
Dr. Young highlights modern perceptions of fairies, including the influence of Theosophy, Disney, and neo-pagan traditions in shaping current beliefs. - 20:57 - The Influence of Walter Evans Wentz
He introduces Evans Wentz, an American folklorist who documented fairy encounters across Celtic regions but controversially attempted to prove their existence. - 30:23 - The Role of Supernatural Experiences in Human Evolution
Dr. Young theorizes that supernatural experiences may have been an essential part of early human societies, with a small percentage of the population naturally predisposed to such encounters. - 35:36 - The Fairy Census: Goals and Methodology
He explains the structure and purpose of the Fairy Census, aiming to collect 2,000 detailed accounts to analyze patterns in supernatural experiences. - 40:08 - Challenges and Criticisms of the Fairy Census
Dr. Young acknowledges the self-selecting nature of his survey participants and discusses how this affects the objectivity and scientific validity of his data. - 48:01 - Memorable Accounts from the Fairy Census
He shares standout stories from the Census, including a man who repeatedly submits his childhood fairy encounter, demonstrating how deeply these experiences remain ingrained in memory. - 55:42 - The Role of Supernatural Experiences in Modern Life
Dr. Young reflects on the growing rejection of institutional religion and how personal supernatural encounters might fulfill a psychological or spiritual need in contemporary society. - 01:02:48 - Boggarts and Other Folkloric Research
He delves into his research on Boggarts, a distinct type of supernatural entity in northern English folklore, separate from traditional fairies. - 01:04:25 - Final Thoughts and Future Direction
Dr. Young expresses his belief that supernatural experiences are a meaningful part of human culture and invites listeners to contribute their own encounters to the Fairy Census.
Links
Dr Simon Academia Site / Fairy Census Submission
Note: Illustration above from Oberon, Titania and Puck with Fairies Dancing circa 1786 William Blake 1757-1827 Presented by Alfred A. de Pass in memory of his wife Ethel 1910 Source
Interview Introduction
(I recommend listening to the conversation as the medium is the message - but for those visual learners here is a transcript. Please note: Apologies in advance for minor transcription errors and inaccuracies.)
Dr. Simon Young: In terms of human evolution, there seems to be a certain number of people who have very frequent supernatural experiences. Suppose that somewhere deep inside me, I have a conviction that the supernatural matters, that it's not an embarrassing part of paleolithic society that sometimes somehow made it through to the present. It is something that to some extent to have healthy lives
What I mean by that is that supernatural experiences, I think, are just part of human programming and increasingly in a rational age, we've started to edit this out leave it to one side. It's become an embarrassment on many levels. I think the experience that people have has a real importance in their lives, and I think it also has real importance in our species.
individuals and society more generally have to be able to absorb and particularly in an age when religion is being rejected and ridiculed these more personal versions of spirituality I think become incredibly important.
And I think it's useful to look and ask ourselves, well, what is this really for? What does it do?
Leafbox: Thank you Simon for agreeing to do this. Well, I have my own personal reasons for interest in your project, but then I didn't realize this scope of your just the entirety of your project.
So I was telling a friend last night that I was going to interview you and she's like, oh, you know, that sounds ridiculous. But then immediately she started divulging her own experiences with encounters. And she's from Argentina and she was telling me all about the South of Argentina and all these experiences and encounters.
And I was like, see, this is a fascinating topic we're going to get into. So Simon, I I'm beating around the bush, but for my listeners, why don't you tell us a little bit about your background, where you are? And I guess you're in folkloric studies or what your main focus is in right now.
Exploring Fairy Lore and the Fairy Census
Dr. Simon Young: Okay, so yeah, I come from a background in history, in fact in medieval history.
But perhaps in the last 15 years, I've slowly shuffled away from that, and I've become more and more interested in folklore generally. And I've always right through from my adolescence had a particular interest in fairy lore. And so I do a lot of writing around folklore generally, particularly British and Irish fairy lore.
But I also have a kind of a side project and this is what you're referring to. It's the Fairy Census. And the Fairy Census isn't really history at all though perhaps it has a historical application, but it's an attempt to get as many records from people living today of fairy experiences that they've had.
Leafbox: So Simon, one of the things that's so interesting about, you know, people might be hearing the word fairy and Faye and they might be a little bit shocked. On another podcast, you said, when you go to parties, you either have people jumping in to tell their stories just like my friend, or they jump away.
What, what's your day to day experience with this topic and how does it fit? I think you use a term encounters. I was telling my partner about it and you know, immediately she started telling me about her own experiences in Polynesia in other supernatural elements. So just curious about your day to day life with this topic and how that, how you approach it.
Dr. Simon Young: Well, I suppose that to some extent I'm in the closet as far as fairies go, in that when people ask me at a faculty meeting or students ask me about my studies, I usually keep it quite vague and I say, oh, no, I write on ghosts, witchcraft, and then maybe sotto voce, I say fairies and I certainly don't normally get into the question of encounters, not least because honestly, 10, 15 years on, I'm still pretty confused myself as to what's going on there.
Leafbox: What was your transition moment? You said that you had some interest in this topic when you were a teenager, but what shifted your focus from medieval history to folklore?
Transition from Medieval History to Folklore
Dr. Simon Young: Okay, so I'm now 51, and it really started happening 30s, and basically I became very, very ill. And I had two or three hairy years.
And then after that, honestly, I had a couple of confused years. And when all that was at the end, I was coming out of the tunnel, a wonderful feeling, I just realized that I didn't want to study the middle ages anymore, or at least I didn't want to study them in the way I'd been doing. But I also had learnt in that time that I needed to study something that for me doing research writing was really important.
And so I messed around a bit, I looked at different topics and in the end I landed on this one and it was, it was a really happy choice.
Leafbox: And what was it specifically? Was it an encounter story or what specifically drew you to this topic?
Dr. Simon Young: Okay, so I have no really good answer to that. What I would say is I grew up in the countryside.
