Episode Transcript
No one likes to be alone. Even introverts need to come up for air every now and then and experience human contact. Being around others has a way of calming our souls and imparting a bit of safety, if only in theory. But sometimes, even crowds of people and scores of friends can’t fight the crippling feeling that we are, in the end, isolated and alone.
Humans have become very good at chasing away that feeling, though. When darkness threatened to cut us off from the world around us, we discovered fire, and then, electrical lights. We use technology today to help us stay connected to friends and relatives who live thousands of miles away, and yet the feeling of loneliness grows deeper every year.
We’ve learned to harness tools to fight it, though. In ancient cultures — in the days before Facebook and even the printing press, if you can fathom that — society fought the feeling of being alone with story. Each culture developed a set of tales, a mythology and surrounding lore that filled in the cracks. These stories explained the unexplainable, they filled the dark night with figures and shapes, and they gave people — lonely or not — something else to talk about. Something “other”.
Some tales were there to teach. Some preached morals through analogy. Others offered a word of warning or a lesson that would keep children safe. In the end, though, all of them did something that we couldn’t do on our own: they put us in our place. They offered perspective. It might seem like we’re at the top of the food chain, but…what if we’re not?
From the ancient hills of Iceland and Brazil, to the blacktopped streets of urban America, our fascination with “the others” has been a constant, unrelenting obsession. But while most stories only make us smile at the pure fantasy of it all, there are some that defy dismissal. They leave us with more questions than answers. And they force us to come to grips with a frightening truth: if we’re not alone in this world, then we’re also not safe.
A Little History
In Greek mythology, we have stories of creatures that were called the pygmy. The pygmies were a tribe of diminutive humans, smaller than the Greeks, who were often encountered in battle. And these stories have been around for thousands of years. We even have images of pygmy battles on pottery found in tombs dating back to the 5th-Century BC.
First-century Roman historian Pliny the Elder recorded that the pygmies were said to go on annual journeys from their homeland in the mountains. They would arm themselves for battle and climb onto their rams and goats and ride down to the sea where they would hunt the cranes that nested at the shore.
In South America, there are tales of creatures called the Alux. A figure of Mayan mythology, they were said to be between one and two meters tall, hairless, and dressed in traditional Mayan clothing. Like the pukwidgies of Native American tribes, the Alux are said to be trouble-makers, disrupting crops and wreaking havoc.
According to tradition, the Alux will move into the area every time a new farm is established. Mayan farmers were said to build small, two-story houses in the middle of their corn fields, where these creatures would live. For the first seven years, the Alux would help grow the corn and patrol the fields at night. Once those seven years were up, however, they turned on the farmers, who would put windows and doors on the little houses to trap the creatures inside.
The ancient Picts of the Orkney Islands, off the northeastern tip of Scotland, spoke of a creature they called the Trow, or sometimes Drow. They were small humanoid beings, described as being ugly and shy, who lived in the mounds and rock outcroppings in the surrounding woods. Like many of the other legends of small people around the world, the Trow were said to be mischievous.
In particular, they were said to love music. So much, in fact, that it was thought that they kidnapped musicians and took them back to their homes, so that they could enjoy the music there. In addition, it was common for the people of Shetland to bless their children each Yule day as a way of protecting them from the Trow.
Nearby in Ireland there are tales of a similar creature, small and hairless, called the Pooka. The pooka are said to stand roughly three feet tall, and like the Drow, they too live in large stone outcroppings.
According to legend, they can cause chaos and trouble within a community. So much so that the local people have developed traditions meant to keep them happy. In County Down, for instance, farmers still leave behind a “pooka’s share” when they harvest their crops. It’s an offering to the creatures, to keep they happy and ward off their mischief.
But the pooka isn’t unique to Ireland. In Cornish mythology, there’s a small, human-like creature known as the bucca, a kind of hobgoblin. Wales is home to a similar creature with a reputation as a trickster goblin. It was said to knock on doors and then disappear before the people inside opened them. And in France, a common term for stone outcroppings and megalithic structures is pouquelée (pook-lee).
Oh, and if you are a fan of Shakespeare’s play, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, you might remember the character Puck, the clever and mischievous elf. The name Puck, it turns out, is an Anglicization of the mythical creature, pooka or pouque.
I’ll stop, but I think you get the point. There doesn’t seem to be a culture in the world that hasn’t invented a story about smaller people, the “others” that live at the periphery of our world. It’s not surprising, either. Many of these cultures have a deep history of invading nations, and that kind of past can cause anyone to spend a lot of time looking over their shoulder.
