Observations placeholder
Mr. Hart - 1634, Wiltshire, England - Dancing elves, a paralyzed witness
Identifier
028983
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
A description of the experience
As quoted in Wonders In The Sky - Unexplained Aerial Objects From Antiquity To Modern Times - and Their Impact on Human Culture, History, and Beliefs - Jacques Vallee and Chris Aubeck
Mr. Hart was paralyzed and assaulted by a group of dancing elves at night. He woke up in a fairy ring.
The curate of a Wiltshire 'Latin Schoole', Mr. Hart was assaulted by a group of elves one night in 1633 or 1634. Whilst walking over the 'downes,' he saw "an innumerable quantitie of pigmies or very small people" dancing in a typical fairy ring "and making all maner of small odd noyses."
Mr. Hart, "being very greatly amaz'd, and yet not being able, as he sayes, to run away from them, being, as he supposes, kept there in a kind of enchantment," fell to the ground in a daze. The "little creatures" surrounded their prey and "pinch'd him all over, and made a sorte of quick humming noyse all the time..." Hart awoke to find himself in the centre of a ring pressed into the grass — a fairy ring. "This relation I had from him myselfe, a few days after he was so tormented," writes Aubrey.
Source: K. Briggs, A Dictionary of Fairies (London: Penguin Books, 1976).