Inter-dimensional Trespassers and Interlopers From the Liminal Realm

The worlds of cryptozoology and paranormal research are definitely strange, encompassing a wide range of phenomena that range from the odd to the downright weird. Yet when does the weird become something so utterly bizarre that it defies classification and even the limits of our own perception of reality? From where do these things spring forth from and are they even of the world as we know it at all? Perhaps some of the stranger phenomena out there have their place not in cryptozoology, the paranormal, or delusion and lies, but rather in the ever-growing idea of a multiverse and the notion that things might be able to traverse the barrier between our reality and the next, perhaps using liminal spaces as a way to do it. 

The realm of cryptozoology is one rife with possible examples of inter-dimensional interlopers of some kind. I mean this in the respect that there are some creatures sighted which are nothing one would expect to encounter within the natural world as we know it, and are even completely absurd. With something like Bigfoot or Nessie, there is a way to rationalize it as a flesh and blood animal. For instance, Bigfoot might be some undiscovered primate or human ancestor, Nessie might be some unknown aquatic animal, and so on. Even the more bizarre accounts of supposed living dinosaurs fit in somehow with natural history as we know it and are something we can comprehend as maybe being kind of sort of possible, but with some of the more outlandish reports of cryptozoological entities all bets are off. 

Take the account of what can only be described as a hairy octopus. In the summer of 1961, a 29-year-old truck driver named Arquimedes Sanchez was driving along a precipitous mountain road through the Basque mountains in Spain at around 11 PM, along with an unnamed companion, on their way to the town of Puerto de Barazar. As they rounded a bend (a liminal space), their headlights hit a bizarre and rather monstrous being standing upon an embankment nearby, which prompted the pair to stop their vehicle. When they peered through the murk ahead of them they claimed that they saw a “hairy octopus,” which stood around 4 feet tall, with glowing eyes and “tentacle-like” arms.

The witnesses and the thing apparently sat there completely frozen and immobile for several minutes, both parties probably just as startled and scared as the other, before Sanchez snapped out of it and slammed the accelerator, which caused the weird apparition to scurry backward away from the threat, after which Sanchez backed up and tried again, apparently intent on running it over. Interestingly, the otherworldly intruder refused to take off into the night, instead always just managing to avoid being run over, as if it were all a game. Finally, the two men, neither who were willing to step out of the vehicle to investigate, drove off to leave the being behind, never to be seen again.

What in the world was this thing? Maybe it wasn't of this world at all. Continuing road oddities is another case reported to the site Cryptozoology News by a taxi cab dispatcher named Edgar Zayas, who on the evening of June 3, 2018, says one of his drivers had been driving a passenger home and had his bizarre encounter as he had been driving on a rural road (a liminal space) through Elizabethton, Tennessee. He says that this driver had not seen the creature, but that the passenger had witnessed a “kangaroo-like” beast running along on its hind legs, and the report says of the incident:

“The female passenger in his cab asked upon passing the spot where the car had swerved if my driver had seen “it”. When he told her he had not, she described the creature as something about 2 feet tall, running at a high rate of speed across the road on only its hind legs, and had the overall body shape of a Kangaroo. She said the creature was running towards the woods. To the best of my knowledge and research, this is the first sighting of anything like this in or around this area of Tennessee. There have, however, been other sightings of other cryptids ranging from the Birdman of Hampton to the Tennessee Wildman, and even several possible Sasquatch sightings, including a possible winged Bigfoot encounter.”

Adding to all of this bizarreness is what can only be described as some sort of vegetable-like humanoids. Certainly one of the more downright bizarre cases comes to us from the U.S. state of West Virginia, where in July of 1968 a local man by the name of Jennings Frederick was out bowhunting in the rural backwoods just outside of Fairmont, West Virginia. At some point, he allegedly heard a high-pitched, unearthly sound that he would describe as sounding like “a recording running at exaggerated speed.” Curious, Jennings searched about for the origin of this surreal noise, and this was when he came across a very strange sight indeed.

