All I could hear were the words [he] had actually used sixteen years earlier, but they left me in no doubt that as a child my friend had spoken to something sitting on top of a gate which had replied to him as a pixie.
Marc Alexander, Enchanted Britain
[Halloween originated as a Celtic religious festival, the Celtic Day of the Dead. Upon the night of November Eve the gates to and from the Other World were thought to yawn so wide that residents of our own realm might blunder through them. All manner of supernaturals, including the human dead, were likelier to drift out. Our contemporary customs of trick-or-treat and masquerade surely derive from celebrations of welcome to the family dead or playful imitation of the garish beings that trooped out with them. Since Celtic supernaturalism is dominated by its fairy-beings, Halloween could be considered a night of the Fairies. Enter, “the Little People.”]
1
When I started my study of the upstate paranormal, I came to it with preconceptions like those of every non-specialist. Face it: Most of us get our impressions of supernatural and paranormal subjects from pop sources like TV. I’ve had surprises. One of my biggest shocks, though, and one I still can’t get over, is the overlap of ancient world-folklore into contemporary paranormal report–and into Western New York.
In a typical year I interview hundreds of people about paranormal topics in the upstate. Ghosts and hauntings top the field. While there are only a few trackable UFO-or Bigfoot reports in Erie County, most blocks in Buffalo have hauntings by the handful, at least according to the testimony. I usually prefer the term “apparition” to “ghost,” since it holds less baggage and is a little truer to its meaning: visual phenomena.
You’d think these spontaneous apparitions we call ghosts would be reported in the general mix of humanity, past or present: 10% toddlers, 10% seniors, the rest in between, and an equal mix of male and female. Think again. Two ghostly types dominate my upstate files. I doubt you’d find much different in any broader survey of the Northeast.
The folklorists call the adult woman ghost, “the White Lady.” She’s not always Caucasian and not always even wearing something white, but some reported apparitions are on the pale side, and that’s become the working term. There are so many Little Girl Ghosts about the upstate that I just write “LGG” in the notepad when I hear yet another report. The LGG is more numerous even than her spectral aunt but less likely to come with a back story.
Other common forms in my files include The Old Chief, The Old Soldier, the Animal-Ghost (always dogs, cats, and horses), the Little Boy Ghost (rarer than his sister), the Children, and the Old Farmer.
Surely this is a study in itself: the apparition-forms. Surely the common ones are archetypes with meaning to the unconscious mind. Some combination of mood, moment, and site, too, has to factor into the way any apparition is interpreted by a witness. Think of a Rorschach (inkblot) test–or a car crash. The impression varies by the perceiver.
The occasional sighting of the Little Girl Ghost, the Old Soldier, or any of the other forms is almost always just a glimpse involving no interaction. It’s a spark, not a flame; a note, not a song, and typically no sign whatsoever of the survival of human consciousness and identity after the death of the body. It seems to have no intention of its own and to represent no attempt at communication. I know you expect that from TV, but this is the reality, at least in the pattern of reports. There are apparitions that seem to do that, typically the Crisis Apparition or sometimes the Near Death Apparition, but they are rare, and reported experiences are very easy to tell from the typical site-apparition.
Other forms I consider apparitions include the cryptids: Lake-snakes, Bigfoot, and the bizarre morphs I call “AAFs”: Altered Animal Forms. I can’t tell you what any of them truly are, but until somebody hauls one in I will believe them all to be purely visual phenomena. They suit the definition of apparitions: You see them, nobody can catch them, and then they vanish.
There’s one shocking apparition-category that steps right out of folklore and seems all its own: The Little People. It’s one of the rarest, but it usually comes equipped with a Hell of a lot more baggage than your typical ghost-sighting. It touches down quite firmly in Western New York.
