A family moved in to a farm house near the Tule River in the area around Porterville, in rural Tulare County, California.
After moving in, the mother, Tammy, began to feel on edge, as if she was always being watched. And one location, in particular, made her uneasy: the barn. Even the family's animals (pets as well as fowl such as geese and chickens) avoided the barn, and everyone got the creeps when near it. They could never put a finger on what bothered them, but knew that something was not right.
One night, when returning home from the grocery store with one of her children, Tammy heard a sinister chuckling and saw movement out of the corner of her eyes. Turning, she saw a small (2-3 feet tall), gnome-like creature. It as wearing a red hat, a gold-colored shirt, and black pants, and when it "smiled" at her, it revealed to rows of brown, decayed, and sharp teeth.
Eventually, a woman named Charlie and her family moved into the house, and it all began again. They noticed that animals, both domestic and wild, avoided a building that they called "the shack" (presumably the barn that made Tammy uneasy). On at least one occasion, Charlie felt so unnerved while walking near the shack that she picked up her two young children and broke into a sprint to get away from it.
And then, one day, things picked up and became much more frightening.
Charlie heard what sounded like a car fighting with something inside the shack. When her husband went to investigate, he found a cat alright, entirely skinned on one side and with a huge bite taken out of its neck. He stepped out to clear his head, and when he stepped back in, the cat was gone.
A short time later, at 3 a.m.*, Charlie and her husband woke to a guttural, eerie singing coming from the back yard. Looking out their window, they saw the same creature. It was looking at them as they looked through their window at it. It pulled a fish out of the koi pond that Charlie had installed, and smiled as it ate the fish and stared at the couple. Charlie's husband yelled out the window that he was going to call the police, an the gnome flipped them off** and then walked away, laughing the entire time. When the police arrive,d they found nothing but child-sized foot prints.
The creature returned every night at 3 a.m., messed about with their lawn ornaments (mostly gnome and fairy ornaments, naturally) and eating the fish in the pond. Finally, the family locked the ornaments away and put the fish into a tank in the house. When the creature showed up the following night, it was pissed. It proceeded to scream in it's odd, guttural language, while running in circles around the house. Charlie ran downstairs to find the dogs barking at the dog door, which she quickly secured from the inside before running upstairs to lock all of the windows.
The family left shortly thereafter. When a writer introduced Charlie and Tammy to each other, they went back to look in on the property. The barn/shack was gone, but when they went to speak with the current resident, they were rudely rebuffed and sent packing. A commenter claiming to be Tammy claimed that she would later learn, however, that others in the area had been terrorized by the creature for years, and that, some years later, the creature seemed to follow her to her new home. Some web commenters from the area claim that, while they never saw anything, they always felt uneasy in the vicinity and avoided the property in question.
* I make a point of noting the time only because 3 a.m. plays a prominent role in modern ghost folklore. This seems to be a development of the last few decades, with midnight being important in earlier folklore. Initially, the 3 a.m. time, from what I have read, comes from the three numbers that mark "the beast" in the book of revelations, which has come to be the "number of the devil" in popular folklore, and so the fact that there are three numbers have made 3 a.m. (get it get it?) important to many people who like a religious bent to their ghost stories. I have also heard that as this is three in the dark, it can be a dark reflection or parody of the holy trinity. Personally, I have always thought this was a rather silly conceit that generally just makes me roll my eyes, but that's me.
** Well, rude hand gestures ARE the universal language, after all.
Commentary: While not specifically a ghost story, I feel like this one falls more on the weird spirit side of the spectrum than the cryptozoological one, so I decided to add it here.
That said, the story fits very nicely into the tradition of the western European Faerie stories. Although we tend to use the term "fairy tale" nowadays to describe something both fantastic and gentle if not childish, the actual folklore from which the term "fairy" comes were, in fact, more often dark and molevolent (indeed, if you were to tell a 10th century person that they were "fae" they wouldn't think that you were calling them feminine, they would think that you were saying that they were doomed to a horrible fate at the hands of the supernatural). When Black Sabbath sang about fairies in boots dancing with dwarves, they weren't trying to call up a cartoonish image, but were, instead, trying to describe something otherworldly and terrifying.
So, the idea of a malicious gnome terrorizing a family in an isolated farmhouse is absolutely in keeping with these older traditions. That said, the description of the creature in the story doesn't match that of a gnome so much as it does a faerie (later Christianized as a demon) from northern Europe known as a Redcap - these creatures looked in many respects like the garden gnomes that we appreciate so much, but were vicious murderers whose hats were red with the blood of their victims. Should their hats dry out the redcap would die (or be sent back to Hell, or be banished from the material plan, etc. etc.). The redcaps wore iron boots (unlike other such folkloric creatures, they weren't afraid of iron), but nonetheless ran faster than any human could. They were vile, often dirty, and enjoyed the pain and suffering of others.
It is interesting to me, as a resident of the San Joaquin Valley, where this story takes place (Tulare County is just south of Fresno County, where I currently live) that this story is reliant on northwestern European faerie mythology, and not the more common Latino folklore that permeates much of our local ghost folklore (in fact, I went for a walk this afternoon along a trail said to be haunted by a La Llorona spirit). Given the tendency for many neo-pagan groups to rehash selective elements of Celtic and Germanic folklore, it may be that this is the source of this, or it may be something else. Regardless, it makes for an interesting story.
Naturally, the internet being the internet, on the web pages where this story was posted there is a lot of speculation as to what happened, ranging from discussions of fairies to speculation that the little man might have been an escaped mental patient. And in one web forum the there is an active debate as to whether or not one more fervent evangelic Christian poster is justified in calling this thing a demon.
The text of the story at Weird Fresno is taken from Mysterious Universe, so they may seem redundant, but the blog comments at Weird Fresno are worth a look. First, off, there is someone who claims to be the "Tammy" from the story, further describing her experiences. Secondly, there is a commenter who claims to have seen the same type of creature at another location in another state. As stated above, this story bears more than a passing resemblance to some of the faerie folklore from which gnomes are derived, so it seems only fitting that others would claim similar encounters.
Sources: Weird Fresno, Mysterious Universe
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