There in the brush between the road and the forest beyond (a liminal space) stood a 7-foot tall, semi-humanoid entity, with an exceedingly thin, almost skeletal frame, long ears, and stalk-like arms that were almost like tendrils and which ended in slender, 7-inch long fingers tipped with some sort of needles or thorns, as well as suction cups. The whole of the anomalous creature was described as green and very plant-like in nature as if it were part animal and part plant. The whole time Frederick watched it that incessant chattering sound reverberated around him, and he suddenly realized that he could make out words within the alien noise, like glimpses of meaning from white noise, which he took to say:

“You need not fear me. I wish to communicate. I come as a friend. We know of you all. I come in peace. I wish medical assistance. I need your help.”

As Frederick stood there wide-mouthed in bewilderment, the mysterious being purportedly suddenly lashed out with one of its stalk-like arms with blinding speed to wrap him in an iron grip. The needles or thorns on its fingers then apparently pierced the startled man’s skin and began to draw blood, but rather than the pain he found himself drawn to the thing’s eyes, which seemed to rapidly switch back and forth from red to yellow in a hypnotizing, oscillating cycle that held him in thrall and dulled his senses. After about two minutes of this, the otherworldly plant-monster reportedly let him go and took off in a sprint up a nearby embankment in great 25-foot-long bounds, followed shortly after by a deep thrumming noise that Frederick would later speculate to have been the sound of the creature’s space ship. For years Frederick kept this undoubtedly absurd-sounding story to himself out of fear of ridicule, but in 1976 he would relate it to the paranormal researcher Gray Barker, who would then include it in his newsletter. The story would be brought to even greater attention when it was mentioned in the late Brad Steiger’s 1978 book Alien Meetings. Was this an alien, some sort of cryptid, or was it something from beyond the veil? Whatever it was, the “Vegetable Man” of West Virginia is certainly one of the more bizarre encounters on record.

Similar in some respects we have another report, this time from near Waverly, Kentucky, from witness Bill Wolfe and his family. The road they were on (a liminal space) went straight on through a vast expanse of cornfields (also a liminal space), and while the swaying stalks would have been eerie enough already, it was when they went up over a low hill (liminal space again) that things would get truly bizarre. As they went over the hill, they saw something crawling or slithering across the road in front of them. It was somewhat humanoid in shape, around 7 feet tall, very thin and long, and looked like what they would describe as an “anthropomorphic stalk of corn,” covered in tufts of what looked like the kind of hair one finds growing on corn stalks. The outlandish beast then crawled its way across the road to disappear into the gloomy cornfield on the other side. What was this bizarre creature? Was this some abomination that just crawled in from some parallel goblin universe to go crawling right back out? Whatever it was, the “Cornsquatch” has never been seen since.

Joining the ranks of all of this bizarreness is an encounter originally published in the October 8, 2017 edition of Strange Magazine, that supposedly occurred back in 1948 at the shipbuilding port city of Bremerton, in the U.S. state of Washington. One day, a young woman named Virginia Staples was just going about her usual daily household chores, carrying a load of laundry down to the washing machines in the basement of her run-down apartment building. It was a mindless chore she had done countless times before, and there would have been no reason for this time to be any different, but it was to prove to lead to a shocking experience, indeed.

The dim basement (a liminal space) was described as enormous, its voluminous floor constantly covered with a sheen of water that leaked from the walls and was rumored to come from passageways leading to the nearby sea, but although it all had a rather creepy foreboding atmosphere, Virginia was used to working in this dark and dank place. Yet on this day, something was not quite right, as she felt an undefinable sense of unease and dread as if she were being watched from the ample shadows clinging to everything in there. She tried to cast the odd feeling out of her head, chalking it up to nerves, but it would not abate, indeed becoming stronger the longer she lingered there, graduating to sheer terror for no discernible reason. She would say of what happened next:

“It was such a creepy feeling I finally turned around and looked toward the back of the basement and froze. I was so scared I can still feel it. I couldn’t move. In one of the huge holes in the basement there stood this thing. It was horrible! I stand five feet tall and this creature was as tall as I was. It had a bright orange colored body and little spidery thin legs and antennae on its head that kept moving back and in and out. That thing started towards me. I backed out of the basement and got up to my apartment and packed up all my things and moved. I was so scared. I moved over to Seattle to my cousin’s. Really no one would really believe this, but as God is my witness it really happened.”

