A Pukwudgie Sighting in Massachusetts

Sometimes people write to me about strange experiences they've had. Just a few weeks ago, a woman I'll call Mary sent me an email about a weird encounter she had while walking a dog. 

Mary lives in Norwell, and was taking care of a friend's large Labrador retriever while the friend was traveling. The dog would wake Mary up every morning between 4 and 5 am to take it for a walk. Mary would usually bring the dog to a small nearby watershed - a patch of woods and swamp - for its morning perambulation. 

Mary and the dog went on these early morning walks for a few weeks without anything strange happening, but that changed on March 1. It was pitch black, and as they walked on a road near the watershed the dog stopped in its tracks and let out a low growl. Had it seen a raccoon, or maybe a coyote? Feeling nervous about being alone in the dark with a wild animal nearby, Mary looked around to see what startled the dog. It was not a raccoon, or a coyote. It was something much stranger. 

Crouched near the woods was a small humanoid creature. It was covered in what looked like matted, black fur. Mary thought the creature stared at her with glowing green eyes, but isn't sure if she just imagined this detail. Whatever the creature was, it was something she had never seen before. She and the dog ran home. 

A few days later the dog went home to its owner, and Mary thought that was the end of her strange experience. But on the night of March 13, Mary heard some unusual sounds coming from outside her house. It sounded as though something were quietly but insistently tapping on the side of her house, or possibly on the window. At first Mary thought maybe her daughter had locked herself out of the house, but that was not the case - she was safely inside. Nervously, Mary's thoughts then turned to the small humanoid she had seen near the woods. Was it outside her house, tapping on the walls and windows?

The next day she talked with some people at work about what had been happening, and one of them suggested she had encountered a pukwudgie. Pukwudgie is a one name for the small, hairy, magical humanoids that are said to live in the woods in New England. Basically, they are a type of fairy. Not a pretty, tutu-wearing fairy like Tinkerbell, but a scragglier, rough-around-the-edges fairy. They're the type of fairy you'd expect to see in the woods around here, which are rough, rocky, and filled with poison ivy. 

Pukwudgie is something of a modern term, at least in New England. The Native Americans in New England had other names for these beings, like makiawisug, mekumwasuck, or mikumweswack. Pukwudgie was originally a word used by the Ojibwa Indians of the Midwest to describe the small magical beings they encountered, but it has since became a popular word in New England, and particularly in Massachusetts. (You can read more about the history of the term pukwudgie here.)

Pukwudgies are believed to be mischievous at best, and malevolent at worst. Traditionally, the local Native Americans believed that the little people would help humans if treated with respect. That is not the case with pukwudgies, who supposedly like to shoot people with darts, lure them off cliffs, and in general lurk around and frighten anyone who encounters them. If I can speculate, perhaps this change in behavior is because most New Englanders don't know how to treat them with the respect they deserve? 

Mary's encounter is similar to several other well-known pukwudgie encounters. For example, in 1990 a Raynham, Massachusetts man named Bill Russo was walking his dog late at night near some woods when he saw a small hairy humanoid creature, which tried to lure him into the woods. He declined the offer. And Christopher Balzano describes a very similar situation in his 2007 book Dark Woods: Cults, Crime and the Paranormal in the Freetown State Forest. A woman named Joan was walking her dog in the Freetown State Forest when she noticed someone watching her. It was a small, grey-skinned humanoid with hairy arms and a hairy head, and it stared at her with deep green eyes. After encountering the pukwudgie in the woods, Joan noticed the pukwudgie lurking around her house several times. Apparently it had followed her home. Creepy!

After I got the email from Mary, I asked Balzano if he had any advice for people who encounter pukwudgies, particularly if the pukwudgie seems to be lurking around their house. He said the best thing to do is just ignore them. Eventually, they'll go away and the strange phenomena will stop. That sounds like good advice to me. I think that the more attention you give to weird phenomena, the more of it you'll notice. You can just get sucked down the rabbit hole!

In a subsequent email, Mary told he that she had some lucky things happen to her on the day she encountered the creature in the woods. So maybe seeing it had been a fortuitous event, even if it was spooky? In the end, the situation was oddly ambiguous, much like the pukwudgies themselves. 

Tiny Cavemen, A UFO Abductee, and Fairy Folklore in Massachusetts

Did tiny cavemen live on an island in the Connecticut River in the 1970s? Let's face it, that's a bizarre question to ask. Obviously, the answer is no. And yet that claim was made by Betty Hill in 1998.