I live in the countryside now. I live in Italy. And I think that I've always had a very intense relationship with the landscape around me.
Understanding Fairies Through Time
Dr. Simon Young: And so maybe for that reason, there's something about fairy lore, it's almost like a dialogue with the landscape in some ways, that human, human beings have had these encounters.
And they talk about having fairy encounters, but to some extent it's, it's them having encounters with the world around them. And perhaps I found that really interesting, perhaps on some levels I related to that.
Leafbox: One of the things that's so interesting about your perspective is that you seem so agnostic and you have a very anthropological, ethnographic neutrality.
Could you talk about that and how you apply that to your research and your work?
Dr. Simon Young: I'm not sure if this is an advantage or a disadvantage. You've put it in very polite terms, but I really am agnostic. I really, really don't know what I think about this i, I suppose it's good when you study something to have an open mind, but maybe my mind is a little bit too open sometimes.
At the same time, I find bold scepticism to be quite boorish, and obviously when I speak to people about their experiences, I respect what they're telling me. And maybe to some extent in this part of my research, the research around encounters, the ability to stay sitting on the fence is actually quite useful.
Leafbox: The word you used there was interesting, respect. Maybe you can tell me about that concept in terms of your ethnographic approach. You seem to respect the storyteller of the encounter.
Dr. Simon Young: Yeah. So if I meet someone or if someone writes to me with a fairy experience, I clearly take the experience seriously and I have a phrase that I used to share with fellow researchers in this area that I would say, I don't know if I believe in fairies, but I believe that people see fairies and I think that probably gets to the essence of it. I think the experience that people have has a real importance in their lives, and I think it also has real importance in our species.
What I mean by that is that supernatural experiences, I think, are just part of human programming and increasingly in a rational age, we've started to edit this out leave it to one side. It's become an embarrassment on many levels. And I think it's useful to look and ask ourselves, well, what is this really for? What does it do?
Categorization and Analysis of Fairy Encounters
Leafbox: Before we tell us what, maybe we can go into some of the analysis. I'm curious about your categorization projects, the Fairy Census, and how that fits into just how people approach the supernatural and this type of work.
Dr. Simon Young: Yeah, I think that this is something that honestly has been a bit of a monkey on my shoulder over the years.
When I started off, I was perhaps a little bit innocent about categorization, and particularly with the Fairy Census. What I'm saying to people is, listen, if you've had or you think you might have had a fairy experience, I want to hear about it. But of course, that opens the door to people deciding whether their experience involved fairies or not.
And here, let's just step outside the question of belief or otherwise. But there's a whole series of different types of supernatural experiences. And so one of the things I've begun to find quite fascinating Is the way that that experience I just had wasn't an alien experience. It wasn't a ghost experience.
It wasn't a Sasquatch experience. It was a fairy experience. And so I'm, I'm really intrigued by the way people make their own choices in this respect. And personally, my suspicion is a lot of these supernatural experiences, however we explain them, whether we're hardcore sceptics or opened arm believers, my instinct would be that actually all these experiences have the same root.
Leafbox: Yeah, that's why I prefer the term you use, encounter, because whether it's a UFO, a fairy, a Sasquatch, that seems less believable to me even. I guess that's my own bias, but there's something rooted in that. It's very fascinating. So in terms of categorization, What are fairies? And I became interested in them because my daughter, she goes to Waldorf school and Steiner, and they have a very strong spiritual bent and metaphysical bent.
So she started talking about fairies all the time and playing with them and, and we're in Polynesia and Hawaii, and it just seems sort of, you know, I was associated with Ireland and England, so it seems quite foreign, so maybe my two questions are, what are fairies, and then what's, how important is the cultural lens in manifesting the paranormal?
Dr. Simon Young: So I've just talked in a way about the horizontal categorization, but we can also look at the vertical axis, in other words, through time, and this is another aspect of categorization that I find really disturbing. But disturbing in a stimulating way, of course. The issue is that fairies have changed through time.
What we think of fairies as being have changed. And so if you look at an account from 1500 and compare it to someone in the same country in 2000, the two accounts would just be dramatically, dramatically different. And as far as the tradition of, I think you said your daughter is at a Steinerian school? And so particularly there, you have a fascinating influence, which is theosophy. Theosophy is a creed that really begins at the end of the 19th century that gives a big place to fairies. And that, to my mind anyway, is the most important influence in the evolution of fairies in the 20th century, with perhaps Walt Disney being a distant second.
And one of the things that Steinerians do is they re, I say Steinerians, let's be more generic, Theosophists do, is that they rechristened What we call, what used to be called fairies as elementals, and this means that elementals, these creatures are not just beings that live out in the landscape that have shadow lives or mirror lives to our own.
They're actually the building blocks of nature. And so, Steinerians and Theosophists earlier have this notion that for instance for a flower to be produced there needs to be a plant fairy. So these elementals are part of the building bricks of life. Now again if you go back in time that's a little bit different from the way we were told fairies were in the middle ages.
And so one of the strange things about studying this subject is just this sense that the earth is constantly moving under you, and that the term fairy really just means so many things to different people. And for that reason, when you actually sit down and write about fairies, it's quite useful to be anchored in a place and a way of thinking and define what is meant by fairy before you get going.
But then when you step back and when I look at what I've over the last 15 years on fairies. There are just lots and lots of different versions of the supernatural.
Contemporary Views on Fairies
Leafbox: What is the most contemporary, mainstream image of the fairies? Is it the Tinkerbell, Disney, Twinkie, Pixie model? Or what's the contemporary, is it a dark fairy?
Or what is the general, most mainstream fairy?
Dr. Simon Young: Yeah, I mean perhaps one way to think of it is, I said that in different periods there are different views of fairies, but actually not only are the different views in different periods, there are different strands looking at fairies. And this is true of the modern age as well.
