North America as well is a land steeped in tradition, folklore and real-life encounters with its own versions of the wee folk, ranging from bipedal, hirsute beasts to perfectly proportioned human-like entities. Just as in South America, mysterious places dot the landscape in all directions. In New Salem, New Hampshire, for instance, there was also found an ancient construction of tiny tunnels which predated the Indians of the region, who claimed that they were built by “little men.”
When the Miami and Delaware Indians first settled in the area now known as the state of Indiana they found that they shared the forests and hills of their new home with some very strange neighbors. They were only two feet tall and had white skin, long brown hair and dressed in clothing woven from long grasses and tree-bark with tufts of fur and feathers sewn in.
According to native tradition, they lived in huts made of grass and tree branches, but also made their homes in the many caves along the riverbanks. The strangest things about these creatures was that they possessed the ability to vanish right before one’s eyes like a spirit. The Miami called them Pa-i-sa-ki, the Delaware referred to them as Puk-wud-jies. Both these names translate to mean “little wild people of the forest.” In the Algonquin dialect, Puk-wud-jinies, meant “little vanishing people.”
A race of tiny, white-skinned beings with supernatural abilities inhabiting North America before the Indians? Surely not, you say. Such would be tantamount to no less than historical heresy. But it’s true nonetheless. One old Indiana story noted by author Tim Swartz, was alleged to have taken place in the early 1800s and concerned a Methodist minister who became fed up with his congregation’s fascination with the Puk-wud-jies. Grabbing up an axe, he set out to chop down the tree that, according to local tradition, sheltered the entrance to the strange diminutive people’s underground kingdom.
He had struck the tree only a couple of times, the story goes, when a hole appeared at its base and out came a large number of small, angry little fellows who surrounded the man of the cloth. The minister stared in disbelief as the little men pounced upon him, threw him bodily to the ground and cut his throat using a flint blade. But the preacher survived to tell the tale, it was said, and never again scoffed at tales of the wee folk.
In 1927, ten-year-old Paul Startzman of Anderson, Indiana was hiking near an overgrown gravel pit when he came within thirty feet of a little man no more than two feet tall. He had thick, dark blond hair and a round, pinkish-colored face, Startzman recalled some years later. The little fellow was also barefooted and wore a long, blue gown that came down to his ankles. In a flash the being had turned and disappeared into the surrounding woods.
Personally speaking, I first became interested in the diminutive enigma many years ago in my youth as I wandered along the creeks and ridges overlooking the Ohio and Green Rivers in Western Kentucky. My brothers and I spent many an idle day back then hunting for Indian artifacts in the cultivated fields in Henderson County and it was in the mid-1980’s when I found my first pygmy flint, a perfectly crafted leather punch that was only a quarter of an inch in length.
Several years later, and a few miles away, my brother and I found another. This one was a tiny projectile point and had a thin vein of quartz crystal running diagonally through it. It was smaller than the fingernails of our little fingers, and perfectly crafted in its proportions. On first inspection both the artifacts appeared to be of Amerindian make, only far too small to have been of any use to, or even constructed by, normal sized hands regardless of culture.
When examined under a magnifying lens, the percussion and pressure flaking was executed so exquisitely, and yet were so minuscule, that I could scarcely imagine the miniature tools that would been required to make them or the tiny hands that must have held the tools. In Ireland and Scotland, it is a commonly held belief that flint arrowheads such as these once belonged to fairies, and farmers endow these artifacts with unfailing medical powers.
I have also beheld, on two separate occasions, very small human-looking footprints in the middle of well plowed fields that were only three to four inches in length, or about the size of an infant’s. I didn’t find a line of them, just a single print on both occasions a long way from where any children would be. This was proof enough, at least to me, to at least seriously consider the possibility that the many tales of diminutive inhumanoid entities, long proclaimed as mere ‘legend’ and ‘myth,’ might be based on something more substantial.
