On 23 September 1979, a group of primary school children took an evening walk through Wollaton Park in Nottingham — and returned with one of the strangest stories in British paranormal history.
The children reported encountering dozens of tiny, gnome-like figures travelling around the park in small cars. According to their accounts, the vehicles — each apparently carrying a driver and passenger — pursued the children around the park for approximately fifteen minutes before refusing to follow them beyond its boundaries.
It sounds more like something from a fairy tale than a paranormal case, yet the Wollaton Gnome Encounter has continued to fascinate researchers for decades.
Were the children caught up in a shared imaginative experience? Was there a mundane explanation? Or does the encounter belong to that much older tradition of strange beings encountered in particular landscapes — experiences that once might simply have been described as encounters with the fairies?
In this episode, we revisit the extraordinary events of 23 September 1979 and explore one of England's most peculiar anomalous encounters.
My Special Guest Is Kate Ray
Kate Ray is a paranormal investigator and writer whose work has featured in Haunted Magazine and on television and radio. She is the author of Woolly Snotts: The Curious Case of the Wollaton Gnomes and host of the podcast Hare in the Hawthorn.
Join us as we step back into Wollaton Park and ask: just what did those children encounter that September evening in 1979?
