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Some of the most provocative psychic cases I ever hear about involve young children, usually with recollections of “imaginary friends”–confidants and companions no one else can see. Some of the best cases look like simple psychic ones of the spiritualist-style; the circumstances at least tolerate the possibility that the child in question is getting accurate information from some unknown source, possibly even a late human being like a family member or a former resident of the site. At other times, these cases have a suspicious overlap with another strange subject, this one folkloric: the legendary Little People.
The Celtic and Germanic cultures of Europe had old and apparently indigenous legends about magical races of more-or-less human-style beings we call the Fairies. (Specialists will know that, despite our current impressions, not all of them were envisioned as little.) So did other parts of the world. Those who read my books, visit this website, or simply know the matter will know that some Native American societies had well developed traditions about fundamentally the same thing, magical societies of Little People. The Iroquois nations of upstate New York certainly did.
Not many whites are aware of this, and most Iroquois would be happy to keep it that way. Even most of those who know of this tradition would think of Little People in purely folkloric terms and sense no connection to the modern paranormal business.
The fact is that white New York residents living on old Iroquois territory still report seeing Little People, if not apparitions suspiciously like them. Most often they report them to me as simple apparitions, but this oddest kind of a ghost story makes for an unlooked-for connection. Many of the sightings take place at the sites or at least the type of sites–more on that at another day–that the Iroquois would say they ought to be found. (Suffice it to say that Little People everywhere tend to be associated with the most powerful of the type of sites that produce ghosts and other apparitions: important burying-grounds, places of natural geophysical power or curiosity, and ancient sacred monuments.) And it’s another inescapable stereotype of the Little People, in all parts of the world in which their traditions are found: They have a not always healthy attachment to human children.
I wonder: If there ever had been a “real thing” that caused so many parts of the world to develop these traditions independently, what would it look like? How would a child describe it?
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The East Aurora ghost walk stops in front of the Fire Hall on Oakwood Avenue and hears a tale about the Paine Street “little people.” On July 23, 2011, one of my guests was reminded of something in her own past. At the end of the tour she joined me at the bar of the Globe Hotel.
Now living in Texas, she had spent her first thirty years in the south towns of Erie County. As a young mother, she had lived in Orchard Park near the Ralph Wilson Stadium. Her son, the youngest of three, may have said his first words at nine months, and was conversing well before schedule. He had another unusual feature.
Even before he could talk, he often followed things about with his eyes as though studying ghostly presences. Sometimes he threw his toys and bottles in the direction he was looking, giving everyone the impression that he was trying to hit moving targets no one could see.
When the boy was still an infant the family moved to a new home in West Seneca. The troubling syndrome followed. By then he could talk, and his mother asked him what he was throwing at. He called the target of his projectiles “scary (sometimes angry) babies.” They were taunting and irritating. The mother noted that none of her other children ever saw these presences, and this little lad only saw them after sunset. By the time he was five, the family was in a new residence, and the little people sightings were over.
The boy as he grew developed another oddity that should have had nothing to do with the Iroquois fairies. In eighth grade he came down with chronic fatigue syndrome, an unusual thing in an adolescent. Not until he was a high school senior did the lad start to get his energy back. His mother ascribes this to the influence of working with a physical trainer.
My subject reported living in a couple of other haunted houses about Western New York, and she gave me all of the addresses. She experiences no psychic phenomena in her new community of Houston, though. That part of her life was left back on the Niagara.
As our interview drew to a close, the mother reflected that she should have talked more with her son as the phenomena was happening. “I’ll talk to him when I get home,” she concluded, referring to her now-25 year old. “He might remember something I don’t.” He had, she said, very clear recollections of the more than twenty-year-old cycle.
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So what do I make of this story? Had this child seen anything psychic–“supernatural”–at all? Do I have any reason to associate the case with the Iroquois Little People?
As with any psychic or paranormal report, I do not expect a sense of certainty. This one holds both consistencies and contradictions. Overall, though, it has so many suggestive elements that I should add my reactions as items. This is my pattern of looking at its factors.
