Faerie Well Then! Exploring the Energy Feeding Phenomenon

I was about five years old when I first noticed that other people's bodies did something to mine.

I didn't have language for it then, and it would be decades before I had instruments, but the sensation was unmistakable even at that age- certain people made me feel stronger, warmer, more awake, and certain people made me feel like something was being pulled out of me through my skin. I could feel my heart change rhythm around different people, could feel my nervous system brighten or dim depending on who was standing near me, and I learned very early to pay attention to that information even though no one around me seemed to be receiving it. I assumed for most of my childhood that everyone felt this and simply didn't talk about it, the way adults don't talk about a lot of things, and it wasn't until much later that I began to understand that what I was experiencing was not standard equipment.

As an adult, my husband Artemaeus and I began experimenting at home with scientific instruments, including a voltmeter- not casually, but in controlled and varied conditions, documenting everything, running the same tests on both of us so that we had a baseline to compare against. What the instruments showed was that my body pulls in energy from its environment in a way that Tems' does not, and in a way that, as we would later learn, the scientists who studied me had never seen before in any of their previous subjects. My field draws energy inward, like a current running in the wrong direction, and when I am in good health and reasonably balanced, this pull is strong, measurable, and consistent. We discovered this ourselves, in our own home, before anyone else confirmed it, and I mention that because it matters- this was not something a scientist told me about myself that I then accepted. This was something I had felt since early childhood, something Tems and I verified with our own instruments, and something that was later confirmed independently by a researcher who had no knowledge of our home data.

In July of 2025, I attended the Full Disclosure Now Conference in St. Pete, Florida, where I agreed to be scanned by Paul Bey of Sound Living using a Bio-Well GDV camera. The Bio-Well is a Gas Discharge Visualization device developed by Dr. Konstantin Korotkov, a professor of physics at St. Petersburg State Technical University, and it works by applying a very brief electromagnetic pulse to the fingertips and capturing the resulting photon emissions- the light that escapes through the ends of the fascial meridians- to create a visual map of a person's energy field, chakra alignment, stress level, and total energy output. It is based on the principles of Kirlian photography, it has been certified as a medical technology in Russia, and it has over two hundred published scientific papers behind it across fields including integrative medicine, psychology, and consciousness studies. It is, in other words, a serious instrument, and what it showed when it scanned me was, in Paul's words, unlike anything he had encountered before.

I was Sound Living's second client scan and their first case study. My initial readings showed a total energy of 30 Joules, which is low and indicates system-level fatigue, but my chakra balance was at 90% even in that depleted state, which Paul noted as remarkable- most people, when they are that low on energy, lose alignment entirely. My stress was very high, at 6.91. The energy field images from before the session showed visible gaps and fragmentation in the field around my body, areas where the photon emissions were thin or absent, and the overall shape was uneven and broken in places.

After a session with Eva Piko, who works as a quantum tuning practitioner synchronising a person's energy to their current state using perception and energy resonance at what Paul describes as the DNA level, my readings changed dramatically. Total energy rose from 30 to 51 Joules. Stress dropped from 6.91 to 4.04. Chakra alignment went from 90% to 97%, with an average of 5.2 Joules per chakra compared to the initial 3.0. The energy field images from after the session showed a full, continuous, luminous envelope around my body with no gaps, no fragmentation, and a richness and density of colour that was visibly different from the before scans even to an untrained eye. The energy that had been missing was, it seems, always available- it simply needed to be called in and synchronised with.

Paul's data confirmed something else, too- my body carries a negative charge, whereas all other subjects he has scanned carry a positive charge. My field does not radiate outward the way most fields do- it draws inward. My aura, my body, my energetic permeability are, in Paul's assessment, far beyond anything he has measured in any other person he has worked with. I am, by every instrument that has been pointed at me, extraordinarily sensitive to energy, to electronics, to the fields of other people, and my body responds to that sensitivity in ways that are physically measurable and, when I am around the wrong kind of energy for too long, physically dangerous.

