After years of research, including with historian Professor Ronald Hutton, Jersey-born folklorist Jo Hickey-Hall has come to the conclusion that fairies exist and are simply a part of nature that we don’t yet know about. She spoke to TOM OGG about those who share their experiences on her Modern Fairy Sightings Podcast and about signing with SpectreVision Radio, a ‘strange podcast network’ co-founded by Hollywood superstar Elijah Wood
“HELLO and welcome to the Modern Fairy Sightings Podcast where we listen to people’s fairy encounters. But take heed, we’re not talking about winged Tinker Bells here. These are real fairies. Real encounters that took people like you and I by surprise. Stay a while and hear their stories.”
Such is how Jo Hickey-Hall welcomes listeners to each episode of the Modern Fairy Sightings Podcast.
A former research assistant in anthropology at the University of Bristol, Jersey-born Jo is a writer, folklorist and social historian. She is also a firm believer that fairies exist not only in children’s books and animated motion pictures but right here in the real world. And, as the Modern Fairy Sightings Podcast attests, she is far from the only one with such a belief.
Since it was launched in 2020, the podcast has attracted a dedicated online following, with episodes often attracting tens of thousands of views (Jo’s interview with Professor Ronald Hutton has garnered north of 300,000 views on YouTube), and with an ever-increasing number of people from across the globe coming forward to chat to Jo about their encounters with otherworldly beings from unknown realms.
“Back when I first started doing this, almost everyone who contacted me wanted to stay anonymous,” says Jo, chatting from her home in Bristol earlier this week.
“And I can understand that because, initially at least, I myself found it a huge deal to talk about my experiences. But there has definitely been a shift. In the early days, people didn’t want to be identified in any way – I think they were worried about being mocked or disbelieved – whereas nowadays if I say: ‘Don’t worry, I’m recording only for transcription’, they’ll reply: ‘Oh, please film it, put my name out there, I don’t mind’.
“There has been a real sea change. I mean, it’s noticeable if you look at my channel – there are so many videos now. More and more people are wanting to talk about their experiences.”
They are indeed, including several well-known figures from the world of film and television. Step forward, Lord of the Rings star Elijah Wood and film producer Daniel Noah, who – along with fellow film producer Lawrence Inglee – have launched SpectreVision Radio, a “bespoke podcast network” focussed on film, music, the arts and “esoteric subjects”, and with which Jo has now signed.
As of this week, the Modern Fairy Sightings Podcast is one of several podcasts available on the SpectreVision platform, with others including Visitations, which is hosted by Elijah and Daniel, and Extraordinary Evidence, which is the brainchild of “scholar of the occult” Mitch Horowitz.
For Jo, it is, to put it mildly, something of a big deal, so much so that, when she was first approached by the SpectreVision team, she assumed it was a wind-up.
“I thought it was a scam email,” says the married mother-of-three with a laugh. “I get silly emails all the time and I just thought: ‘oh, dear me, what is this?’ I thought it was someone using Elijah Wood’s name to get my attention. And then I thought maybe it was someone who just happened to have the same name. You know, Elijah Wood from Bournemouth. So I ignored the email at first, and it was only later that I went back and re-read it and decided to look up SpectreVision online. And, oh my goodness, it looked legit. I realised it really was a company owned and run by Elijah Wood and Daniel Noah. I couldn’t believe it.”
The arrival of the email felt doubly eerie and prophetic because Jo – who is currently working on a book (about which more shortly) – had been writing about the Lord of the Rings films that very week.
“I was working on a chapter about a guy who’d had a childhood experience in a campsite in South Wales,” she says. “And he’d said to me: ‘You know when Frodo puts on the ring in Lord of the Rings and everything changes? That’s what it was like’. He was describing when he met these small white beings in the woods in South Wales, which took him onto a craft of some kind. So there I am, writing about that, and then an email arrives from Elijah Wood’s company inviting me to join SpectreVision Radio. It felt like a sign.”
A sign it may have been, yet Jo was nevertheless initially hesitant as to whether to accept the offer.
“I mulled it over for quite a while,” she says. “I wasn’t sure whether I would say yes. It felt like a really big thing to step into – a huge commitment. And I’m so used to doing things by myself.
“But they assured me I would be able to just carry on doing what I’m already doing. I spoke to a producer and they said: ‘Look, we really love your podcast, we love what you’re doing, and we’d love for you to join us’.”
This was then followed by a Zoom chat between Jo and Daniel, whose production credits include such mind-bending sci-fi-horror gems as Mandy (2018) and Color Out of Space (2019), both of which star Nicolas Cage.
“I was very moved by what Daniel had to say because he’d had a number of significant supernatural experiences,” she says. “This is someone who had, until relatively recently, been sceptical. And there had then been a kind of turning point in his life when he’d had these experiences, things he couldn’t explain, and he’d started thinking: ‘Oh, my goodness, is there really something to this?’ You know, he makes these films, all of these horrors and what have you, but he’d never experienced anything himself. And then, of course, he did. And so now he feels like a big part of his work is to ensure that people – the people who watch his films or listen to the podcasts – know that this stuff is real. It has become a bit of a mission for him.
“I think Elijah has been into it for a long time,” she adds. “And I believe Elijah found it rather amusing when Daniel kind of, you know, crossed over to the dark side. [laughs] Elijah was just standing back and observing how Daniel was suddenly, like, oh, okay, so there really is something to this? Elijah and Daniel met in Hollywood, they were both in the film business, and they’ve been really good friends for a long time.”
