The Dwarf - my Father's Story

The Dwarf: an Unusual Encounter from the 1940s

N. Reiter

My father grew up an only child.  He was born and raised on a farm about 4 miles northeast of the town of Tiffin, Ohio.  The trip from the Reiter house to Tiffin was a fairly straight drive, along Ohio route 101.  One fall night, when my dad was maybe 6 or 7 (which would have made it around 1942) he saw something very odd.  My dad and my grandma and grandpa were driving from Tiffin toward home.  The time was somewhere past 11:00, perhaps closer to midnight.  Dad was awake in the backseat, looking out the front windshield, past his parents.

As the car went around the large bend about a mile from their home, at the end of a long gravel driveway and illuminated in the car’s headlights, dad saw a weird person or being standing.  It was a short man – like a dwarf.  The dwarf had a wide brimmed low hat on that was light tan in color.  He was wearing a strange – almost frightening looking – coat similar to a light colored trench coat but one that flared out stiffly like a triangle or cone.  Around the dwarf’s waist – but not interfering with the triangular shape of the coat - was a wide black belt with a large buckle.  The coat appeared to be about the same color as the dwarf’s hat.

Dad has told me that he remembered hearing grandma scream, “Oh my God, what is that!?”  Grandpa gunned the car’s engine to rush past.  Then, grandma said, “should we call Pat Corthell and have him lock his doors?” (Pat Corthell was the single gentleman farmer whose lane the dwarf was standing at the end of…)

Dad next remembered grandpa saying something in reply that puzzled him for years after.  Grandpa said resolutely, “No, something like that can walk through a locked door anyway.”  They drove the rest of the way home, and spoke nothing more about it.  Dad felt deeply afraid until he was safe in his house, assured their own doors were locked.  Dad never mentioned it or asked his parents about it ever again; nor did either of them bring it up.  By the time my father told me of the matter a few years ago, both my grandparents had passed away.

Dad related that it was something that he would remember occasionally over the decades, but then forget about it again.  It was my writing about UFOs and aliens that brought it back to the forefront in his mind, and that prompted him to tell me.