The Inhumanoids

by Barton M Nunnelly

  The next day Bill Bartlett told his friend, 18-year-old Will Taintor, of his own sighting. Little did he know that Taintor would catch a glimpse of the creature himself as he was driving fifteen-year-old Abby Brabham home around midnight that evening. Abby was the first to see it as they drove along Springdale avenue. In the headlights along the side of the road was a creature that appeared to be crouched on all fours and facing the car. Its body was thin and monkey-like, they later told Coleman. It had a large, oblong head with no nose, mouth or ears. Furthermore, it had hairless, tan or beige-colored skin that was lighter around its glowing green eyes.

  Loren Coleman was able to interview all of the principle witnesses involved and was convinced of their sincerity. So were all the parents of the witnesses and several police officials, who all considered the witnesses reliable. Loren was reminded of the curious inhumanoids known to the Cree Indians of eastern Canada called the Mannegishi, an alleged race of little people with round heads and no noses who were quite fond of playing jokes on weary travelers. They were said to have long, spidery arms and legs with six-fingered hands and to live between rocks in the rapids.

  Ever the observant investigator, Loren also noted that the area had a history of unexplainable occurrences. Back in the 1600s, on Farm street where the first Dover Demon sighting took place, a man allegedly claimed to see “his Satanic Majesty” as he was riding through the area on horseback one day. The area had also experienced UFO activity in 1969.

  One afternoon in June of 1995, diminutive inhumanoid witness Daniel Klemsrud and his girlfriend were enjoying a walk in a wooded area near Boscobel, Wisconsin when they suddenly felt like they were lost. Daniel couldn’t explain how this might have happened, he later told author Brad Steiger, as he had often hiked in the region and knew the area well. His girlfriend was getting irritable, which was unfortunate, he admitted. The reason he’d brought her out there in the first place was to confess his secret love for her, hoping that a walk through the woods would encourage her to reciprocate his feelings, and this unexpected turn of events made for an awkward predicament.

  He was in the process of assuring her that he simply could not have gotten them lost when the afternoon sunshine quickly turned to gloom. The sky had suddenly and unexpectedly become quite dark and cloudy, casting the woods through which the two walked into even darker shadow, as if night were about to fall. “As if things weren’t confused and puzzling enough,” Daniel claimed, “there now appeared a heavy mist that made it extremely difficult to stay on the trail.”

  The woman then started yelling that they were completely lost and what a mistake she’d made by going on a walk with such an idiotic jerk; and Daniel knew that their love seemed doomed to failure at this point. Then, “suddenly, from all around us, we could hear the sounds of giggling, like small children laughing at play. The laughter was almost musical.”

  The two noticed a nearby clump of bushes that was shaking and, thinking that they’d luckily happened upon the children of some nearby campers who could lead them out of the woods, Daniel walked to the bushes. But things didn’t turn out quite as he expected. “I swear that as I pulled back the branches, I caught a glimpse of two smallish, yet perfectly proportioned, men in greenish jumpsuits scurrying into a hole,” he said. “They were only about three feet in height and I saw a shiny buckle on the boot of one of them as he dove into what appeared to be a tunnel.”

  Then, according to Steiger’s account, the man noticed that they were standing at the base of a rather large hill which was completely devoid of vegetation. His friend then asked if this was an old tribal burial ground. “I think it’s a fairy mound,” he told her. “You know, the Wee Folk, the Nisse, Elves, the Forest folk.” This caused the girl to go into a fresh diatribe against not only his intelligence but his sanity as well.

  Daniel knew now that their relationship was at and end and, responding to some inner urge, he reached into his pocket, drew out some stray coins and threw them into the opening of the tiny tunnel. Immediately then the clouds lifted, he said, and the sunshine beamed down revealing the path that they had missed just minutes before, allowing the two to make their exit.

