III - Little Girl Lost
This story was told to me by a lad from our town, who I'll call David. It happened in the mid-nineties, when his family were living on the outskirts of the town, in a house with a beautiful garden.
One morning, a friend of his mother’s, let’s call her Veronica, popped by to visit with her young daughter, Maria. They sat together in the front room, chatting over coffee and eating cakes. After a while Veronica went to the bathroom at the back of the house and Maria followed her. When she returned the little girl did not.
“Where’s your daughter?” asked David’s mother.
“I thought she was here,” Veronica replied.
“No, she went with you!”
So they began calling the girl, “Maria! Maria!” When there was no reply, they started to search the house, but she was nowhere to be found. Then they looked in the garden, calling the girl’s name all the while, yet still they came up with nothing. So they went and knocked on the neighbours’ doors, and they looked in their gardens too, and still there was no sign of the girl.
By now Veronica was getting quite distraught. “OK,” said David’s mother, “Let’s call the police.” This they did, and the police informed the local radio station who announced that a little girl had gone missing, gave her description, and asked anyone who spotted her to call the police.
The hours passed, and Veronica was frantic with worry. Late in the afternoon, the police received a phone call from somebody at the other end of the town. They had seen a girl matching the description given on the radio. The police came, and sure enough it was Maria, and happily she looked fine.
So they brought her back to her mother, who sobbed with relief on recovering her daughter. Of course she asked Maria where she had been, and what she had been doing all this time. “Well,” said Maria, “I followed you when you went to the bathroom, and then I went out into the garden. When I was there, a little man appeared and asked me if I wanted to play with him. So we’ve been playing!”
And that was all the explanation there ever was of the girl’s strange disappearance, absence and reappearance right on the other side of town.
NEXT: Face to face with the Little People!
Wednesday, September 8, 2010
Wednesday, June 30, 2010
In The Land Of The Little People: Part 2
II – The Mystery Drummer
I haven't seen the Chaneques, but I might have been the victim of a couple of their pranks. One night I was staying at a friends’ house, in the countryside not far from our town. They have a workshop that consists of a lower floor, where they make drums, with wooden stairs leading to a wooden upper floor where they store the drums when they are finished and waiting to be sold. I slept there, alone, on the upper floor. I laid out my sleeping mat and sleeping bag, turned out the lights, and got in. My friend had already gone to bed inside the house, and everything was silent.
After lying in the dark for about fifteen minutes or so, I still hadn’t got to sleep, when suddenly I heard a loud noise, “Poom!” It was the sound of somebody hitting one of the drums hard. I froze and held my breath to listen carefully to see what would follow. Next I heard an extremely soft creaking sound, as if a very small person indeed were treading on the wooden steps, and then another, and that was all.
I lay quite still, listening intently, and trying to think of an explanation for this. When an adult human climbs the stairs, even if they try it barefoot and tread very gently, it is impossible for them not to cause every board to creak quite loudly on the way up and again on the way back down. What could it have been? A rat perhaps, falling off a shelf, and landing on one of the drums before scampering away? I hadn’t heard any sounds that resembled scampering though, just two very soft creaks. Maybe the cord that holds the skin tight on one of the drums had snapped, causing the sound – but then what about those creaks?
The next morning I examined the drums that were on the floor at the other end of where I’d been sleeping. Firstly I noticed that there were no shelves above them, nor anything overhanging form which a rat, or anything else, could have fallen onto them. I also found that none of them had a loose cord, all of them were quite tight just as they are supposed to be.
Over breakfast I told my friend what had happened. “Oh,” he said, “that must be the Chaneques. Another friend who slept in there saw one once! And my neighbours’ children sometimes play with them, they usually see them in the trees up on the hill over there.”
So that was that. There never was any ‘logical’ explanation for what I heard. Only the Chaneques!
NEXT: Little Girl Lost
I haven't seen the Chaneques, but I might have been the victim of a couple of their pranks. One night I was staying at a friends’ house, in the countryside not far from our town. They have a workshop that consists of a lower floor, where they make drums, with wooden stairs leading to a wooden upper floor where they store the drums when they are finished and waiting to be sold. I slept there, alone, on the upper floor. I laid out my sleeping mat and sleeping bag, turned out the lights, and got in. My friend had already gone to bed inside the house, and everything was silent.
After lying in the dark for about fifteen minutes or so, I still hadn’t got to sleep, when suddenly I heard a loud noise, “Poom!” It was the sound of somebody hitting one of the drums hard. I froze and held my breath to listen carefully to see what would follow. Next I heard an extremely soft creaking sound, as if a very small person indeed were treading on the wooden steps, and then another, and that was all.
I lay quite still, listening intently, and trying to think of an explanation for this. When an adult human climbs the stairs, even if they try it barefoot and tread very gently, it is impossible for them not to cause every board to creak quite loudly on the way up and again on the way back down. What could it have been? A rat perhaps, falling off a shelf, and landing on one of the drums before scampering away? I hadn’t heard any sounds that resembled scampering though, just two very soft creaks. Maybe the cord that holds the skin tight on one of the drums had snapped, causing the sound – but then what about those creaks?
The next morning I examined the drums that were on the floor at the other end of where I’d been sleeping. Firstly I noticed that there were no shelves above them, nor anything overhanging form which a rat, or anything else, could have fallen onto them. I also found that none of them had a loose cord, all of them were quite tight just as they are supposed to be.
Over breakfast I told my friend what had happened. “Oh,” he said, “that must be the Chaneques. Another friend who slept in there saw one once! And my neighbours’ children sometimes play with them, they usually see them in the trees up on the hill over there.”
So that was that. There never was any ‘logical’ explanation for what I heard. Only the Chaneques!