However, most non-European societies hold the very idea of ‘Little People,’ of any description, to be a whimsical one at best. The ‘rational’ mind cares little that beings such as these have been seen and reported by humans, in one context or another, since the beginning of history and, as a phenomenon, is one shared by nearly every culture in the known world. Moreover, these diminutives are still being seen regularly and, while I’ve never personally observed a being of such tiny stature with my own eyes, there are plenty of other people who have.
The Native American Indians of the Northwestern tribes also know the “little people” well. There seem to be two different types of diminutive inhumanoids which figure into their legends. One is an apparently intelligent race of small fairy-like beings resembling their European counterparts, and the others brutish, hair-covered beasts; half-human, half-animal. Along various rivers in Washington and Oregon many rocks have been found with mysterious picture-writings painted onto their surfaces.
The origins of the rocks are a complete mystery to both the Indians and archeologists, but elderly members of the Yakima tribe believed that the writing was done by a mysterious race of tiny men called the Wahteetas. This race never grew more than two feet tall. They lived in the cliffs and clothed themselves in robes of rabbit hair. They flitted about among the rocks of the riverbanks at night, according to Yakima legend, searching for smooth stones on which to paint their enigmatic symbols. They painted with four different colors; red, blue, white and yellow.
“They used to watch over the pictures and never let them grow dim,” one man said in 1912. “Often the Wahteetas repainted the rocks during the night. If you rubbed the picture paintings with any kind of coloring or any kind of mud, the next morning they would be all bright and fresh as ever. They were the laws of the Yakima, painted there by the ancient little people.” To see the Wahteetas, they said, presaged certain death.
The Arapahos were also familiar with the little people. The beings, according to their traditions, were less than three feet tall, incredibly strong despite their size, and much feared because of their reputed taste for human flesh. According to Arapaho legend, these cannibalistic devils perished in a great forest fire many, many years ago. Both the Shoshoni and Bannock tribes maintained traditions of similar cannibalistic dwarfs living in caves in the Owyhee Range in Idaho, and in the mountains of the Salmon River country.
On the other hand, the three-foot-tall dwarfs of Flathead tradition were considered a peaceful race, farming the land the Flathead Indians later claimed as their own, and tending herds of tiny black horses. These beings eventually retreated into the mountains, it was said, to live in caves. They slept during the daylight hours, only coming out of their caves at night to dance and play and go about their business unmolested.
The Coeur d’Alenes tribe of the Rosebud lake area recognize similar dwarfs of kindly disposition. They lived in the bushes and trees and were fond of practical jokes. Persons who approach too close to them are said to fall into a swoon and often awaken hanging upside down in a tree or missing some of their clothing. The little people dressed in brown suits and wore brown pointed hats. These beings made a sound which was always attributed to them, Bigfoot enthusiasts take note; the sound of sticks beating on tree trunks.
“In the evening my family would sometimes hear sticks beating against the trunks of trees,” one Coeur d’Alene said. “My grandparents would say; “The dwarfs are hitting the trees.” We children would be afraid.” At other times the family would be unable to sleep because of the dwar
fs’ incessant wailing all through the night.
The “Stick Indians” of Nez Perce tradition are also said to make similar odd sounds. These beings lived deep in the forest, wore deer skins and were very strong. They would occasionally kidnap people and livestock. The Stick Indians do not like being seen and can, in fact, render themselves invisible to avoid it. Those who have seen them however, often endure a painful swelling of the face. They describe the diminutives as ugly creatures, with small eyes, wrinkled faces and long unkempt hair.
“One time when some people were huckleberrying near Mount Adams,” another Indian said, “they locked their baby in the car, for safety. No one else was in the car. While they were picking berries, they heard the baby cry. They went to the car and found that the baby was gone. Then they heard it cry from another direction. They went over there, and there they found it. The little people had taken the baby out of a locked car. This did happen.”