2
The Native Americans of the upstate–the Iroquois/Longhouse Confederacy, the League of Six Nations–had their own legends of a fairy-culture living around us in the natural environment. The old-timers among them had three tribes of these beings, the Little People. There were those associated with the seasons and the woods, most likely to be benevolent towards humanity. A second group was associated with the lakes and streams, and more likely to be pranksters. Then there were the “Hunters” whose job was to keep watch on the hunt and the natural balance, including keeping the infernal monsters where the Creator put them–below ground. It’s more intricate than that, but as a teaching model this analogy may work.
My Native American friends have a guarded belief that the Little People of the Northeastern woods are still around. Something like them is reported now and then, and it’s not only Native Americans who see them.
It was the author and journalist Edmund Wilson [Apologies to the Iroquois (1959)] who noted that the Little People mentioned in the 20th century were almost always the ones he called “Healers” and “Tricksters,” as if the “Hunters” had either dropped the job of keeping the lid on Hell or else were fully absorbed in doing it. As he so often did, Wilson hit it on the head. Most of the Native people I know these days describe only these two. They are also very private about it. If you have a Native friend, don’t ever push him or her to talk about Little People. I’ve had good friends among the Tuscarora, the Seneca, and the Algonquin, and they would go only so far about the Little People in my presence.
3
If you ask me where the Little People come from or why humans should report seeing them any more, I can’t answer you. I take the reports of them as curiously consistent mysteries. If you ask me about their precedents in folklore, I can comment. A good bit of ink has been spilled over it.
The magic of one society is often the religion of a culture they’ve marginalized. To cut a colorful subject brutally short, the prevailing theory for the origins of the Fairies of most Western literature and tradition is that they are the diminished gods of the Celtic people.
Stereotyped as “the Native Americans of Europe,” the Celts were a genetically diverse folk sharing lifestyle, culture, language, a few fundamentals of temperament, and rough allegiance to supernatural/religious belief. For much of history they impressed other cultures as mystics and warriors with a spiritual connection to the natural environment.
The Celts never formed an empire. They were not urbanized. They lived in tribes, not nations, and those tribes lived in communities and villages. Due to their shared culture, tribal lifestyle, and spread-out turf, the Celts had religious/supernatural figures who were cultural, national, and local.
The cultural and national gods to the Celts were likely to have become the fairies we most commonly envision, the ones who live in communities under kings and queens. They’re the most coherent, and easier to get a grasp on. They had sometimes exquisitely nuanced rules of interaction with humans. Most likely this is why we’re left with our impressions of them as diminutive. They shrank in imagination due the influence of the supplanters of the Celtic cultures, if not the influence of Christianity.
Other folkloric fairies come to us as one-offs.
As have the Native Americans, the Celtic people supernaturalized their landscape. Streams, fountains, hills, and groves were likely spots to have their lesser god or goddess, probably analogous to the Greco-Roman nymphs and naiads. That spring has a female spirit. That cave has a gnomelike being. The localized deities, that fountain-spirit or hill-troll, became the Solitary fay: the dull Brownie; the shoemaking Leprechaun; the ever-morphing Pooka, the savage river-horse, the Kelpie; the murderous water-hags, Peg Powler, Jennie Greenteeth, and Meg Mucklebones (as in Ridley Scott’s 1985 film Legend).
We don’t have the same chance to parse the roots of the Little People for the upstate Iroquoians. Maybe customs of the Little People were lifted from some other Native culture. Some Seneca have attributed their witchcraft, for instance, to some of the nations they supplanted in Western New York, including the Andastes, the Sac, and the Kahquas.
Some ethnographers have liked to suggest that the Little People tradition among the Six Nations could have been acquired by contact with Irish and Scottish immigrants to New York. I doubt that. Traditions concerning the Little People were well-developed by the first contact with the French, Dutch, and English. The Six Nations, too, have a medicine lodge, sort of a shamanistic cult, devoted to tributing and even talking to these protectors of the natural world. Things like that don’t develop overnight. Archaeologists have found thousand-year-old burials containing items associated with the Little People–small, shiny crystals, little faces on plaques, and miniature tools and weapons. They have been taken to indicate that the individual buried there had been a member of the Little People society.
