Sebastian Polizar, The Gnome
I am now 22 years old, but when I was 17 I saw a gnome, and this is how it happened. My mom and I just moved to Puerto Rico. She bought an old house on a hill that she fixed it up, and soon we moved in. One day I came home early from school. No one was home, so I went to take a shower. I could hear my dog barking and chasing something, so I got out of the shower, ran to the window and saw what he was barking at: a gnome! He was standing behind a tree. He was very small, wore a white, cone-shaped hat and pointy shoes. Everything he wore was white. He saw me and we looked at each other. When I blinked, he was gone. I decided not to say anything to anyone. Then a couple of days later when I saw him again

I was driving one night with a friend of mine, and he was skeptical to the core - a person of pure science who did not believe in anything "mysterious" or "unexplained." As I was rounding the corner on this dark night, my headlights caught something odd. I didn't see it as well as I would have liked, as my eyes were on the road. What I did see was burned into my memory and has been there ever since. There was something on the side of the road, that had been walking on its knuckles, like a gorilla. It reared up and looked at us as the headlights hit it. It was about four feet tall, the size of a child. Its arms were long enough that when it stooped it touched the ground, even though it was standing up. Its face - one of the images that remains hazy - I only remember as incredibly ugly. It was wearing clothes - and a pointed hat!

The first people to settle Detroit called him “Le Nain Rouge,” a grotesque little hobgoblin standing no more than 2 feet tall with glaring red eyes and warty crimson skin burning under a coarse blanket of thick black hair. If observers were not sure whether to be afraid or amused by the shambling little horror, they soon learned that the Red Dwarf was a faithful predecessor of calamity. Without fail, disaster followed close behind any appearance of the hideous gnome. Almost every notable misfortune in Detroit—from the ruin of Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac in the 18th century to the devastating ice storm of 1976—fell soon after a sighting of this stumpy monstrosity.

"I learned that a bored young boy playing along a creek near Bend, Oregon, saw two little people who crossed the creek and stood looking at him. He said they were no more than 15 to 18 inches high and very dark complected. They wore skins as garments, and after a period of 10 to 15 seconds, walked back across the creek and into the forest. The boy showed their footprints to his parents, who had contracted to a logging company to clean up slash piles. The prints were obvious and his parents were flabbergasted, but chose not to follow the little beings into the woods. He believes now that the little men weren't happy about the logging and destruction in the forest."