The Fairy Podcast

A bumper episode in which we cover listener fairy sightings, the Missing 411 series by David Paulides, UHFs (Unidentified Human Forms) in the landscape and even Bigfoot gets a mention and how he could be more fairy than hairy.

Many religions incorporate fasting as a means to bring people spiritually closer to god but can fasting also make our brains more receptive to paranormal experiences? Has the modern diet fogged our psychic perception that once allowed us to see things such as fairies more frequently?

Could ancient stone circles mark the entrances to other worlds and do they have a greater purpose than just charting the passing of the seasons or places to conduct funeral ceremonies?

We discuss this and more.

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In this special episode we interview Sebastian Baczkiewicz about his long-running series for Radio 4, Pilgrim, which draws on the myth and folklore of the British Isles and stars Paul Hilton as the immortal protagonist, William Palmer. The series was nominated for the Prix Italia and awarded silver at the Prix Europa.

This fantasy tale follows William Palmer, a stone mason who, in the 12th Century was on a pilgrimage to Canterbury when he inadvertently offended the king of the Grey Folk (the fairies), who cursed him to life eternal. The series documents Palmer’s adventures between the worlds of faerie and man and incorporates Sebastian's vast knowledge of folklore.

In this episode we discuss the most famous of all fairy cases, The Cottingley Fairies. Although revealed as a hoax in 1983 is there more to this story than meets the eye? Fiona reveals startling new evidence which has been hidden in plain sight for over 100 years. Not everything is always as it seems!

Fiona's book 'The Secret of the Cottingley Fairies: Hidden for 100 Years: The New Evidence' is available via Amazon here in paperback and also on Kindle.

Dan also chats about his experience of the 'stairs in the woods' phenomenon, where people all over the world are finding inexplicable stairways in forests that lead to nowhere.

More information and stories regarding stairs in the woods can be found here.

You can submit your own stories and experiences for inclusion in the show by e-mailing us at [email protected]

You can also e-mail the hosts directly at [email protected] or [email protected]

We interview Jane Cooper, daughter of the late Joe Cooper, the author of what is considered to be the definitive book on The Cottingley Fairies. In this rare and exclusive interview, Jane discusses her late father and his beliefs in not only fairies but also the supernatural.

Joe Cooper, who has died aged 87, was the jovial debunker of the celebrated Cottingley fairy photographs (supposedly showing fairies captured on film in a Yorkshire garden in 1917). He remained a firm believer in unexplained phenomena to the end. In spite of finally prompting a confession of fakery by one of the two cousins who took the pictures, Cooper was far from sceptical about the existence of "little people" and thought that something genuinely unusual had happened in the West Riding village.

His engaging and sympathetic approach ended the long deception by the cousins, Frances Griffiths and Elsie Wright, who were in their 80s when Cooper's interview appeared in the magazine The Unexplained in 1983. They described to him how the "fairies" had been copied by Wright from a well-known children's book of the time, The Queen's Gift Book, and then held in place with hatpins.

Such trickery was widely assumed to have taken place by the time the interview appeared, in spite of the early endorsement of the images by photographic specialists and eminent figures, notably the writer Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. In a television discussion after Cooper's story had been published, Griffiths explained how she and Wright had seen a childish joke get wildly out of hand, because of people who "believed because they wanted to believe".

In a sense, this was true of Cooper, who combined an academic career with less conventional enthusiasms to which he devoted great zest. He promoted astrology and psychic investigation winningly, believing in Conan Doyle's summary of the fairies: "The recognition of their existence will jolt the material 20th-century mind out of its heavy ruts in the mud, and will make it admit that there is a glamour and mystery to life."

Cooper parted company with mainstream academia in research for his master's degree at Bradford University, which amassed data to suggest links between season of birth and eventual choice of occupation. One of his many other interests was playing the ukulele, and he performed his own astrological composition, Zing Zat Zodiac Zong, on TV after an interview with David Dimbleby in a series on the "beyond".

Cooper was born in Leeds, but the family moved early to Southampton and he was educated at Taunton school. During the second world war he served as a navigator in the RAF.

He tried various jobs after the war and had an early taste of the media when he appeared in a documentary made by the young Lindsay Anderson while working in a drawing office at Wakefield. He wrote material for Frankie Howerd and was an eager member of Leeds Art Centre in the 1950s, appearing in amateur dramatics with another cinema tyro, Peter O'Toole.

It was not until the end of the decade that he settled down to train as a teacher, moving on in the 1960s to become a lecturer in sociology at Bradford University (from where he retired in 1980). This led to wider involvement as the organiser of evening classes in psychic education in Yorkshire, and in the 1980s he wrote a column for the Guardian called Body and Soul.

Cooper met the Cottingley fairies cousins in the early 1970s and got to know them well. He later wrote a book, The Case of the Cottingley Fairies (1990), about the episode which played a part in the 1997 film Fairy Tale – a True Story.

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