Her name may be familiar. Betty and her husband Barney claimed they were abducted by a UFO in New Hampshire on September 19, 1961, and their experiences were made into a book (The Interrupted Journey) and a movie (The UFO Incident). The Hills' story was one of the first UFO abduction narratives in America and helped popularize the concept of alien abduction.

The Hills were active in the civil rights movement of the 1960s, but are now best remembered for their UFO encounter. Barney Hill died in 1969 at the young age of 46, but Betty lived until 2005, when she died at age 85. She continued to see UFOs throughout her life, and became a beloved figure in the UFO/paranormal community. Many people came to Betty with their own stories of unexplained phenomena.

Image from Pinterest

In 1998, she contributed several of these stories, all focused on Bigfoot and set in New England, to a book titled The Psychic Sasquatch and Their UFO Connection by Jack Kewaunee Lapersitis. (The Psychic Sasquatch is one of those weird and amazing books that everyone should read.) Betty Hill claimed the following happened near Springfield, Massachusetts:

My informant said that at one spot in the middle of the Connecticut River there was a good-sized island that was uninhabited. Then one day it was inhabited by small, prehistoric-appearing people. They don't know how many of them there were, maybe 50. They lived on the island for three years. No one ever succeeded in getting near them. The police had gone out to the island on boats and had gone onto the island. These small, primitive people could outrun anyone. They would take off running and then could not be found... It is not known how they lived or what they did for food. No fires were ever seen on the island, but they lived there year-round for approximately three years. Then, just as suddenly as they appeared, they disappeared.

... Planes and helicopters had flown over the area, hoping to get pictures, but these little people - they're not really tiny people, but maybe four feet tall or so - would take off running at such speeds that no one could even get pictures of them. These prehistoric looking people would be there one instant, then would start running and in the next instant they would just disappear. 

Hill claimed she was given this information by a local police chief, who also told her the little people were naked and covered with "sparse hair."

There is a lot to unpack here. First of all, the only source for this story is Betty Hill and The Psychic Sasquatch. I don't doubt the sincerity of Betty Hill or Jack Lapersitis, but if small cavemen had really been living on an island in Massachusetts for three years I think more people would know about it. Hill claims anthropologists went to the island, and that local residents would stand on the riverbank trying to see the speedy little cavemen. I think someone would have alerted the press if this had happened.

On the other hand, these speedy miniature cave folk reminded me of New England's most famous magical little people, the pukwudgies. When I say "magical little people," I mean fairies. Like these cavemen, the pukwudgies are generally described as being small and hairy. The word pukwudgie originally comes from the Ojibwa, a Native American group in the midwest, and made its way into New England folklore via local 19th century poets like Henry Longfellow, town historians, and Wampanoag storytellers on Cape Cod. Puwudgie is generally said to simply mean "little people," but poet and folklorist John Greenleaf Whittier thought it meant "little vanisher," which certainly is descriptive of the cavemen Betty Hill discusses. 

Vintage brownie illustration found here. 

People who encounter fairies across Europe and North America often say they wear archaic or old-fashioned clothing. It is rare to meet a fairy wearing yoga pants and a hoodie. This may be because fairies represent the past, whether that's an older way of life, a culture that has vanished, or because they are actually spirits of the dead who remain nearby. The tiny naked cavefolk could easily fit into all these categories. 

Some fairies also appear naked. For example, in Scotland the fairies called brownies generally appear as small, naked, hairy beings. Brownies were said to perform chores for the humans whose homes they inhabited, but would disappear if given a gift of clothing. 

I'm not necessarily saying the tiny cavefolk on the Connecticut river were fairies or brownies, but just that the story about them has themes similar to fairy and pukwudgie stories. If there are fairies in New England, and many people believe there are, I can certainly see why they'd appear as small hairy humanoids. It just feels like the right fit for our stony, woodsy biome and occasionally inclement climate. Flowing gowns and diaphanous wings would not fare well here.  

If anyone has more information on this story please let me know in the comments or by email. I would love to know more about this topic.  

Two Encounters with Pukwudgies in Lawrence, Massachusetts

One of the nice things about writing this blog is that sometimes people share strange stories with me. Last week someone I'll call Miss S. wrote and told me about some unusual things that happened to her family thirty years ago. She said I could share them so here they are.

The first incident happened to Miss S.'s brother Bob. He was just a child at the time (maybe seven or eight years old) and was watching TV with some cousins at his grandparent's house in Lawrence, Massachusetts. They were sitting on the couch, which faced the TV but had its back towards a doorway into another room.

As they sat there watching TV Bob felt someone pull on the back of his hair. He thought it was his cousin Sandra and he told her to stop. Sandra denied pulling his hair. A few seconds later he felt it again. Again he yelled at his cousin, who still said she didn't do it. A few more seconds passed and Bob once again felt someone tug on his air.

