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 They’re even more withdrawn nowadays, offended by the plight of the Native Americans, the wrecking of the natural environment, and the racket of contemporary culture that breaks into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 places.
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.
The Genesee Valley had many sites and monuments that were special to ancient societies. The only ones we can write about are those the Seneca described for the first whites, if those whites went on to list them in the histories. Wherever these sites are, they are magnets for psychic folklore.
The Genesee River flows through Rochester, New York. Three of its waterfalls are within the city limits. General mystery spots to the Senecas, these falls were special to the Little People. We don’t expect to learn much about them beyond that.
A bit further upriver and south of Rochester is another waterfall in Letchworth State Park, also associated with the Little People. When the beams of sun hit just right, the merry spume makes earthy rainbows, tossing light and color. The Little People were fond of natural psychedelia everywhere. It’s no wonder that this was one of their places.
John Billington was the manager of Beaver Island State Park on Grand Island in the Niagara—longtime Seneca country. Billington was not a talkative fellow, at least around his white colleagues. Those who told us about him were not sure of his nation, but it’s a good bet that he was Iroquois. He used to point out a certain patch of ground in the park that his workers were never to disturb. He was so emphatic about this that more than one of them got interested in the reason. All he would ever say of it was that it was “because of the Little People.” The man we interviewed remembered it as a curious area, a little mound in the grass in a natural clearing, before a unique-looking tree.
Though upstate New York is historic Iroquois territory, there were
