Stories of mysterious little beings exist virtually in every culture around the world. Some anthropologists believe that myths and legends regarding mysterious beings, such as trolls and gnomes, could date back to a time when there once existed various species of Homo. Homo floresiensis, for example, was found off an island in Indonesia whose remains showed an average height of only 3 and a half feet. It has also been suggested that myths regarding trolls might in fact date back to Homo neanderthalensis (Neanderthals), who at one point in time co-existed with modern-day humans. These internalized ancient memories being passed down as stories through the ages might have resulted in such a wide-array of mythology regarding various beings existing deep within the dark corners of the wilderness. But what if there was something more to these ancient myths than just offshoots of our human ancestors? As far back as the Greeks, there was a held belief that little being-like creatures once existed in a realm just outside our own. Much like an intertwined duality that perpetuates through all living kingdoms in nature, they maintained their own sphere of existence. Over the centuries have we perhaps lost this forgotten gift to communicate with these elementals? many believe so. It is believed that students of various mystical sects were once required to communicate with these elemental forces in nature before continuing any further training. Students of Western Esotericism believe, for example, that various elementals exist and correspond with the four elements of life: fire, earth, air and water. Furthermore, the spirit of a particular river or stream may be represented by an undie, or the spirit of a particular plant or tree is represented by a gnome, and a small grove may consist of a colony of gnomes working collectively to maintain and protect the area. Researcher and mystic, Manly P. Hall, once wrote:
“Just as visible Nature is populated by an infinite number of living creatures, so, according to Paracelsus, the invisible, spiritual counterpart of visible Nature (composed of the tenuous principles of the visible elements) is inhabited by a host of peculiar beings, to whom he has given the name elementals, and which have later been termed the Nature spirits. Paracelsus divided these people of the elements into four distinct groups, which he called gnomes, undines, sylphs, and salamanders. He taught that they were really living entities, many resembling human beings in shape, and inhabiting worlds of their own, unknown to man because his undeveloped senses were incapable of functioning beyond the limitations of the grosser elements..
According to Paracelsus, “Man lives in the exterior elements and the Elementals live in the interior elements. The latter have dwellings and clothing, manners and customs, languages and governments of their own, in the same sense as the bees have their queens and herds of animals their leaders.”
Paracelsus differs somewhat from the Greek mystics concerning the environmental limitations imposed on the Nature spirits. The Swiss philosopher constitutes them of subtle invisible ethers. According to this hypothesis they would be visible only at certain times and only to those en rapport with their ethereal vibrations. The Greeks, on the other hand, apparently believed that many Nature spirits had material constitutions capable of functioning in the physical world. Often the recollection of a dream is so vivid that, upon awakening, a person actually believes that he has passed through a physical experience. The difficulty of accurately judging as to the end of physical sight and the beginning of ethereal vision may account for these differences of opinion.”
Earliest Recorded Account in the Americas
In 1527, Spanish explorer, Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, along with three others, found themselves shipwrecked in what is today present day Florida. He and the other survivors spent the next eight years traveling across the present day United States from Florida to the Pacific Ocean and down into Mexico disguised as Medicine Men. His detailed writings are among the most valuable in anthropological research because it sheds light into an unexplored stretch of land long before any European was to set foot on the soil. While reading through his account something caught my attention. It was a brief odd account told to him by the Native Americans in what is now Texas. Perhaps, in retrospect, it remains as a valuable small glimpse into a forgotten realm of nature that we have long lost. The tribe was known as the Avavares, who once existed in Eastern Texas, presumably of Caddoan origin. Whether imaginative or real I cannot say, but for this tribe of people at that moment in time the fear was all too real. Perhaps it was something now lost, a part of the human psyche now subdued by years of industrialization and modernity… we will never know. The following is a brief excerpt from ‘A Land So Strange: The Epic Journey of Cabeza de Vaca’, written by Andrés Reséndez, who translated Cabeza de Vaca’s original writings:
While among the Avavares, the castaways found what they considered to be many disturbing signs of the Devil’s presence. Most poignantly, the Christians learned from the Avavares that fifteen or sixteen years earlier, a strange creature had visited them. The Spaniards called him Mala Cosa or Evil Thing. He was “small in body” and, although nobody had seen his face clearly, wore a beard like Europeans. Mala Cosa carried a sharp flint. Whenever he appeared, the natives trembled and their hair stood on end “and he took whichever one of them he wanted, and he gave them three large incisions in the sides,” Cabeza de Vaca was told, “and he placed his hands into those wounds and pulled out their entrails, and cut off a piece, or more of less a span long, and threw the part that he cut off into the fire.” Mala Cosa also dislocated arms and then set them back in place, and lifted huts high in the air and let them drop to the ground. The strangers were skeptical of these tales at first. But some of the Avavares came forth, showing the scars that they still bore from the cuts made years earlier by Mala Cosa. In many ways Mala Cosa was a mirror image of the four medicine men. “And we gave them to understand that, if they believed in God our Lord and become Christians like us, they would not be afraid of him, nor would he dare to come and do those things to them.” (Reséndez, Andrés A Land So Strange: The Epic Journey of Cabeza de Vaca by Andrés Reséndez, pgs. 174-5)
Further written account by Cabeza de Vaca suggests a possible origin of this creature. After the horrific events that unfolded, the creature would continuously reappear again during the Avavares’s sacred dances. Sometimes it would be dressed as a man, and other times as a woman, and would show its ability to toss their houses into the air bringing them crashing back down. Terrified, they tried offering it food, however, it would never eat. During one of these instances the Avavares asked the creature where it had come from and it pointed to an opening in the ground and said it had come from an opening inside the earth.