NEXT: Little Girl Lost
Tuesday, June 29, 2010
In The Land Of The Little People: Part 1
I - Introduction
The town where I live has grown a lot over the last few years. However, there is only one building that is four stories tall, and a few that have three, the rest are all low buildings of only one or two floors, which are usually shorter than the trees that stand here and there around the streets between them. In the centre, almost all the houses are of the old colonial style – high, stone-framed windows, protected by iron grilles, regularly spaced along the front, big wide double doors of heavy wood in the main entrance archway, and gently sloping roofs of earthenware tiles that jut out across the whole pavement, to shelter passers-by from the torrential rains in the hurricane season.
What is more, you don’t need to walk very far from the centre to come across patches of undeveloped land, still covered in bushes and undergrowth, and between the centre and the newer outlying neighbourhoods, you can see many fields of coffee bushes, shaded by centuries old trees. All this greenery is well within what constitute the boundaries of the town.
It should perhaps be of no surprise then, to students of folklore, to learn that our town defies the conventions of twenty-first century reductionist logic, and that we humans are not the only people who live here – there are also the little people!
I hope I haven’t just lost half my readers! Please bear with me, for I too was initially rather sceptical, then a little less so, and finally, after speaking to so many sensible people who have not only witnessed the little peoples’ pranks, but have actually seen them, and even conversed with them, I have to admit that things may not be as we have been brought up to believe in our shiny, steel, plastic and neon, hi-tech, ultra-neo-modernist world!
Elves, Pixies, Faeries, Gnomes, etc. – we were told that all of these are but the fantasy of children’s tales. Not here! My friends and neighbours call them 'Chaneques’ and here they are as real as you or I. The number of people who tell you these stories so matter-of-factly, and with no benefit to be gained from having invented them, is so great that it is hard to deny their existence.
In fact, except for those who have moved here recently from the capital or elsewhere, everybody has some story to tell about them, if it didn't happen to them personally, it happened to their cousin, parent, uncle, friend, etc. Those who have seen them usually describe them as looking like small children, but their faces are those of old people.
These are their favourite tricks:
- getting people lost. This can happen even when somebody is on their own ranch, where they have lived all their life, and which know their way around perfectly.
- moving small children. Fortunately they don't usually take them away, and if they do they seldom keep them. Often they take babies from on top of a bed, and lay them gently down on the floor underneath the bed.
- throwing stones at people. This is not so common, but it has happened to at least one friend of mine.
- other pranks in general - moving things, hiding things, taking things away and later putting them back exactly where you first looked for them.
Remarkably similar tales are told in all corners of the globe, with the little people hiding things, taking children and generally causing mischief from Japan to Britain, to Latin America. Is it not, then, more incredible to imagine that all over the world, exactly the same fiction could be invented independently, than to accord these stories some degree of truth?
Whatever your opinion, I hope you enjoy the strange stories that I shall share with you!
NEXT: The Mystery Drummer
The town where I live has grown a lot over the last few years. However, there is only one building that is four stories tall, and a few that have three, the rest are all low buildings of only one or two floors, which are usually shorter than the trees that stand here and there around the streets between them. In the centre, almost all the houses are of the old colonial style – high, stone-framed windows, protected by iron grilles, regularly spaced along the front, big wide double doors of heavy wood in the main entrance archway, and gently sloping roofs of earthenware tiles that jut out across the whole pavement, to shelter passers-by from the torrential rains in the hurricane season.
What is more, you don’t need to walk very far from the centre to come across patches of undeveloped land, still covered in bushes and undergrowth, and between the centre and the newer outlying neighbourhoods, you can see many fields of coffee bushes, shaded by centuries old trees. All this greenery is well within what constitute the boundaries of the town.
It should perhaps be of no surprise then, to students of folklore, to learn that our town defies the conventions of twenty-first century reductionist logic, and that we humans are not the only people who live here – there are also the little people!
I hope I haven’t just lost half my readers! Please bear with me, for I too was initially rather sceptical, then a little less so, and finally, after speaking to so many sensible people who have not only witnessed the little peoples’ pranks, but have actually seen them, and even conversed with them, I have to admit that things may not be as we have been brought up to believe in our shiny, steel, plastic and neon, hi-tech, ultra-neo-modernist world!
Elves, Pixies, Faeries, Gnomes, etc. – we were told that all of these are but the fantasy of children’s tales. Not here! My friends and neighbours call them 'Chaneques’ and here they are as real as you or I. The number of people who tell you these stories so matter-of-factly, and with no benefit to be gained from having invented them, is so great that it is hard to deny their existence.
In fact, except for those who have moved here recently from the capital or elsewhere, everybody has some story to tell about them, if it didn't happen to them personally, it happened to their cousin, parent, uncle, friend, etc. Those who have seen them usually describe them as looking like small children, but their faces are those of old people.
These are their favourite tricks:
- getting people lost. This can happen even when somebody is on their own ranch, where they have lived all their life, and which know their way around perfectly.
- moving small children. Fortunately they don't usually take them away, and if they do they seldom keep them. Often they take babies from on top of a bed, and lay them gently down on the floor underneath the bed.
- throwing stones at people. This is not so common, but it has happened to at least one friend of mine.
- other pranks in general - moving things, hiding things, taking things away and later putting them back exactly where you first looked for them.
Remarkably similar tales are told in all corners of the globe, with the little people hiding things, taking children and generally causing mischief from Japan to Britain, to Latin America. Is it not, then, more incredible to imagine that all over the world, exactly the same fiction could be invented independently, than to accord these stories some degree of truth?
Whatever your opinion, I hope you enjoy the strange stories that I shall share with you!
NEXT: The Mystery Drummer
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