When American Dave Barsalow was 10 years old, he lived in New York in an old house with his parents, sister and grandmother. One night, a heavy thunderstorm began and thunderclaps woke the boy in his bedroom on the second floor. But not only the gusts of wind and thunder woke him up, there was something else.
“Another sound came with the wind and it gave me goose bumps all over my body. It was a very eerie groan or roar, and people don't cry like that and no animal that I knew moans or whines like that."
This sound, which the boy called howling, made him eventually get out of bed and out of fear to go to his grandmother's room, she was the closest. He climbed onto the bed and lay down beside his grandmother, and then asked her what that eerie sound was. Grandma told him that it was just the wind.
“But I knew it was not the wind. And my grandmother also knew that it was not the wind. An eerie groan moved like a living creature. He went around the house and walked right up to the wall next to my grandmother's bedroom. “Howl was so close, just a couple of feet from us, and I buried myself in my grandmother’s shoulder in fear and asked her to hug me.”
Finally the sound became quieter and the storm also died down. Dave fell asleep. When he woke up, he saw sunlight coming in through the window, and his grandmother was not there. He found her on the street, with a bucket and a mop, she was cleaning the porch. “And I saw what she was cleaning. They were dirty tiny footprints. The entire porch was covered with them. They were as small as a baby's."
“I got goosebumps again and I asked my grandmother what it was. But she didn’t answer me, but continued cleaning. I never asked my grandmother about this mysterious howl again. Part of me was just afraid to find out the truth about what was there outside that night."
Then Dave found out that many Indian tribes who lived in the Hudson River Valley (where New York is now located) told legends about little people. And these dwarfs were somehow associated with thunderstorms and storms.
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Another story took place in 1948 in Liberty, Missouri. Dan Bortko's family moved to a new house from Kansass and this house was built sometime in the 1920s and earlier someone lived in it, but then it was empty for a while. The house stood at the top of a hill and there was an old barn next to it.
In this house in 1952, Bortko saw what haunted him for many years. Dan was then very young, he was only 4 years old, but he clearly remembered that he saw a troll or a gnome with a big beard.
Dan was sleeping in a room with his two younger brothers when something woke him up in the middle of the night. As he opened his eyes, he realized that there was someone else in the room. “I barely opened my eyes and saw THIS. He was an old man with a long white beard, a large nose, and less than a meter tall. He stood at my feet. I was very surprised.
The little old man looked like a real gnome from a postcard. He was wearing German-style leather shorts, and in his hands he was holding a pipe and smoke was coming out of it. He looked at the boy, and then smiled at him, winked and disappeared into the closet.
Later, Dan's mother told him that as a child, he often talked to someone whom no one saw, it was believed that the boy had an imaginary friend. Then Bortko himself recalled that looking out of his bedroom window, he saw little people near the barn.
Dan also tried to draw the gnome he met at night and depicted the face of an old man with large dark eyes. Seeing this drawing, his younger brother Bill was very scared and cried. "Every time he saw this drawing, he went crazy."
The following story comes from New Jersey. 54-year-old David Schwab grew up in Orange, New Jersey, and his friend Jerry saw a gnome or troll in the early 1960s.
"I remember Jerry often talking about some troll / elf / gnome - a creature with a rather long beard," says Schwab. Schwab dated Jerry in December 2009 before his friend moved to the Philippines and asked him about the history.
“He told me that when he was a child, he went out for a walk in the yard and was scared to see a little man with a long beard standing on the porch. He said that the little man wore funny clothes and a pointed hat. He was only 2 or 3 feet (60-90 cm) tall and looked at the boy.
And this was not the last time this dwarf appeared at Jerry's house. When Jerry was over 20 years old, his brother and his five-year-old son came to visit him and during the day the boy was put to bed in Jerry's bedroom.
And suddenly the boy ran out of the bedroom with loud cries and began to go downstairs to his parents. He said that he was awakened by a small man with a long white beard, who stood and looked at him.