First hand accounts
I recall a story told by my grandmother when I was growing up about a similar creature she had encountered in Texas (about a two hour drive from where the Avavares tribe had encountered the creature). My grandparents had just driven from Corpus Christi back to their house on the corner of Cedar and Frost in Laredo, Texas. In the house was my grandmother, her daughters, and her then husband at the time, my grandfather, who was a WWII veteran and who was active in the Navy Reserves. The year was 1958, and they were just settling back in at home when my grandmother started hearing the distinct sound of pots and pans being thrown around inside the kitchen. As the sounds continued she walked towards the kitchen to investigate. And there standing on the table was a little 2-3 feet high creature standing on top of one of the tables. She could only describe it as an ugly little troll-like thing running on top of the tables kicking over pots and pans, causing them to crash violently on the floor. She stood there in disbelief watching it wreak havoc when suddenly it saw her. It stared up at her and gave her a disgusting snarl and without notice it immediately took off running and jumped off of the table and disappeared in mid-air. She then yelled for my grandfather, “Jorge! Jorge!” and when he ran up she explained to him what she had witnessed, and he, being the logical man he was, dismissed it as hallucinations. It was also ironic that during World War II, stories ran wild of gremlins, troll-like creatures, messing up their equipment on planes of which my grandfather must have heard about at some point. I never once doubted the story. I later found out that the local newspaper covered a story about a boy that some time later, just a few streets down, claimed to have seen a similar creature. He saw it inside his house and as it quickly ran outside it cut through the screen door. It was curious stories like these that really captured my imagination growing up and I began to realize that perhaps these weren’t just random figments of the imagination.
Around 1999 I heard another amazing personal account regarding a similar encounter with a mysterious being like that of the Avavares. And even to this day, it makes me wonder what really is out there, could it be something beyond our comprehension in the natural world? maybe a deep forgotten part of our unconscious being visibly projected? Regardless, of what the origins of this experience may have been (psychological or real), it both fascinates me and leaves my hairs on end. I sat down with an older lady for dinner, alongside my mother, who was one of her close friends at the time. Everything seemed normal enough, and somehow we got on the subject of the ‘paranormal’. Her face then turned serious. My mother, semi-knowingly, asked her if she had ever encountered anything weird, and after a brief pause she replied yes, and started with the story. She grew up in a very rural village in Mexico, where the children had to stay home and work around the house rather than go to school. She made the point very clear, there was no television anywhere in her village and there were no books available to her growing up. As customary for early morning work, the children were sent off to the nearest stream or river to fetch water. That morning started out normal enough, she grabbed the clay jug and proceeded to the nearest stream to gather water as she did every morning. However, this morning something was different. She approached the bank and placed the jug into the stream to fill it up with water when she then heard a strange sound. From across the waterway there was small laughter, with an almost sinister and simultaneously humorous tone. She glanced about and saw nothing, and continued on her task but then laughter continued. The voice was, according to her, different from ours, it was rather soft and high in pitch. As she glanced about, to her surprise she finally saw what was laughing. She glanced at the figure for a long moment trying to rationalize what she was looking at. In her quickened state of shock she dropped the clay jug which shattered on the rocks and ran home. At this point in the story she pauses to tell us that she had never told anyone about this until this day. She strongly believed others would have deemed insane. Upon returning home she told her mother exactly what she saw down by the stream, and how in her frightened state she accidently broke the jug. The parents obviously thought she was lying for breaking the jug and she was given a swift punishment as a result. Being from a poor family and having to replace a clay jug was something they could not easily afford. After that incident she had completely forgotten it until she immigrated to the United States many years later.
