Fairies of New England: The Little People of the Hills and Forests

In the nineteenth and early twentieth century, when white American folklorists reported Little People stories they’d learned from Indigenous people, they often ended up creating what I call “hybrid fairies.” That is, they wrote about beings with characteristics drawn from both Indigenous and European folklore.

It’s not entirely clear whether these stories about hybrid fairies existed before the folklorists put them to paper or whether the folklorists invented them themselves. Did the stories develop organically from the meeting of Indigenous and European people or were they literary inventions?

In some cases, folklorists clearly added European characteristics to Indigenous Little People through a process of embellishment or mischaracterization. That’s because enthusiasm for storytelling often outweighed academic standards of reporting in the nineteenth century. This is unfortunate, because it meant that generations of white Americans may have read inaccurate descriptions of Indigenous folkloric beings.

In other cases, Indigenous people added aspects of European folklore to their own tales (this can be seen, for example, in my post on fairy kings and queens of New England). In rare cases, such as the story of the Little Man of Chappaquiddick (see below), we appear to be in possession of an organically shared folklore.

Lastly, in the modern age, we see the adoption of certain characteristics of Indigenous Little People (i.e., the name pukwudgie and some of that being’s traits) in popular culture.¹

Below I offer four examples of hybrid fairies drawn from the northeastern United States. Hybrid fairies may well exist all over North America, but as I’ve only researched parts of the Northeast, that’s the region I’ll draw from.

Charles M. Skinner’s “Mohican pygmies”

In 1896, American folklorist Charles Skinner described a tribe of Little People that he claimed existed in the folklore of the Mohican people. The Mohicans’ ancestral lands are along the Hudson Valley; they now live in Wisconsin, but at a later point in their East Coast history, they had villages in the Catskill Mountains where this legend is set. Skinner’s legend reads as follows:

Behind the New Grand Hotel, in the Catskills, is an amphitheatre of mountain that is held to be the place of which the Mohicans spoke when they told of people there who worked in metals, and had bushy beards and eyes like pigs. From the smoke of their forges, in autumn, came the haze of Indian summer; and when the moon was full, it was their custom to assemble on the edge of a precipice above the hollow and dance and caper until the night was nigh worn away. They brewed a liquor that had the effect of shortening the bodies and swelling the heads of all who drank it…

Skinner’s claim that the Mohicans’ told stories about pygmies is not without merit. It’s very likely that the Mohicans—like the Munsee Lenape to their south and the Haudenosaunee to their west—did tell stories about Little People in the woods either side of the Hudson Valley, including, possibly, the Catskills. Assembling on the edges of precipices may also have Indigenous origins, for the Tuscarora (Haudenosaunee) did tells tales about Little People who played on the edges of ravines.

On the other hand, Skinner has clearly added plenty of material of European origin to this story. One of Skinner’s goals in writing his legends was to bring the fairies to North America. He wanted to create a new American mythology rooted in the land so that Americans wouldn’t have to keep relying on European literary culture for their storytelling. Indigenous Little People provided him with the pretext he needed to introduce the longed-for American fairy. His embellishments of Indigenous tradition include the following:

1. The amphitheatre where the pygmies dance, as well as the liquor they brew, is clearly taken from Washington Irving’s Rip Van Winkle. These elements ostensibly have Dutch roots, for Irving was deeply inspired by Dutch American culture and storytelling, although he was equally capable of invention. Indigenous Little People, as far as I’m aware, don’t actually brew liquor. Nor do they have beards.
2. The pygmies’ occupation (working with metals and furnaces) is clearly drawn from Northern European folklore about mining/weapon forging dwarfs and gnomes. Indigenous Little People are not known to work in mines or engage in metallurgy, although they often live underground.

Abenaki water fairies’ “fairy bread”

Charles Montgomery Skinner recorded many American legends in his book Myths and Legends of Our Own Land (1896), but these legends often represented a strange amalgamation of traditions. This means that the book is a rich source of hybrid fairy stories.

Regarding the water fairies that appear in Abenaki folklore in the New Hampshire region, Skinner wrote:

Waternomee Falls, on Hurricane Creek, at Warren, are bordered with rich moss where fairies used to dance and sing in the moonlight. These sprites were the reputed children of Indians that had been stolen from their wigwams and given to eat of fairy bread, that dwarfed and changed them in a moment. 