These stories are deep and often allegorical. They mean something, sure, but they aren’t rooted in reality. No one has captured a pooka, or taken photographs of an Alux stepping out of its tiny stone building. But that doesn’t mean there’s no evidence.
In fact, there are some legends that come a lot closer to the surface than you might have thought possible. And that might not be a good thing.
Things Get Real
The Shoshone tribe of Native Americans that live in the Rocky Mountains have been there for thousands of years. Their land spanned much of the countryside around the Rockies, but they also built seasonal homes high up in the mountains, sometimes 10,000 feet above sea level.
One of the Shoshone legends is that of a tribe of tiny people known as the Nimerigar. One story tells of a man who rode up a small trail into the Wind River mountains to check on his cattle. While he was traveling the narrow path, one of these creatures stepped out and stopped him. This was his trail, the little man said, and the rancher couldn’t use it anymore.
The man ignored the tiny person and continued on toward his cattle, and this angered the Nimerigar. The tiny creature took aim with his bow and fired a poisonous arrow at the man’s arm. From that day on, the story goes, the rancher was never able to use his arm again.
The Nimerigar are just myth. Or, at least, that’s what most people think. But in 1932, that perception changed when two prospectors, Cecil Main and Frank Carr, found a mummy in a cave in the Pedro Mountains of Wyoming. They said it had been sitting upright on a ledge in the cave, as if it had been waiting for them.
This mummy was small. Honestly, it was only about six inches tall, but had all the proportions of an adult. The two men had found it on a ledge and sitting upright, mummified by the dry Wyoming climate. After its discovery, the mummy changed hands a number of times. Photographs were taken, as well as an x-ray, but by 1950, it vanished, never to be seen again.
In 1994, after an episode of Unsolved Mysteries asked viewers to help locate the missing mummy, a second mummy came to light. This one was a female with blonde hair, but it was roughly the same size, and also from a mountain cave. This time, medical experts were able to study it, and what they discovered was shocking.
It wasn’t an adult after all. It was an infant that had born with a condition known as anencephaly, which explained the adult-like proportions of the body and head. Like the first mummy, this second one disappeared shortly after the examination, and the family who owned it vanished with it.
Halfway around the world in Indonesia, there are stories of a small, human-like creature called the Ebu Gogo. Even though their name sounds a lot like a Belinda Carlisle cover band, these creatures were said to strike fear in the hearts of the neighboring tribes.
According to the story, the Ebu Gogo had flat noses, wide mouths, and spoke in short grunts and squawks. They were know to steal food from the local villagers, and sometimes even children. And apparently, one of these incidents in the 1800’s led to an extermination.
The Nage people of Flores, Indonesia claim that generations ago, the Ebu Gogo stole some of their food, and the Nage people chased them to a cave where they burned them all alive. All but one pair, male and female, that managed to escape into the forest.
The stories are full of imagination and fantasy, but in the end, they might hint at something real. In 2003, archaeologists discovered human remains in a Flores cave. The remains — dubbed Homo floresiensis — weren’t ordinary, though; they were small adults. Very small, actually, at just one meter tall. They were nicknamed ‘hobbits’, if that helps you picture them.
Small people, found in a cave, near the Nage people of Flores. It seems like the stories were proving true. The trouble was the age of the remains. The oldest skeletons clocked in at around 38,000 years old, and the youngest at about 13,000. In other words, if the Nage actually had attacked a tribe of tiny people, it had happened a lot more than a handful of generations ago.
Unless you believe them, that is. In that case, the stories hint at something darker: that the Ebu Gogo are real, that they might still inhabit the forests of Flores, and that, ultimately, the stories were telling the truth.
It sounds enticing. In fact, I think anyone would be fascinated by such a notion. Unless, that is, those stories were about something in your own backyard.
Dover
On the night of April 21, 1977, a man named Billy Bartlett was driving through the town of Dover, Massachusetts with two of his friends. On Farm Street, they began to drive past a low, rough stone wall that was well known to the locals. As they did, Billy noticed movement at the edge of his vision, and turned to see something unlike anything he had ever seen before.
It was a creature with a body the size of a child’s, long thin limbs, elongated fingers, and an oversized melon-shaped head. Billy claimed it was hairless, and that the skin was textured. He even reported that it had large, orange-colored eyes.
Billy later sketched a picture of the thing he had seen, and then added a note to the bottom of the page: ‘’I, Bill Bartlett, swear on a stack of Bibles that I saw this creature.”
A whole stack of Bibles, you say? Well alright then.
