Panic and Faeries
Mar. 1st, 2011 08:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
potato_headI tried to write up this post a few days ago but I couldn't get it to go right, LOL. I think I've got it this time, though! Apparently by that I meant 'I think I can ramble a lot this time, though!'
I just wanted to talk a bit about people's apparent fear response to the proximity of fae/faeries.
In the (relatively few) instances that I've seen a faerie and there has been another person around, the other person, at the very least, gets uncomfortable. My little sister I have known to freak the FUCK out, but she is especially susceptible to being scared at all - for years after we went to Disney World, she wouldn't let us even mention the name of the ride The Tower of Terror...she didn't even go on it, I just told her the story behind it, which is, as far as scary stories go, pretty...not intense. And I say that as someone with a mild fear of elevators.
Anyway, speaking of my sister, case in point; I've discussed here the time when she freaked out in the car, yeah? And there was a fae running alongside the car? That's the most extreme reaction I've ever seen from her, but I've since found out that when I'm not home, she frequently sleeps in the living room (where I sleep, and have in the past seen them looking through the windows) and if she doesn't close the blinds in there she has nightmares.
She isn't the only one who closes the blinds in that room, though. In fact, the whole family does it almost compulsively, as soon as the sun goes down. The other blinds around the house are...pretty much left alone in a half-open state all the time.
I've felt the fear before, myself; in the incident where I was chased through the woods, I was running primarily out of a sort of ambiguous panic, and not because of any specific fear. TBH I don't really even know if it was chasing me, or if I started running and it was just following me; recently I've begun to suspect the latter. There was also, well, the tree incident, of course. They're all the same flavor of fear (like you're being watched by a predator?) although of different intensities.
Woods Panic
The phenomena of woods panic (also known as 'Pan' and 'the grey man') is, I think, possibly caused by faeries. It basically goes as such: a person, walking through the woods, feels a sudden creeping uneasiness, or just escalates straight to full-on panic; they often run for open spaces, sometimes falling and hurting themselves.
The particular flavor known as 'the grey man' is called such because it more often afflicts people at high altitudes (mountain climbing/hiking, that is), and as they run, they see what looks like a huge grey shadow on the fog or clouds in front of them. I will note here that it's been conclusively proven that this is probably their own shadow. No disrespect to those people; everything you see in a state of panic is probably going to look scary, and high altitudes, in addition, can be very disorienting.
It also goes by the name of 'Pan' because, way back, the Greeks reported that lone travelers in the woods were sometimes struck by a similar fear; they attributed it to Pan, the faun-like god of the wild forests, pastures, etc.
Yeah, this goes all the way back to ancient Greece. And honestly, from what I've observed, it's very common; every time I bring up the topic, almost everybody has a story about the one time they freaked out in the woods, hiking, or in their own backyard. Or the several times. Or how it happens all the time.
So, is this panic definitely attributable to faeries? I really don't know. My money's on yes, at least a good deal of the time. There are probably other things out there, too. My general advice is don't go on long hikes alone (which is just good safety anyways) and listen to your instincts.
And that brings me to my ending point, which is: I feel like I haven't said this often enough. I'm no kind of expert, I'm just a college kid with a handful of unusual first-hand experiences and an unnatural inclination to research and ability to hold information in my head, as well as an intensely voracious appetite for learning about other people's experiences. Everything I say is based on about a decade of personal experiences and research, much of which is not verifiable fact; not that I don't vet my sources, but I'm by no means scientifically rigorous about it.
Basically what I'm saying is don't take anything I say as 100% fact; it's just my own conclusions.
I just wanted to talk a bit about people's apparent fear response to the proximity of fae/faeries.
In the (relatively few) instances that I've seen a faerie and there has been another person around, the other person, at the very least, gets uncomfortable. My little sister I have known to freak the FUCK out, but she is especially susceptible to being scared at all - for years after we went to Disney World, she wouldn't let us even mention the name of the ride The Tower of Terror...she didn't even go on it, I just told her the story behind it, which is, as far as scary stories go, pretty...not intense. And I say that as someone with a mild fear of elevators.
Anyway, speaking of my sister, case in point; I've discussed here the time when she freaked out in the car, yeah? And there was a fae running alongside the car? That's the most extreme reaction I've ever seen from her, but I've since found out that when I'm not home, she frequently sleeps in the living room (where I sleep, and have in the past seen them looking through the windows) and if she doesn't close the blinds in there she has nightmares.
