The story of Little People Island goes back to my childhood, when I was growing up in our small rural town. The local high school sat beside two sizeable public-access woodlots, both of which were familiar territory to the kids in the area.
The first woodlot was spacious and surprisingly quiet. A couple of main trails cut through it, running from the street beside the high school toward a wider path that continued between the two woodlots and eventually led to the community centre. The trees there were tall—easily over twenty feet—and spaced out enough that the whole area felt exposed. For reasons I never really questioned back then, we rarely spent much time in that section. Maybe the openness made it feel less adventurous, or maybe it just didn’t spark our imaginations the way the second woodlot did.
The second woodlot, by contrast, had a much denser canopy and a more enclosed atmosphere. The path in followed the fence line before curving toward the back of the school’s soccer fields. About halfway along that trail, you crossed a small creek—a drainage line for the fields. It was tucked away enough that you couldn’t easily be seen from either the fields or the far end of the community centre property. The creek ran steadily most of the year; I can only remember a handful of occasions when the water wasn’t moving.
Near the upper part of the creek, maybe two-thirds of the way in, were a couple of large rocks that looked like they’d been pushed downstream at some point to clear the area for the fields. It was under one of those rocks that the so-called Little People were said to live. The legend described them much like the Little People found in Cherokee–Iroquois stories: generally friendly and passive, but capable of causing trouble or misfortune if they were treated disrespectfully.
There is at least a loose historical connection that might explain how the story took root. Our town sits on former Saugeen First Nation (Chippewa) lands, and the Saugeen people spoke an Iroquoian language. It’s possible that local stories and Indigenous folklore blended over time, eventually evolving into the version that circulated among the kids of my generation.
I spent countless hours back there during my childhood and early teens, playing near the creek and wandering the trails. Every now and then I felt a sense of being watched or accompanied, though I never actually saw anything that could be called one of the Little People. The last time I visited the area, years later, the woodlot had become overgrown and thick with mosquitoes, almost unrecognizable from the place I remembered.
I’m not sure whether the legend survived past the 1990s or if it faded away as the generations changed. But for those of us who grew up with it, the story of Little People Island was a memorable part of our local lore.
The first woodlot was spacious and surprisingly quiet. A couple of main trails cut through it, running from the street beside the high school toward a wider path that continued between the two woodlots and eventually led to the community centre. The trees there were tall—easily over twenty feet—and spaced out enough that the whole area felt exposed. For reasons I never really questioned back then, we rarely spent much time in that section. Maybe the openness made it feel less adventurous, or maybe it just didn’t spark our imaginations the way the second woodlot did.
The second woodlot, by contrast, had a much denser canopy and a more enclosed atmosphere. The path in followed the fence line before curving toward the back of the school’s soccer fields. About halfway along that trail, you crossed a small creek—a drainage line for the fields. It was tucked away enough that you couldn’t easily be seen from either the fields or the far end of the community centre property. The creek ran steadily most of the year; I can only remember a handful of occasions when the water wasn’t moving.
Near the upper part of the creek, maybe two-thirds of the way in, were a couple of large rocks that looked like they’d been pushed downstream at some point to clear the area for the fields. It was under one of those rocks that the so-called Little People were said to live. The legend described them much like the Little People found in Cherokee–Iroquois stories: generally friendly and passive, but capable of causing trouble or misfortune if they were treated disrespectfully.
There is at least a loose historical connection that might explain how the story took root. Our town sits on former Saugeen First Nation (Chippewa) lands, and the Saugeen people spoke an Iroquoian language. It’s possible that local stories and Indigenous folklore blended over time, eventually evolving into the version that circulated among the kids of my generation.
I spent countless hours back there during my childhood and early teens, playing near the creek and wandering the trails. Every now and then I felt a sense of being watched or accompanied, though I never actually saw anything that could be called one of the Little People. The last time I visited the area, years later, the woodlot had become overgrown and thick with mosquitoes, almost unrecognizable from the place I remembered.
I’m not sure whether the legend survived past the 1990s or if it faded away as the generations changed. But for those of us who grew up with it, the story of Little People Island was a memorable part of our local lore.