I would personally say that again the Theosophist Fairy has been absolutely fundamental because it contributed in a really strong way this idea that fairies are nature spirits, that they're elementals and you get this already in some of the early Disney films but then it becomes very very strong in contemporary fairy culture.
And for instance, I'm sure your daughter will have seen quite delightful films in some ways, but the Tinkerbell films where Tinkerbell is given a central role. She leaves poor old Peter Pan behind, finds herself in Pixie Hollow. And what do the fairies do there? Well, they go around and they look after nature.
They're theosophic fairies. And. What I find fascinating is that I'm sure that the people creating these scripts and drawing these stories have never even heard of the Theosophists. It's just the beautiful idea of how in intellectual history, ideas get lodged in culture, and it takes some pulling to move them.
Now there is another strand in contemporary fairy lore. And that's what I think of as the neo pagan fairy. And these are a series of people who have taken up alternative forms of religion, particularly in the last, say, 40 years. Sometimes we've termed this new age. And these people have a prehaps almost the steampunk version of Fairy in the sense that they claim to go back to the traditional version of Fairies but actually their version of Fairies is also a rather different take on the traditional take of 200 or 300 years ago, say
Leafbox: Do you know what the term creepypasta is?
Dr. Simon Young: I, I've heard the term, but I can't remember. Is this what you get on the internet where there are various suggestions to fill in? Is this the idea?
Leafbox: No, creepypasta is a term for supernatural beings on the internet. One of the most famous is the Slender Man. He's this mysterious, and usually girls or, you know, young boys, 13, 14, there's accounts of them seeing these people on videos and having encounters with this man called the Slender Man.
Terrifying accounts. And I was just curious, how do you think these Encounters manifest, whether or not they're real or not is irrelevant, but how do they manifest? What is, is there a bidirectionality, like the theophicists are pushing down towards culture, or is it individual cases that spread up through virality? What is your take?
Dr. Simon Young: Okay, well, this is the million dollar question and you say whether it's true or not is beside the point and up to an extent I agree with that, but I suppose in the end we also have to start answering that question, or at least setting the parameters for it. So there are various possibilities.
I would say this, though, that whatever option you take, then social Social views of the supernatural, be it Slenderman or other figures, are really, really important. And I'll take an example of fairies, but you could also extend this to ghosts. You could bring Slenderman in. With fairies, fairies do not have wings.
If you go back into our earlier records, fairy wings only start to appear in art at the end of the 1700s. They slowly emerge into writing in the 1800s, and then they appear in experiences in quite big numbers in the 1900s. There are three ways, I think, crudely speaking, that you can explain that. The first thing you can say is that, well, clearly, fairies are just a figment of our imagination, and the proof of that is that culture there has changed what fairies look like.
The second possibility would be that well, no, that's not necessarily the case. These are supernatural beings, but we're seeing them through our filters. Maybe there's something that's just impossible for us to process on our own. And so we're, we're putting decoration around them in the same way we constantly edit our memories.
The third possibility is that Fairies are absolutely supernatural creatures, but we expect to see them with wings, and so they do us that courtesy. Here they are, bang in front of us with wings. I personally I think it's worthwhile setting out the possibilities. I'm pessimistic about any kind of resolution.
But what I think is interesting is that whatever of those three options you go for, then your social view of the supernatural is changing what we are seeing. We have to acknowledge that. So I'm a historian, I dislike sociology, but there is a sociological element to this. And I think there's, there's just no getting away from that.
And again, this isn't just fairies. This is a model that we could apply right across the supernatural.
Leafbox: Well, I would argue that you could apply it to any meme. Or any thought, right? If you have a conspiracy like QAnon, for instance, that arises from somewhere and then spreads through culture or any general idea, hyperstition, there's this feeling that, you know, moves across society for a variety of reasons, just like the fairy or the UFO concept to me.
I don't know if you disagree with that or agree.
Dr. Simon Young: I agree with it up to a point. I suppose, for me, the important word you said there is idea. The special thing about the supernatural is the supernatural is not like bird life. It's not something that we see all around us. Very few people have these experiences regularly and a larger but not impossibly small number have them occasionally or once in a lifetime.
And so, I mean, there are whole forms of what to use the word from before an encounter where we have encounters with physical things and yet we don't seem to put these kind of filters on or at least it's a very vague filter whereas if you're talking about ideas and absolutely you could extend this to conspiracy theories then yes, I would agree that they're they are much more pliable Let's say to these social cultural influences
Leafbox: Going back to your categorization in another podcast, I think you mentioned one was a secretary, another was an American folklore, I forget the name, Evans was it, or?
The Influence of Walter Evans Wentz
Dr. Simon Young: Evans Wentz, possibly.
Leafbox: , I was curious about, I haven't read his book, but he seemed to be an early folklorist categorizing fairy encounters. And you said that the later half of his book is analysis. I'm curious what his analysis was, or you don't seem to engulge in analysis. You're more into the categorization.
Dr. Simon Young: Okay. Well, first of all, let me introduce the American because you, many of your listeners might find this guy interesting. This is Walter Evans Wentz. Evans Wentz was this, can we say eccentric American who in his twenties made a certain amount of money and decided to spend this money coming to Europe and studying fairies.
Now, Evans Wentz actually had strong links to Theosophy. And so he went around talking to people, first of all in Brittany, and then Cornwall, Ireland, Scotland, the Isle of Man and Wales. And he gathered in fairy experiences. He didn't have fairy experiences himself, something that was a matter of frustration for him, but he had a great gift for talking to total strangers and basically getting this information out of them.
And the first half of his book, which is called The Fairy Faith in Celtic Lands, 1911, Oxford University Press, is just a collection of all these fairy experiences from these very rural areas. And then the second half of the book is him analysing this. For me, the analysis is delirium. It, it really, I don't want to say it's valueless, but his aim is to prove that fairies exist.
And incredibly, he did a doctorate at Oxford University with this as the conclusion. He cared passionately about this, and I'm not taking issue with his passion. He was a very impressive individual. However, you say that I don't like analysis. I think here I have to step back. I don't like analysis of supernatural experiences beyond the empirical.
