Iroquois Supernatural: Talking Animals and Medicine People

by Michael Bastine

  She heard a sound she described as “rushing horses,” increasing in volume as if coming toward her. Then she heard light, stray human voices like children on a playground fading in strangely. None of this made sense at the top of a snowy hill. She turned her head as much as she could and rolled her eyes.

  She saw small children running toward her, moving over and across the hilltop in huge, half-flying strides. A boy jumped over her in a bound as big as he was small, landed in the water behind her, and started trying to push her up. He smiled as if her danger were play.

  Another child took her by the hood, and other boys and girls tugged at her arms. Not even wearing winter clothes, they were as cheery as the first bold boy. They seemed at the start no stronger than they looked, but something pulled so hard and well that the mortal girl went airborne, soaring over the top of the bank and landing several feet from the water’s edge, as safely and softly as if the others had leaped or flown along with her. She was suddenly, completely alone again in the sunlight, astonished enough to forget the cold.

  Her companions soon arrived. They loaded her soaked and shivering on a sled and took her back to the cottage. After a long process of thawing her out, their host commenced an interview session that went over the simple facts again and again. At the end he shook his head.

  There were three ponds on the broad top of that hill. They’d been drained a bit so the spring thaw wouldn’t cause them to flood the field below, but they were death traps. Climbing out should have been impossible for a snowsuited seven-year-old. “The boys and girls got me out,” was all the girl could say.

  When she was sent to bed, her Irish-born father took over. He turned to the boys and asked carefully about these other children.

  “There was no one else up there,” his son said. “She was already out of the water.”

  THE SECOND NATION

  Storyteller Leo Cooper grew up on the Allegany Reservation near Salamanca and Allegany State Park. In his boyhood, his little sister used to talk about playmates no one else could see. On a day that seemed like a dream to Cooper, he was close to seeing them himself. 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.

  The Little People Zone

  A house that had been a funeral home once stood on Paine Street in East Aurora. A family that lived next door to it in the 1980s ran into some problems. They centered around a first-floor bedroom facing the old funeral home and a window with a low sill.

  This was the bedroom of a four-year-old. If the blinds to the window were closed overnight, the girl always slept peacefully and well. If the blinds were left open or raised and the little girl woke and could look outside, she started to scream bloody murder.

  The first time it happened, the parents rushed into the room, expecting to interrupt a break-in or kidnapping. They found their daughter out of her bed, her tiny body backed against the wall. She was pointing out the window and shrieking hysterically, “The Little People! The Little People!”

  When she calmed, her mother tried to get the details. She thought Little People came onto the lawn at night and paraded outside her window, grinning at her, mocking her, enticing her. They wanted her to come outside so they could pull her under the ground where they live. They laughed because, sooner or later, they would get her. Her descriptions of them and the events were unusually coherent. She showed her mother where they tried to grab her forearms.

  Some nights the girl was afraid to sleep in her room. She spent many an hour in bed with her parents.

  The family soon moved and had no further issues at their new home. The house that was the focus of it all was demolished in the 1990s to make way for the new wing of the Boys’ and Girls’ Club.

  But stories of children’s encounters with Little People have surfaced about another house on Paine Street, and a few hundred yards to the south, on King. These reports come to us with less development, and we have not been able to interview witnesses. But what a Little People zone the core of East Aurora must have been! Could there be any connection to the rumor that the village had once been a prehistoric battlefield? There are plenty of ghost stories in this area as well.

  The Strange Jungie

  One of our Cayuga confidants remembers an aunt who, when a girl around 1960, had a Jungie as a friend. He came to visit her now and then at the Tonawanda Reservation and talked about things that had happened in her life. Usually they met outside, but sometimes he came to her family’s trailer on Shanks Road. He was her strange, beloved companion. Sometimes he warned her about things she needed to look out for. He could be jealous, though, of other friends. Once when some of her schoolmates were visiting, he bit a little white girl on the leg.

  The Tuscarora Girl and the Little Man

  One young Tuscarora girl used to think she saw a little man now and then in her grandmother’s house when she went over to spend nights. The grandmother always told her it was nonsense, but the little girl thought she knew more than she was saying. After a particularly traumatic night, the girl confronted her in front of the rest of the family. “I saw him in your bedroom, Grandma, right on your dresser. And he was bad!”

  The girl was a fine natural artist and did a drawing of the little fellow she’d seen. It was not a hopeful one. He had a thatch of tangled, coal-black hair, pointed ears, and jagged teeth.

  The girl was tragically killed in a shotgun accident in 2003. People who live in the murder house still report a dark, blurry shape a foot or so high that streaks across the floor now and then. One of the local elders called the case “bad energy.”

  A Discerning Native

  A friend of ours was one of a handful of white teachers on the Cattaraugus Reservation. He got along well with everyone and was a particular favorite of the children.