She would say that it looked to her almost like a humanoid shrimp and that for years afterward she says she had potent, chronic nightmares. The interesting part of this tale, other than the sheer outlandishness of the entity described, is that this was in the basement of an apartment complex, and not even a remote one out in the boondocks. At the time Bremerton was a bustling Naval port city home to around 80,000 people, so it makes no sense at all that there should be this thing, even if there were passageways to the sea. Where did it come from and why didn’t anyone else see it? The strange abomination was only seen this one time and we are left to wonder just what it could have possibly been or whether it ever really happened at all.

One very odd humanoid creature of some sort that has been reported is what appears to be some sort of deer man, with various truly bizarre sightings of such creatures from all over the United States. One account was made in northeast Ohio by a witness who claims that he was at his cousin’s house playing hide and seek outside one day when he was 14 years old. It was reportedly around dusk (a liminal space), and they were playing near a wooded creek when it was the witness's turn to search, and as he did he claims that he heard the sound of leaves crackling underfoot. He turned to look expecting to see his cousin, but instead saw a deer through the brush that appeared to be oddly standing up on its hind legs, unusual for a deer but which would prove to be even stranger than that. The report reads:

“It was getting dark and I was the one searching. I heard leaves crumpling, and when I turned to look, I saw what looked like a deer on its hind legs. I clearly remember seeing “dog legs” running, but the rest of the body was straight up. And it ran with incredible speed, and I knew it wasn’t either of my cousins hiding. I ran as fast as I could back to the house, and my one of my cousins was running in too, he saw the same thing. It still creeps me out to this day, because my uncle always told us how he saw weird things on that property.”

A sighting of a similar creature that appears to have also had the ability of shapeshifting was made in the state of Delaware in 1993. The witness claims that he was around 8 years old at the time and he had been staying with his family at his grandparents’ house in a rural, forested area near the town of Hockessin. One morning he says he woke to a clear day with the sun shining in through the window (a liminal space) and also the surreal sight of the silhouette of a deer with a huge rack of antlers standing just outside. Things would get bizarre rapidly, and the witness says of what happened next thus:

“It was RIGHT there, like almost pressed against the window in profile. I stared in awe. And that is when it changed. In one smooth movement, it reared up on its hind legs and it was no longer a deer, but a man. There were only two men in the area, my grandfather and my dad, and it was clearly neither (not sure if that made it better or worse). Grandfather was very built for his age, dad had a gut. This silhouette was clearly younger, muscular but not in the “like a brick” way my grandfather was. It exuded strength. And scared the hell out of me. It stared to the side for a moment, and then strode off with purpose. Looking back, I want to tell myself it was just the imagination of a half-awake child, but I remember the awe and the utter fear I felt when the “deer” changed.”

Yet another Deer Man sighting was made as recently as 2012, in the Wichita Mountains of Oklahoma. In this account, a Kyle Heying claims that he was out at the Wichita Mountains National Wildlife Refuge hiking along a trail (a liminal space) in order to take photographs of the night sky there with a friend. On this evening at around 10 PM, the usual sounds of the forest suddenly became muted and the local wildlife started to display some decidedly bizarre and uncharacteristic behavior. First, some elk came running by and then a herd of bison, which all came uncomfortably close before hurrying off, and it seemed almost as if these animals were trying to get away from something scaring them out in the dark forest beyond.