The witness: The fact that our subject reported living in more than one haunted house might at first lead us to think she was one of those “live wires,” as I call them: people who say they see spirits everywhere. Without commenting on whether any of them do or don’t, I should remark that such people are generally useless to my type of study. I am not interested in peoples’ impressions that cannot be verified by any known means; I want to know what they experienced with their physical senses and what they have heard other people say. But anyone who would think that this lady is one of the flakes has simply not met her. She is smart and composed. I believe her rendition of the things she has observed, whatever their cause. I have my own reasons, to come.
I also note in defense of her credibility that my subject never speculated on the causes of the apparent psychic phenomena at these sites nor on the causes of her son’s testimony and behavior. She reported it all simply as phenomena. Her purpose in speaking to me about it was understanding.
The family: Often when you have a pattern of psychic phenomena in a family, some clue to the matter lies in the ancestry.
Some parts of the world are especially rich in certain kinds of supernatural tradition. Some families carry tradition that, even after crossing an ocean, could be generations old. While the Irish- and the Native Americans are as rich in this sort of tradition as any Americans I’ve ever encountered, it is far from confined to them. I’ve met Scottish-American families who still hold customs of the banshee. I’ve met Italian-American clans with stories about the evil eye, and heard of German-American neighborhoods with stories about pillow-magic. You also see that psychic abilities and the tendency to be visited by psychic manifestations can be passed along one side of a family, exclusively.
As far as I can see, no such clues present themselves in this circumstance. The father of the boy at the heart of the case is all Italian-American. The mother may have a touch of Native American ancestry, but she does not know the nation. Otherwise, she is Italian-American.
While all parts of Europe have some kind of fairy lore, it’s understated around the Mediterranean. I would look to other factors for any kind of pattern in this family.
The sightings: Though the lad’s characterization of his companions as “angry babies” is unique, this “eye tracking” by pre-verbal children and domestic animals is commonly reported in haunted or otherwise psychically active houses.
The fact that none of the family’s older children saw these “angry babies” is not out of the pattern. While any one of any age might report witnessing tiny apparitions in Iroquois country, in adults it is usually an isolated case, and seemingly a feature of the exact place and time. The fact that the boy at the heart of the story stopped seeing them once he was of school age is also part of the familiar program. When these Little People make regular appearances to individuals, they tend to come to children of certain ages only. As the child grows, the attachment between them lessens.
The fact that the boy in question never saw the little beings in daylight hours is fairly consistent, too. “That’s pretty much in the pattern of them,” said my Algonquin friend Michael Bastine, who has heard quite a bit about the folkloric Little People.
The boy’s chronic fatigue syndrome: While the odds are high that this condition in the boy had no relationship to his infant visions, in folkloric terms, any wasting condition or disease is tied to the impression that those who spend their nights “with the fairies” (or witches or vampires or the Wild Hunt or hag-riders or any other sort of supernatural being) don’t get the rest they need. When they ought to be static in this world, they are energetic in the other. And more than any other supernatural, the fairies were suspected of being able to put someone into a state of captivity that, though they live in this world, keeps them perpetually in thrall. They are weak, blasé, disinterested, and fey. The fact that adulthood coincided with the end of the boy’s condition does not defuse any stereotypes. In most cases the Fairies are not interested in people once adulthood arrives.
The lad’s memories: One thing that could be troubling on the surface is the fact that the young man (today 25) is said to remember a lot about these early childhood irritants. By 2011 it is regarded as impossible that anyone could remember anything from infancy. This assertion alone would be enough for some materialist thinkers to reject every part of the woman’s story, and we need to address it critically.
Since so many of the most interesting psychic cases I hear about involve young children, I’ve made a bit of an inquiry into childhood memory. Some very good studies have actually been made. Not only has it been found that people remember almost nothing coherent from before the age of four, but that memory in general may be more plastic than most of us would think. False recollections of childhood events can easily be planted in test individuals well after the time they supposedly happened. All it takes is for the fabricated stories to be regularly reinforced by the adults around them as they grow, and by their teens, people can have very sincere and even vivid impressions of events that never happened.