So, for instance, I've written studies looking at the development of fairy wings. What I mean by that is the way fairies appear in art in written stories, later in photographs, and ultimately in the descriptions people give us of experiences. For me, that's analysis that's based that has a good empirical basis.
You can actually go through, you can put footnotes down and you can make a reasonable case that there's evolution going on here. That is, I think that when you get to experiences and encounters themselves, you have to be a little bit more careful there. And this is where I always trot out a formula.
And it is this, that Evans Wentz and his successors. wanted to study fairies. I want to study people who see fairies. Because, for me, fairies, frankly, whether they exist or not, are not amenable to study. This isn't what you do with fairies. Like your daughter, you play with fairies. Maybe you go out on a moonlit night and have an epiphany there in the woods.
This isn't about study, and yet you can start to study the experiences and particularly the conditions and the people who have these experiences. Does that make sense?
Leafbox: Yes, 100 percent. I, I, I thought that was his case. I didn't know he was such a believer or it almost sounds like he was a cultural engineer trying to propagate fairies in. I'm curious how reliable he was an investigator.
Dr. Simon Young: No, I think he was pretty reliable, actually. And to pay him, again, great credit, we have this incredible fund of fairy encounters from people in these various rural areas, thanks to him. And I think he was very good at taking a step back and recording the material as it was given, because he saw himself as some kind of biologist who was actually studying fairy life through these accounts.
And One of the wisest choices he made was to split the book in two and so the first book still today You know that experience when you go in a second hand bookshop and you look at a book on the shelf and on the spine you can see it was only read until page 100 and the last 200 pages weren't touched
Leafbox: That's your recommendation for his book. I take it.
Dr. Simon Young: Well, but it's what most people do with his book it's people just pour over the first hundred pages or so with all these really rich experiences and then maybe people once in their life read through the second part, but I think that generally speaking, generally speaking, people don't get very far.
Evans Wentz was a fascinating individual thinking about cultural engineering. He spent a couple of years in London after this very research getting involved in Celtic nationalism. He then moved to the Mediterranean and had two or three rather sterile years. At least no writing survives, but he then moved to India and he gravitated towards the Himalayas that have this place of great importance in theosophic thought.
Madame Blavatsky, the founder of theosophy, claimed that she had relations with some of the the ancients, the masters who lived in the Himalayas. And there he came into contact with various Tibetan thinkers and writers and he translated, let's put translate there in inverted commas, the Book of the Dead, the Himalayan Book of the Dead.
And in fact, overwhelming number of people who know his name today know him for that, rather than for the fairies. He doesn't seem to have known Tibetan, but he basically masterminded the translation process and brought it to fruition.
Leafbox: I mean, it's just fascinating because you use the word culture engineering and the value and impact of the Book of the Dead in contemporary Western society is profound. So he's had quite an influence, both theosophically and then, I guess, alternative or, I mean, there's films about the Book of the Dead, right? So. Very interesting.
Dr. Simon Young: No, I mean, wherever he is now, if something like his soul still exists, he can look down with satisfaction that twice in his life he changed the weather, once with this fairy book and once with the Himalayan Book of the Dead.
Leafbox: Let's go back to your maybe I'm curious about analysis and in terms of categorization, what do you think these encounters represent? Is there, yeah, I'm curious, what, what is the manifestation? What are these psychological, let's do a psychological analysis, for instance, you have general thoughts.
Dr. Simon Young: I suppose that so far in the Fairy Census, there are a thousand records available and they're freely available online. When you start reading through these I think the first thing that will strike you is just the vast range of different experiences. And so this is where categorization starts to make sense because it really helps to just start, oh, how can we put this, to start, I suppose, corralling , bringing together certain types of experience.
For example, the type of experience that I find particularly interesting are children's experiences. Particularly under the age of 10 and something like, I think it's 44 percent of children's experiences under the age of 10 take place in bed. In other words, the child is going to sleep. The child is waking up in the night.
Or the child is waking up in the morning, or in some very rare cases, the child is in bed with a fever or is ill. And these are, these are a substantial number of different cases. And the great thing is, when you have a thousand records, and you, you can start to classify things, you can break them down, so you can say, okay, I just want to look at the records of children under 10. You get these from the Excel, and then I just want to look at experiences that relate to sleep. People being in bed or people being late at night. So I, you, you, you have to pick your different experience. And I think the answer to your question would depend on the different experience.
Leafbox: Fascinating. So, I mean, there's almost a liminal state there. There seems to be. But you keep arguing, or at least you, not to argue, but you said this is a fundamental aspect of human nature. Could you expand on that? That you think just a way of explaining things or our mind just needs these paranormal explanations for entities or beings to be real, or what's your thoughts?
The Role of Supernatural Experiences in Human Evolution
Dr. Simon Young: Right, so here I'm going to be very tentative. I'm not really sure. I do think though in terms of human evolution, there seems to be a certain number of people who have very frequent supernatural experiences. I'm a somewhat sceptical person.
And so I've had in my life probably five or six, perhaps even seven or eight, in inverted commas, supernatural experiences. I consider these to have been hallucinations. Maybe audio hallucinations, visual hallucinations. But there are other people who have had many, many more experiences than this, who have had literally hundreds of experiences over 60 or 70 years.
And who considered these experiences to be real? And so, you have different gradients of experiences. And then, of course, you'll come across people who have, who will say, quite simply, Well, I've never had an audio visual hallucination. And no, nothing like this has ever happened to me. Our numbers are very bad for this.
But there have been a number of better surveys statistically than mine that look at the supernatural or paranormal experiences more generally and it's sometimes been suggested that something like between three and ten percent of the population have relatively frequent supernatural experiences. My guess would be that humans in their most basic state back in the Paleolithic, if we're living together in a community of let's say at the outside 150 people.
