The Little Man in Striped Pajamas

It’s only appropriate the first post under this topic deal with the little people.

This is a first hand account from my mother in law, a retelling of a story I’ve heard many times now. When she was young my mother in law (“Shannon”) would go visit her grandparents who lived in an old farm house in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia.

She stayed with them often during the summertime and had the run of the house as kids do. There was a piano room separated from the kitchen by a somewhat long and narrow hallway. At the end of the hallway was the entrance to a dirt walled root cellar. Shannon said she never felt any strange feelings anywhere in the farm house except for that hallway. She said whenever she would leave the piano room for the kitchen she would always steel herself and run across the front of the hallway without ever looking down it. Except one day she did. She said she went to run past the hallway to the kitchen and for no reason stopped and slowly turned her head and looked down the hall. There, halfway down the hall she saw a little man. White with sandy colored hair, standing about two to three feet tall and wearing what she described as red and white striped pajamas. She said the man just stood there staring at her as she stared at him. Both seeming startled by the other. Then the little man turned and darted into the root cellar.

Shannon never saw the little man again and never looked for him either. Decades later she was reminiscing with her uncle about the old house when her uncle said “I never did like that hallway to the root cellar though. Strange stuff down there.”

and then he told her he had seen a man in red and white striped clothes in the root cellar one day.

-R.A.