The Zoom chat with Daniel has subsequently been made available as a Patreon-only video on the Modern Fairy Sightings Podcast, much to the delight of Jo’s many fans.
“Oh, my Patreons really loved Daniel. It was such a great chat. It really is cool to have such big names in the industry interested in my work, and especially people who have been involved in films along similar subject lines. It’s nice to know they actually believe it all, that they’re not just acting in these films – it’s something they really believe. I think that’s nice to know, don’t you?”
There are, says Jo, many other big names now involved with SpectreVision Radio, among them director Joe Dante (The ‘Burbs, Gremlins, Piranha, Innerspace) who co-hosts The Movies That Made Me podcast with Oscar-nominated screenwriter Josh Olson (A History of Violence).
“When they first invited me to join, it was the early days of the platform, they were just starting to put it all together, and so I got to watch as all these big names then came on board. I had to keep pinching myself. Most of the podcasters are American – I’m one of the few British podcasts.”
In terms of the films which SpectreVision will be producing, the aim is to create mid-budget films of the sort that were once commonplace but which are today something of a rarity.
“It seems that, these days, a film is either extremely low-budget, shot on someone’s iPhone, or they’re multi-multi-million-dollar movies, whereas back in the 1990s you used to get lots of partially funded mid-level indie films. That seems to be a lot less commonplace today, which is sad, and I think Elijah and Daniel want to bring it back.”
The move to SpectreVision Radio is all but guaranteed to increase interest in the Modern Fairy Sightings Podcast, which in turn means Jo will have even more people lining up to speak to her about their encounters, adding to what is already a sizeable backlog of interviewees-in-waiting.
“I’m now having to say to people that, although I really want to speak to them, I don’t have availability until next year,” she says. “I don’t have a team working behind the scenes like some of these big-name podcasts – it’s just me. And I think that, because this is such a sensitive subject, I can’t give my videos to anyone else to edit. The conversations can sometimes be very personal and kind of intuitive.”
The Modern Fairy Sightings Podcast videos are often accompanied by imagery that suits the stories being told, with Jo sourcing images from the British Library and elsewhere. Although this is a time-consuming task, she remains adamant that she won’t ever use AI.
“Personally, I am uncomfortable at this point in time with using AI – I’d rather a bit of a shoddy yet honest DIY attempt than AI slop, which seems to be invasive on YouTube in particular.”
In terms of guests, Jo says that some of the most recent podcasts have proven especially interesting, with Michigan-based author, musician, songwriter, poet and “lifelong experiencer of the otherworlds” Tiyi Schippers among the most fascinating interviewees.
“Tiyi is the mayor of the town where she lives and is just an amazing, amazing woman. One branch of her family – her mother’s side – are from Cork, which is where my own family originate from, and the other branch of her family are from Haiti, they’re Creole, and she also has Nordic ancestry. And so her family history alone is interesting. And from a very young age she was seeing fairies and she was supported in this by both branches of her family. It was something her grandparents had experienced, and now she has passed it down to her own grandchildren. It’s a really touching episode of the podcast. I would highly recommend it – Tiyi is an incredible storyteller.”
Another recent episode (“Circle of White Beings”) sees Jo chatting to a man named Siôn, who lives in Gwynedd in North West Wales, and who recounts childhood experiences of an encounter with a “green wisp” and a strange being that impersonated his favourite teddy, Pinky.
“That was a really popular one,” says Jo. “There is quite an equal balance of people [on the podcast] from both the US and the UK, with a sprinkling of people in Australia and some in New Zealand.”
As if her schedule wasn’t already packed enough, Jo is also currently training to be a psychotherapist (“Buddhist-based Karuna therapy”) and recently acted as associate producer on an independent documentary film, Fae Folk: A Search For Connection, in which she also appears. (It is due for release later this year.)
And then there is the aforementioned book, which will focus on both Jo’s own fairy encounters and those of others, and which, once completed, will be published by Watkins Publishing and distributed by Penguin Random House.
“One of the things I really want to get into with the book is: why?” she says. “Why now? What is happening in the world at the moment, in this strange time through which we’re all living, that is leading to so many people having these encounters?
“I want to cover a lot of that in the book, in addition to discussing the experiences themselves. Some of these encounters will have been covered in the podcast and the book look at them in more detail, while others will be entirely new and never before released.
“And, of course, I will also include my own experiences, including those I had as a child. My experience with the little green man, which is what kind of kickstarted all of this. And I will include my theories about what and who these beings actually are. This is something I haven’t properly discussed publicly anywhere and it will all be in the book.
“And I will be talking to readers about how, just maybe, they too can open themselves up to these worlds,” she continues. “I’ll discuss the mechanisms that seem to be used in these encounters, and how they relate to UFO and alien encounters as well.
“The book is taking a lot longer than I had originally envisaged, but that’s because I want to really go in-depth into it all. I want to get it exactly right before it goes out to the public. But it’s hard because I’ve got all of these different plates spinning at once and so I have to ensure I set time aside to devote myself to writing.”
Given the continued fascination in all things fae, it seems likely that, as and when it is released, Jo’s book will prove every bit as popular as her podcast.
“I’m just trying to focus on the most important thing, which, ultimately, is the people who I speak to,” she says. “Even after all these years, it is still so humbling to hear their stories, it really is.
“It is always a beautiful experience.”
*For more on the Modern Fairy Sightings Podcast, visit tinyurl.com/y8prhh2s
*For more on SpectreVision Radio, visit spectrevision.com/podcasts
‘At first I thought it was a scam email – I couldn’t believe it was really Elijah Wood’
