Fairies Kidnapping

Fairies kidnapping is a fairy tale trope that involves humans being abducted by or captured by the fair folk. Fairies are magical creatures that can be good or evil, and they are capable of all sorts of miracles. They can turn people into statues, make them ill with disease and even cause death. They are a dangerous and powerful race of supernatural beings that live in the shadowy realm of Faerie, and there have been many accounts of humans being captured by them.

In the early modern world, it was not uncommon for people to be convinced that their child or loved one had been stolen by fairies. Some of these stories involved whole families being torn apart by a belief in fairies. Others were more specific, such as the story of Anne Jefferies, whose family were all convinced that she had been taken by fairies in 1626.

This case made quite a stir back then, and it continues to be a part of local folklore without a clear explanation of what really happened. What is known is that Anne was a young woman with a bright and inquisitive mind and a wild imagination. She was raised in a rural area where stories of fairies were common, and she had a deep connection with the supernatural.

Anne had a very unusual ability to feel things, and this made her especially susceptible to being taken by the fairies. As she grew older, her experiences became more frequent. She would often wake up with bruises or scratches on her body, and she could feel the presence of fairies in the house. Her parents enlisted the help of a Roscrea witch doctor named Bridget Peters, who used rituals to try to drive the fairies out of the home. They were unable to stop the fairies from taking Anne, but they did manage to kill her father with water on the brain and her brother with a tumor.

In most cases, fairy kidnapping was seen as a very negative thing. Like witches or vampires, fairies were scapegoats that were blamed for anything from illness and death through to mass famine. Like any scapegoat, fairies were not actually to blame for these events, but they did cause tremendous suffering and fear. It was also not uncommon for women to be taken for fairies, and even after official persecution stopped in Britain there were still hundreds of serious attacks on women who were believed to have been taken by the fairies.

It is possible that the fairies were trying to get Anne because they needed a human mother. It is believed that fairy mothers rarely birth their own children, and they need human women to carry their offspring. Other times, they just need a changeling to replace their own dead ones. In some instances, the changeling will forget that they are not human and return to their fairy families forever, while in other cases they will be turned loose into the wilderness to die.