This was enough to spook the men into packing up their stuff and calling it a night, and as they did they allegedly felt a strange change in air pressure and all of the sounds of the woods just stopped to send a profound silence crashing down upon them. The two unsettled men then heard something rustling about out in some tall grass nearby, jarring in the otherwise void of silence that had blanketed the area, and it seemed like whatever it was was coming towards them. Heying claims that he and his friends had then picked up some rifles they had with them, wary of what was apparently approaching. They started the car and began to drive off when they saw something step out in front of the vehicle that they would never forget, a creature that Heying described as having a head like an elk but which stood upright on two human legs and had two human arms and “dark red” eyes. As they passed it, the nightmarish creature lurched forward to hit the car, and Heying floored it away as fast as the vehicle would go until they were about 3 miles away, where they stopped their flight to regain their wits. Heying would say of what happened next thus:

“We were scared shitless. Things got even quieter when we stayed there. While there we heard one ear-piercing screech or scream, almost a hunting screech of some sort that made my hair stand on end and gave me goose bumps even worse. With that we left the mountains completely, we felt as though we were not wanted there that night. The way the wildlife acted, the figure that we came across that the animals had to have ran from, and then the scream of which I can only find references to happens to be the Banshee. I cannot forget that figure we saw, as well as the scream. It was not human but it was not of any wildlife I am familiar with from out there.”

Across a large swath of West Virginia including Boone, Kanawha, Putnam and Mason counties there is said to be lurking a hulking creature which is really hard to classify. Starting from around the mid-1990s there began a string of sightings of what was described as a white, wooly bear-sized beast with a pointed head topped by goat-like horns, a snouted face with long, sharp teeth, and a long hairless tail said to be reminiscent of that of an opossum. Often reported as accompanied by a pungent, sulfurous stench, the creature was at first called simply the “White Thing,” and would later garner the name “Sheepsquatch,” although it bears very little physical resemblance at all to its more famous Sasquatch cryptid cousin other than perhaps its size and hairiness.

The first sightings of this bizarre creature started coming in in 1994. In perhaps the earliest report, a group of women claimed that they had been driving along a treacherous icy road (a liminal space) in a location in West Virginia known as the TNT area, which they were cautiously inching along in order not to get into an accident. According to the witnesses, they were then surprised by a large creature that lumbered out of the woods in front of them, described as being around 7 or 8 feet tall, covered with shaggy white hair, and with a pointed snout, ram-like horns, and human-looking legs. The mysterious creature allegedly froze for a moment when the headlights hit it before running off into the dark forest.

Soon after this report others came pouring in, and there were numerous sightings made in 1994. In one account, a former Navy seaman out hunting observed the same creature emerge from the forest to crouch at a creek (a liminal space) to drink before continuing on its way. The witness claimed to have watched it for several minutes and said that it had human-like hands. In another account, a motorist spotted a tall, robust creature on a hillside, that was covered in white fur that appeared to be like rags hanging off of its body. In that very same year, there was another rather high-profile sighting made in Boone County by two children playing in their yard. The children reported that a beast that looked like a white bear walking on its hind legs was making its way through the underbrush on the periphery of their property (a liminal place) when their startled screams sent it in a mad bolt through the forest, leaving snapped saplings and tree branches in its wake.

Later reports of the Sheepsquatch would take on a more threatening tone. In 1995, a couple was driving along when they spotted a white, bear-like creature hunched over in a roadside ditch (a liminal space). When the couple slowed down to see what it was, the creature had then stood up on its hind legs to reveal that it was no bear, but rather a massive beast with a horned head and, oddly, four eyes. The thing then allegedly dashed at their car in a fury, slashing and banging the side of the vehicle with great force before the terrified couple sped away. They claimed that when they reached their home they discovered that the side of their car displayed wicked scratches that looked like they had been made by claws. In 1999 there was another such frightening encounter, when some campers heard what they at first took to be the sounds of bear grunting, huffing and moving about out in the darkness beyond the periphery of their campsite (a liminal space). Already a little spooked that a bear was in such close proximity and not sounding to be in the best of moods, the campers were truly in for a shock when out of the brush came crashing a hulking white blur which let out a bloodcurdling, unearthly scream. Fleeing for their lives, the campers briefly looked back to see the Sheepsquatch standing at their camp glaring at them. Allegedly, when the campers returned the following day their campsite seemed to have been totally ransacked by a large animal of some kind. In yet another apparent attack by a Sheepsquatch, an account outlined on a 2013 episode of the TV show Monsters and Mysteries in America, two hunters claimed that a giant, furry white beast over 9 feet tall had let out an “ungodly, gut-curling growl” before running towards them in an aggressive manner.

