Two Tales of the Catskill Gnomes

The Catskill Mountains are situated 160km north-northwest of New York City, and reach an elevation of 4,180ft within the 179km stretch of the Hudson Valley region they occupy. These misty peaks are mired in folklore - especially that which discusses encounters with so-called Little Folk - tricksterish diminutive humanoids of somewhat unpredictable moral alignment. Stories of these enigmatic imps are so prevalent that there's even one involving Henry Hudson (the man who gave the region its name) encountering a group of the strange sprites in 1609. However, the stories we are going to be discussing today took place comparatively much more recently. First, a girl is saved from potentially joining the ranks of Missing 411 victims by two dwarfish entities, and then a man steps into another world while out hiking in the mountains...

## Saved by the Little Folk

Jill was only five years old when she and her parents went to visit her cousins in the Catskill Mountains one weeked in the mid 1940s. Her aunt lived in a sizeable home just off the road, surrounded on three sides by thick forest into which the children had been told never to go for fear of them getting lost. Her parents were busy having tea on the covered front porch of the house, which extended the full length of the home - while she and her three cousins were playing in the back yard. Jill spied some butterflies fluttering about near a fishpond, and with all the whimsy expected of a child of her age she ran off after them - leaving behind the others and following the beautiful insects into the forest. As was virtually inevitable, she soon lost sight of the butterflies and discovered that she had ventured too far into the woods. She now realised that she couldn't find her way back home, and I can imagine that panic started to form in her stomach like a heavy rock.

The family back at the house soon realised that Jill had vanished, and a search party was soon formed. By late afternoon on that fateful day, over forty people from the area had joined this ever-growing effort - but nobody was able to find any trace of the missing 5-year-old. Dusk was approaching at this point, and although the searchers had been calling out to Jill for hours, they never heard a response. Her parents were hysterical with panic, but they knew deep down that nothing more could be done for their daughter until the morning came. Just as the search party was preparing to disband, Jill came toddling out of the woods, with a smile on her dirty face. She ran to her mother and explained what had happened to her with eyes full of wonder.

She had been following the floating butterflies among the labyrinthine trees, and when she lost them she found that she had lost herself as well. As she tried searching for her aunt's big house, she only found herself wandering deeper and deeper into the seemingly unending forest. At one point, when she sat down to briefly take a rest, she heard people calling out her name - but they seemed very far away and when she tried to walk towards the voices she only became more confused. Tears were running down her cheeks. As the sky darkened, she came across a small clearing with a fallen tree in it, and so she sat down and started eating the candy bar she had remembered was in her pocket. It was unnervingly still in the clearing, and the only sound she could hear was the breeze gently moving through the silent trees.

It was then that she looked up and saw two small figures - described by her as '*dolls*' - standing beside a rock and looking at her. These diminutive humanoids were dressed in shiny green clothing, wore small hats and had wavy silver hair which came down to their shoulders. She smiled at her new companions and offered them some candy, but the entities didn't respond to this gesture. Tearfully, she asked the dolls if they knew where her aunt's house was - and presumably to her shock they nodded as if they understood exactly what this meant. They motioned for her to follow them - and so she did just this through the darkening forest. Dusk was now upon them, and as it became darker and darker little balls of blinking coloured light appeared to float around the dwarfish humanoids as they walked. While walking, the gnomes appeared to be moving ever faster - and behind them Jill was baffled to find that she too was moving at an unnaturally fast pace. When she was older, she would describe this movement as being like when a film is sped up. Just moments later, the dolls came to an abrupt halt and pointed towards Jill's aunt's house - which was now just about a hundred yards away. She saw the search party gathered around the house, and turned to thank her diminutive helpers but found that they had vanished. Shrugging off the weird experience as a 5-year-old would be wont to do, she ran to her mother and explained about how she had seemingly been guided to safety by dolls.

## The Disappearing Forest

The perfectly-named Ned Grimm loved going out for walks in the Catskill forests around his home. He was a devoted hiker, and so felt no need for maps. On his many long and illustrious rambles he would often take photos. However, on June 29th of 1977 he would go on a hiking trip that would severely challenge his preconceived notions about the nature of reality. He drove up a twisted, overgrown little dirt road near the western boundary of the Catskill range before parking his truck and setting off into the woods for a relaxing day of getting back to nature. He was about 100 yards into the forest when a strange tingling sensation suddenly came over him while he was walking near a large rock formation. This feeling only lasted for a few seconds, and so he was able to more or less shrug it off.

As he continued on his merry way, he started to notice that things weren't quite right. It had previously been overcast, but now the sky was clear and had a strange greenish tinge to it. He weaved his way among the tall trees, all the while spotting more and more unfamiliar vegetation, and noticed that the area was much more open than he had previously thought. He soon came to some enormous granite cliffs where he could've sworn none had previously been. A narrow, twisting canyon snaked its way through these monolithic cliffs, and Ned decided to venture up this rocky trail to get a better view of his surroundings, thinking that he must just be lost. He walked up this canyon for several minutes until he heard some eerie music coming from around the next corner. Pressing himself against the granite wall and creeping forwards, he took a peek around the bend.

Sitting on sizeable boulders near a small waterfall were four diminutive humanoids playing the unearthly music on flutes. There was a fifth entity nearby, filling a jug with water. Ned blinked in shock, and double-checked to make sure that he wasn't imagining the bizarre sight before him. He then remembered that he had a camera with him, and so he pulled it out and snapped some pictures from his hiding spot. Just a moment later, the fifth little man returned to the group, now with a jug full of clear water, and the pint-sized posse retreated up the hill and out of sight.

Now confident that he had objective proof of his baffling experience, Ned retraced his steps across the strange landscape, walking for about an hour until he caught sight of his vehicle through the trees. In that instant, he felt the bizarre tingling come over him once more - and when the feeling left him he could now see that the sky was once again overcast. Turning around, he found that the surrounding area now looked familiar again. He felt as if he had been gone for approximately three hours, but when he checked his watch he found that only half an hour had elapsed since he left the truck. He drove home in shaken silence, knowing that something truly unexplainable had just happened to him. His wife didn't believe a word he said about it, of course - and although he had thought that he'd managed to gain indisputable evidence of his experience - when the film was developed the photos that were supposed to contain the little men only showed a collection of out-of-focus shadows with a green tinge about them. All the other photos he had taken outside the '*phantom forest*' came out perfectly clearly.

## Source

'Little People' by Ron Quinn - This book is a veritable treasure-trove of Catskill gnome stories. Expect like the two above from this book in the very near future.