Research Article.

This article examines storytelling events as contexts in which propositions about the fairies and folk healers associated with them were appraised and contested. It considers the evidential rhetoric employed in narratives that argued for and against the existence of fairies and the powers of wise folk who trafficked with them. Particular attention is given to narratives of negative evidence including stories that depicted individuals who believed they have had supernatural experiences as deluded, either by their own imaginations or through the chicanery of others. As will be seen throughout, traditions of belief and traditions of disbelief were competing discourses that came into collision, interpenetrating and modifying each other in a dialectical relationship that informed individuals as they negotiated their own attitudes about the fairies and fairy healers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]