  One day, the teachers took their classes on a field trip around the reservation. Community elders were stationed to explain the history of certain spots and buildings. One of them started to talk about a certain grove that was special to the Little People. He caught himself, looked around, and locked eyes with our friend. “Are you Native?” he asked.

  Our friend is dark eyed and olive skinned and could probably pass for part Native. But he conceded that he was not. “I’m sorry,” said the elder. “We’re not allowed to talk about some aspects of our tradition with people who are not members of our society.” He scanned his eyes over the children. “We’ll get to that another time.” The discussion moved to another topic.

  The Lucky One

  In 1995 a white friend of ours was living in Riverside near Buffalo. He worked at an auto parts shop on the Tuscarora Reservation. His colleagues were all Seneca and Tuscarora.

  His young son started to complain about visits from little human beings in his room at night. He described their sly little faces grinning at him, their little hands clutching. They wanted to take him away.

  For the first few weeks, the parents thought it was just night terrors, but the matter escalated, and the boy’s descriptions sharpened. In every Little People dream he went deeper with them along a trail into a woods at night. He didn’t want to go, but they cast a spell on him, and he couldn’t resist. They were heading for the mouth of a cave. If he ever got into it, he believed, he was never coming back out.

  The visions and dreams scared him so much that he was afraid to fall sleep. He could wake terrified after even a few seconds. The only rest he or his parents got was during the day. The situation exhausted the whole family. After an especially troubling night, our friend overslept and came late to work on the reservation.

  “Man, you look terrible,” said his Tuscarora boss. “What happened?”

  “I might as well be honest with you,” he said. “We’re really worried about my little boy. He’s having all these dreams and visions about Little Peo
ple—”

  At that word, his boss cut him off. “Let’s take a walk.” In a grove out of the hearing of their colleagues, he retold legends and stories about the Little People. “It’s OK about you being late today,” he concluded. “Go home and get some rest. I’ll get some help for you. But don’t ever say anything about Little People around those guys again.”

  In a few days, a call came to his home. A woman with the accent of the reservation was on the line. She seemed uncomfortable, as if she’d made the call only to repay a debt. She asked my friend what was wrong, listened to his answer, and waited before she spoke.

  “We Seneca people have legends about things like these,” she said, “these Little People. I’m not sure anybody really knows what they are. Sometimes they show themselves to children like this, though, and then we think they’re up to no good.” She hesitated before she spoke again.

  “There’s nothing you and your wife can do but wait. Some children stop seeing these things as they grow, and these children are OK. Some children don’t stop seeing them, and . . .” She paused and took a breath. “I hope your boy is one of the lucky ones.”

  As if an afterthought, she spoke again. “Oh, and one more thing. Be sure to watch your boy. Never leave him alone outside. Never let him out of your sight, especially near woods or bushes or trees—at least until he stops seeing these things.”

  Within a few months, the boy stopped mentioning these visits from Little People, and the case seemed closed. What happens to the children who aren’t so lucky?

  The Seneca language reminds us of Latin in some regards. It’s a subtle, complex, old tongue that only a handful of people speak any more. One does not learn Seneca in a long weekend. Like Latin has become to Christians, Seneca is a language of traditional spirituality, used mostly in reservation rites, dances, and prayers by people who cannot always converse in it. Due to its use in the incantations and spells of reservation power people, Seneca, like Latin, could be considered the voice of magic, of supernatural beings.

  The Children Who Came Back

  (Seneca, Contemporary)

  In the late spring of 2005, a young white man, his Seneca wife, and their two children were at a family gathering on the Tonawanda Reservation. After dinner, the couple’s boy and girl, then six and four, played with some reservation kids. The husband lounged outside, keeping half an eye on the brood. When the mass of them headed off for the railroad trestle, he saw no reason to object. The tracks were unused, and they were in clear sight, one hundred yards away. He relaxed, enjoying the slow merge of day into night.

  He found himself studying some odd lights by the overgrown tracks at which he’d last seen the children. They were delicate, fist-size, and incandescent, sashaying a foot or so off the ground in open spaces, moving as seamlessly through the patches of brush as if they could both fly and climb lightly. He realized that he had been seeing them for some time without noticing. Did the children have flashlights?

  But this was a different form of light. Their texture was odd. They were light spheres, too diffuse to be man-made, but too big and steady to be fireflies. They stayed mighty low to the ground, too. They lasted as long as he looked and drifted off into denser wood. He could think of no natural explanation for them.