She isn't the only one who closes the blinds in that room, though. In fact, the whole family does it almost compulsively, as soon as the sun goes down. The other blinds around the house are...pretty much left alone in a half-open state all the time.
I've felt the fear before, myself; in the incident where I was chased through the woods, I was running primarily out of a sort of ambiguous panic, and not because of any specific fear. TBH I don't really even know if it was chasing me, or if I started running and it was just following me; recently I've begun to suspect the latter. There was also, well, the tree incident, of course. They're all the same flavor of fear (like you're being watched by a predator?) although of different intensities.
Woods Panic
The phenomena of woods panic (also known as 'Pan' and 'the grey man') is, I think, possibly caused by faeries. It basically goes as such: a person, walking through the woods, feels a sudden creeping uneasiness, or just escalates straight to full-on panic; they often run for open spaces, sometimes falling and hurting themselves.
The particular flavor known as 'the grey man' is called such because it more often afflicts people at high altitudes (mountain climbing/hiking, that is), and as they run, they see what looks like a huge grey shadow on the fog or clouds in front of them. I will note here that it's been conclusively proven that this is probably their own shadow. No disrespect to those people; everything you see in a state of panic is probably going to look scary, and high altitudes, in addition, can be very disorienting.
It also goes by the name of 'Pan' because, way back, the Greeks reported that lone travelers in the woods were sometimes struck by a similar fear; they attributed it to Pan, the faun-like god of the wild forests, pastures, etc.
Yeah, this goes all the way back to ancient Greece. And honestly, from what I've observed, it's very common; every time I bring up the topic, almost everybody has a story about the one time they freaked out in the woods, hiking, or in their own backyard. Or the several times. Or how it happens all the time.
So, is this panic definitely attributable to faeries? I really don't know. My money's on yes, at least a good deal of the time. There are probably other things out there, too. My general advice is don't go on long hikes alone (which is just good safety anyways) and listen to your instincts.
And that brings me to my ending point, which is: I feel like I haven't said this often enough. I'm no kind of expert, I'm just a college kid with a handful of unusual first-hand experiences and an unnatural inclination to research and ability to hold information in my head, as well as an intensely voracious appetite for learning about other people's experiences. Everything I say is based on about a decade of personal experiences and research, much of which is not verifiable fact; not that I don't vet my sources, but I'm by no means scientifically rigorous about it.
Basically what I'm saying is don't take anything I say as 100% fact; it's just my own conclusions.
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no subject
Date: 2011-03-02 02:36 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-03-02 03:51 pm (UTC)But they like me, any time I start to panic in the woods they all glom around and I calm down and I get ~escorted to safety~.
...Um. That's probably a bad thing yeah?
no subject
Date: 2011-03-02 04:25 pm (UTC)Well, this is what happened:
My aunt and uncle live basically out in the woods, on a lake. Most people who have property on the lake use it as just a vacation home, so most of the houses out there are just little cabins that are empty most of the time, and the woods between the lake and the nearest town are pretty thick, with no houses. My parents both hate driving on the highway, so they found a shortcut that involved driving for about a half an hour through said woods.
The first time we made this drive was in the daytime, and I noticed my sister was asking pretty frequently if we were almost there yet, but I assumed she just had to pee or something. When we left again that night, though, she tucked her head down between her legs and said she didn't feel good. I assumed she meant she was carsick (she used to get carsick a lot, not so much recently) and told mom and dad she was feeling sick, but she corrected me and said she was just really, really scared of the woods; it was a little bit before that that I had noticed a faerie coming out of the trees next to the road, and it had been following alongside the car. Basically, it followed us for the whole drive, and my sister continued to be curled up in a little ball on her seat, with her eyes shut, and a little while after that too.
no subject
Date: 2011-03-02 04:27 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-03-02 04:30 pm (UTC)I wonder why all my paranormal whatsit that likes me is super bad news what did I ever do? ;~;
no subject
Date: 2011-03-02 06:32 pm (UTC)What did this one look like? Any of the ones you drew?
no subject
Date: 2011-03-02 06:36 pm (UTC)It was hard to see it since both it and the car were moving, but I remember it was sort of a coppery-wood color, like the color you get if you cut open a tree and let the wood dry out?