The settlers of the town of Detroit, Michigan were said to have been plagued by a fiery-eyed, diminutive inhumanoid during the 1700s. Even the town’s founder, Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac, was not immune to the attentions of this frightening apparition. The entity was considered a bad omen to behold, and Cadillac lost his entire fortune soon after his sighting.
On May 15th, 1913, such a being appeared to a group of children in Farmersfield, Texas. It stood only about a foot tall and had green skin, they said. Unfortunately, a pack of neighborhood dogs also spotted the tiny inhumanoid and attacked the entity, tearing it to pieces before the children’s eyes. I see no mention as to the possible fate of the diminutive’s remains. Perhaps the dogs devoured them completely.
In 1956, another diminutive entity was seen by a man named Tant King. King was walking in a field one night near Edison, Georgia when he was terrified by the appearance of a “little naked hairy man about three feet high.” The diminutive had come out of the woods and was walking along the edge of an old fence when it was seen. King immediately called some friends, who later found footprints and strips of white, curly hair about three inches long on the fence. The hair was later analyzed by a local crime lab and found to be human.
In the late summer of 1959, another strange diminutive, this one much more sinister-looking, appeared in Oshkosh, Wisconsin to eight-year old P.C. Hodgell. Fifty years later she still often thinks about what she saw in that old, junk-filled barn, and still doesn’t know what it was. Something was standing “...by the ladder. Something darker than the shadows around it. A black, squat silhouette with a pointed head or perhaps a hat, gripping a rung of the ladder with one hand, red eyes staring back at me.” Then, in the blink of an eye, it was gone.
In January 26, 1965, seven teenaged boys reportedly chased three silver-suited diminutive beings across a muddy field in Brands Flats, Virginia. The mud didn’t seem to slow the beings down at all, the youths claimed, and they left no footprints.
For the remainder of that year we go to South America.
South America has always been plagued by high strangeness events of every sort, including sightings of bizarre diminutives. These beings figure prominently in local legends throughout South America. The Tzeltal Indians of Mexico, for example, have their legend of the Ikals, three feet tall, black, hairy dwarfs who live in caves from which they periodically emerge to attack or kidnap humans. They render their victims helpless, it is said, by paralyzing them and are associated with spherical flying objects.
1965 was a very good year, it seems, for South American diminutive inhumanoid encounters. On August 1st of that year a fifteen-year-old boy, Alberto San Roman Nuez, told police in Lima, Peru that he had seen a saucer-like object while taking in the wash from the roof of his home. The craft landed near him, Nuez said, and disgorged a three-and-one-half foot tall being with “greenish lights on his skin that made him look like a frog.”
Terrified by the outlandish turn of events, Nuez ran for the stairs. The object then shot out a beam of red light which enveloped the terrified teen for a moment, then flew away in the direction of the ocean. Terribly relieved that he was not instantly vaporized, Nuez headed straight for the police, who later found four circular marks, each about a foot in diameter, on the roof.
Thirteen days later on August 14th, railway worker, Joao do Rio saw a flying saucer land while he was fishing near the village of Cruzeiros, Brazil. A tiny man, only twenty-eight inches tall, then got out of the craft and approached him. The being announced in perfect Portuguese that he was from “another world,” then authorized Rio to tell whomever he pleased and handed him a small metal disk. The diminutive entity said that he would return, then reentered the craft and flew away. The disk was turned over to authorities for analysis; never to be seen again.
A large number of people reportedly observed two glowing dwarfs emerge from a flying disc in Cusco, Peru on August 20th. On September 12th, the Lt. Governor of Santa Barbara, Peru declared that he had seen two tiny inhumanoids walking in the snows near Lake Ceulacocha. He had heard a “deafening noise,” he said, and then the beings were gone.
In Arequipa, Southern Peru, two witnesses claimed that they narrowly missed running over a tiny, one-eyed entity on September 29th, 1965. It was only about thirty inches tall, they said, and appeared to have silver and golden stripes around its body. A few minutes later a UFO appeared and flew along with their car for some distance. Other witnesses in the area that night reported seeing a low flying aerial object as well.