But what about the unintended planting of the memories of true events? That could happen, too, and honestly.
In the case of this boy who saw the “angry babies,” I find it believable that the events happened the way the mother said they did; that no one knows what the infant really saw (only what he said and how he reacted); that the young man today could not remember the events; and that he might sincerely believe he does since his immediate family members had been talking about the curiosity around him for years. This side of the sequence is no reason to doubt our subject’s sincerity.
The sites: As far as I am concerned, one of the real consistencies in our case here is the sites.
When you see how common psychic folklore and experience is, you rapidly lose your interest in rushing out to validate one more haunted site with surveillance gadgets or personal intuitive experience. At least I have. Almost from the start, I was more interested in the big picture, the patterns.
I tend to think in terms of haunted zones as much as I do haunted houses. In most upstate counties there are small regions or strips of road that pick up a disproportionate supply of ghost stories. In the past or present of the region, you can usually find some parallel to the broad picture of supernatural folklore elsewhere.
We could be troubled by some other variables in our witness’ story, particularly my witness' propensity to live in haunted houses. She told me about five haunted former residences in Erie County. Someone who hadn’t met her would think she sees ghosts everywhere! Also, my subject didn’t say she saw ghosts or “spirits” at all these places in Western New York. She observed the phenomena typical of haunted houses, all of it simple unexplained physical phenomena. And at four of the five addresses she gave me, most of her neighbors did, too.
Two of her former addresses were on the same section of the big country block holding Ralph Wilson Stadium in Orchard Park. This was a hotbed of psychic report for most of the 1970s and early 1980s. Most of the people who lived here attributed it to the construction of the stadium, which disrupted settler-era and Native American burial ground and seems to have radiated psychic disturbances for half a mile around it. This is a powerful case in the local rumor-cycle, and I have written about it a number of times. One of these stadium-side addresses was a simple active house. The other was where the family lived when the boy first saw his “angry babies.”
I had never been told that the Seneca associated Little People with the site of the Bills’ stadium, but I have to admit that few Seneca have ever talked to me about Little People. (It is an extremely private tradition, and talking about it with a writer, at least without a vow of secrecy, would be a bad way to keep it that way.) It would be wrong to presume a direct connection, but important sites associated with the human dead, typically ancient ones, are occasionally linked to the Little People.
I already had files on two of the other former addresses the woman gave me. One was along one of the old numbered routes of Western New York, all former Native American trails and common haunts. This one was also in the vicinity of one of the three publicly known surviving ancient earthworks in Western New York. The one of the five addresses my subject gave me that did not fit a pattern was a house in Hamburg. (There may be some connection there, but very few Hamburg sites appear in my files.)
The most curious address–the switch during the boy’s infancy when the “babies” came along–was a relocation to Center Road, West Seneca, at the heart of the Ebenezer Community’s former territory. This settlement of German Christian fundamentalists bought their Western New York land from the Seneca of the Buffalo Creek Reservation. Word is that the Great Hill Folk weren’t sorry to part with just this section of their ground. Though it’s not one of the county’s most public traditions, this whole small region of the Ebenezer Community is soaked with ghost stories. There is also, apparently, a prehistoric battlefield within the area, probably due to one of the clashes between the Seneca and their forbears in Western New York, possibly the Eries, possibly the Neutrals.
I don’t think this woman sees spirits everywhere; she lived in haunted houses and haunted zones. Everybody else saw ghosts there, too. “She moved from one powerful place to another,” said Michael Bastine when I discussed the case with him. "That's funny how that happens sometimes."
Overview: I not expect full resolution out of any potentially psychic or paranormal case. I do not expect the figments of folklore to behave according to strict rules. We will never know whether the apparitions the boy reported seeing were oddities with no parallels or whether they were associated with the Native American Little People–“the Indian Fairies” as some have called them. But the details of this case are consistent enough for me to suspect that there could be some connection. It feels like it.