Legend: Encounters With Leprechauns

In twenty twenty, an article surfaced online that talked about a peculiar sighting leprechauns now. I hadn't seen any of these mentioned posts on social media that are referenced, but the content of the article really made us wonder about what could be out there. Two teenage girls and their younger brother were out walking in County Claire, according to the website. Meanwhile, in Ireland dot Com, they were out with their dog in an area near Limerick when they had a strange encounter. Mary O'Neill said quote, we were out walking Gypsy, our golden retriever, when we came across this tiny little man. He was no more than three feet tall, with a big long beard, and he was sitting on a small stone step while mending a pair of shoes. She described him as being dressed at a top hat and knee length breeches, along with shiny brogues on his feet. As soon as he saw them, he ran away, saying you'll not get me gold, so you won't. Then he disappeared. I probably had the same questions that you're having now, and trust me, the answers we found might surprise you just as much as they surprised me when I read about them. Today, we'll take a brief look at a topic we might have all heard about, but I had no idea of their hidden truths, the little people leprechauns. My name is Edwin, and here it's a dark memory. Now this page said that from the Irish College of Folkloristics, Professor David Murphy brought some expertise regarding this leprecaun signing. He said that more and more leprechaun sightings had been reported, even though they have been considered extinct for a very long time. Now this is the part where we took a hard pause and then decided to go instead for a deeper look into these creatures where they came from. First, i'll tell you more about what they actually are. A famous part of Irish lore, Leprechauns are known to be a type of fairy now. These stories started being told in the eighth century. Their name comes from the word lucrepon or lucrepan, which means small body. Physically, they are said to be two to three feet tall and to live in tiny caves underground or inside hollow tree trucks. When they are illustrated, they look like shoemakers cobblers, and that's what their supposed profession is within the fairy world. Because they are hard workers, they are usually depicted alongside a pot of gold. Over the years, people in Ireland and around the world developed a common depiction of these creatures, which are basically old men dressed in a green hat and green suit, sometimes seen smoking a pipe. Some earlier drawings of these people also showed them wearing red. We have settled with green, probably because of just how popular the color is within Ireland. Traditionally, leprechauns are often told to possess pots of gold and hide them at the end of the rainbow, and if you want the pot of gold for yourself, you have to find them at the end of it. If you catch one, you become luckier and you get three wishes. Granted, all of these stories you might be very well familiar with, and what really makes these interesting and frankly a bit eerie, is that there have been many sightings reported about these members of the leprechaun population. Now there were countless out there about if they could actually be real, being still hiding in the forests and caves, but one of their most interesting ones was one that mentioned that they were being trapped and then taken to be displayed around the world. If any of them managed to escape, they may have gone into hiding for years all around the world. Based on this idea, we went looking for some alleged encounters and we ended up on several websites where we learned about some of these sightings. In Liverpool, England, in nineteen sixty four and Jubilee Park, people began reporting that leprechauns had been lurking around an area known as Bowling Greens. People described them being from just a few inches up to a few feet tall, with beards, bushy eyebrows, and green coats. One of the witness accounts said that at around four point thirty Peter in early July nineteen sixty four, he was on his way to play football when he saw tiny creatures men dressed in red and black, simply looking at him while they stood in the grass. The boy, being only ten years old at the time, panicked. He ran all the way home. To his surprise, his mother told him that leprechauns had been spotted on Jibilee Drive and Edge Lane the day before. Crowds of people showed up to the location to try and see the creatures for themselves. In another account, a person speaks of her friend named Susan, who claimed that she had seen a leprechaun in the hallway of her room the previous night. She had been sleeping when she heard rustling noises outside in the hall. Then she got out of bed to peek around the corner. That's when she saw a small man of approximately two feet in height in dirty clothes with red hair. She made an emphasis to say that it did not look like the leprechaun and the Lucky Charms box. Many years later, the person who wrote about her friend Susan believes that the creature had not been a leprechaun, but rather a type of creature known as Tommy knockers. This story took place in Pennsylvania, which does a large amount of coal mining and such. These creatures are described as being dirty and looking like little men with reddish hair. There are many more stories of strange encounters on the website Mysterious universe dot org, and I'll be sure to link to the specific article for you to read. But there's also a reason why I found this particularly interesting. One of the first stories. In my other show, Scary Story podcast, I wrote an episode called the Creatures from the Hills, a true story during the visits to South America. My experience was so bizarre that I actually wrote it out and finally got to share the story once a podcast came out. The story goes that I was walking with two friends along the dirt trails of a town in the Andes Mountains when we decided to take a road behind the town instead of taking the main street, and that's where we would get a ride back to the main city. The town we were in is called c Cincetto, and the city we were trying to get to is a famous city of Cusco in Peru. Anyway, as we were heading back to the main part of Cincetto, we bumped into a potato farmer who was equally as curious about us. Long story short to when we were about to head back, he looked at us with a straight face and told us to be careful of the little people. When I asked him if they were real, he did not hesitate to tell us that yes, in fact, they had been known to take some of their animals and kids deep into the mountains to areas so large that it is impossible for them to have been thoroughly explored. Even today, there's slots we don't know about the world around us, and through tales like these and the ones you find on the Other show, or even Natalie's tale on true Scary Story called the Little Man, has spiked some interest in having an episode dedicated to the phenomena and sightings of these creatures. You would be surprised at the overwhelming amount of stories of sightings that exist out there. Learning about them can send chills down your back. Perhaps they really do live out there in the dense trees around your cities or deep underground right around where you live. This episode of A Dark Memory was researched by Madeline Guera and written by me Edwin Komarujas. If you have any idea or comments about the episodes, be sure to visit a Dark Memory dot com or email me. You can find my email in the description of this episode. Thank you very much for listening, See you soon.