The Fairy Investigation Society (also known depending on date and person as ‘the Faery Investigation Society’, ‘the FIS’, ‘the Fairy Investigation Society’, ‘the Fairy Investigating Society’, ‘Fairy Lore Society’, ‘the Fairy Research Society’, and ‘the Society for the Investigation of Faery Fact) was founded in 1927 and continued to operate to just before the Second World War under the leadership of Quentin Craufurd. Its members were fairy believers and most had sympathies with theosophy, seeing fairies as ‘elementals’. The FIS started up again following on from the war, after perhaps ten years of non-activity. Soon after its refoundation, in 1950, an energetic woman from Nottingham, Marjorie Johnson became secretary to the society and writer of the FIS newsletter. At this date, the FIS had just over a hundred members including such famous names as Walt Disney, Lord Dowding, Edward Gardner, Walter Starkie, Daphne Charters, Ola Cohn, S. Jackson Coleman, Ithell Colquhoun, Marion Crowe, Geoffrey Hodson, Douglas Hunt, George Phar Legler, Nancy Price and Wellesley Tudor Pole. Five years later the FIS undertook its most ambitious post war project. In 1955 Marjorie Johnson and the celebrated Scottish folklorist Alasdair Alpin MacGregor began a survey of modern fairy belief, writing letters to various newspapers and asking for reports of fairy sightings: a report that regrettably has never been published in English. Then, in later years, the society was run by Leslie Sheperd (from his home at Blackrock, Ireland), finally, falling into abeyance for a second time in the early 1990s.
In 2013, the writers of this website decided to relaunch the FIS: it is our great regret that no member of the old FIS has yet been found. The new FIS and the old FIS have important differences though though. Craufurd’s, Johnson’s and Shepherd’s FIS were exclusively for those who believed in fairies. The 2013 FIS is a secular version of the same; that is to say that it is for all those who have an interest in fairylore, be they believers or ultra skeptics. Membership is free of charge and all applications should be sent to fairyinvestigationsocietyATgmailDOTcom. The aim of the society is threefold.
i) To create a website that will gather together sources, links, bibliographical references and discussions on fairies and related supernatural creatures and make them available online free of charge, or, in the case of our electronic pamphlets, for a nominal sum.
ii) To establish a bi-annual FIS newsletter with a collection of all interesting fairy links from the web and references to any new publications on fairies and fairylore.
iii) To run in 2015, sixty years after Marjorie Johnson did the same, a ‘fairy census’ of all those who have had fairy experiences, a census which will subsequently be published online.