The most recent report of the Sheepsquatch occurred in 2015 when a group of six unnamed campers saw it while camping out in a place called Fulks Run. One of the campers reportedly first saw the creature crouching menacingly atop the crest of a hill (a liminal space) at around midnight, after which he went to warn the others. It was then that whatever it was stood to its full height of 8 or 9 feet and started running down the hill towards their camp. Apparently, a river (a liminal space) stood between the campers and the creature, but after trying in vain to find a way around it simply waded right into the rushing water to slosh towards them. By this time, all of the campers had gathered to watch the strange monster coming inexorably through the river towards them, and when it emerged they could see that it looked like a huge, white bipedal dog, dripping water from its soaked fur. The campers reported that there had then been a shriek from out in the forest from something else, and this had frightened the creature, who whimpered and slunk off back into the woods in apparent fear or passiveness. One wonders what could have provoked such a response.

Some of the alleged encounters with phantom creatures have been truly odd, to say the least, downright bonkers even. In one account from Steytlerville, South Africa, a monster was described as smoothly transforming from a man in a suit into a pig, and then into a bat, after which it flew off into the night. In another account from Easter weekend in 2011, two men were walking near a tavern late at night when they saw a suspicious-looking man in a dark jacket loitering about. When one of the two tried to talk to the man they were ignored, and it was then that they realized that the figure had no head. Shortly after this startling realization, the stranger was then reported to have morphed into a dog that was “very angry and big as a cow.” As the two terrified men ran away, the strange creature then purportedly turned on another group of people and transformed yet again, this time into a monkey, before hissing and scampering away into the night. The encounter was not good for the tavern’s business, as customers became too afraid to venture there at night.

Sightings of the Steytlerville Monster became so upsetting to panicked local residents that they demanded that the Eastern Cape police do something about it, and apparently, the townsfolk had several heated meetings with authorities to discuss the matter. According to one law enforcement officer, Warrant Officer Zandisile Nelani, there was even a picture of the thing taken, purportedly showing the creature resting under a tree. According to Nelani, the photo was originally taken of the monster in human form, but when the picture was developed it showed some sort of unidentified animal instead. Although the mysterious intruder caused a good amount of unrest in this otherwise quiet, sleepy town, whatever it was reportedly did not harm anyone. It is difficult to really classify what the Steytlerville Monster could possibly have been, and it is hard to imagine a stranger, or indeed more absurd mystery creature.

What in the world could possibly account for what these witnesses saw? Just what kind of creature could these things possibly be and are any of these accounts connected in any way? This doesn’t even include all of the sightings of bug-like humanoids out there. How can we reconcile hairy walking octopuses, vegetable men, deer men, Sheepsquatch, Shrimp people, shapeshifters, and other such otherworldliness with anything that could possibly exist in nature? How is it that they come and go without leaving any evidence and in many cases are seen only once and never again? Perhaps they are so fleeting, weird and so out of this world because they aren’t from this world at all, but rather are merely trespassing into it from outside our own reality, maybe even a reality in which this is all quite normal? 