Maybe you need three or four shamans... maybe you need four or five visionaries in the tribe and what becomes interesting for me Then is I think so far that's not so controversial and I I think that even a Dawkins would would perhaps go along with that but what becomes interesting as is as our culture goes forward, as it changes, as it evolves, you still have this four or five percent of people and what, what do they end up doing in our society?
Are they just an embarrassing relic, a kind of tailbone in modern society, one that doesn't really do anything anymore? Or actually, are these people that still have a purpose? And the romantic in me would like to think that they still have a purpose.
Leafbox: And what do you think that purpose is?
Dr. Simon Young: I don't know. I wonder if they're especially useful for mediating cultural ideas.
I wonder if they're good at bringing new creative thoughts in. I wonder if they end up becoming shatsu workers or working in alternative medicine, going into psychology. I'm not sure what these different things But my guess is that this personality complex still has a role in our society. And the, the nightmarish version of course of this is the kind of person who would end up in a psychological ward.
But. I like to think that in our society, there are lots of people who perhaps have these very unusual experiences, but lead useful and productive lives. And so I would be fascinated to learn more that this goes, I think, beyond my brief about why these people continue to be important, if indeed that is the case.
Leafbox: Well, I think going back to your concept of the cultural lens, I mean, different cultures have different placements and importance of these types of people, right? So. Yeah, I mean, in certain South American societies, the shaman is a very central role. And even if someone in the West might be considered schizophrenic. In Iquitos, Ecuador, they would have a higher place in that society and a role. So, like you said.
Dr. Simon Young: Yeah, no, absolutely. I, I agree with this. I, I'm just curious how the dice fall. If, if this is some kind of a constant in human evolution, maybe perhaps I would look at this. If I was going to reduce this to a self help journal, I suppose I would make two observations.
The first is that. It seems to be a constant. And so we as societies have to make sure the space for people like this. And God forbid, I don't mean government subsidies or anything of this type. But I just mean a recognition that this is part of the wealth of human experience. The second thing is that I think to some small extent, many of us, maybe most of us in our lives would not do badly to open the door to these kind of experiences.
Even if it's just through very natural physiological mediums like dreams and sleep, say. But just, just to accept that there are other ways of seeing the world. And even if that's just a little shock to our system, I think that can be quite useful.
Leafbox: No, I love how open minded you are. I think I'm the same.
The Fairy Census: Goals and Methodology
Leafbox: Yeah, my next question is, how are researchers and what's your goal with the Fairy Census? Do you want, who's using your data? Is this open source? Do you want literature analysis? Who's using your data right now?
Dr. Simon Young: Right. So, My aim, first of all, my aim is to get to 2, 000 records that have been through the fairy census.
So these would be 2, 000 experiences where they have answered the many questions that are in the Fairy Census. And maybe in a moment we could talk about some of these questions just to give. You and your listeners a flavor. So I want to get to 2000. I've so far got to a thousand but some of these maybe about a hundred are just encounters or experiences that people have written in to me about so for me They don't, they're very interesting, and I include them in the collection.
But they're not, for me, they're not easily comparable in the way that experiences that have been through the same questionnaire would be, obviously. And also what I've found over the years is we've talked here about, I think we talked about Polynesia before, about Argentina. Obviously, these are things that are found in different forms around the world.
However, most of my respondents come from the English speaking world. This was not planned, but I think while I'm very grateful for reports from Costa Rica or from various Asian countries of which there is a sprinkling, I wonder increasingly whether it wouldn't be great to have at least 2, 000 experiences from the English speaking world, just for the purposes of comparability.
And as I get to 500 new records. I release them. So at the moment, Fairy Census 1 and Fairy Census 2 are both out, and that means there are a thousand records out there. And I'm slowly preparing the way for fairy census three. I expect by the end, there will perhaps be five fairy censuses, though this will be another 10 or 15 years.
And my end goal would be to have then these 2000 experiences, plus this miscellany also available. Right the way through the process, these have been open sourced. Now when I get an experience, if for example your daughter were to do the questionnaire with you and I get this tomorrow, it probably wouldn't become open source for another three years until Fairy Census 3 is out.
So like I say, they come out in units of 500 and the idea with the first two Fairy Censuses is that this material is It's absolutely out there. It's in the form of an Excel so you can mess around with categories. It's in the form of a PDF so you can do simple word searches. And it's also available as print on demand books.
There's also a website by John Moriarty, which basically allows you to go down and look at categories. So again, children aged 1 to 10 in North America, for instance. And. So far, I've had a number of people who've been using the data. I've had a couple of people, no one apart from myself has written, to the best of my knowledge, peer reviewed academic articles solely on the Fairy Census.
But the Fairy Census has been mentioned or analysed, or even criticised in a number of peer reviewed works. And I've always said to people, look, the data's there, you're welcome to use it. And then there have also been a number of people who've taken the experiences and used them in their own fairy work.
And this can range from the creative, for example I can think of a couple of people who have done works of art based around experiences in the Fairy Census, but it can also be traditional folklore collection where. Perhaps, for instance, someone wants to do a book of fairies from Wales, and as long as it's done in a reasonable fashion, I always give permission for them to include a certain number of the Fairy Census experiences.
Challenges and Criticisms of the Fairy Census
Leafbox: What is I'm curious what well, your, my first question is, how did you design the questionnaire and what is the questionnaire? And then two, if you could highlight some of the criticism you've received.
Dr. Simon Young: Right. So as far as the questionnaire. when I was very conscious when I began that this could easily go on for a few years.
I didn't expect decades at that time, but it could easily go on for a few years. And so I took a lot of care about the questionnaire. And there are, I think, 40 questions and I'll just give you a quick sprinkling. I'll run through it in my brain and I'll miss a lot. But for instance, what decade of your life are you in now?
What decade of your life were you in when you had the experience? How long did the experience last? Multiple choice. What mood did you perceive the fairies as having? Were they angry? Were they friendly? Were they aloof? Etc. And then from there we move on to questions about the person themselves. For instance, what religious tradition do you belong to?