  Daniel was later grateful to the Wee Folk for the encounter, which had revealed the girl’s true feelings for him and saved him later heartache. He also admitted that he had encountered the Wee People before. “I saw them often as a small child,” he stated. “I can remember once when I was very ill with chicken pox, one of them appeared by my bedside and gave me some elixir to drink from a small vial. My fever broke that night, and I soon had my strength back.”

  Daniel Klemsrud is not alone, it seems. For reasons far beyond the reach of mortal ken, some humans apparently gain the favor of these tiny entities from childhood which continues on throughout their entire lives. Betty Kirkland from Illinois is another such person. Her story first came to public attention in 2001. While she was living in a suburb of Chicago. Kirkland, a married thirty-three-year-old with two little girls aged eight and six, claimed that she had been favored by the fairies since age three. She first saw the wee people on a farm in central Illinois where she spent her childhood, she recalled, when she was only three years old.

  “I saw a little man and a little woman picking apples that had fallen from the trees in our orchard. They were taller than I was at that age, so I thought, at first, that they were just some very short people my mother had allowed to enter our orchard. What really caught my attention is the way they were dressed. With their conical hats and bright green and red costumes, I thought they wore very strange clothing for farmers.”

  As is the wont of a small child, Betty innocently approached the couple, who went right on about their business of picking up apples, inspecting them, and placing the good ones in the colorful cloth bags they carried. Out of childish curiosity Betty then asked them what their names were and a look of shock came over their faces.

  The little man’s mouth dropped open and the woman exclaimed in a shrill little voice, “Oh no! She can see us! She’s not supposed to be able to see us!” The man then gave a chuckle. “Sure, she can see us,” he said, “She’s got the gift. See the glow around her wee head?” Betty remembered the woman asking if she was a “changeling.” She later found out that, according to fairy lore, a changeling is a human-fairy hybrid that they sometimes left in place of human babies which they kidnaped and took to their subterranean kingdom.

  The odd little man introduced himself as “Acorn” and the woman as “Fluff.” Fluff hade made a little curtsy when Acorn introduced her, which struck Betty as being very cute. “I had never seen a woman do that before,” she said. “Later that night, when my mom asked me to wash my face and hands for supper, I curtsied. Mom laughed and wondered where I had learned to do that. I told her that a fairy named Miss Fluff had shown me how, and mom just laughed all the harder.”

  As is nearly always the case, children such as Betty are almost never believed when they confess to parents their interactions with “imaginary” friends and are usually discouraged from such silliness in the future. And so, the children keep the events to themselves, but the fairies still appear; just as they did to Betty. She enjoyed the company of Fluff and Acorn throughout her childhood, but it didn’t take her long to figure out that they were invisible to most other people. Many times they appeared to her as little lights which often danced with the fireflies through the darkness.

  Soon they had assumed the roles of “guardian spirits,” looking out for her welfare and keeping her from harm. Once, when she was young, her two fairy guardians had distracted an angry bull from butting her when she inadvertently wandered into the pasture during a mating ritual. When she was ten years old, they chased away a stray dog that had wandered onto their farm. It was foaming at the mouth, possibly rabid, and advancing on her when the fairy lights swirled around its head and pulled it away by its floppy ears.

  “Less than a year later, they saved me from drowning in the creek that ran near our farm,” Bet
ty recalled. “I had seen some older neighbor kids jumping off the banks into the water, and I had incorrectly assumed the depth as being much less that it truly was. And to make matters worse, I was alone that afternoon.” Following the other kid’s examples, she leapt from the bank and became panicky when she found that she couldn’t touch the bottom, thrashing and sputtering helplessly about in the muddy water.

  “I would surely have drowned,” Betty stated, “if Acorn and Fluff had not hovered over me and pulled me to the bank. There was no one else there to help me, but my fairy guardians were there to help me.” Although the fairies appeared less and less as she grew older, they sometimes still appeared to Betty when she was feeling ill or depressed. She would often hear their child-like laughter, which never failed to elevate her spirits.