She recalled seeing Santa Claus for the first time in her life, after coming to the US, which made her think back the incident from her childhood. She then began to vividly recall the features and similarities based on the Santa Claus outfit and what she saw. She explained that the creature was about 8 inches in height and had tiny fish-like teeth. It’s clothing was similar to a shade of natural earthy brown, and its shoes had curls at the end. It wore an elongated saggy pointed hat and had a white beard. She again reiterated that growing up she had no access to books, toys, or anything ‘westernized’ for that matter, and that the only life she knew was a hard working simple one.
Could there really be another race of being that co-exists with our own? Endless myths and legends ranging from the ancient Celts to the most isolated of Native Americans tribes, tell tales of small beings which have been passed down through the ages. What are they? natural spirits? our imaginations? or, perhaps, maybe something beyond our own comprehension. Many children are raised not to believe in such things after a certain point in their lives and as a result they become closed-off to any outside possibilities. With age, imagination becomes less relevant and moves from being realistic to seemingly intangible. Maybe some children have the ability to perceive these beings and are quickly given medication upon explaining to their parents what they may have encountered. After previously writing on the subject in 2006, a reliable individual, who shall remain nameless, entrusted me with the following little story. We were in correspondence with each other for some time and though this story takes place in the United Kingdom, it parallels closely with similar themes in the Americas:
“My older brother’s wife was born in Ireland and raised in London. She told me a tale once, which she swore was true, of how she and a girlfriend had once seen a being they thought was a Leprechaun. According to her, she and her friend skipped classes one day and went for a walk in a nearby residential neighborhood. As they strolled by a house, they heard a terrible commotion break out inside. At first, because of all the yelling, screaming, and crashing sounds, they thought a nasty domestic fight was happening. But then they saw the door of the house open and watched as a terrified looking man threw a tiny bundle of cloth out the door onto the street. He shouted curses at it and ended by saying: “In the Name of the Holy Mother, never come back to this home!” The door slammed shut, leaving the two girls bewildered on the street, staring at the tiny bundle. In amazement, they watched as the bundle started frantically moving. They assumed that an unwanted kitten or puppy was wrapped up inside of it and were drawing closer when suddenly the sheet concealing the creature within was torn off. A tiny man popped out, snarled at the two horrified girls, and took off at an amazing pace down a back alley! My sister-in-law described this little fellow to me as being about ten inches in height. He wore a brown coat and pants, had long hair and a beard, and looked incredibly evil and pissed off! They screamed, and the man in the house cautiously opened his door again and asked them if the little bugger had gone away. They told him that the creature had vanished, and he and his wife both came out, explaining that the little man was a Leprechaun that had been bothering them for days. The fellow had finally managed to throw a sheet over it and evicted it. He asked them not to tell anyone. My sister-in-law, who was a very common-sense woman not prone to flights of fancy, swore that this had really happened to her!”
From malicious trickster to hero
I had heard several other stories from people throughout the Central America and North America. A lot of early ethnographic writings collected from people in the Americas make mention of similar beings. In these myths, the beings are personified through the indigenous ‘trickster’ deity, taking on various shapes and forms, but more often than not they are seen as small people. The mischievous nature of these beings is almost childlike in that they more often than not present no immediate danger unless for some confrontational reason. Traveling throughout Peru I had heard several stories regarding similar beings, once in 2008 and in 2013. The first story I had heard was a first-hand account from a man living in Cuzco. Around 2006/7, he was visiting his wife’s family in a small remote valley several miles near the infamous Machu Picchu citadel. Her family owned a small farm and due to its remote location, they were blanketed by miles of wilderness stretching out in every direction. At some point in time, they both had an argument, and he angrily took off into the forests. This area, along with much of Peru, was known for ancient Inca trails crisscrossing every which way, and that are now largely grown over by vegetation and debris. It is not uncommon for people to still discover new routes leading to lost temples or archaeological sites. On this occasion, he managed to find a nearby Inca trail and decided to walk out his frustration. Some hours passed as the trail went deeper and deeper into the forest. Slowly, the trail became darker and darker due to the larger trees lingering over the path. The path took a sharp turn, when suddenly, standing before him was a little 3 foot high ugly creature. He described it as a man wearing strange clothes and very ‘duende’-like (duende, meaning troll/gnome). His heart dropped to his stomach, too scared to move as he just continued staring at it. It glanced up at him, turned and walked away into the darkness. He returned back to his wife, dazed and in a cold sweat. He said that for a whole week, he was in absolute shock and felt physically ill.
