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!
