Strange and Stranger: Some American Fairy Encounters

I had the day off today, and spent some time organizing my books. As I was moving my musty tomes around I picked up Fairies: Real Encounters with Little People by Janet Bord, something I haven't looked at in a few years. Published in 1997, Fairies gives a nice overview of fairy lore and encounters from around the world. 

Although much of the book deals with the Ireland and Great Britain, Bord does devote a chapter to fairies from other places. The chapter is evocatively titled "Dwarfs, mummies, and little green men: Little People around the world." Bord discusses some interesting fairy encounters from the United States in the chapter. Here are a few of my favorites, in increasing order of strangeness.  

STRANGE: In the 19th century, a young man in Snowhill, Maryland, was wooing a young woman who lived in the nearby town of Pocomoke. One night he discussed marriage with her, but they argued because she was not really keen on the idea. As he rode away from her house in his wagon, the man noticed something strange. A little man wearing a green plaid jacket and yellow necktie stood near the woods. The little man smiled but didn't speak, even when the young man tried to start a conversation. Unnerved, the young man whipped his horses and rode off. Even though the horses were galloping at a good speed, the little man in green ran after the wagon and caught up to it. He ran next to the wagon, smiling maniacally at the young man. The little man disappeared once the wagon left Pocomoke. The young man believed the strange occurrence was an omen, warning him away from the young woman. He stopped seeing her and eventually married someone else. 

STRANGER: In an undated encounter from the Morongo Valley of California, a man was driving his truck when a little green man ran into the road. He braked and came to a sudden stop. As he sat in the truck, trying to figure out what he had just seen, he heard a noise coming from underneath his truck. He got out and saw that the little green man was trying to remove a protective metal plate near the radiator. The man got back in his car, drove to a nearby friend's house, and wired the plate back in place. The next day he found the screws lying in the road where the little green man had removed them. 

STRANGEST: The weirdest story comes from Farmersville, Texas. In 1913, a boy named Silbie Latham and his two brothers were out cutting cotton when their dogs started barking wildly. The boys ran to see what was upsetting the dogs.

What they found was a little man about eighteen inches tall, and dark green in colour. He wasn't wearing any clothes, but his body looked like a rubber suit, including a hat that looked like a 'Mexican hat.' As the boys looked on, the dogs jumped on the little man and tore him to pieces. The boys saw that he had human-looking internal organs, and red blood. Afterwards, the dogs avoided the spot where the remains lay rotting in the sun, and they seemed frightened. Next day, when the boys went to the place again, there was nothing to be found, not even a bloodstain (Janet Bord, Fairies: Real Encounters with Little People (1997), p.71)

Many years later, in 1978, Silbie Latham told his story to a staff person at the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History. The staff person said that Latham clearly believed the story to be true, and rejected the staff person's suggestion that the little green man had just been a large frog. 

That's really an insane story, right? Things must be bigger and weirder down in Texas, because Bord does include a few stories from Massachusetts in the book, but they're not nearly as crazy as that one. For example, she discusses the Dover Demon, the infamous humanoid cryptid seen in Dover, Massachusetts on April 21 and April 22, 1977 by several teenagers. The first person to see the creature was Bill Baxter, age 17, who was driving down a wooded road with two friends. He saw a creature that looked like this:

That drawing is the actual one Bill made that night. He claimed he saw a creature about the size of a baby, with long spindly limbs and fingers that wrapped round the rocks. Its eyes glowed bright orange in the car headlights. His two friends did not see the creature, but three other teenagers did, including John Baxter, age 15, who was walking home from his girlfriend's house. Baxter drew the following picture:

The creature was dubbed "The Dover Demon" by cryptozoologist Loren Coleman, and the name stuck. The Dover Demon has become pretty famous, and is one of those creatures that has never really been pigeon-holed or satisfactorily categorized. Was it one of the Little People, as Janet Bord suggests? Was it an extraterrestrial creature of some kind? Or was it all just a hoax? There's no clear answer, and no one saw the Dover Demon again. 