He turned around angrily, expecting to see one his cousins hiding behind the couch. But his anger turned to surprise when he saw who was there. Instead of a cousin, he saw a little old lady with long white hair. And when I write little, I mean quite small - she was only two or three feet tall. When she saw Bob looking at her she quickly started to run towards the front door of the house. She disappeared into thin air before she reached it.

Bob was understandably surprised by this, but when he blurted out what he had seen his grandmother told him not to worry about it. "Don't worry," she said. "They're friendly.'

The second incident occurred one day when Bob's mother took him and his cousins, including Sandra, out to the movies. After the movie was over they returned to their grandparents' house. The door was locked. No one was supposed to be home so they were surprised to see through the window that a lamp was on in the living room. Sandra peered through the window to see if she could see her grandparents. She jumped back from the window and screamed "I am getting the f***k out of here!"

Bob's mother stepped up to the window and looked inside. She saw a very short old man with long white hair run out of the living room. She gathered the kids together and they quickly left.

Miss S. says that her brother and mother still talk about these two incidents. They say that in retrospect they should have known something odd was happening in the grandparents' home. They would sometimes find the tin of coffee opened and spilled onto the floor, and bottles of Coke stored in the attic opened and half drunk. When asked about these things the grandparents would just shrug and say they had rats, but can rats take the metal caps off glass bottles?

In her email Miss S. wrote that she thought these were encounters with pukwudgies, the magical little people from local Native American lore. The beings her family members saw were short, fast and had very long hair, which certainly matches some of the descriptions from local Algonquin lore. That lore also describes them as being mischievous but shy, which matches these two encounters.

It's important to note that historically Native American lore from New England includes a wide variety of little people known by many names. It was only in the late 20th and early 21st century that pukwudgie, a word of Ojibwa origin, has become widely used to describe them. I use it because it is a convenient term that people are familiar with.

I think it's also important to point out that Miss S.'s grandparents, mother, and brother are of Mi'kmaq heritage. The Mi'kmaq are a Native American group originally from Canada's Maritime provinces and parts of Maine. Mi'kmaq legends tell of small beings called the wiklatmuj or pukulatmuj. They enjoy playing tricks, including tying knots in people's hair. Was this what the old woman was trying to do to  Bob? 

It seems possible that since the grandparents were Mi'kmaq they weren't worried about having the little people in their house. They understood that they were just part of life. A family of European descent unfamiliar with these beings would probably have called an exorcist!

Most local Native American groups tried to foster good relationships with the pukwudgies. Like any neighbor, they could be malicious when treated poorly and helpful when treated right. Miss S. says she has never seen the little people herself, but when she moves to a new house she always does something her mother taught her. She leaves a small spice cake on the back steps the first night she moves in. She says her house is peaceful and her garden very productive.

It may seem strange that pukwudgies would appear in someone's house since they are usually associated with woods and forests. The grandparents' house was in an urban part of Lawrence, so it was definitely not a rural environment. However, I have found at least two other cases where a small, fairy-type being has appeared in someone's home. In one case, a house in Somerville was allegedly haunted by a troll. I've also read about a house in Weymouth that might have been inhabited by a mischievous pukwudgie. Are some accounts of haunted houses actually caused by pukwudgies instead of ghosts? That's probably an unanswerable question.

Pukwudgies in Freetown: Some Fairy Sightings in Massachusetts

Are there little magical people (fairies, if you will) hiding in the woods of New England? Most people would tell you no, but those who have actually seen them would disagree. And the fairies in these parts aren't the cute little ballerinas in tutus that you might expect. Like the landscape, they're rough and more than a little craggy.

It's only recently that legends about New England fairies have become popular, and there's a historical reason for that. 

When the Puritans came to these shores in the 17th century they brought a lot of their folklore with them. They brought their stories about witches and ghosts, and also their stories about the Devil.

This was portable folklore and wasn't specifically tied to the Puritans' old homeland of England. The Puritans thought that witches could be found among their own neighbors and friends here in the New World, and ghosts could be found wherever someone died under duress. And of course, the Devil could be found anywhere in the world.

The Puritans left behind other folklore, though, which was firmly tied to the English landscape. Stories of dragons and ogres didn't cross the Atlantic, nor did stories about fairies. Fairies were believed to reside in specific landscape features like hills or ancient burial mounds, or were attached to ancestral castles. The Puritans left those sites behind when they left England, and left the fairies with them.

Several New England writers commented on lack of fairies in New England. Sylvester Judd, a Unitarian minister of the 19th century, noted that, "There are no fairies in our meadows, and no elves to spirit away our children."