Besides, there’s no reason to look off the continent for precedents. Traditions of Little People of some sort are found in many Native American cultures, and on all the continents. The tradition with the Iroquoians was in full form by the time the Euros arrived, and it seems to have become quite streamlined in the past century.
4
Everywhere they are found in world tradition, the fairies are associated with three things.
They are figures of nature. They live, most of them, in the natural world. They move freely in the woods and wilderness. They live with the animals. They talk to the animals.
They are associated with the human dead. It’s not as if, when you die, you turn into a fairy. It’s more like the Fair Folk inhabit a portion of the Other World that’s at least close to the realm of the mortal departed. The fays often have information about the departed elders. Sometimes people presumed to have died have actually been taken by the fairies–or went joyfully.
They have a connection with human children. They come to children. They talk to children. They protect children. And some of the time… they don’t.
The pattern is no different on the Niagara Frontier. There’s a body of folklore to confirm that.
5
When adult witnesses report sightings that could answer to the Little People of folklore, they are often abashed to be reporting their sighting, and they have no idea what to make of it. They think they are witnessing some kind of ghost, or an utterly inexplicable anomaly. Somebody saw something small and it freaked them. That’s a report, not a story.
The most developed adult experience I have have ever heard is a third-hand account. As a Tuscarora artist painted one summer morning in a wooded environment, he caught something moving at the corner of his eye. Without changing position he looked to a small space at ground level between trees and cover. The sunlight fell through it, illuminating the air with dust motes and mist. A tiny humanlike creature rested on the forest floor and preened itself in the gap, joying in the moment like an animal that dreaded no predators. For up to fifteen minutes he could see the being. As the sun moved, the angle of the beam changed, and the creature faded until it was invisible. That was our friend’s only reported sighting, but it rouses questions in all of us about the witness experience. I’ve long suspected that ghost-sightings are heavily affected by material features such as light and shade. I sincerely believe that simply being in the wrong part of a room or site could affect one’s capacity to see an apparition.
Otherwise, adult experiences do tend to be one-offs, like ghost-sightings. The exception comes with certain families who have a tradition of closeness with the Little People. There are Celtic parallels.
Some clans among the Gaels–O’Donoghue, for instance, among the Irish and MacLeod among the Scots–had customs of allies among the nearby fairies, usually due to some favor done by one of the ancestors. This relationship might last generations. Celtic cultures thought their Little People gave great talents to their human favorites, too. The Scottish poet Thomas the Rhymer and the Irish fiddler and songwriter Anthony Raftery–“last of the wandering bards”–were fabled to have gained their gifts from “the touch.”
Something similar could have been afoot among the Six Nations. My late Tuscarora friend Ted Williams (1930-2005) always maintained that his grandfather had a special friend among the Iroquoian Little People. His interest and protection extended to his son, the revered healer Eleazar Williams (1880-1960), whom he helped in many ways throughout his long life.
Eleazar knew a certain tree in Niagara County that marked the fairy community that resided beneath it. To Celtic cultures this would be called a sidhe (“shee). When Ted was small and there was no one to watch him, Eleazar used to drop him off there while he did dangerous work in another part of the woods. The Little People always came out to entertain him. It was a miraculous, marvelous experience.
Seneca author and storyteller Leo Cooper (Hayendohnees, 1909-1976) grew up on the Allegany Reservation near Salamanca and Allegany State Park. In Seneca Indian Stories, he recalled a tale from his childhood. One of his neighbors was knocked cold in a late-night fistfight on the railroad tracks. He would have been frozen or flattened before morning, but a flock of little people tugged him awake and saw him home. Who knows what service one of his ancestors could have done them?