  Leprechauns

  Everyone is familiar with the Irish legends of “little green men,” the Leprechauns, who were said to wear tight-fitting brown or green clothing, frequent rivers and lakes and live in underground tunnels with their hoarded riches. Not only did they steal shiny objects but, according to lore, from time to time they were said to kidnap children as well, who were never seen again. Just as with the Fairies, it was considered ill luck to encounter them with woe sure to follow. Like many other inhumanoids, Leprechauns are said to be able to leap great distances, disappear into thin air, and to have the power to put humans under some kind of enchantment, or spell.

  “I can still recall the time in my childhood when I lay in my bed and watched out the window in fascination as a rather smallish man with a conical hat stood on his tiptoes to another window and watched my parents as they moved about in the kitchen of our farmhouse. After several moments of seemingly enthralled observation on both of our parts the little man must have felt an uncomfortable sensation of someone watching him.

  He turned to look at me over his shoulder, and I got a good look at his tiny, pinched features in the light from the kitchen window. He smiled, shook his head; and then I am not sure what happened, but it seemed that he simply disappeared. At the time, I was convinced that I had seen a brownie or an elf. In my later years, I had regarded the episode as the single most vivid dream of my childhood.”

  -Brad Steiger in, “Revelation: The Divine Fire.”

  But was it a dream? Artist, musician and friend, Kim Pompey Del Rio had a very similar strange experience in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in 1978 when she was thirteen years old. She’d become very ill with complications from the mumps and lay, in serious pain, on the couch for over a week. She writes:

  “...One afternoon my mom came into the living room to check on me. As she left the room I noticed something strange on the windowsill across from me. There, standing on the sill of one of the twin, stained-glass piano windows were two little people! They were about eight inches tall. They had greenish skin and clothes. At least, I thought they had on clothes, as the color of their faces and hands were lighter than the rest of their bodies, giving the appearance of a suit of sorts, with attached shoes.

  They both had on pointy hats; that, or their heads ended in curvy points toward the backs. They had big black eyes and wide open black mouths with no visible teeth. They had tiny noses, but no ears that I could see. Their limbs were long and thin, as were their fingers. The tips of their feet ended in a point just like their heads. They were identical to each other except that one seemed a little taller than the other.

  The one thing that really disturbed me was not the fact that I was looking at two little green people, it was that these little green people were laughing at me! One was bent at the waist, pointing at me. And even slapped its knee. But although they were laughing, I never heard them make a sound. I don’t recall how long I looked at them. I also don’t recall what happened after that. I may have fallen asleep; or something may have distracted me. My brother would often tap on the window from outside and make funny faces, trying to cheer me up.

  I think they were fairies, perhaps elves? I often wonder if I saw them because of the pain I was in. Now as an adult, whenever I get real sick I find myself looking around the room, hoping to catch another fleeting glimpse of a little green person.”

  Oregon’s Tiny Terrors

  On the opposite side of the coin, as we have seen, many encounters with the Little People can be quite frightening. Just ask the Bredlow family who, while vacationing in Oregon in 1997, underwent a terrifying series of events involving malicious diminutive inhumanoid creatures. They had arrived at the quaint little cabin, nestled among the high cliffs along the Oregon coast overlooking the Pacific Ocean, in July and were looking forward to spending the next two weeks relaxing and enjoying the outdoors. But it wasn’t meant to be.

  “Almost from the very first moment I set foot in the cabin, I felt a strange vibe coming from one of the storerooms in the back,” said Margie Bredlow, 47, music teacher. “I think Violet, our little one, who just turned eight that May, felt it as well. She held ‘Muggins,’ her stuffed kitty doll, up to her mouth and whispered into its torn cloth ear, “I hope we don’t have to sleep back there. I hope we get the bedroom by the kitchen.” Loyd Bredlow, 48, Margie’s husband and also a teacher, and her oldest daughter, DeAnne, 13, all helped unpack quickly, intending to go on a hike through the woods before dark.