Janet Bord includes a couple other encounters from Massachusetts, and unlike the Dover Demon they involve beings that are more obviously fairies. In the spring of 1974, teenaged Jane Woodruff was walking to high school in Lexington with a friend when they saw something - or rather someone - sitting in patch of weeds on the side of the road. It was a leprechaun.

'Did you see that?' we exclaimed in unison. Surprisingly enough, we both described the leprechaun the same way: green clothes, a long thin curved golden pipe between his lips and a flopped-over conical cap (Janet Bord, Fairies: Real Encounters with Little People (1997), p.73) 

A year later, Woodruff and a friend named Orin saw hundreds of small fairies dancing in a field of blue wildflowers in the town of Ashby. The fairies were only around 5 inches tall. Although the thought of encountering hundreds of fairies is a little unnerving - what if they swarm you? - Woodruff's stories are very gentle compared to the others.

In Fairies, Bord evaluates the many possible theories about what fairies might be. For example, some people think they are really extraterrestrials, some think they are the remnants of an earlier and smaller human race, and others theorize they could perhaps be the spirits of the dead. Bord reviews all the different theories, and concludes that there's really no strong evidence for any of them. And yet people still continue to encounter them, in stranger and stranger ways. 

Orgiastic Gnomes Terrorized a Massachusetts Family in 1895

I want to thank Simon Young and Chris Woodyard of the Fairy Investigation Society for telling me about the following bizarre story. 

Here's a trigger warning - there is sexual assault involved. 

*****

Newspapers in 19th century America often printed some pretty outrageous stories. Publishers wanted to sell papers, and sometimes the stories that sold best were about weird supernatural phenomena, like this one about a family persecuted by goblins. 

The story, which was printed in the July 6, 1895 issue of The Cincinnati Enquirer, begins by describing an abandoned house in a village in Worcester County, Massachusetts. The house is "sadly dilapidated, with ragged roof and windows, in an inclosure, overgrown by brush and weeds, at the mercy of the elements, for nobody enters its creaking doors nor approaching it nearer than necessity demands. To old and young alike it is the abode of mystery and dread—of specters to torment and vanquish the strongest man!"

Many years ago a family named Dane lived in the village. They were prominent members of the community with ancestry dating back to the Puritan era. The Danes lived a respectable and unremarkable life. One day Mrs. Dane was home alone with a servant when the crockery and dishes began to fall off the shelves. At first the two women were puzzled, but they grew scared once the dishes were thrown at them by invisible hands. Even the broken pieces on the floor flew about the room, cutting the Mrs. Dane and the servant. When the men of the family returned home that evening the poltergeist activity occurred again with greater ferocity, knocking over chairs, bureaus, and mirrors. 

Up until this point the story is a classic haunted house story of the kind that has been told in New England for centuries. But it gets weirder. 

The Danes decided to leave their house and stay with their neighbors, the Grahams. The weird phenomena follow them. The Grahams' house is filled with the sounds of wood being chopped, furniture breaking, and strange voices issuing threats. This goes on for a while, until one night during a thunderstorm all hell breaks loose. 

During the storm the families' candles are mysteriously extinguished and the house is plunged into darkness. But the Grahams and Danes are suddenly not alone. Illuminated by flashes of lightning, they see that the house is filled with monstrous, foul-mouthed gnomes: 

When lightning projected vivid flashes into every nook and corner of the Graham domicile it was found to be peopled with an innumerable multitude of gnome-like creatures, with large eyes and noses, perpendicular mouths, a superabundance of hair on heads and chins, and complexion of bright green. These monsters laughed grimly and made threatening gestures. As an evidence that they prided themselves upon their hideousness the most grotesquely hideous among them were the leaders of their orgies, and gave the word of command, supplemented by voluminous profanity (The Cincinnati Enquirer, July 6, 1895, p.6)

The Danes decide to leave the house, hoping that the hideous gnomes will follow them and spare the Grahams. The gnomes have other plans, though. All the members of both families find themselves unwillingly propelled into their beds where they are unable to move. Then - there's no other way to say this - the gnomes rape everyone. 

