We are many we are small
We were here before you rose
We will be here when you fall
- Neil Gaiman, Coraline
I can imagine that the two children of the Bredlow family chattered amongst themselves in excitement in the back of the car as they pulled up to cabin. It was a dazzling piece of coastal Americana - a small cabin nestled among the towering cliffs of the Oregon coast. Waves crashed and foamed below - ready to provide the background noise to the crackling of a wood fire. It was July of 1997, and the Bredlows were looking forward to spending two weeks in this cabin - relaxing and getting back to nature. However, the house they were now stood in front of was already occupied by something incomprehensible – and that something wouldn’t give up its property easily. A dream vacation was about to become a nightmare.
... It's Rats He Gets!
The Bredlow family was made up of four members. Margie Bredlow, a 47-year-old music teacher, had married Loyd Bredlow, another teacher, one year older than his wife. Together, they had had two daughters – Violet, who was eight years old as of that May and DeAnne, thirteen years of age. Nearly as soon as they stepped into the house, Margie noticed a strange feeling coming from one of the storerooms in the back of the building. Violet seemed to feel the same thing, holding her stuffed kitty doll ‘Muggins’ up to her mouth and whispering ‘I hope we don’t have to sleep back there’ into its cloth ear. DeAnne and Loyd helped Margie unpack the family’s stuff before it got dark – they were all hoping to go out hiking in the woods while it was still light.
Now wandering through a narrow forest path, the family were approaching a beautiful waterfall. This was going to be two weeks of rural idyll, they doubtless thought. The two girls were walking ahead of their parents when a ‘strange kind of mist’ settled around the group. Visibility rapidly declined to zero, and in the confusion Loyd and Margie called out desperately for their girls to follow the sound of their voices and come back to them. DeAnne responded immediately, quickly retreating back to the comfort of her parents’ arms. The family clung together in the ‘frightening’ fog, calling out for Violet but receiving no response. Just as the icy daggers of panic were starting to set in, the mist dissipated into nothingness just as quickly as it had come. Violet’s voice called out from behind them, prompting the other three to turn around in astonishment. That shouldn’t have been possible. They had been on a narrow path, shouting her name. There was no way she could’ve walked past them. However, when they asked her how she had done this – she replied that she hadn’t walked. Instead, she said ‘They carried me through the air and set me down again. It was pretty scary but they promised they wouldn’t hurt me.’ She apparently hadn’t heard the desperate shouts of her family, and hadn’t seen any fog. Margie would later say that she regretted not packing everything up and leaving that instant – but in that moment she decided not to let her ‘imagination’ run away with her. Whatever was wrong with the property would soon lift itself out of the realms of possible dismissal in such a way.
As they had dinner that night, they were presumably all trying to keep their minds off the bizarre events of that afternoon. Well, all of them save for Violet. After she had finished her food, she started preparing two plates from the leftovers. When Margie approached her and asked what she was doing, her daughter replied that ‘they’ must be fed twice a day, or they would become very angry and force the family out of the house. Margie asked about the identity of the mysterious ‘they’ – and the response allowed her to put worries of home invaders from her mind temporarily. Violet said that they were ‘the two little people who carried me in the air above the trail and who live in the storage room’. Margie likely smiled at this, thinking that her daughter was just playing a game – and she told her to go ahead, walking with her to the back storage room. Violet opened the door eagerly and set the plates down on the floor, before kneeling down and waiting the arrival of her diminutive friends. Everything was still for a moment, before Violet broke the silence and told her mother that the little men wouldn’t eat while they were watching. With this, she took Margie’s hand and stood up. The pair hadn’t taken more than two steps out of the room before the storage room door suddenly slammed shut with a loud bang – making Margie jump and momentarily shriek in shock. Loyd came running to the sound of the commotion, and when he asked what was happening, Violet matter-of-factly replied that they were feeding the little people in the back room. Her father assumed that she was talking about vermin of some kind, and so chided her before opening the door to have a look…
Eating the leftovers from the two paper plates just behind the slammed door were two plump and satisfied-looking rats. Margie and DeAnne looked in to see these rodents as well, and Loyd responded to the sight by finding a nearby broom and walked towards the room to shoo the pests out of the house. Violet begged him not too – seemingly afraid of angering the rats – but Loyd paid no attention to his daughter’s cries. However, just as he was reaching the door – armed with his trusty broom, the door once again slammed violently shut. Presumably sighing with annoyance, Loyd reached for the handle and tried to open it – only to find that it wouldn’t open, no matter how hard he tried. Eventually, he gave up and wandered off – mumbling about the door having somehow locked itself from the inside. Quite how he imagined this happening is unclear to me. As soon as Loyd had left the scene, the door opened itself once again, and two plates were seemingly pushed out onto the floor. They had been licked clean. Violet smiled up at her mother, telling her that the little men had enjoyed the potato salad and Jell-O, but that they wanted more of the baked beans. ‘They don’t really like to be called rats, but they can look like anything we want them to’, she added.
