IT IS ALL CONNECTED

THE WEE PEOPLE
by Tom Dongo

They are also known as Gentry, Banshees, Gentle Folk, Fairies, Sidhes, Leprechauns, Elves, Gnomes, Corrigans, Tylwyth Teg, Sith, Daoine Maithe, Ankou and others. I am going to lump them all into one category because I think they all originate from basically the same place. I have no idea where that place is (and neither does anyone else), unless it is some mysterious dimension or octave somewhere, populated by phantom-like life forms. In all of my research, I have run across only three or four people who have had reliable, direct encounters with this enigmatic element of the paranormal. In modern times, at least, since 1920 or so, there seems to have been little activity by the Gentry. I don't know why this is but perhaps on their level they were ordered to have less contact with us humans. Contact between them and us has always been pretty much accident anyway.

In earlier days, mainly in the 1600s through the 1800s human Gentry contact was rather common and it seems it was quite well documented. These contacts were not always beneficial for humans. Even though there are credible instances of Gentry saving the lives of humans or aiding humans in time of famine or financial or physical or mental stress, there are many more credible instances of open conflict with the Gentry. These conflicts were often initiated by a human farmer or peasant who had done something to upset a Gentry. There are many tales of mysterious mishaps and deaths of humans as the result of contact with a member of the Gentry. This conflict was often brought about by a human or humans disturbing or destroying a Gentry's "turf." Evidently, even cutting the wrong bushes in a Gentry's turf was reason enough for retaliation by the Banshees. Just about all of them were capable of great good or great evil. All, that is, except for the wispy little, transparent-winged Tinker Bell-like fairies; they seemed to be only curious, kind and benevolent.

"There is nothing about the supernatural, high strangeness or paranormal worlds that is boring. It is an endlessly exciting subject.

Doing the kind of research that I do, I constantly run across things that are extraordinarily unusual. Lately, for my book Unseen Beings, Unseen Worlds, I have been doing a bit of research into Fairies, Leprechauns, Elves, Gnomes, Banshees and Sidhes. All those and "ghosts" and UFO/alien activity are directly and indirectly connected. One thing often links to another by extremely curious threads or coincidences, as is the case in all paranormal activity.

A retired lady in Sacramento has graciously sent me several letters describing some of the out-of-the-ordinary experiences she has had in her lifetime. She is obviously a very intelligent woman, judging by the tone of her letters, and she has had a number of odd occurrences happen to and around her. I always wonder why it is that certain people, for no discernible reason, seem to be singled out to experience or be shown highly paranormal activity.

One of this woman's first experiences was when she was a little girl. This is a slightly edited excerpt from one of her letters:

"... and when I was around five years old I captured a little man in a backyard tomato patch. The tomato patch belonged to our attic tenant, an old Italian woman. The little man looked very much like the Mickey Rooney of today. He was dressed in handsome, well-made clothes. He had on a white shirt, green vest, green knee-pants, white knee-length socks and shiny black shoes with silver buckles. I grabbed him. He struggled and cussed me out in gibberish. I carted him into the house where my father -- shaken to the core -- ordered me to let him go. The little man scampered out the door and was barely able to climb the few steps leading back down into the yard."

If you were a little man, maybe a foot and a half tall, door steps would seem like a series of three-foot cliffs.

The following account is of an episode with the Wee People that occurred nearly a hundred years ago. Notice the similarity to the Sacramento woman's encounter. This is excerpted from The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries by W. Y. Evans Wentz:

"There is some of this feeling too in that strange story reported by Lady Archibald Campbell in 1907, when she spoke with an old blind man and his wife living in an Irish glen who claimed to have (caught) a fairy and kept it captive for two weeks -- a little red capped fellow, not two feet high, his hair reddish, his skin very clear but dark in color. The little red cap fitted neatly upon his head. His dress was green, soft to the touch, shorter than a kilt; his boots were as soft as moss over his naked legs. It was a Leprechaun - the fairy that might bring luck to a poor man, for he knows where the crocks of gold are hidden:

'I gripped him close in my arms and took him home. I called to the woman (his wife) to look at what I had got. "What doll is it you have there" she cried. "A living one," I said, and put it on the dresser. We feared to lose it; we kept the door locked. It talked and muttered to itself queer words... It might have been near on a fortnight since we had the fairy, when I said to the woman, "Sure, if we show it in the great city we will be made up." (i.e., become rich) So we put it in a cage. At night we would leave the cage door open, and we would hear it stirring through the house... we fed it on bread and rice and milk out of a cup at the end of a spoon...

"But finally it got away and they had had bad luck ever since, the old man said sadly: 'For me, though I've lost my sight, the day I took the Leprechaun I thought no harm, only that we would be made up. I am thinking different now by the way things have gone. Sure, we are among them in God's world who are born to be poor."

The Sacramento woman's experience is not unique, by any means. There have been thousands of encounters like this over the years by people all over the world. The Smithsonian Institution has the perfectly preserved body of a sixteen-inch-tall person found when miners blasted through solid rock looking for gold. The little man was discovered sitting on a rock ledge in an ancient cave. An autopsy showed that his anatomy was identical to that of a modern full-grown human. His clothed body may have been entombed in the space for untold millions of years.

In a sadder case of contact with the little people, only a few years ago two farmers in Texas were one day doing some work out in a field. The men had their dogs with them and suddenly the dogs started barking furiously at something they had come across in the woods at the end of the field. The farmers thought it was probably just the usual raccoon or an opossum but the dogs were unusually excited, so the men stopped their work and went to see just what the commotion was about.

The two men got the shock of their lives when they came up to the hysterically barking dogs. Sitting on a fallen branch between the two dogs was a very small man, about twenty inches tall. The tiny man was sitting there calmly with an expression of complete resignation on his face. He obviously knew he was trapped and could do nothing. The stunned farmers paused for a few moments, still unable to believe what they were seeing -- then the dogs attacked the little man. They tore him to pieces. It was over in seconds.

The farmers watched, still unable to act or to believe what they saw. They turned and went back out into the field and silently resumed work. Several times that day, still not able to believe what they had seen, they went back to look at the tiny human body parts and bloody ground. Finally accepting what had happened, they contacted the local sheriff. The two men took the sheriff to the location of the attack. There were patches of blood and signs of violence but all parts and traces of the little man had mysteriously vanished. That was the beginning and end of that particular human-wee people episode. As I said, there have been many.

Getting back to another of the lady's letters... one night she was working a late shift in a hospital in California:

"I was up late reading, again waiting for the nurses to come in. My door was locked and bolted to be safe, when I caught sight of a bunch of smoke that had gathered over near the door. I wondered how cigarette smoke could bunch up like that when the last cigarette was well out and the smoke gone. So I turned my head for a better look.

"The smoke seemed to be consolidating. Then a beautiful lady emerged. She had a great mop of golden hair that fell to her mid-back. Her skin was pearly white, her eyes of a pale blue or grey. She had an exquisite body, was about 5 feet 7 inches, and she was dressed in a chiffon-like garment of an ancient Grecian style -- one bare shoulder, a bodice, then three layers of flouncy pleats or gatherings. She may have been bare of foot. As she gracefully went by, she seemed to put a finger to her lips as if to say, 'Shhh, be quiet.'

"My heart pounded and shock waves went up and down my body. The lady went to the same window (where I had seen the UFO) and faded through it. Next, a big wave of sleep knocked me back into my pillows."

Out of the same window the apparition had gone through, the woman had seen, just nights before, a very large UFO that had flown right over Redwood City, California. The UFO had emitted a machinelike vibration as it passed over the hospital, but only a few people reported the sighting because it was in the early hours of the morning. Were the two events connected? I believe they were.
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Extracted from "Unseen Beings, Unseen Worlds" by Tom Dongo, used with permission.