Some Celtic-style encounters come to us from the Genesee Valley. In the diary of Irish-American William Connelly of Greece, NY, is a strange entry from April 24, 1887. The night before, an Irish-American named Hugh Duffy had told Connelly that he had been surrounded by a handful of Little People during a night-time walk close to the intersection of today’s Latta and Greenleaf roads. Duffy took them for Celtic-style fairies, and they behaved as if they were. They dispersed once their leader recognized that Duffy was carrying an iron implement, possibly a pot. (Iron, not silver, was considered the true bane of magic in most of Europe.) Duffy took the experience to heart. He moved back to Ireland soon after, perhaps preferring its less-threatening fays.
In the second half of the 19th century something nicknamed “the Fairy Farm” existed in Victor, right about where today’s Interstate 90 meets and obliterates the landscape of the old Route 96 (once a Native trail). An Irish-American couple had a prosperous estate with marshy sections that sometimes gave off an eerie green glow and spooked their mostly-Irish farmhands. When a Downs daughter was born to them it was tragically assumed that she was a changeling, a sort of uncouth fairy-child exchanged for a natural babe. In ancient belief, a changeling is a fairy trickster, there with a human family only to enjoy the benefits of pampering. The true child is lost until the parents hit on just the right formula for driving its replacement back to its elfin home.
6
When reported by adults, the Little People-sightings are usually like those of the typical ghost: quick and quiet. When the Little People are reported by children, the matter gets trickier. And creepy.
Some of the eeriest stories I have ever been told involve children and their sometimes sinister little playmates. The tales are more gripping because the children involved seem too young to make up and maintain such intricate stories. In many cases, this Friend appears to know something. The children are getting information they shouldn’t have. Sometimes the apparent fairy-being is a protector and a sustaining companion. Sometimes he, she, or it is a potential kidnapper, and it’s not always alone.
A woman I’ve interviewed recalled a miraculous incident from her childhood. Out sledding on a brilliant winter day, she got ahead of her comrades and fell through the thin ice of a snow-covered pond. She was near-death from drowning and exposure when a small horde of jovial, suspiciously-small teenagers came out of nowhere. They tugged on the sleeves of her sodden snowsuit and levitated her out and over the banks where her playmates could find her. As they hauled her to safety, all she could mutter was, “The boys and girls got me out!” Her Irish-American dad talked long and hard to all the children as if he suspected that the matter was more than natural. They’d seen no signs of flying children.
My Tuscarora friend Ted Williams used to write little free-verse reflections on life that he always signed, “Love, Ted.” In one of them he recalls a message his father was given by his special friend: “Don’t forget, we’re not all good.” If testimony is to be believed, they aren’t.
Either as protectors or exploiters, the Little People can be likely to appear anywhere, even into children’s dreams. I know of a boy from Black Rock tormented by night-terrors about Little People. They merged into daytime visions, and the family was desperate. The episodes diminished and soon ended seemingly on their own, though a Seneca healer may have done some “work,” as they say, long-range and behind the scenes.
I know of a short street in East Aurora in which several children have reported Little People encounters. Two that make a story are of the unsettling variety. A four-year-old thought the Little People were dancing outside her window at night, hoping to lure her outside. The parents broke the lease and moved across town. The same street was a source of inconsolable agitation to a Downs child whenever her school van parked outside the house that had been the scene of the earlier episode. The route has since changed.
In his boyhood, Leo Cooper’s little sister used to talk about playmates no one else could see. On a day that seemed like a dream to Cooper his sister stood before him and announced that she was going off with her friends to play in the woods. She was halfway down the walk, arms out exactly as if hand in hand with small, invisible presences. Their mother looked from the house, rushed out, and took her youngest child inside.
A Seneca family told Edmund Wilson a strange story about one of its late uncles, probably from the early 1900s. A boy of ten disappeared into the Allegany woods for about four weeks. When he came back to his family he had no recollection of where he had been or how the month had been spent. He was pretty well off for a kid who’d been in the woods that long. His clothes were clean. His hair was combed. Everyone presumed he’d been taken by the Little Folk in order to save him, as they were thought to do, from some illness or danger. To the end of his life the matter remained a mystery. The man he grew into was said never to be quite right, either.