Around people who are healthy, balanced, calm, or in a genuinely happy and excited state, I can feel my heart, skin, and nervous system responding positively, and my muscles feel stronger over time. Around people who are mentally, emotionally, or physically unwell, even when they hide it beautifully, I begin to get tired, I develop brain fog, heart palpitations, and swelling at my joints and wrists and ankles, if I am in intimate contact for more than an hour or so at a time. My body is telling me, and the instruments are confirming, that I am pulling in whatever is in the field around me, and what I pull in either nourishes me or depletes me depending on the quality of the energy at the source.

I am, in a very real and measurable sense, feeding.

If I exist in this form, doing this measurably and involuntarily and since childhood, then the question of whether other beings might do the same thing, deliberately and across much longer timescales, is not a leap of faith. It is a logical extension of something that has already been documented in a lab, and in my living room, and in my body since early childhood.

In European folklore, the faerie peoples have long been said to extract the essence or vibrational content of food rather than consuming the physical substance itself. The Reverend Robert Kirk, writing in the seventeenth century, called this essence the foyson- a Scots dialect word meaning the substance, the goodness, the essential nourishment of a thing. J. G. Campbell, collecting Highland tales, used the Gaelic toradh to describe the same concept. Katharine Briggs, in An Encyclopedia of Fairies, synthesised both sources and noted that the faeries steal the essential good out of food and leave an unnourishing substance behind them, and that animals would refuse to eat food from which the foyson had been taken and humans who consumed it were described as becoming sickly and weak. The physical matter remained. The life in it did not.

This is not a metaphor that maps loosely onto what my body does. It is a precise description of the mechanism, applied to a different kind of body.

The tradition around food offerings to faerie peoples supports this further. Across Celtic cultures, it was customary to leave out milk, cream, butter, bread, and the first fruits of a harvest, and the understanding was consistent- the faeries did not take the physical food. The food would still be there in the morning. What they took was the foyson, the toradh, the essence, and what remained was a husk that looked like food but no longer carried its nourishment. Morgan Daimler, whose scholarship on faerie folklore I respect enormously, has noted that the faeries appear to prefer food that is as close to its natural source as possible, fresh and raw and full of that life force, and that items further from their natural state would carry less of the essence they are after. This is, I think, relevant when considering what kinds of environments might attract beings who feed this way in the modern world, and I have written about that at some length in my recent piece for Eerie Expeditions, "What the Fluorescence?!", which examines why grocery stores under fluorescent lights may be exactly the kind of place where this feeding is happening today.

The man who gave us the word foyson paid for it with his life, or with something stranger than his life. The Reverend Robert Kirk was the minister of Aberfoyle, in the Scottish Highlands, and in 1691 he compiled what may be the most detailed firsthand study of the faerie peoples ever committed to paper- a manuscript he titled The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns and Fairies. Kirk did not write as a skeptic or a folklorist at a safe distance. He wrote as a man describing a neighbouring civilisation, calmly and without ambiguity, the way you might describe the customs of a village down the road. In his own words, some of the faerie peoples have bodies "so spungious, thin, and delicate, that they are set by only sucking into some fine spirituous Liquors, that pierce like pure Air and Oil," while others feed "more gross on the Foyson or substance of Corns and Liquors." He was the first to use that word in print, and he was describing, with seventeenth-century precision, exactly the mechanism I have been talking about- a body that feeds on essence rather than substance, on the life in the food rather than the food itself.