The possibility of interdimensional trespassers carries over into the UFO phenomenon as well. Now granted here we are talking about alleged aliens, which could appear as pretty much any bizarre thing we can think of, but some sit firmly on the fence between believability and the absurd. Take a very weird account from August 17, 1971, from Palos Verdes, California. Witnesses John Hodges and Pete Rodriguez were allegedly headed to their car at 2 AM when they saw off through the trees a faint, mysterious glow emanating from beyond. They got into their car, switched on the headlights, and suspended in the beams of light from their vehicle were what were described as two large, blueish entities that looked just like disembodied human brains, hovering right in the middle of the road (a liminal space) and surrounded by clouds of vapor that seemed to cling to them. The larger one of the “brains” was described as having a prominent red eye set within it, and this is the one that began to move towards the vehicle for purposes unknown.

The two terrified men understandably got out of there as fast as they possibly could, and it was later noticed that they had 2 hours of missing time. In 1976, Hodges would undergo hypnotic regression after years of being plagued by nightmares and wondering what had happened to them out on that lonely road. Under hypnosis, Hodges revealed that he had dropped Rodriquez off at home and arrived at his own house to find the larger brain waiting for him there, which had then telepathically spoken to him. He claimed that he had then been taken into the brains’ ship to some sort of "control room," where it was revealed that they were merely telepathic tools being used by other aliens, this time more akin to the “grey” aliens typically described in more mainstream reports, although in this case, they stood over 7-feet tall.

These master aliens then apparently showed Hodges various images of nuclear war and destruction as they explained that the human race had grown too powerful for its own good. He was also shown another planet that had been completely destroyed by another race that had met the same fate and was admonished that humankind would be the “instruments of their own fate,” telling him, “Take the time to understand yourselves. The time draws near when you shall need to!” Hodges then says that he felt a potent buzzing sensation in the back of his head and found himself back in his car. In the years after, he became convinced that these aliens had implanted him with what he called a “translator cell,” and that he received frequent telepathic communications from them through this device, in which they made dire predictions such as an apocalyptic war in the Middle East and the future widespread use of nuclear weapons. Whether you think this story and its “space brains” has any truth to it at all or not, you have to admit it is a damn strange tale all the same.

Another one of the weirder of these reports is an account chronicled by UFO researcher Linda Moulton Howe in her book Glimpses of Other Realities, Vol. II: High Strangeness. She tells the tale of a witness named Linda Porter, who claimed to have had an incredibly odd encounter with a telepathic mantis-like humanoid in a hallway (a liminal space) in 1961 and that it had whisked her off to another dimension via what she called an “interdimensional tunnel.” The next thing she knew, Porter was with a “Praying mantis being in a light-filled room,” and she said:

“I remember the being slowly coming around the corner and facing me. He stood very still and simply waited as if he knew how frightening he appeared to me. Eventually he began to talk to me (telepathically). He seemed to possess a great deal of dignity and gave the impression of being quite old. He walked me to this room (filled with dense light). The memory ends with me about to enter the room and the thought ‘Translated Into the Light’ has to do with what happened.”

Adding to the utter strangeness of this case, Porter, who had been born with a heart defect, claimed that she had had her soul transferred by the creature into a cloned body of herself that was healthy and that the creature had explained to her in-depth about other dimensions and travel between them. Very weird stuff, indeed. In another peculiar account from UFO BC, there is a witness who says that she and her friend had been captured by tall, insectoid humanoids and then subjected to some sort of violent, gruesome medical procedure. She would say:

“I stood there helpless for the longest time, not knowing what to do but feeling a real sense of panic. Something had to be done quickly. All of a sudden there were two Beings that appeared next to my friend. They seemed to push me right aside and silently went right to work on her, like skilled surgeons. They stood to her left, standing together and working furiously on my friend. I had no idea who they were, what they were doing, but the first thing I thought of was ‘are they aliens’??? I stood there and watched…I thought they looked like Praying Mantises. Alien Praying Mantises…
 
Then I focused on my friend and saw her head was split wide open, like these aliens sliced it perfectly open. I saw freshly sliced raw flesh and these Aliens/Praying Mantis were busily removing pieces of bone, rock or whatever from her brain. This did not look anything like what I would imagine the inside of a brain to look but it was just such a clean cut. These two Alien/Praying Mantis worked quickly, without speaking one word. I seemed to black out and don’t remember any more of it.”