The folk of the Tonawanda Reservation have long been suspicious of a certain defunct railroad line for its occasional mystery-lights. They warn children not to play near them on certain nights since they might encounter the Little People. In the 1990s a part-Seneca boy who played on these tracks was visited at home by his new friends, tempting him to sneak outside. His Seneca grandmother launched a ceremony that involved a house-clearing, but the matter remained unsettling.
Another boy on the Tonawanda went missing for days after visiting those tracks on the wrong night. When they finally found him one frosty dawn knocking at someone’s door, he was in suspiciously good shape for a kid who’d been lost in the woods for most of a week. There was one true oddity besides that: He couldn’t speak English. He had started to speak fluent Seneca–a rare language, but the one of magic in Western New York, of witch-spells, enchanted beings, and, presumably, the Little People. It was weeks before his English returned.
7
The theme of the recurring relationship with a child takes us into the realm of the Imaginary Friend/Companion. According to developmental psychologist Marjorie Taylor, “An imaginary companion is a friend whom a child has created, talks about, or interacts with on a regular basis.” The typical age, I’m told, for this friend is 3-5. Usually when a kid gets to kindergarten, he or she gets socialized and forgets all about ‘the Friend.’
I’ve never been able to interview a child during the period of ‘the Friendship.’ Even a year or two later the child almost never remembers anything about the matter. It’s family members, typically parents and grandmothers, who remember the details.
Many children have Imaginary Friends. The syndrome is not considered worrisome by psychologists. If anything, the Imaginary Friend is taken as a sign of creativity. Some pretty successful people–like British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Irish poet W. B. Yeats–were said to have had vivid childhood companions.
Sometimes this Imaginary Friend seems almost a genius loci, a spirit of place. It can be associated with a tree or grove or spot in a landscape, and it does not follow the young subject if the family relocates. This attachment to site places it into a suspicious parallel with fairy-folklore, even in the upstate.
One would think the Imaginary Friend would be in the form of another child, but not so fast. Some have come in the form of adults. Some have had animal-like features like cartoon characters. The trick is that none of the Imaginary Friends I’ve heard of were thought of as any bigger than the child itself, and most were smaller. That to me is one of the Little People.
In 2002 I interviewed a Seneca family living on the Tonawanda Reservation whose daughters had an imaginary friend, a gnome-like being that no one but the children could see. He could make himself material and join in the children’s games. As one of the daughters aged and started to find other friends, this being got jealous. He even bit a schoolfriend that his favorite brought back to play in her room. As if abashed, he made himself scarcer afterward. I saw a pencil drawing that an 8-year-old made of her recollections of his appearance, and it was alarming. The figure was animal-like, with a big head, a mane of dark hair, and a sinister expression. He also had raccoon-like teeth.
8
I know of several areas about the upstate that are fabled as Little People zones among the six Longhouse nations. Two are in Mohawk country.
A beach along one of the Adirondack lakes once used for flint-knapping was a site of solemn ceremony to some Mohawk escorting a handful of Jesuits. Somewhere also in the Mohawk turf is a place once called, in their tongue, “Little Man Valley.” It’s near the Palatine Bridge, and I’d give a lot to know where precisely. I don’t know who’s left to ask. As a community, the Mohawk have been out of there since the Revolution.
There’s a tale from the days of the Erie Canal that some Irish diggers uncovered the burial site of a tiny human being during work near Syracuse. It spooked Hell out of them, and they nearly rioted. Fortunately, some local Native Medicine People, surely Onondaga, came in to clear it up. Some elders I know among the Tuscarora and Seneca have told me that bones and artifacts are still within the possession of the Six Nations, somewhere. A close friend has told me that he was once shown a tiny human skull. He is in no doubt that he witnessed a wonder.
In Seneca country I know of several favored Little People haunts. The three falls of the Genesee River were thought of as playgrounds for the Little People on sunny days. They like it for the joyous terrestrial rainbows cast up by the beads of spume. I’ve heard that Ga’Hai Hill near Salamanca is proverbial on the Allegany Reservation for Little People. And don’t forget that railroad track on the Tonawanda.