  Just before full dark, his two children came back. The four-year-old didn’t have much to say for herself, seeming bemused, even a little sly, as if holding a secret she needn’t share, but the boy was beside himself. “Dad! Dad! There are Little People that live by those tracks! Little People!” For his age, he was quite descriptive. Wonderful friends, they were full of tricks and fun. They told him about the sounds the animals made and what they were saying by them. They made life in the woods seem like a never-ending amusement ride. He was also amazed. He was old enough to have a picture of reality and to fall into wonder at the violations of it. No one at school had told him that the world held anything like Little People.

  The boy’s Seneca grandmother came out in the middle of this conversation and caught the drift instantly. She scolded both children harshly and told them not to be playing with Little People. Her attitude was as if “they ought to know,” as if she might have told them this before. Then she turned to the parents. “Take them home, and don’t say any more about this,” she said. “Call me if anything strange happens.” The white father found it all puzzling. It was just children telling tall tales.

  A dozen miles away, the dad spent one of the worst nights of his life. Every five minutes he jump-started. It wasn’t exactly material sounds that woke him, just the sense that something was in the driveway. Time after time he got up to peer out the broad second-floor window. He never saw anything. Another room overlooked the spot: the one in which the children slept.

  In the morning, the six-year-old described a remarkable night of his own. “Dad! Dad! You know who came to see us last night? It was the Little People from Gramma’s! They were outside all night in the driveway! They were trying to get us to come out and play! I really wanted to, but I was good. I remembered what Grammy told us. I didn’t think you wanted us to go out there, either, Dad.”

  The father called his wife’s mother and gave her all this. She told him to leave the house quickly with his wife and children and not to return before the end of the day. When they came back, something about the apartment felt different, and a faint, natural fragrance lingered in the air. The couple could only figure that a reservation healer must have come to the house and worked a ritual, possibly going through every room with a smudge of sage or cedar.

  That was the last the father said or thought about Little People for quite some time. When they were on the reservation even in daylight, the family’s children stayed away from the questionable trestle and before long had forgotten the incident. One night, though, a year or so later, the father found himself in the same chair outside his mother-in-law’s house, again gazing toward the tracks at twilight. He saw the light spheres again where he had seen them seasons before and recalled the strange incident. He was tempted to stalk off after them and challenge their mystery. As if she could hear him thinking, the grandmother came out of the house, took a seat by her white son-in-law, and told him why the reservation folks were on edge about Little People.

  A few years earlier, a reservation lad the same age as his boy had disappeared. He was lost for three days, apparently outdoors. That seemed the only possibility for where he had been; they had turned the reservation upside-down looking for him.

  Everyone was glad just to have him back when he walked up to someone’s house and knocked on the door. There were curiosities, though. For someone who had been outside for this period of time, he was pretty well cared for. He was clean, and he wasn’t hungry. Other than not remembering where he’d been, there was another oddity: He was speaking fluent Seneca. It was months before English came all the way back as his natural language.

  LANES OF THE LITTLE PEOPLE

  The Little People were probably only spotted by humans when they chose to be. They’re even more withdrawn nowadays, offended by the plight of the Native Americans, the wrecking of the natural environment, and the racket of contemporary culture that breaks into their woods. All that said, there are a handful of spaces reputed to be homes and playgrounds of the Little People. You had better know how to spot them. People who mess with these spaces often pay a price. The pattern is familiar in Europe.

  One of the best-known contemporary Celtic fairy anecdotes concerns automaker John DeLorean (1925–2005), who against a warning had a certain tree felled as he was clearing a plain for his Dublin factory. He ended up broke, divorced, and in jail. This is a familiar theme in Iceland, where the locals are very protective of certain stones sacred to the Hidden People. An American Army base in England during World War II encountered a pattern of disasters when they moved a standing stone to widen a road for their tanks. (The locals eventually put it back in the same spot, and the Americans moved the road.) Don’t mess with these Little People place
s.

  It’s interesting to note that upstate New York’s folkloric patterns follow those of most of the rest of the world. These Little People places often fall inside zones of folklore of all other paranormal types: UFOs, mystery critters, ghosts, occultism. Is the whole thing set off by some energy at the sites, or is it all just the tricks of the Little People? They’re known for that sort of thing everywhere else.

  The Cattaraugus Creek flows northwest through Gowanda and the Cattaraugus Reservation and empties into Lake Erie at Irving. Thirty-five miles south of Buffalo, it branches to form the sublime Zoar Valley.

  The origin story of the Seneca Dark Dance is set in Zoar Valley, long associated with the Little People and apparently all else paranormal. People say the valley hums at night, as if it breathes orenda or some other vast force. They talk about how hard it is to build roads that last through it. They talk about hunters and hikers who go missing in the valley, curiously and seriously lost. It took a full day and a massive search to find a group in 2003; they said they’d gone far into the park following other hikers, who just . . . disappeared. Others rescued report that familiar trails and landmarks looked completely different; they’d been “pixie led” as the Brits would call it. It would be no wonder if the Little People had a hand in it.