What was going on here? What were they doing? What happened to the friend? Was this all a hallucination or is there anything more to it? Who knows? From the same site is a bizarre report from a witness who claims the Mantis Men were rather more benevolent towards him, and even gifted him with advanced technology. He explains:

“My Praying Mantis figure was very kind to me. He urged me to stay calm and telepathically reassured me everything would be alright. My right eye was removed by a device that came down from the white ceiling. I started to really panic but the Mantis kept me from really freaking out. Then it was replaced. The Mantis also told me telepathically that I was a special person who would really make a difference here on earth. I am now 44 years old and have made no real significant differences to the human race. I think he may have just wanted to reassure a child at the time. I have retained 1 thing from my encounter. I still have the power to see major global disasters before they happen. I only report them to either my fiancé or my close family members because I know anyone else would just call me crazy. But now they believe me for the most part. Because when I see something clearly and tell them, it always happens.”

If these men were telling the truth at all, could this also be a case of interdimensional beings invading our reality? Harder to categorize as cryptozoological or extraterrestrial is the many reports out there of what appear to be actual gnomes, complete with little beards and pointy hats, like something out of a fairy tale. One such encounter is given on the site True Ghost Tales, from a witness who says she had just moved from Indiana with her husband and three children to South Texas when the phenomena first started, where they lived in a spacious house in a rural area along a dirt road and surrounded by expansive fields. The first time they saw these gnomes was as they were taking a walk along the dirt road (a liminal space) and running around playing. As they did so something strange would happen indeed. The witness says:

“We began laughing and chasing one another as moms do but about two miles down the road my oldest son Austin let out this scream that made me immediately turn to see what was wrong. That is when I saw them. My son was pointing down the road a bit and there on the side of the road was four little people.
 
Now when I say little people I do not mean short I mean about a foot tall and they were all wearing pointy little white hats and white clothes. Two of them were splashing arm in arm in the rain puddles that had collected on the side of the road and one of them appeared to be filling up a bucket with the same water. The last one was the smallest and walked with a bit of a limp and I noticed a fifth one that was much taller than all the rest and wore all black and had a shorter black hat on as well. I could tell right away that the one in black was obviously some type of authority or leader and I watched as he picked the smallest one up and placed him on his shoulders.
 
Now all this time we are standing there watching them they seemed completely unaware of us. We just stood there frozen and not believing what we were seeing. Then out of nowhere the leader, or one in black, seemed to notice us and he turned to the others obviously telling them it was time to go because they stopped what they were doing right away and followed the biggest one into the tall grass. We walked up to the place where they had been after waiting awhile to be sure they were not coming back and there were a bunch of tiny bare foot prints left behind in the mud along with weird writing that looked a lot like hieroglyphics. We looked around the area and I gotta tell ya there was no place around there they could of gone without us seeing them or them having to cross the road to the other side where the woods are.”

Although on this occasion these “gnomes” seemed to be a bit shy about being seen, this would apparently change, as they would soon appear again and seemed to want to communicate or play with the witness. The witness says that later that very same evening she went outside to have a smoke, and out of the surrounding gloom these little people materialized again, looking upon her with what she took to be great curiosity. The witness describes this odd encounter:

“I went out for a smoke and I couldn’t believe it there they were again just at the edge of my property staring at me with such curiosity that for some reason made me not feel afraid of them. They began to copy or mimic my movements and when I put my hands on my hips they did so to. I finally sat down on my mothers old wheel chair and noticed how curious they seemed about the chair. I went inside after awhile and in the morning when I went back out there were lots of tiny muddy foot prints all over the concrete patio leading up to the old wheel chair and all over the chair itself. I had to laugh it just seemed so surreal to of really seen them and now this. Since then I have seen the tiny people numerous times and each time they seem to be observing me. I have never gotten any bad feelings or ill intentions from them so I’m not scared of them anymore but I gotta say this is the weirdest thing I have ever heard of.”