Then began an orgy of grosser kind than can be risked in a description for the public eye. Truthfully might these devoted people have felt that “Hell is empty and all is devils here,” for in the bottomless pit no darker devilments are devised. The house was suddenly illuminated by phosphorescent gleams, making the green gnomes still greener, and at once their acts were of the grossest and most utterly indescribable obscenity. Those old tales of phallic orgies in Pompeii seem to have been rendered tame and semi-decent in comparison... (The Cincinnati Enquirer, July 6, 1895, p.6)

At one point the gnomes also whip their female victims with "illuminated wires" and two of the women "carried the marks of the devil’s flogging as long as they lived." Yikes!

The gnomes disappeared when the sun rose, but they returned to the house every time there was a thunderstorm to torment the Danes and Grahams. They turned bread into rats and meat into snakes. They threw a blood-like fluid onto people that caused festering sores, and threw real human blood on the walls, permanently staining them. 

The Danes and Grahams held a prayer meeting to exorcise the evil gnomes. The little monsters failed to appear during the next thunderstorm, but the Grahams' house was instead pelted with boulders that smashed the windows and lodged in the fireplace. During the same storm a "luminous apparition" also appeared in the sky, denouncing the Puritan witchcraft trials of the 1600s. 

The article ends inconclusively. The Dane house is destroyed by lightning and villagers see green gnomes dancing in the flames as it burns. The Graham house becomes abandoned and is eventually destroyed. But it's not clear what happens to the two families or the gnomes, or even which haunted house is being referenced at the start of the story. 

There's a lot to think about here. It's interesting that the story appeared in an Ohio newspaper. If it had appeared in a Massachusetts paper readers would have wanted more details, like the village's name or the years when it happened. They would also have suspected it wasn't true. But perhaps to an Ohio reader Massachusetts was a distant land where people used to hang witches and weird things happened*, or at least a place where people told strange stories like this one. 

Parts of Ohio were settled by New Englanders, so it makes sense that a story like this appeared in The Cincinnati Enquirer. And some aspects of it do seem authentically New Englandy to me, like the poltergeist activity (which has been reported in this region for more than 300 years) and the connections to the Puritans and the witch trials which are alluded to. 

The weirdest part of the story obviously is those evil, hyper-sexualized green gnomes. There are plenty of local stories about fairies and other Little People, but nothing like this one. I'm going to assume they came from deep inside the author's imagination. At least I hope so. 

*OK, both of those are true. 

A Little Green Man for Christmas

Here's a weird story I first read in Joseph Citro's great book of folklore, Passing Strange.

The place: the woods of Derry, NH, a small town near the Massachusetts border.

The time: December 15, 1956. Fifty four years ago!

A local man was out in the woods, cutting down Christmas trees. He was alone, and as we all know when you're in the woods by yourself things can get spooky. Usually there's no reason to be afraid, but in this case there was.

As the man looked up from a tree he had cut he saw something strange. Really strange.

Standing near him was a little green humanoid. It was about two feet tall, with a big head and large floppy dog-like ears. It had two slits for a nose, and like a reptile it's eyes were covered with protective membranes. It was naked, and had stumpy arms and legs and toeless feet.

The man watched the creature for about twenty minutes, and then tried to capture it. The little green man became terrified and started screeching so loudly and hideously that its would-be captor ran off. I don't know if he took his trees with him, but I kind of doubt it.

Since this encounter took place around Christmas time I'd like to think the creature was an elf, or maybe the Grinch's baby.

We'll never really know what it was, but Derry historian Richard Holmes has traced this story back to its original source, some letters between Derry resident Alfred Horne and UFO researcher Walter Webb. Horne was the man who actually encountered the little green man, and since he wrote to a UFO researcher I guess he thought it was an extraterrestrial of some kind.

This story reminded me of two other stories. First, Derry is the home of Tsieneto, the fairy that allegedly helped Hannah Duston in her escape. I've never read a description of Tsienneto, but maybe she had green skin and snake's eyes.

Second, twenty minutes seems like a long time to watch a scary little humanoid in the woods, but a woman in Winhall, Vermont who encountered another small (but hairy) humanoid said she stared at him for forty minutes. It was almost as if she were in a trance.

The lesson I take away from this story? Buy your tree from a tree farm!