In this description, Skinner appears to have combined authentic Abenaki traditions about Little People at Waternomee Falls with European traditions about “fairy food.” The notion that human beings become “stuck” in “fairyland” if they eat fairy food is commonly found in European tales but isn’t really present in Indigenous folklore, as far as I’m aware. Indigenous Little People have been known to kidnap children, however.

Sauk Ketch’s fairy king

In 1833, Penobscot elder Sauk Ketch told a strange tale about meeting a king who ruled over the water fairies of Penobscot lore. These water fairies (that is, wenagameswook) have always been a feature of Penobscot folklore, but Ketch’s king resembles a figure from a European fairy tale (or even Gulliver’s Travels). It seems likely that Ketch improvised the story for entertainment purposes rather than following older Penobscot tales:

We then landed from our canoes; and going near to the leader, who had beckoned for us, we saw before us, on the rock, a huge man. His gray hair was long and in ringlets. His neck was as large as a barrel. His feet were large, and he had on a strange sort of dress. On his feet were black shining moccasins with silver clasps. He had close-fitting leggings. His coat was olive-green outside, and bright blue and red inside. He had on an under-coat of bright red which covered his body. It was opened at the neck, and his long curls lay loose on the rocks.

Ketch’s description of the fairy king’s brightly colored clothing is highly reminiscent of European descriptions of fairies. Also reminiscent of European literature is the fact that the king is lying down while the Little People hurry around him with ladders—similar to the Lilliputians (little people) of Gulliver’s Travels. Published in 1726, Gulliver’s Travels was one of the most successful books of its day and may well have been known, in some form or other, to Ketch.

The Little Man of Chappaquiddick

This fairy is perhaps the most interesting hybrid fairy because he represents the organic sharing of folklore between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people. Although his story was shared by white Americans (descendants of the English) on Chappaquiddick Island (a tiny island off Martha’s Vineyard), he behaves in a way that’s highly reminiscent of Wampanoag and Mohegan Little People.

First attested in the early twentieth century, the story suggests that residents of the island sometimes saw a little man in their fields. As soon as they laid eyes on him, he’d point into the distance. When the beholder looked away, the little man would disappear.

So why might this little man be considered a “hybrid” fairy? Although his story apparently arose in a white American context, the man’s behavior—that is, pointing and disappearing—closely resembles the behavior of both the Mohegan Little People (the makiawisug) and the Mohegan/Wampanoag divine figure Granny Squannit. When those spiritual beings wish to hide from human sight, they also point. However, instead of pointing into the distance, they point at the person they wish to hide from.

While there can never be definitive proof that the Little Man is a hybrid fairy originating in Indigenous folklore, the folklorist William Simmons was so convinced of this point that he argued the following:

it is more interesting to speculate that the English adopted the Little Man from Wampanoag storytellers. The English of Chappaquiddick told their best stories “in the island farm-house at dead of winter, before the open fire” (Clough 1918:553). The Indians, too, told their legends in winter, and perhaps one evening they planted the seeds of this story in front of an English fire.

If you’re aware of any other hybrid fairies—from inside or outside the Northeast—please leave a comment below.

Read about more New England fairies in my book New England Fairies: A History of the Little People of the Hills and Forests.

1. Pukwudgie stories in Massachusetts go back to the 1930s when two Wampanoag storytellers reported stories about pukwudgies living at Popponesset Bay on Cape Cod. These original pukwudgies were very clearly Little People, similar to the Wampanoag in their social organization, and capable of great magic. In recent years, non-Indigenous storytellers have reported encounters with far more monstrous pukwudgies: they have glowing red eyes, resemble eerie cryptids, and are covered in hair (sometimes porcupine quills). Importantly, they appear to be solitary creatures, unlike the original pukwudgies, who had a tribal social structure. These pukwudgies live in vaguely the same part of New England as the original pukwudgies (that is, the Freetown State Forest, fairly close to Cape Cod), but otherwise they don’t resemble them much at all. The modern-day pukwudgie is perhaps the most successful hybrid Indigenous/European fairy: folklore about them has developed to a much greater extent than other hybrid fairy folklore. If you’re interested in the appropriation of pukwudgie folklore, I wrote a post about it here. ↩︎