A Real Ghost Story: Fairy Terror

This is a real ghost story that happened to me.

More accurately, this is a story about sharing space with the unseen.

In late 2017, my late husband and I moved into our dream home in Western North Carolina. I was born here, and it had been a dream of mine to return someday. After putting our desires out into the ethers, we found our home in a very magical way. It had almost everything we ever wanted in a home.

Shortly after we moved in, our area experienced a polar blast. Temperatures dipped into the low single digits (Fahrenheit). Heat rises, so we retreated to the loft of our unfamiliar new home to watch television and to warm up.

One evening, as we watched an innocuous show, both of us sat up suddenly. The hair on the back of our necks rose up as a strong sense of dread came over each of us. We both had the sense that something was out there. It felt like we were in extreme danger, like we were being stalked by a chainsaw-wielding serial killer. The sense of danger was enormous and we were both on high alert.

What the hell was out there?

We both wondered, "Is it a bear? Is it someone who is going to break in? What IS that?"

Whatever this was felt deadly, and it felt like we were being watched and stalked in our own home. At the top of the mountain. At the end of the road. Surrounded by a few thousand acres of wild forest. In the dead and dark of Winter.

The feeling persisted most nights, but try as we might, we never caught sight of anything. We decided that this was likely a spirit who was not happy, so we decided that we needed some clearing done.

It's a rule of thumb that one cannot easily clear a field that one is immersed in. God knows we both tried! It's difficult to get clarity on what you are experiencing while you are saturated in it. So, we asked a colleague to check it out for us.

Here's what she found

Our friend and colleague did some work to see what this feeling might be. She found that not ten feet from our home (and bedroom), there was a Fairy Track, a path on which spirits travel. It is a well-known fact that in places like Ireland, Scotland, and Scandinavia, it is bad news to mess with a Fairy Track, or to build a structure or disturb land where the Fair Folk live or do their business. When we had looked at the house for the first time, we were both struck by the magical nature of the path of this Fairy Track. It ran right up the ridge through a magical little glade that was incredibly inviting. We didn't know that that's what it was, but the little path that ran up the ridge right next to the house had such a seductive, magical aura about it, so much so that we wanted to experience it for ourselves. So we ventured up the path to get a better feel. This was a mistake. We ventured into Fairy territory without permission. The Fey Folk, the Fair Folk, decided that we needed to pay for this incredibly rude transgression. They decided to scare us out. The Fey, the Fae, Fair Folk, Good People, Shining Ones, can exert something that my colleagues call "Fairy Terror" or "Fairy Scary". The mere presence of the Fae can glamor us, erode our free will, and induce us to do things we normally wouldn't. They can also use this built-in reality-altering capability to scare the living shit out of us, which is what happened to my husband and me. I'm not kidding, this was stomach-churningly frightening. It is not physically damaging, but it does make a person want to flee immediately.

Western North Carolina has many wild places, and several stands of old-growth trees. Our little town lies in between two arms of the Pisgah National Forest. What I've come to understand after moving back here is that there are extensive intact spirit ecosystems, communities of Nature Spirits, Fae, and other Beings who were never displaced by humans in the first place.

Since the Fey were here long before we were, we can't evict them. We don't want to; we'd like to find a way to live together peacefully. So, instead of forced eviction and possibly starting an all-out war, my colleague engaged in conversation and brought in deities known to the Fair Folk. These deities helped move and separate our two realities farther away from each other dimensionally so that we could each share space with the others without intrusion or incident. She and they found a way for us all to live together more peacefully. And it has worked. I will have been in the house for nine years this December 2026, and our relationship with our unseen neighbors has been much more harmonious!

Why this approach?

Because spirits are people. They are our neighbors, and we have no grounds for moral superiority or to indulge in human supremacy. Just because we can't always see them, we all live together, sharing the same spaces, and most of them were here long before we were. Just like neighbors in a neighborhood or in an apartment complex, we want to be good neighbors and not the noisy, oblivious kind.

Conversation and negotiation are civilized and polite. Being human absolutely does not give me the right to do as I please and evict spirits who were here before, or make the energetic landscape into my own Image of comfort.

This article is the first in a series of articles about working with spirits.

Next time, I'll talk about some of the other spirits who were also upset at our coming.