An Advantage in Being Struck by Lightning

      Edwin E. Robinson, 62 of Falmouth, Maine was bald, blind, and deaf. His baldness, I presume, was natural, but his other disabilities were the result of a brain injury in 1971, when the truck he was driving jacknifed on an icy bridge. He wore a hearing aid and learned Braille. Then, on 4 June 1980, something happened. He was looking for a pet chicken in his back yard during a thunderstorm, and was struck by lightning.

The Little Boy and the Little Visitor

      Do you remember having a weird experience - I mean a really weird experience - when you were young - and I mean really young? If you do, how do you remember it now? Do you remember it as a real event, or have you convinced yourself that it must have been a dream, an hallucination, or a misinterpretation of something you didn't understand at the time? It would be comforting if you could so convince yourself. The reason I am asking this is that I am increasingly coming upon people who claim to have encountered as adults what, for lack of a better name, can be called "fairies". But the striking thing is that many others claim to have had such encounters as small children, and yet believe they really did happen.

      Such is the case of a man who calls himself only "John". Most of us can remember hardly anything before the age of three, and possess only fragmentary memories of our lives before school. However, John remembers that, when he was three years old, he was plagued by a tiny, terrifying bedtime visitor. To his incomplete memories he has added what his parents told him he had told them at the time, and the fact that they themselves used to hear voices emanating from his room at night. Whether all this was a strange pychological phenomenon or - perish the thought! - something paranormal, it deserves wider distribution. This article originally appeared in the Fairy Investigation Newsletter 16, New Series (June 2022), and is republished with the permission of the author, John and the editor, Simon Young.