  As they were walking cautiously along a narrow path that led to a waterfall, “a strange kind of mist settled around us. It was very frightening. We couldn’t see a thing; or each other. The girls had been walking ahead of us, and we called out for them to answer us and walk back toward us at once.” DeAnne responded almost immediately and was soon back among them, clinging together in the thick, dark clouds which had settled around them; but there was no response at all from Violet. They called for her for several minutes with no answer. Just as panic was setting in, the strange mist quickly dissipated and they heard Violet’s voice calling out from behind them.

  “We all turned around with our mouths open in wonder,” Margie said. “There she was, walking up the trail right behind us. We all knew that it was impossible for her to have walked by us as we were clustered together on the narrow path, shouting our lungs out for her...” When asked how she had gotten behind them, Violet answered, “They carried me through the air and set me down again. It was pretty scary but they promised they wouldn’t hurt me.”

  On further questioning young Violet claimed that she didn’t hear anyone yelling for her, and she had seen no fog. Margie later commented that she should have made everyone pack up and leave immediately. There was something very strange about the cabin and the woods around it. “I felt it,” she claimed, “but I couldn’t define it so I told myself not to allow my imagination to run away with my reason.”

  That night after supper she was puzzled to see Violet preparing two plates from the leftovers of the meal. When asked what she was doing Violet answered that “they” must be fed twice a day or they would become very angry with them and make them leave. When asked who “they” were, the girl replied; “The two little people who carried me in the air above the trail and who live in the storage room.” Thinking her daughter was playing pretend, she told her to go ahead, and walked with her to the back storage room. Violet opened the door and sat the plates down just inside the room, then knelt down to await the diminutive’s arrival.

  After a moment’s waiting she said, “They say they won’t eat while we’re watching.” She held her mother’s hand as she stood up, and they hadn’t taken more than one or two steps when the door to the storage room suddenly slammed noisily shut. Margie couldn’t help but jumping and letting out a little shriek, which brought Loyd on the run.

  When asked what was going on, Violet told him that they were feeding two little people in the storage room. Assuming that she’d meant chipmunks or wood rats or some other “cute” animal, he chided her for feeding vermin, then opened the door to have a look. Sure enough, there sat two plump-looking rats eating the leftover food from the plates. Then both Margie and DeAnne looked inside and saw the rat
s for themselves.

  Loyd located and grabbed a nearby broom. “Please daddy,” Violet said, “don’t hit them with the broom! You’re going to make them very, very mad!” Just as Loyd, broom in hand, reached the door, it inexplicably slammed violently shut and, try as he might, he could not get it to open again. At length, he gave up and walked off mumbling that the door must’ve locked itself from the inside. He set the broom aside and went out to sit on the front porch-swing. As soon as he was out of sight the door mysteriously opened on its own and the two paper plates, licked clean, sailed out onto the floor.

  “They liked your potato-salad and Jell-O, Mommy,” Violet said, “but they really wanted more of the baked beans. Oh, and they don’t really like to be called rats, but they can look like anything we want them to.” When asked how she knew what they were saying, the youngster replied that she could hear them “inside her head,” the same way they had spoken to her when they first met her on the trail. Her mother then inquired what the two looked like when they didn’t look like rats. “Like two little people,” Violet replied. “But weird little people with funny, crinkly faces.”

  The next few days seemed idyllic. Margie and Violet secretly fed the little people twice daily and all was peaceful. Loyd caught up on some reading, she worked on music compositions and the girls busied themselves reading or working puzzles. None of them knew that Loyd had set out a rat trap that he’d purchased in the village earlier that day.

  Then, just before sunset on the fifth afternoon of their stay at the secluded cabin, Margie heard the terrible sound of metal slapping wood and the scream that accompanied it. She dashed into the room, realizing with dread that the scream was coming from Violet, who was standing there with her hands pressed against her temples.