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

Some years ago I read about the legend of the “old men of the mountains” who supposedly inhabit the Berkshires in northwestern Connecticut (also called the Litchfield Hills). These little men have apparently been seen since Colonial times and are described as wearing flowing gray robes. Whenever someone lays eyes on them, they immediately disappear.

After learning about this legend, I quickly forgot all about it and didn’t include it in my book New England Fairies. It was only at a recent book signing in Colchester, Connecticut (at the Folklore and Fable Booksellers), that I found the story again. I was flipping through Zachary Lamothe’s book Connecticut Lore (2013) when I came upon his section on the Little People—including a reference to the Berkshires’ “old men of the mountains.” Lamothe called the men “elves” and compared them to the shrunken gnomes of the Catskills, who appear in Washington Irving’s Rip Van Winkle.

But where did this story originate?

Apparently, the tale first reached a New England-wide audience in Joseph Citro’s Passing Strange, a 1997 collection of supposedly “true tales.” Before that, it had appeared in historian Neil Hogan’s column in the New Haven Register (February 25, 1990), where it was reported as an age-old legend and where Citro learned about it.

According to Hogan,

As far back as Colonial times, there have been stories of strange creatures who were said to inhabit the Berkshire foothills in the town of Canaan in northwestern Connecticut. Inhabitants of that area called the creatures “the old men of the mountains.” It was thought by many that these men possessed supernatural powers and some people even considered them to be in league with Satan. Folks in Canaan believed the old men lived in caverns in the deepest part of the hills far away from the settlements and appeared at will. They also believed the old men possessed vast treasures of gold and silver, which they minted into small triangular coins that were inscribed with strange characters. Many stories were told about these strange men who supposedly were always dressed in gray flowing robes.

Besides these details, Hogan also recounts three brief tales in which residents of Canaan experience magical encounters with the men—in the hills around the town and at home. These tales are clearly indebted to Northern European folktales about the fairies, for the “old men of the mountains” keep watch over piles of gold and silver, live in homes carved from rock, and occasionally reward residents of Canaan when they agree to give them food (they leave behind “triangular coins, inscribed with strange characters”).

While these stories are entertaining and are quite faithful to European folklore, they don’t appear in any other sources. Hogan also doesn’t cite any sources himself. Although he claims that the legend dates to Colonial times, it isn’t attested folklore, and despite passing through the works of three different authors over the course of thirty-five years, it doesn’t seem to have “taken off” as a self-sustaining legend.

The only story I’ve seen about a “little man” inhabiting the Berkshires can be found—like the former story—in Joseph Citro’s Passing Strange. There Citro cites a New York Times article from October 18, 1879, in which two young men report seeing a “wild man” of the woods while hunting in the Berkshires south of Williamstown, Massachusetts. The article reports:

The young men describe the creature as being about 5 feet high, resembling a man in form and movement, but covered all over with bright red hair, and having a long straggling beard, and with very wild eyes.

Very different to the robe-wearing men of the mountains, this “wild man” is similar to the wild men of the woods (or woodwose) who’ve appeared in European folklore since medieval times. The sighting also has much in common with other sightings of large or small hairy woodsmen reported in the United States throughout the nineteenth century (precursors to the modern Bigfoot). However, sightings of “wild men” represent a rather different tradition to the Fairy-influenced stories told by Hogan. The two traditions possibly overlap in depictions of the Massachusetts pukwudgie—in particular, people’s encounters with hairy humanoids in the 1990s and 2000s. These beings seem to combine both fairy and wild man attributes.

To read about more Massachusetts fairies, check out my book New England Fairies: A History of the Little People of the Hills and Forests.