Do you often have supernatural experiences? And then also experience, questions, excuse me, around the encounter. For instance, Had you just woken up or were you going to sleep when you had the experience? Also relating this to health. Do you have audio issues? Do you have eyesight issues? And then yeah, some lots and lots of questions.
I hope I've given you the flavor there and I talked to various experts who look at fairies who look at aliens And I ran the questions by them and the questions became a good deal more robust I would say
Leafbox: So were you trying to model like an ethnographic survey, is that kind of your goal in this census or
Dr. Simon Young: I didn't really think about it in those terms but I I was determined, going back to that phrase before, I didn't want to study the fairies, I wanted to study the people who saw the fairies, or heard the fairies, or felt the fairies in some cases.
And so I wanted to cover different bases, but it was very much with that in mind. I think that in some ways I was rather naive about just opening this up to the world. In fact, I certainly was. And It's turned out rather nicely that 90 percent of the answers are from the English speaking world, because I think if these thousand answers had really been spread evenly around the globe, the survey would actually have been a lot less interesting, because it would have just been captioned tiny micro glimpses in different cultures of sometimes really very different things wherever the word fairy brought you or however, it was translated as to the criticisms there have been a couple the first criticism which is a good one. Is that the ideal way to study, say in Great Britain, fairy experiences would be to get a million people to say, Have you had a fairy experience?
Of course the vast majority would look at you strangely and say no. You let those people go, and then you give the rest of the people. A, the fairy census to fill out the people who've said yes, and of course, the reason that that then you have a representative sample of the population, you can start to think about well, to what extent of these people actually part of a larger whole, where, of course, the fairy census is completely self selecting.
And this produces a number of issues. For instance, I hope that there will be a few people who've listened today, maybe like your friend from Argentina, who will think. Oh, my goodness. Well, yes, I've had a fairy experience. They'll go into Google, they'll type Fairy Census, they'll find the Fairy Census, they'll fill it out.
Ultimately, these people have self selected. And so it's been pointed out in one publication in a in a gentle and constructive way that self selection with subjects like this makes the data, let's say, more suggestive than definitive. And I, I completely agree with this. Given my resources, given my time, it was just not really credible to do otherwise.
And I'll come back here to saying that the Fairy Census is a relatively small part of my academic life. So it's something I keep, you know, think of one of those gas cookers in the kitchen where you have four hobs. This is on a small hob simmering away. It's there in the background. Every two or three years, I spend a lot of time on it, but then I move on to my other projects.
It's probably 10 or 15 percent of my work. And I think that's probably the most substantial criticism.
Leafbox: Yeah, it's similar to, there's a project called this might sound like a strange junk, but how familiar are you with psychedelic culture? Not very at all, but very interested. There's a website called Erowid, which is a user generated case reports of every known drug that you can snort, inject, everything on earth.
And it has the same issue. There's, you know, whatever, a million reports of people uploading, I tried this mushroom or this toad or, you know, this plant, and then they write extremely detailed case studies. And it's the same thing like your census, it's a giant census. People will search through it and what's interesting, though, is that itself becomes, like you said, propagating of what experiences are supposed to be like, which is one issue it has. And then there's many researchers who use this site to pull data from and how many people are using this new substance or this Chinese designer drug. So it's a very interesting resource, but it has the same problems you have.
It's not peer reviewed. unreliable, un clarified data. But what's very interesting is that the government, at least in the U. S., uses this as a way to determine, oh, what's happening here? Is a new drug coming up? Should we crack down on this? So it's very interesting.
Dr. Simon Young: Yeah, no. So the comparison sounds a very fair one.
And again, I long for the days of big, big data. Whereas in the end, the kind of material that I'm putting together here will be useful. I'm sure of that is useful. But in the end, there is this element of the anecdotal about it. And there will be all these biases. I suppose sometimes when I feel a bit glum about this kind of thing, I remember Evans Wentz and his book where people only read the first 100 or 150 pages, but I just think how useful those pages have been to so many people and how they give us windows into the world.
Into worlds that had Evans went, not necessarily written this stuff down, would've been lost in some cases irretrievably. And I like to think that if we're still kicking around in a century or century and a half, the fairy census will be a little bit like that. It will be a window that covers perhaps at its greatest extent, about 60 years.
In other words, people are remembering back into the fifties and forties, perhaps not the forties, the fifties, sixties, seventies. It will allow people to trace at least the outlines of how supernatural experiences were lived.
Memorable Accounts from the Fairy Census
Leafbox: Do you have any favorite accounts from this census, ones that were inspiring to you or interesting? I mean, I'm sure out of the thousand, if you could just recall a quick story of one of them or
Dr. Simon Young: Yeah, so every time people often ask me this question, of course, and I guess I'm like a parent. I don't really have favorite children. It just, I, different times, different ones emerge in my head. There's one story that I find fascinating.
It's from a very old man now. And he, he, was based in Glasgow, hope I've got this right, and when he was a young boy he had an experience that just absolutely blew him away. One night he was asleep in bed and I seem to remember he was sharing the bedroom with his grandfather not that his grandfather shared any of the experience.
And he describes waking up in the night and seeing this incredible cavalcade of fairies coming towards the window. And the truth is that what happens, there are some unusual features of this experience. But actually, within the general pattern of children having experiences at night, they're somewhat banal.
What blows me away about this experience is that this guy hasn't had supernatural things happened to him in his life. This was something that happened to him when he was a kid. And yet clearly it's just a memory that will not let go. And the reason I say this is because I think the gentleman in question has written this account, hope I've not got this wrong, but four different times to the fairy census.
He's just so desperate to get the experience out there. And so clearly every couple of years he sits down and he writes it out again. And in fact, at the moment, I'm trying to get in touch with him just to say, look, your account is already out there. It's already been published. Thank you so much for your contribution.