Something like this probably happens every year somewhere in the world. Someone sees something weird, their mind twists their memories, and all of a sudden they think they encountered Abraham Lincoln in a hot tub. But Billy’s story had some added credibility.
You see, just two hours after he saw whatever it was that he saw, 15-year old John Baxter was walking home from his girlfriend’s house, about a mile from Farm Street. He claimed that he saw something walking down the street toward him. According to him, it was roughly the size and shape of a small child. When the figure noticed him, though, it bolted for the woods.
John, being a highly intelligent teenager with powerful decision-making skills, decided that midnight was the perfect time to chase something strange into the woods, and so he followed after it. What happened next was a literal “over the river and through the woods” chase. When Baxter finally stopped to catch his breath, though, he looked up to see that the creature was standing beside a tree just a few yards away from him. Watching him.
That’s the moment when common sense took over, and John ran for his life. Later that night, he drew a sketch of what he saw. He also told the police about it. He described a creature that had the body of a child, a large oval-shaped head, thin arms and legs, and long fingers.
On their own, each of these sightings could have been easily dismissed by the authorities, but together they presented a powerful case. Still, any chance of their similarity being labelled a coincidence vanished less than twenty-four hours later.
15 year-old Abby Brabham and 18 year-old Will Taintor were out for a drive on Springdale Avenue, when they saw something at the side of the road near a bridge. It was on all-fours, but both of them claimed they got a very good look at it. Each of them described the creature as hairless and child-sized, with an overly-large head and long, thin limbs.
Three separate events spanning two nights. Three unique sightings. Yet one seemingly impossible description, each captured in eerily similar sketches. There were small discrepancies regarding the color of the creature’s eyes, but outside that, the consistency was astounding. Each of these eye witnesses had seen something they couldn’t explain. And each of them seemed to have observed the same thing.
What I find most fascinating, though, is that nearly 30 years later, in 2006, the Boston Globe interviewed Billy Bartlett, and he’s never wavered from his story. He’s experienced embarrassment and ill treatment because of it over the years, of course. But though he’s clearly transformed from the teenager who saw something into a responsible, middle-aged adult, that maturity hasn’t chased his testimony away, no matter how fantastical it might sound.
They’ve called it the Dover Demon ever since that week in 1977. Others have come forward with similar sightings. One local man, Mark Sennott, has said there’d been a rumor in his high school in the early 70’s of something odd in the woods.
Sennott even claimed that he and some friends observed something odd near Channing Pond in 1972 that fits the description from the later reports. Channing Pond, mind you, is right beside Springdale Avenue, where Taintor and Brabham said they saw their Dover Demon. Clearly, something was in those woods.
Like most legends, this one will continue to cause debate and speculation. There have been no further sightings since 1977, but even still, the Dover Demon has left an indelible mark on the town and surrounding area.
Shifting the Blame
We don’t like to be alone. But I think in the process of creating the stories that have kept us company for centuries, humanity has also invented convenient excuses. All of these human-like creatures have acted as a sort of stand-in for human behavior and accountability. In an effort to absolve ourselves from the horrible things we’ve done, we seem to instinctively invent other beings on which to set the blame.
But what if “the others” really were there, long before we wove them into our stories? What if they were less an invention, and more a co-opting of something we didn’t fully understand? Perhaps in our effort to shift the blame, we altered the source material a bit too much, and in doing so, we buried the truth under a mountain of myth.
There’ve been countless theories surrounding the 1977 sightings in Dover. Some think it was an type of extraterrestrial known as a ‘Gray’. Others have actually suggested that it was just a baby moose. I know, that does seem like an odd way to explain it. Only two moose sightings were recorded in Massachusetts in 1977, and both of those were out in the Western part of the state, far from Dover. Add in the fact that a yearling moose weighs more than 600 pounds, and I think it’s clear that this theory just won’t hold up.
But there is a different, and more textured, theory to consider. If you remember, Billy Bartlett saw the Dover Demon sitting on an old stone wall on Farm Street. Well, just beyond that wall is a large stone outcropping that the locals have always called the Polka Stone.
Some think that the stone’s nickname is a mispronunciation of a different word, though. The original name, they say, was the Pooka Stone. It could just be folklore, perhaps the tall tales of an early Irish settler, told to a group of children around the foot of enormous stone. Unfortunately, we’ll never know for sure.
But if you really want to see for yourself, you're always welcome to head over to Dover and take a drive down Farm Street. The wall and the woods beyond are still there, still dark, and still ominous. Just be careful if you travel there at night.
You never know what you might see at the edge of your headlights.
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