<body><div><figure><img src="https://img.particlenews.com/image.php?type=thumbnail_580x000&amp;url=34EQM8_1Gb4MfAd00" alt="https://img.particlenews.com/image.php?url=34EQM8_1Gb4MfAd00" width="1536" height="1021" ><figcaption>History</figcaption></figure>[Surely Europe’s oldest still-active holiday, Halloween is a natural power-point in time, a cross-quarter day between solstice and equinox such as the Celtic peoples of Europe chose for their four celebrations. Far from a night of random deviltry, Halloween–the variously pronounced Samhain–was simply the evening for the Celts when the boundaries between the worlds, natural and supernatural, were for a short while loosened. While the shades of the welcome human dead were wont to revisit, almost any other figment of the vivid Celtic imagination was likely to drift over, too. As the dominant figures of Gaelic Celtic tradition were the fairy-folk, the original Halloween must be considered a night of the fairy beings, most of whom have been envisioned as small in the last few hundred years. These magical humanlike beings are not exclusive to the Celtic imagination, to Old World turf–or to centuries past. It’s been one of the great surprises of my study on the Niagara and all of Western New York to find that people still say they see fairies.]An Old First Ward man had childhood memories of a gnomish creature that occasionally manifested by a workbench that had been passed through his family for five generations. His brothers and sisters all talked about it. An elderly non-Native woman maintained all her life that as a child she had seen the Little People in her home at the edge of the Tonawanda Reservation. As if they truly lived in another dimension, they manifested in visions like a TV screen on the wall of her bedroom. Two East Aurora families lived in the same house twenty years apart. Both reported their young daughters troubled by visions of little people in the yard at night. Even a pre-verbal Downs child seemed to sense something about the site. The school van she rode changed its route one year to stop outside the same house. Every time she grew unsettled until it moved. Tiny human footprints by the hundreds were found in the snow one morning outside a Buffalo warehouse on Seneca Street near Elk. It was as if a troop of fairies had frolicked there overnight. It figured to our witness that the place could be energetic. A batch of Reservation workers had been recruited to build that structure but displaced by crew of whites. Someone who knew the old ways wouldn’t have been happy about it.A Hamburg man bought an elegant bedroom set that had appeared in a famous Disney film. On more than one occasion he woke to see little Victorian-clad people sitting at the foot of the bed. Smaller and fainter than natural, the ghost-children–the Little People!–of the voluminous basement of East Aurora’s Roycroft Inn are said now and then to spy on people who work there. If someone leaves a door open their laughter trickles up. During the time his father worked on the Tuscarora Reservation, a 4-year-old boy from Black Rock was traumatized by dreams and visions of little people. Only the counsel of a Seneca clan mother eased the family through it. A white artist and his Seneca wife used to visit the Tonawanda Reservation frequently. One night their 4- and 5-year-old children were followed home by Little People they had encountered in a place on the Reservation known for them. Their Seneca grandmother cut the connection with a ceremony and the matter was clear, but she was well to be worried. That Reservation had lost a 5-year-old for days within recent memory. The Reservation folk had been worried that they’d never get him back.Native folk of the upstate still talk about the knee-high adult skeleton uncovered near Syracuse in the early 1820s during the construction of the Erie Canal. It and its tiny artifacts and accoutrements thoroughly spooked the mostly-Irish crew of diggers. Only after a council of Onondaga elders came to take charge of it did work continue. In the 1990s a Hamburg family lived near the Fairgrounds and the archaeological site of ancient burials. Their toddler was troubled by small beings he described as “Scary Babies.”A Batavia farmer was overheard discussing the strange little humans his three boys saw on their farm. Blue-collar and devoutly Christian, he struggled to explain to them something that didn’t fit with the Good Book–yet that all of them knew. A Hamburg boy spent endless hours in the family garden, returning with elaborate tales of little people. Fabricating their splendorous echelons seemed beyond a kindergartner. Keeping them straight should have been impossible for one–unless he saw and spoke to them enough times to remember. In her collection of Genesee Valley folklore Valley of the Ghosts (1982), Monroe County historian Shirley Cox Husted detailed an encounter between an adult Irish immigrant and a handful of little people on a track above one of the canals. Someone reported it to be true. The account was preserved in a family journal. A retired State Trooper recalls some creepy being that routinely manifested to his 4-year-olds at night in their East Aurora bedroom. “Baby Bobby” told the twin boys things about itself and its condition that made it sound like something other than the spirit of a human child.Ga’Hai Hill on the Allegany Reservation is the Senecas’ legend-mountain. Sometimes called, “The Hill of Dead Witches,” it’s home to the Djogao, fairy-beings whom the Rez folk nickname, “the Jungies.”The Goodleberg Cemetery in Wales (NY) has become the legend-mountain for the whites, at least in Buffalo’s south towns. Like Ga’Hai Hill in Salamanca or Indian Hill in Gowanda, it hosts reports of almost every form of spontaneous psychic manifestation, including apparitions that answer to the Little People. I feel guilty for being the first to publish about Goodleberg’s untoward reputation. It was only a matter of time, but still, the whole thing has become a nightmare to road residents, particularly around Halloween. Stay out.What do we make of these Little People who come as friends, protectors, guides, and sometimes tormentors? These, dare we say it, “fairies”? When they surface in contemporary paranormal report, I have to suspect them some form of apparition, basically, ghosts. In almost every other reported particular, they behave very differently from our typical site-ghost that repeats some obsessive action and seems not to know what it is. The Little People seem intelligent and purposeful. They are far, too, from the comforting after-death apparition of a lost loved one, bidding a final farewell and never seen again this side of the veil. These Little People can return many times and haunt an individual like a ghost can haunt a house. Plus, they make a very different message to the unconscious mind. [Stay tuned for Part 2]Lead image: Photo by Immo Wegmann</div></body>

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[Surely Europe’s oldest still-active holiday, Halloween is a natural power-point in time, a cross-quarter day between solstice and equinox such as the Celtic peoples of Europe chose for their four celebrations. Far from a night of random deviltry, Halloween–the variously pronounced Samhain–was simply the evening for the Celts when the boundaries between the worlds, natural and supernatural, were for a short while loosened. While the shades of the welcome human dead were wont to revisit, almost any other figment of the vivid Celtic imagination was likely to drift over, too. As the dominant figures of Gaelic Celtic tradition were the fairy-folk, the original Halloween must be considered a night of the fairy beings, most of whom have been envisioned as small in the last few hundred years. These magical humanlike beings are not exclusive to the Celtic imagination, to Old World turf–or to centuries past. It’s been one of the great surprises of my study on the Niagara and all of Western New York to find that people still say they see fairies.]

The Little People, PART 1

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[Surely Europe’s oldest still-active holiday, Halloween is a natural power-point in time, a cross-quarter day between solstice and equinox such as the Celt

The Little People, PART 1

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