And so. I don't know if this disappoints you, but what I love about the story isn't so much what happens, lovely as it is, and a little bit, perhaps, sinister and scary as well. The fact that this man has carried the memory with him all these decades, and it's just been so important to him. And, I think of someone with a pebble in their pocket and they just constantly, they put their hand in their pocket, they have the pebble and they just turn it there in their fingers.
It's part of their past, it's, it's a private cathedral they have, it's, it's this precious memory. And I think there are a lot of people out there with experiences of this kind, maybe fairies, maybe something else that can't quite be accounted for. I, I love that story. Another one that I have shared with people before, which is of a very different kind is from Ireland.
And there was, again, I hope I've got this right. A young American woman with her Irish boyfriend, so she was living in Ireland, and they went to the hills around Dublin. I used to live in Dublin, so I know these hills well. So you have the city down below and you have the, the, the Irish Black Knight. And at a certain point, she turns around and she sees on the side of the hill, How can we explain this?
How does she explain it? She describes it like she says it looked like a white plastic bag and it was just rolling rapidly. across the hillside. And she said to her boyfriend, Oh, you know, look at that back and the winds caught it. And the boyfriend answered the winds blowing in the other direction.
Now I like the punchline, but the reason I really like this story, again, there are always ulterior motives here. But the reason I like this one is that there are several records from Britain and Ireland of strange, usually circular, rolling forms that are associated with fairy life. I think it is almost inconceivable that this young woman knew anything about these stories, because they're a minority in the folklore of Britain and Ireland, someone who knows these folklore systems, well, we'll have run across them from time to time, but they're a minority.
And I'd actually studied many of these accounts. So for me, it was really exciting just to meet someone who innocently had, can we, is this too dramatic? She had innocently encountered a folk archetype on the Black Hills above Dublin one night.
Leafbox: You know the first account you told me about the grandson and his grandchild, I, this might sound strange, but do you know who Whitney Strieber is?
Dr. Simon Young: No. Oh, is this the UFO lady?
Leafbox: Man yes. He wrote a book called Communion, and the accounts sound so similar, these engagements with the trauma. There's a sinister, dark element to these encounters, right? But many researchers and people have analyzed Strieber's work as a model for childhood trauma.
So I'd be curious to understand if, I mean, maybe this is me psychoanalyzing, but was this a case of traumatic experience as a child, and it manifested as a fragmentation as this very encounter, as a way of the mind to disassociate the trauma into a narrative larger myth.
Dr. Simon Young: It becomes a personal metaphor for whatever happened.
Listen, it could be, but let me just defend the supernatural experiences in this sense, that there were a lot in the Fairy Census of children in bed at night who have experiences. And sometimes these experiences are a little bit creepy. In a couple of occasions, they're slightly, I don't want to say they're not exactly frightening, but there, you have a sense of malevolence, okay? But then there are also lots of joyful reports. Now think of the little girl who wakes up in the night and sees a group of 12 fairies circle dancing on her bedside cabinet. And for her, this becomes a precious memory that follows her through her life.
From what I know, alien experiences seem to me to be Let me qualify this. Alien experiences in bedrooms, in other words, people waking up in the night, seem to be overwhelmingly sinister. And at least with fairies, we seem to have a nicer range, let's say.
Leafbox: Yeah, it opens up a lot of, I mean, I keep dropping back into my literary analysis perspective. I mean, there's Freudian elements and you say most of these experiences happened before 10. So I wonder if there's positive or negative associations with puberty. There's so many ways to read these experiences, but I keep dropping back from avoiding the potential of the supernatural.
So that's my bias. I keep trying to keep an open mind like you, that it's something potentially, you know, the child is actually encountering these nature elemental beings which is actually more positive to me
The Role of Supernatural Experiences in Modern Life
Dr. Simon Young: so even if even if you don't go that far These are still things that perhaps are playing out in the child's life that, maybe here we can use the idea of a dream.
We have dreams because we're sweating things out of our system. We're trying to resolve things. You know, maybe these supernatural experiences serve like a particularly powerful experience of a dream. They're a way in which we actually deal with a situation. That's come to us. That's something that I've sometimes considered maybe thinking about the way so many of these experiences are connected to sleep, which is another personal obsession of mine that people are just waking up or just going to sleep.
So I think I think the problem with explaining You were rightly very careful about this. I'm very reluctant to start saying, well, this is actually cloaking a trauma or because here. Well, both you and I would, I think, agree with the sincerity of the person who's giving the account. But I then think, well.
Who are we really without any other evidence to assume that there is actually some real world experience behind this, where we could just, we could explain it in a very, let's say materialist way as being an attempt to process something going on in that person's life at that time, what I do notice is the way these memories, whether they're, these memories are very important for people, and it's fascinating how many people are writing 50, 60 years after they happened, after this allegedly happened, and that they're still recalling it as this key memory from their childhood.
Leafbox: No, I think it's fascinating. I think I, I love how you, you have a lot of respect for the, not the storyteller. So I, I'm trying to learn from you to not keep jumping to analysis. So I, I think that's a commendable feat, very inspiring.
Dr. Simon Young: There is another side version of this. And again, I'm just throwing this in here because I've always struggled with knowing what to make of this.
But you have people who have these one off experiences, but you then have a subcategory of children who have repeated experiences over sometimes several years. And this isn't only at night in the bedroom, it can sometimes be in other contexts. And there was one Canadian man who sent in an account of his child experience where when he was four or five, that's right, he had repeat experiences with a spirit that he came to call Bonnie.
And this was a little man and the gentleman in question actually drew me a picture of Bonnie and Bonnie was let's say in common cultural terms, he was a gnome. He looks like a gnome. But he wasn't a very nice gnome. And he used to come along in the night and talk to this young boy who was lying in bed and essentially criticise him.
And, again, what's fascinating for me with that one is that it wasn't a one off experience. They almost had, let's say, a relationship. They saw each other on a semi regular basis. And there was one extraordinary evening when the child said that Bonnie came along with a friend. And Bonnie started criticizing this young boy.