Massachusetts poet John Greenleaf Whittier wrote in a similar vein: "Fairy faith is, we may safely say, now dead everywhere ... It never had much hold upon the Yankee mind, our superstitions being mostly of a sterner and less poetical kind."

 

Nathaniel Hawthorne expressed similar thoughts. Although his novel The Scarlet Letter is full of witchcraft and divine omens, heroine Hester Prynne says the following of her child Pearl: "But how strangely beautiful she looks, with those wild flowers in her hair! It as if one of the fairies, whom we left in our dear old England, had decked her out to meet us."

Now I don't want to contradict Whittier or Hawthorne, but there were fairies here in New England. A few English settlers brought their beliefs with them, but the Native Americans who had long called this area home had rich traditions about small magical people who lived here.

For example, the Mohegans tell of the makiawisug, small beings who live under Mohegan Hill in Montville, Connecticut, while the Passamaquoddy of Maine tell stories of the benevolent nagumwasuck and the deadly meckumwasuck. The Penobscot have legends about small helpful beings called wanagumeswak, as well as more dangerous creatures like alambegwinosis, the underwater dwarf man.

Stories about these fairy-like creatures were written down in the 19th century, but didn't find a wide audience. Perhaps it's because their Algonquin language names were difficult for English speaking whites to pronounce, or perhaps it's because readers wanted stories about pretty whimsical fairies with diaphanous wings, not small hairy humanoids lurking in rivers and trees. Whatever the reason, these indigenous fairies were not particularly well-known outside of Native American communities.

That changed in 1934, when Elizabeth Reynard published The Narrow Land: Folk Chronicles of Old Cape Cod. Her book included many Wampanoag legends which were told to her by Wampanoag chieftain Clarence Wixon. Wixon was involved with the Pan-Indian movement, and actually used an Ojibwa term to describe the region's fairies to Reynard: pukwudgee. Sometimes also spelled pukwudgie, for some reason the term caught on with general readers and was even popularized in a 1980s children's book, The Good Giants and the Bad Pukwudgies.

Okay. That was a long introduction, but here's the main point of the post. Recently Tony and I went to the Freetown State Forest in Massachusetts. People have seen pukwudgies there. They are not pretty or whimsical, but are small, hairy and seemingly malevolent.

 

Christopher Balzano's wonderful book Dark Woods: Cults, Crime and the Paranormal in the Freetown State Forest contains two pukwudgie accounts. They are both kind of creepy.

In the first, a woman named Joan claims she was walking her dog in the forest on a spring day in the 1990s. Her dog ran off the path and dragged her into the woods. When the dog finally stopped she found herself staring at a strange little being standing on a rock:

She describe him as looking like a troll: two feet high with pale gray skin and hair on his arms and the top of his head... His torso made up the majority of his body and he had very short legs. His eyes were deep green, and he had large lips and a long, almost canine nose.

Needless to say, Joan was shocked to see the creature. She stared at it. It stared at her. Finally the dog ran back to the path, pulling her away from the pukwudgie.

That's a weird encounter, but here's the really unsettling part. Several times after seeing the creature in the woods, Joan woke up in the middle of the night to see it staring in her bedroom window. AAAH! The nighttime visitations finally stopped when Joan moved to another county.

 

The second account in Dark Woods is told by a man named Tom. Tom first saw a pukwudgie when he was a teenager. He had snuck out of his parents house one night to walk in the woods to clear his mind. As he walked down a path he saw a glowing light:

I noticed a dim light, like in the form of a ball, in front of me. It was white and swelled, like it was breathing... It rose to about my shoulders and then flew into the woods. 

Tom followed the light down the path until it disappeared. As he turned to head back home he noticed he was not alone. A short man covered entirely in fur stood nearby. He was about two feet tall, and had a nose like a wolf. The man ran off into the trees with an unearthly moan.

Tom was (un)lucky enough to see a pukwudgie a second time. One night he drove to one of the Freetown State Forest's parking lots and sat in his car. He turned off the engine and the headlights and turned the radio down low, enjoying the solitude.

He soon realized he wasn't alone. Standing in the darkness staring at Tom was the same little man he had seen in the woods. The pukwudgie was about 20 feet away, and he could see its eyes glowing red in the night. Abruptly the engine of Tom's car came on of its own accord, and the radio suddenly blared loudly. In a panic Tom drove home.

Tony and I did not see any pukwudgies while we were in the Freetown State Forest, although there definitely times when the woods did feel quite creepy. What would we do if we did see one? I would probably run like heck for the car. But I think I'd also be thrilled to see one of New England's own fairies.