Curious, Margie asked her youngest daughter how she could hear what the so-called ‘little people’ were saying – to which she replied that she could hear their voices inside her head, which was also how the entities had spoken to her when they had met on the trail. Perhaps starting to allow her disbelief to suspend, Margie continued to ask questions. When she asked what the creatures looked like when they weren’t rats, Violet answered that they looked ‘like two little people… but weird little people with funny, crinkly faces’. Margie henceforth agreed to help her daughter feed the little people. Even if they were just rats, it seemed that she didn’t particularly mind. For the next few days, this is exactly what the mother-daughter team did – in secret from the other two members of their household. Loyd busied himself reading, Margie worked on her music compositions and their daughters either read or worked puzzles. However, this peace was about to come to an end. Nobody else knew that Loyd had just laid out a rat trap that he’d bought in the local village earlier that day.
On the fifth afternoon of their stay in the cabin, just before sunset, Margie heard the awful noise of metal slapping onto wood, accompanied by a high-pitched scream. Baffled and alarmed, she ran into the room and found Violet there with her hands pressed against her temples in agony. The dreadful scream was coming from her. In that instant, Margie somehow knew that one of the elven beings that had been co-occupying their holiday house had been caught in the rat-trap (I am also not certain how she knew about the rat-trap to begin with) and that the telepathic bond they had seemingly formed with her daughter was causing her to feel all the pain of the ordeal. Running to the storage room, Margie threw open the door and found – to her ‘everlasting astonishment’ – two diminutive humanoids clad in green. One of them was trying to free the other from the metal bar of the rat-trap which had slammed closed across his foot. The elf in the rat-trap had his mouth wide open in a silent scream, which was seemingly issuing from Violet’s mouth instead. Gritting her teeth and summoning all her courage, Margie darted forward and clasped her fingers under the bar of the rat-trap and lifted it just high enough for the elf to free his foot and escape from the painful situation. As soon as the entity had removed his foot from the trap, both critters disappeared in a flash and Violet stopped screaming. Coming from some invisible source – Margie heard a tiny voice say with anger ‘If it’s rats he wants, it’s rats he gets!’
Margie had barely recovered from the bizarre situation when her eldest daughter came running down the hall yelling hysterically about rats. There were rats everywhere. Dozens and dozens of the furry vermin had appeared seemingly out of nowhere, and were currently in the process of completely overrunning the cabin. Realising that there was no other real option – the Bredlow family gathered up what they could from the ruins of their perfect vacation and fled the house. To this day, Margie remains convinced that she and her daughter achieved contact with something utterly inexplicable.
This story comes from The Inhumanoids by Barton M. Nunnelly, which is a great book for the sheer diversity of the humanoid encounter stories told within its myriad pages – but is unfortunately not nearly as great when it comes to sourcing these stories. I have been able to track a few of the tales related in the book back to Neil Arnold’s Monster! The A-Z of Zooform Phenomena, which should be notorious for misrepresenting and distorting stories into one-sentence paragraphs. Also, the story of the Vampire of Croglin Grange is included within it as well – which I was able to debunk as a hoax/Penny Dreadful chiller with just a Google Search. This fairy story, while intriguing and fun, may well just be another spooky urban legend – but then again, the evidence for this claim is just as solid as the evidence for the opposite claim. There is no source listed for where this story originally came from.
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