And the friend said, Oh, just leave him alone. And they actually had an argument among themselves. And I, I'm trying to give you the the beauty of the narration here. But I find interesting that there are a number of children who, like adults, sometimes have repeat experiences, and in this case allegedly with the same figure.
Leafbox: Fascinating. Are there any entities, just on my own you keep talking about altered states, you know, the dream state, again, going back to the psychedelic, but have you heard of a drug called DMT? And many people who use DMT, then, you know, they have these, the descriptions of the you know, space world that they meet often fairies and elves and gnomes. And I wonder if that's a social construct from the outer world, or how would you analyze that? Or if people writing reports of meeting fairies in another realm, not this realm.
Dr. Simon Young: Okay, so I suppose the first thing to say is that in the Fairy Census there are a number of people who write in with what are clearly drug experiences and one of the questions asks, with special conditions related to the experience, had you taken a drug, alcohol, were you on a special medicine when the experience took place?
So this is something I've had to deal with. I think at first I was a little bit impatient with these experiences because some people taking a hallucinogenic substance find the experience absolutely enchanting and can write about it for pages and pages, but for people who weren't there, perhaps it's a little bit less attractive than some of these rather lovely stories, you guess, of children meeting fairies or brief encounters elsewhere.
But slowly over time, I've come to think of it as just another way to have these experiences. And I think a lot, I, I, my suspicion is that a lot of experiences are ones in which people Like you just said, they're in an altered state, and for me, an unusual number of the experiences, more than I would have thought when I started, can have that applied to them.
And as such, I would think of an experience with a hallucinogenic, a hallucinogenic as just being another type of altered state. Now it's one that involves brute force, it's much stronger, but I think in the end it's the same class. As to whether the long standing debate about certain type of hallucinogenics can give you certain type of visions, or whether this is culturally determined, there I don't know.
But that's an area that I've sometimes smelt around the edges of and I, there are some really fascinating questions to be asked there, because we come back, as you've anticipated, to the possibility of this being really a social experience, one that's socially informed. This is what we've learnt fairies look like, this is what we've learnt that fairies do.
Boggarts and Other Folkloric Research
Leafbox: Simon, my last two questions, I know you're of times valuable, is one, could you tell us a little bit about your Bogart research? I'm not so familiar with that folkloric character.
Dr. Simon Young: I'd really be glad to, but I'm worried that this might be a bit boring in the sense that this is folklore pure and simple. So the Boggart is a word, a dialect word from, very crudely, the northwest of England.
And I grew up in the northwest of England. And Boggart was. a general term for a bogey. It was for a solitary supernatural being. So in fact, the one type of being it wasn't applied to was fairies. And a couple of years ago I published a book on the bogget. Perhaps in some ways is an unofficial tribute to the lands where I was born.
And it was looking really at the scary supernatural in the landscapes around the mill towns, the cities, the villages, and the farms of the South Pennines and Lancashire. And It did also look at some experiences, including some very unusual ones, but generally speaking, it was a more classical folklore study.
So, the Simon Young who writes about the Fairy Census is rather different from the fairy, from the Simon Young who writes about the Boggart. It's the same author, but on the page they sound a little bit divorced.
Final Thoughts and Future Direction
Leafbox: Fascinating. And then my last question is, how do you, what lesson do you want lay people to, I mean, maybe you can repeat yourself, but what's the value of this Fairy Census for day to day, normal, living life and researchers and interviewers, or what do you want the general lay audience to take from your work?
Dr. Simon Young: I suppose that somewhere deep inside me, I have a conviction that the supernatural matters, that it's not an embarrassing part of paleolithic society that sometimes somehow made it through to the present. It is something that to some extent to have healthy lives individuals and society more generally have to be able to absorb and particularly in an age when religion is being rejected and ridiculed these more personal versions of spirituality I think become incredibly important and I understand that for many people writing or reading about fairies isn't going to change their lives, but I think for some people, it will just start to push them in the direction of thinking about that part of their lives and I like to think that for some people the very act of filling out the Fairy Census might be a productive activity in that you're sharing this with me, I will share it with the world and maybe in 150 years time it will be there on the digital library shelves and other people will be able to go back and look at these fragments of supernatural experiences from the late 20th or from the early 20th century.
21st century. And here, if you don't mind, Robert, I'll just give my appeal that if anyone has been listening to this and you think that you have had or might have had a fairy experience, I would be very grateful if you could type the words Fairy Census into Google, go to the Fairy Census and fill things out to the best of your ability. It takes anything from 10 minutes to half an hour, depending on how long your experience is. And yeah, future generations will benefit.
Leafbox: So there we are and Simon, my last well, one more question is other than that, where can people find your work? And do you teach courses on this or what's your current teaching work like?
Dr. Simon Young: So as far as as far as where people can find me, probably the best place is that I do a podcast with my colleague, Chris Woodyard. It's a very undemanding podcast. in that it's once a month and it's called Boggit and Banshee and every month we look at something from the supernatural. Say for example last month I think was the Cottingley fairy photographs just to give you an idea.
Next month is the experience of fairy disorientation or being pixie led where people lose their way over familiar ground so that might be a good place to look for me. As far as teaching goes now I I do have a couple of online courses that people can follow. But I've generally left that to one side so far.
Maybe that's an inspiration for the future.
Leafbox: But you do teach in person in Florence, I believe, right?
Dr. Simon Young: That's right. So I teach American University students in Florence, but I do not teach them folklore. I teach other, other aspects of history.
Leafbox: Great. Well, I'll link to the podcast and also link to the census and other things as well. Simon, anything else you wanted to share? Any encounters today that you're hoping for?
Dr. Simon Young: No, but again, I'd be very generous. Excuse me. I'd be very grateful if anyone did fill out the census and thanks so much for giving me this time and asking such stimulating questions.
Leafbox: Great. Thank you so much, Simon.