Around Cuzco I had heard and read several variations of myths regarding these natural beings. In Quechuan lore, there are some creatures that are called ‘Muki’, meaning literally, “he who suffocates.” They are described as around 2 feet tall, having long beards, pointy ears and are sometimes seen carrying a small lantern. These Muki are normally seen inside mining caves and caverns. Besides the Muki, as with many European legends, many of the Andean legends of these beings correspond various geographical features to a specific ‘duende’ (the same term is also used to refer to a natural being/spirit that corresponds to a specific feature). These stories are not just limited to the Andes Mountains, there is also a well-known creature lurking just down of the mountains deep inside the Amazonian jungle.
During one of the late nights I spent in the Amazon, I was told the story of the Chullachaki (chew-yah-cha-key). As a violent storm raged on, we gathered around a small table in complete darkness where they told us of the Chullachaki, a creature which the local indigenous people swear is very much real. The Chullachaki, similar to Navajo legends of the Skinwalker, is seen as a malicious shapeshifting spirit of the wilderness that tries to lure people off the main paths in the forest until they become lost. Once you begin to panic the Chullachaki may attempt to scare or chase you, at this point the fear and shock causes your spirit to leave your body leaving you in a zombie-like state until you die shortly thereafter. While we were there we heard several versions of the story as well as personal close encounters with the Chullachaki. In his natural state he is recognizable by his one deer hoof and one human leg. Sometimes he disguises himself as a child, beautiful bird, or other animal that does everything in its power to lure people deeper and deeper into the jungle.
In one instance he took the form of a child who appeared to an expedition team after spending some time in the jungle. The path they were on split into three separate paths. The boy appeared to them saying that only he knew the best way back out of the jungle. The team believed him as they followed him deeper and deeper inside the jungle. At some point, the expedition came to another fork in the road with various paths panning out in every direction. As the turned to the boy for directions they realized that he had disappeared. They were lost as they picked one of the trails and continued on until nightfall. It wasn’t until talking to villagers nearby that they realized their mistake of trusting the boy which was really the Chullachaki in disguise. In this instance he was seen as simply mischievous, however, in other instances the encounter can be anything but.
In other scenarios he takes on the shape of a deer or other animal that you may be trying to hunt. That night they told us a personal story regarding a deadly encounter with the Chullachaki while we were there sitting around in the dark. According to them, a relative of theirs went out hunting deer with their rifle when they spotted a deer. They were alone, and they managed to have get a good field of view of the deer before taking the shot. They started firing off rounds, but the deer stood motionless. It then turned towards them and morphed into a crazed out creature as it charged itself toward him. He knew what he had encountered, and the shock was too much. He returned back home, and as they claim ‘had lost his spirit’ due to the sheer shock of the event, and died a week later. In their tradition, when an individual goes through a traumatic event, it is believed that their spirit or soul leaves the body through the breathe during the initial fright. They can try and retrieve the spirit by means of a shaman or curandero, but sometimes, it never returns and they remain ‘spiritless’ in a zombie-like state (and sometimes die as a result).
Natives in the Amazon jungles of Peru maintain that the Chullachaki is the guardian of the ‘Chullachaqui Caspi tree’ and as such, takes care of the landscape around his dwelling. As of lately there has been a transformation of the Chullachaki into an unexpected savior of the forests. With encroaching illegal logging in the area, it is strongly believed that the Chullachaki has been scaring off unsuspecting loggers, enough so that they never return. As people enter deeper and deeper into the unknown jungles there have been more and more supposed sightings and encounters with the Chullachaki. It is believed he only harms those who wish to do harm towards the natural environment for he is now the unseen protector and guardian of the jungle.
So next time you decide to wander around alone in a dark forest, maybe you should think twice. You never know when the spirit of the forest might try to lure you away off the main path, deeper and deeper, until the forest eats you alive…
Bibliography & additional resources:
- A Land So Strange: The Epic Journey of Cabeza de Vaca
- Giants, Cannibals & Monsters: Bigfoot in Native Culture (HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!)
- The Secret Teachings of All Ages
- The Field Guide to North American Monsters: Everything You Need to Know About Encountering Over 100 Terrifying Creatures in the Wild
- Voices of the Winds: Native American Legends