On the evening of May 14, 1692, a year after completing the manuscript, Kirk walked up to Doon Hill behind his manse, a place known locally as a fairy hill, and collapsed. His body was found, and a funeral was held, but the people of Aberfoyle did not believe he was dead. The legend that arose, and that persists to this day, is that the faeries took him for revealing their secrets, and that his coffin was filled with stones rather than a body. According to the tradition, Kirk appeared as a spectre to a relative shortly afterward, saying that he was not dead but a captive in Fairyland, and that if his cousin Graham of Duchray would throw an iron knife over the apparition at the christening of Kirk's posthumous child, he could be freed. Graham was too shocked to throw the knife. Kirk, the story goes, remains with the faeries still. Katharine Briggs, collecting folklore in Aberfoyle in the 1940s, recorded that locals said if you crossed the hump-backed bridge near the fairy hill, you would sometimes feel a burden on your back- the soul of Robert Kirk, begging to be released.

The changeling tradition offers another view of the same mechanism, and I think it is one of the most misunderstood chapters in all of faerie folklore. In the old stories, when a faerie child was left in place of a stolen human baby, the changeling was almost always described as sickly, wizened, and wasting- constantly hungry but never thriving no matter how much it was fed. The parents would pour food into this child and watch it thin and weaken regardless, and the conclusion the folklore drew was that something was wrong with the baby, that it was not truly their child. But if foyson is the mechanism- if certain bodies are built to feed on the essence of food rather than the substance- then what the changeling stories are describing is not a sick child. They are describing a child whose body cannot extract nourishment from physical food because it was never designed to, a child that needs the foyson, the toradh, the vibrational content, and human food, however abundant, does not carry enough of that essence to sustain it. The child is starving, in other words, in a house full of food, because the food it needs is not the food it is being given. Scottish folklore holds that human milk was necessary for faerie children to survive, and I think this detail is telling, because breast milk is about as close to a pure transfer of life energy from one body to another as the physical world gets.

The berry connection extends this further, and if you have been reading my work for Eerie Expeditions, this will be familiar ground. In my piece "Can't See the Forest for the Beings," I wrote about the warnings I was given by a nonhuman person I encountered in a northern forest in 2016, who told me directly that people who enter the forest to pick berries, fruits, branches, stones, or mushrooms without requesting permission first are the ones most frequently targeted for harm. David Paulides, through his Missing 411 research, has documented berry picking as one of the most persistent profile points across cases of people who vanish in wilderness areas- people disappear while picking berries, are found in the middle of berry bushes, or are found alive after days or weeks missing eating nothing but berries. If foyson is real, and if the beings of the forest feed on the essence of the wild food growing in their territory, then taking berries without asking is not a matter of manners. It is a matter of stealing food from someone's table, and the consistency of the consequences across both the folklore and the modern case data suggests, I think, that the owners of that table take it precisely as seriously as you would.

My body pulls energy from the people around me, and it has been doing so since childhood- when the energy is healthy it builds me up, when it is not it tears me down, and there is no more moral judgment to attach to that process than there is to eating. I think the nonhuman peoples who feed on foyson, or on emotional and social energy, deserve the same absence of judgment, because feeding is feeding, regardless of the body doing it.

The foyson tradition tells us that certain beings feed on the essence of things. The Bio-Well data tells us that my body demonstrably pulls energy inward in a way that no other subject in Paul Bey's experience has done. The instruments in my living room tell Tems and me the same thing. My nervous system has been telling me since before I had words for it. These are not separate facts. They are, I believe, different views of the same phenomenon, and the phenomenon is this: some bodies are built to take in energy from their environment, and some of those bodies are not the kind of body that most people expect to encounter at a grocery store, or in a forest, or in the walls of an old farmhouse on the Isle of Man.

I will have more to say about foyson, about the electromagnetic conditions that may govern where and how this feeding occurs, and about the connection between energy permeability and the ability to perceive what most people cannot, in my upcoming work for Outer Limits Magazine. For now, I will leave you with what I think is the simplest and most honest version of the argument: I know that energy feeding is real, because my body does it, and I know that it is measurable, because I have the scans to prove it, and if my body can do this, documented and verified and repeatable, then the folklore that has been describing this same process in nonhuman peoples for centuries may not be folklore at all- it may be field notes..