I love reading the stories posted here. A lot of the things I have read really hit home.
I'm half Native American (Creek) from Oklahoma, and although I haven't actually lived there in many years (due to joining the military), the things that I grew up hearing and seeing have never left me.
There are two major stories that hit home for me. Those are about "little people" and "Owl-men" (Stiginies). First, little people are what the Hispanics call duendes, what Irish people call Leprechauns, and what everyone else might know as gnomes.
I grew up knowing them being two different types: those that are mischievous and those who get people lost in the woods once they cross into their territory. They look like those you would see in something like The Borrowers, which, from what I grew up knowing, was not how they really live. I only heard about them being deep woods dwellers. They are more fun-loving and live with in their own. The only way to find your way back from being lost by them is to burn cedar.
Their contemporaries are a lot larger and are the height of duendes, but from close second-hand accounts are dressed in more 1800-style clothing. My second-hand account is from my uncle. A little person used to "stalk" him throughout his teens in the 1970s. They are the ones who help medicine men.
I grew up going to a Creek Church, which was fairly rural at the time, and our deacon lived in a camp house out there. He would talk about "little people" dressed in buckskin walking north to the deep woods every evening. Strange story, but true. Stiginies, I'll probably have to write about soon. That's even freakier.