Another peculiar dwarf-like, hairy diminutive reportedly stalks the thickets of Bella Vista Itapua, Paraguay. It was allegedly observed numerous times there by a local farmer in March of 1993.
Many inhumanoid reports mention entities with reddish-colored skin. A red-skinned, clawed, grinning dwarf was seen by several youths in Crewe, Virginia in 1968 and again in 1992, though reports of the Virginia Red Devil are conflicting, with some describing it as a four-foot-tall ‘satyr’ and others as whitish-colored creatures that walked on all fours. Such is often the case when several different varieties of inhumanoid creatures choose to manifest in one location and Virginia, as we shall see later, seems to be a favored haunt.
The Dover Demon
One of the great ‘classics’ of cryptozoology, the Dover Demon case, was first brought to public attention and written about extensively by my friend, the world-famous cryptozoologist Loren Coleman, and concerns a rather odd-looking diminutive entity seen in 1977, by multiple witnesses in Massachusetts.
“The bizarre affair began at 10:30 on the evening of April 21,” Coleman writes, “as three seventeen-year-olds, Bill Bartlett, Mike Mazzocca and Andy Brodie, were driving north on Dover’s Farm Street. Bartlett, who was behind the wheel, spotted something creeping along a low wall of loose stones on the left side of the road. At first he thought it was a dog or cat until his headlights hit the thing directly and Bartlett realized it was nothing he had ever seen before.”
It was, according to him, a small, frail-looking inhumanoid staring back at him with two large, round eyes shining brightly “like two orange marbles.” It had an oversized, watermelon-shaped head, fully the size of the rest of its body, resting atop a thin neck, and long, spindly arms and legs with large hands and feet. It stood three and a half to four feet tall, Bartlett later said, and had what looked like a baby’s body with long, thin arms and legs. Its skin was hairless, peach-colored and rough-looking, “like wet sand paper.” The thing was carefully making its way along the wall, curling its long fingers around the rocks as if to steady its steps. The entire sighting lasted only a few seconds.
Before Bartlett could say anything, he had passed the scene and, unfortunately, neither of his friends had seen the creature. When he finally told them what he’d seen they urged him to go back, but the entity was long gone. Both Mike and Andy later told Coleman that their friend had seemed “genuinely frightened.” Bartlett dropped the two boys off and returned home where he told his father of the incident, then retired to sketch the creature he’d observed, as seen above
. Meanwhile, the thing was about to make an appearance to yet another teenage witness.
Around midnight, John Baxter, 15, left his girlfriend’s house at the south end of Millers High Road and began walking up the street. Half an hour later, after he had walked about a mile, John saw someone approaching him. As the figure was quite short, the youth thought it must be a friend that he knew and called out a greeting; but there was no reply. It was a dark and overcast night and John could see little more than a shadowy form as it continued walking toward him.
Finally, the figure stopped and so did John. He yelled; “Who is that?” but was again met with only silence. He took one more step toward the figure, which suddenly scurried off the road and down into a shallow, wooded gully. John followed it into the gully then stopped. He could see the thing standing in silhouette near a small tree thirty feet away, its feet “molded” around the top of a rock. It was leaning toward the tree with the long fingers of both hands entwined around its trunk, as if for support.
Coleman writes:
“The creature’s body reminded John of a monkey’s, except for its dark, figure-eight-shaped head. Its eyes, two lighter spots in the middle of the head, were looking straight at John, who after a few minutes began to feel decidedly uneasy.”
The boy was looking at something he’d never seen before, and didn’t have a clue what it might do next, so he backed carefully back up the slope, heart pounding in his chest, and “walked very fast” down the road to the intersection where some passing motorists picked him up and drove him home.
The Inhumanoids Page 10
