All over the world, in different cultures, you can find old legends and stories about a small people: elves, fairies, gnomes, goblins, trolls, duende, etc. It is easy to imagine these creatures in the moorlands of Britain, Ireland or Scotland, the green plains of Iceland, in the Alps or in the Ural caves.
But American Detroit? At the same time, they have been seen here regularly for several hundred years.
The first stories about local dwarfs are associated with the Ottawa Indian tribe, who lived in an area that later became the territory of the state of Michigan, and later the city of Detroit. These little creatures are called Nain Rouge ("Red Dwarf") in French. They were mischievous, but at the same time respected spirits of nature and protectors of the earth.
When the first French settlers came to this area, they associated these red dwarfs with a French folkloric creature named Lutin (Lutein), an analogue of brownies or goblins. With the development of society, the American image of the dwarf lutins underwent changes, becoming an evil spirits and harbingers of misfortune.
Those who met the red dwarfs described them as being the size of a small child, with red, wrinkled faces and glowing eyes. Their teeth were yellow and rotten, and they dressed in rags, caps and fur boots. They were sometimes described as being without clothes, but completely covered in thick hair.
It would seem that the image of these creatures is purely folkloric, but the stories about meetings with them do not look too much like a fairy tale, but are described as meetings with real beings.
One of these cases dates back to March 10, 1701 and is associated with a holiday hosted by the founder of Detroit - Antoine Lome de Lamotte de Cadillac. It is said that during the holiday a fortune-teller with a black cat suddenly appeared and predicted Kadilyak in the palm of her hand that he would be the founder of a big city, but a lot of blood would also be shed on the site of this colony.
And the fortune-teller asked him not to offend the red dwarfs living in these places in any way, otherwise everything would turn out very badly. But Kadilyak only laughed at the old woman's words. However, years later, Kadilyak personally ran into one of the dwarfs while walking with his wife. At first, they heard two local residents say that they saw a red dwarf nearby and that this is a bad sign. Kadillac, of course, laughed at their words.
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But suddenly a red dwarf appeared right under his feet. The creature had red-black fur, fierce red eyes, and large, crooked, intimidating teeth. Kadilyak attacked the creature with a cane and hit it on the head, yelling for it to withdraw, but the creature did not seem to notice the blow, laughed loudly and ran away.
After this terrible meeting, Kadilyak began to suffer as if from a terrible curse, misfortunes followed him on his heels, enemies behind his back built their insidious intrigues, and soon Kadilyak was recalled to France and imprisoned in the Bastille. However, he did not stay there for long and died only 10 years later in the rank of mayor of the municipality of Castelsarrazen.
At almost the same time that the red dwarf attacked Cadillac in Detroit, several other people saw this creature in the same places. One farmer, frightened, insisted that he saw him on the roof of his barn, another claimed that the dwarf climbed through the window of his barn and abducted chickens.
The next mass sighting of this creature happened on July 30, 1763 during the battle of 250 British soldiers with 400 Indians, which happened on a tributary of the Detroit River called the Bloody Run (Bloody Creek). The battle itself in history is called the "Battle of the Bloody Creek" and the Indians in it defeated the ambushed British, killing more than 60 soldiers in close combat, including the commander.
Many of the surviving soldiers later claimed that they saw a red dwarf sitting on the bank of the stream, who settled there as a spectator and, as if impatiently awaiting the start of the massacre. And after the battle, he was allegedly seen happily jumping and dancing among the corpses of soldiers.
The reputation of red dwarfs as harbingers of misfortune was sustained by the catastrophic fire in Detroit in 1805, which destroyed half of the city. A few days before the start of the fire, they allegedly saw a red dwarf in the city, and during the fire itself, several people said that they saw a dwarf dancing in the fire of the conflagration.
In August 1812, during the Battle of Detroit, a red dwarf grinning in the fog was seen by the losing battle, General William Hull.
In October 1872, Detroit resident Jane Dacy said that she once returned from a gathering in the evening to her house on Elizabeth Street and literally collided with a short creature "with blood-red eyes, long teeth and hooves on its feet." The creature was sitting in the corner of the room in her house and meeting him shocked the woman so much. that she lay in bed for a while, sick.
In 1884, another woman was severely beaten by an unknown assailant who attacked her at night. when she walked down the street. The creature, she said, looked like "a horned baboon with shining eyes and a devilish grin on its face."
With the advent of the twentieth century, sightings of the creature became slightly less common, but did not disappear. In 1967, the creature was seen several times before the start of the famous Detroit Uprising - a massive city riot of riots, killings and violence that began after a police raid on an illegal bar and lasted for five days. One of the witnesses saw a mysterious creature "doing somersaults and somersaults" on 12th Street during a police raid on the ill-fated bar.
In 1976, two workers reported seeing a red dwarf on top of a pillar during one of the worst snowstorms in the city’s history, in March. At first they thought it was a child and ran to help him. But the child suddenly quickly jumped to the ground and ran away, and the workers assured that they saw him and it was a red dwarf.
In 1996, it was reported about two people who were leaving a nightclub in the evening and suddenly saw something on the street that looked like a little hunchback in a dirty tattered old fur coat. The creature quickly ran away and made a sound like a croak.
In 2017, Detroit resident and Reddit blogger theinfamous99 talked about two more cases of sighting a red dwarf. In the first case, the creature was seen by his aunt when she was still a little girl. She considered him a gnome, but she felt something evil about him.
She said that she saw him in the funeral home, and then the creature wanted the girl to follow him into the dark basement. This frightened his aunt so much that since then she wore a cross everywhere and was afraid to meet this dwarf until her death.
Another case involved a friend of his older sister. She once said that at the bus stop a very angry little creature was running after her. She described him as a gnome in a red pointed cap.
It is easy to see that the sighting of a red dwarf in Detroit is almost always associated with some kind of massive disaster or misfortune. Is this creature or creatures an analogue of the Point Pleasant Moth Man, which, according to one version, was fueled by human grief and the energy released from the death of many people and therefore waited for the collapse of the Silver Bridge? The red dwarf, judging by the above messages, was also happy when people died and suffered.
Regardless of whether the red dwarf is an evil creature or a mischievous spirit of nature, as the Indians believed it, today it is present in the lives of Detroit residents mainly in the form of the city's mascot and has become the hero of city parades, during which people dress up as a red dwarf …