There are surely many more sacred and powerful places that have been lost to history. Once people are displaced–or the site is developed–you tend to lose the stories. But there are many more we can deduce.
The Little People are said to delight in the wonders of the landscape, especially queer and small ones. When works of nature look like works of the human hand, it’s a good bet that a traditionalist might regard it as a site favored to the Little People. While I know nothing about Orchard Park’s Eternal Flame Falls, for instance, from Seneca tradition, Native friends I’ve taken there remarked that it was exactly the sort of space the Little People would have preferred. A member of an Algonquin-speaking nation, the Penobscot, who visited that flame for the first time announced that he felt the Little People there. Every time I take a run through the wooded terrain along the Cazenovia Creek I spot little waterfalls that would have fit the description of “a Little People place.”
9
My goal at the start of my publishing career was to write good books about folklore and paranormal report about the upstate. It has never been to convince anyone of the validity of psychic phenomena or of any other paranormal topic. Today, it includes the purpose of illustrating that there is a rough pattern of consistency to the way disconnected witnesses across thousands of years have perceived certain subjects and that it may illustrate something innate to the mind of our species. To think that ancient tradition has no relevance in contemporary life is folly.
There may be no nation on earth in which contemporary belief in these Other-folk is stronger than it is in Iceland. There they call them, “the Huldufólk,” the Hidden People, and it’s become a feature of tourism. These hidden people aren’t all thought to be small. In that respect they resemble the great Sidhe (Shee), the high Fairies of the Irish and Scottish. Indeed, many Celtic people were taken Iceland as servants and slaves during the viking raids. They surely influenced the folklore.
Magnus Skarphedinsson is Iceland’s acknowledged expert on the Hidden People. He runs an academy in Reykjavik devoted to the Hidden Folk, and the traditions have become his life’s study. His enterprise, like mine, is a summation of generations of academic folklore and contemporary human experience. He comes to the subject of “the Hidden Folk” like someone who interviews so many startled eyewitnesses that he can’t help but acknowledge a touch of belief.
In the summer of 2017 he was at work on a documentary for an Icelandic TV network and visiting Western New York, hoping to collect Northeastern perspectives on these Other-folk. He filmed and interviewed me at the Lily Dale Assembly. His English is very good, and it was quite easy to talk to him. He asked me a barrage of questions. Three he held for the end.
Why do the Little People take children?
“I can’t tell you why or even if they do that,” I said. “I can tell you that it is something that’s associated with the Little People everywhere they exist in world tradition. In the cliche, it’s what they do, at least some of them.”
Magnus frowned and thought. The Icelandic Hidden Folk were sometimes thought to take children.
Do you know anyone who was taken?
“I know people who report people they know being taken. Disappearing for days or weeks as children.”
Did they come back… all right?
I knew instantly what he was getting at. A stream of associations went past me in a flash.
In Ireland, the insane were thought to have been “taken” by the Fair Folk; their glimpse into that Other-world in which the fairies dwell made this one to which they had returned seem drab, dull, and frustratingly slow–or too fast in the wrong ways. No wonder they would be agitated with our world or prefer to try to escape it, dwelling in their remembered visions. This may be the source of our shorthand term for being addled–“touched”–meaning, “touched by the fairies.”
This tradition about the fateful touch of the alter-beings seems muted among the Iroquoian nations, but it exists. I processed all this and smiled grimly as I replied to Magnus’ question. “Always different.”
His brows furrowed, and he stopped for a moment as if he was both troubled and yet satisfied by what he had been told, as if it fit into a pattern that had been long in forming for him.
“In Iceland we know many people we think were touched or taken by the Hidden People,” he said. “Sometimes they never come back and you don’t know what becomes of them. Sometimes a parent sees them walking off with someone strange, in old-time clothing, and runs out, and rescues them before it is too late. Sometimes they disappear for awhile and then come back. But…” He shook his head. “They are never the same.”
Mason Winfield © 2022