Very weird, indeed. Who or what were these diminutive people? What did they want from this witness? Were they just playing, trying somehow to communicate in their own way, or what? In another account from the book Mysterious Disappearances: And Other Strange Tales, by Ron Quinn, there is the account of a couple called “Rick and Joyce,” who apparently owned a remote mountain cabin getaway where they would spend their weekends. One day they were out tending their garden (a liminal space) when a small stone landed at their feet, seeming to come out of nowhere. Puzzled, they looked around and at first, suspected that perhaps a squirrel had dropped the stone from a tree, but there was nothing there. As they looked, another stone fell, lightly lobbed from the branches and obviously not meant to harm. Another stone followed, bouncing against the porch and tumbling down the steps.

The baffled couple looked up into the trees once again, staring through the branches, and this time they claimed that they saw the face of a little man peering out from the leaves at them, wearing a bright pointy hat and sporting a full beard. The little man was only about a foot in height and seemed to smile at them before jumping down from the tree onto the roof of the cabin and disappearing into the brush. The couple tried to coax the strange little man back out, but he was gone, and they would not make another sighting. Again we are faced with the question of what this entity, creature, whatever you want to call it, wanted. What was the meaning of those tossed rocks? Why did it smile at them? Was it trying to play with them? Was this a gesture of aggression? We will never know.

Another report along these lines came to me from a reader, who says this happened shortly after moving to a rural town in California. One evening, she says she woke to a light tapping on her window (a liminal space), which was odd as it was the middle of the night and they had no children or neighbors, and making it even more bizarre was that she was on the second floor of the home. She went to the window, but no one was there, and there was really nowhere anyone could have gone to hide so quickly. She left the curtains open and settled back into bed with that tapping still on her mind when it started again. This time she did see someone or at least something, and she tells me:

“There in the window was the face of a tiny little man, just peering in at me. He had a little beard, pure white, and had a green, pointed little hat sitting askew on his head. I would guess that he would have only been around 2 feet in height, which was baffling to me as I was on the second floor of the house. I just sat there totally astonished. The little man tapped on the window again and smiled, and I didn’t get an evil or sinister feeling from him. He seemed almost like he wanted to play. Then he waved and seemed to step away from the window, although I don’t know how because there was nothing but a sheer drop to the ground. I was so curious that I went to look outside again and this time he was gone and did not come back.”

One commonality in a lot of these more bizarre encounters with the truly outlandish, as I have repeatedly pointed out in the article, is their tendency to occur in liminal places. A liminal place is a sort of threshold between two places in space or time. They are places that lie between where we are now and where we expect to be. Physical liminal spaces could be bends in the road, or even roads in general, windows, hilltops, tunnels, fields, gardens, rivers, banks of fog, doorways, bridges, or old structures lying between existing and succumbing to inevitable entropy to become feral ruins, but these are not confined to merely the physical world. The point between wakefulness and sleep is a minimal space, as is dusk and dawn, or even something as simple as a job interview and waiting to hear if you got the job. Liminal spaces are those that lie between the known and the expected, having a pre-determined beginning and end, and connecting two pre-determined, concrete points.

The way this all connects to what I’ve been talking about so far is that many of the more bizarre encounters with ghosts, aliens, monsters, or whatever, is that they very often occur in these liminal zones. How many reports are there of someone seeing something strange just as they woke or drifted off to sleep? How many alien and ghost encounters happen along darkened roads or after rounding a bend in the road or going over a hill? How many reports of phantoms and monsters come from decaying ruins or in patches of dark wilderness? These liminal places seem to be populated by some of the weirder reports of various entities and apparitions, so why should this be? Are these places that perhaps represent a thin spot in the veil between realities, points where these entities can more easily bleed into our own dimension, whether intentionally or otherwise? We may never know the answers to these questions, but it is something to think about.