I used to be the kind of person who rolled my eyes at stories about duendes, aluxes, chaneques—whatever name people gave the “little ones” in the forests and old towns of Mexico. I grew up moving from city to city because of my parents’ work, and every place had its own version of the same warning: respect the land, respect the old spaces, don’t mock what you don’t understand. I nodded politely and filed it away under folklore.

Then I saw something I still can’t explain.

We were visiting my great-aunt in a small town in Sonora, the kind of place where the heat sticks to your skin in the daytime and the night feels like the only mercy you’re going to get. My aunt was a quiet woman, almost a ghost in her own village, more comfortable with her plants than with people. My mom adored her. We stayed the weekend like we always did, and I brought my dog Sandy, our sweet rescue who’d become family long before I understood what that word meant.

That night I fell asleep early. My mom stayed up talking with my aunt on the porch, enjoying the fresh air. Sandy wandered between us, sniffing the garden like it was a whole universe worth reading. I didn’t think twice about it until a sound pulled me out of sleep—soft, almost pathetic, like a whimper someone makes in a bad dream.

I looked out the window.

Sandy was lying on the patio like she was asleep. But beside her was something small and pale, tugging at her belly the way a newborn might. I don’t know why my brain went to “baby,” but that’s the closest word I have. It was tiny, quick, and wrong in a way I felt before I even fully saw it.

I shouted.

It didn’t even look at me. It just darted into the plants and vanished into the darkness. When I ran outside, my mom was behind me, then my aunt, and suddenly the quiet night turned into panic. Sandy was groggy, weak, like she’d been drugged. She barely moved for two days after that. The vet found nothing obvious, only said she seemed exhausted.

My aunt didn’t ask whether I was sure. She didn’t laugh. She went inside, came back with a dark jar, and sprinkled water through the plants like she was chasing something that had no right to be there.

“It’s a shony,” she told me matter-of-factly. “They come into the garden to dry my plants.”

That sentence was said with the same calm someone uses to explain ants in a kitchen. Like it was a nuisance, not a nightmare. I wanted to ask for a hundred details, but my aunt died before I could hear her full collection of stories. And my grandmother, who had never been close to her, never pushed for answers.

So I tried to do what a reasonable person does.

I moved on.

But life has a weird sense of timing. Years later, I was older, married, and knee-deep in that sacred exhaustion that comes with motherhood. My son was my miracle child. After losses I still don’t know how to put into words, after doctors saying “be careful” like it was a prayer and a warning at the same time, I finally held him in my arms.

I became the kind of mother who checks if her baby is breathing just because the room is too quiet.

We lived in Bahías de Huatulco then, in a small, cozy house built on land that had been wild not too long ago. The neighbors said that’s why strange things happened sometimes. “It was their land first,” people would murmur, half-joking and half-serious. I smiled and changed the subject. I was too busy fighting my own fears to borrow anyone else’s.

Our house had a narrow wooden staircase, and underneath it there was a little space I turned into storage. I put a small shelf there, some household things, the kind of practical solution you make when your home is more love than square footage. My son was around two, barely stable on his feet. One day he fell down several steps and bruised himself badly enough to leave me shaking with guilt.

After that, I watched him like a hawk.

One night, my husband was away. It was just me and the baby—my whole world reduced to two bodies breathing under one roof. I waited until he fell asleep and started cleaning upstairs. The sound of water filling a bucket and a brush scrubbing tile should have been comforting. It was normal. It was life. It was me trying to hold our little world together.

Then I heard movement in his room.

I paused, listened. Silence. I told myself he was turning over. Kids do that. I resumed cleaning. But when I shifted the bathroom door, I saw him on the stairs.

He was already several steps down.

I asked where he was going.

No answer.

I rushed forward, my heart already angry at myself. And then the moment turned into something I still replay when I can’t sleep.

He wasn’t walking.

He was floating.

Not flying, not bouncing, not stumbling—floating as if a careful set of hands were carrying him down, hands I couldn’t see. His body moved with a slow, deliberate steadiness that made my stomach drop. He was drifting toward the space beneath the stairs, a pocket of darkness that suddenly looked too deep for such a small house.

I ran.

I grabbed him.

We fell together on the floor. He woke up crying, and I held him so tightly I thought I might break myself into pieces just to keep him whole.

Between sobs he said something that burned straight through me:

“They were taking me and you weren’t there.”

I told him it was a dream. I told him Mommy was right here. I told him anything that might pull him back into the safe, simple world a two-year-old deserves. But I didn’t sleep. I sat awake with him in my arms, listening to the house like it was an enemy hiding inside the walls.

In the morning, he ate like nothing had happened. Then he pointed to the space under the stairs and asked when his friends would come back.

I froze.

He called them his friends. He said they had a “little house” down there. He asked if they could play again.

So I lied.

I told him their mom came to take them far away. I said they’d gone to another country. I don’t even know why I chose that exact lie. Maybe because it sounded final. Maybe because I needed it to be final.

A friend of mine—older, practical, spiritually grounded in a way I’m not even sure I understand—helped me close off that under-stair space. She didn’t turn it into a dramatic ritual. She treated it like sealing a door that shouldn’t have been open. After that, my son never mentioned them again.

And when he grew older, he had no memory of that night.

Part of me was grateful.

Part of me was furious at myself for how relieved I felt.

Because the truth is, the scariest kind of fear isn’t the one with claws and shadows. It’s the one that asks you what kind of parent you really are when something unspeakable reaches for your child.

After that, I thought maybe my life was done with these stories. That maybe I had earned some peace. But that’s not how fear works. Fear is a rumor that never fully dies.

A woman in my circle—someone I respect, someone who doesn’t drink gossip like water—called me late one night, her voice shaking. She had been hearing noises in her bedroom for over a week. At first she suspected rats. She searched for droppings, torn fabric, a nest, anything that could give her a logical map to follow.

Nothing.

The sounds got worse. A baby’s rocking chair moved by itself in the dark. And when she turned, she said she saw a small figure—quick enough to vanish behind furniture, real enough to freeze her body in place.

She wasn’t a woman who chased attention. She was married, a mother, a believer, and exhausted. She didn’t call me to perform a horror story. She called because fear had moved into her home and she didn’t know how to evict it.

“I’m Christian,” she whispered, like she needed me to understand the seriousness of her plea. “I just want it out of my room. I can’t live like this.”

I didn’t tell her what she saw was definitely a duende. I didn’t give her a checklist of supernatural rules. I told her to take care of her sleep, to get her house checked for animals, to keep lights and cameras if it helped her sense of safety, and to lean on the people she trusted. But privately, a quiet part of me remembered the garden in Sonora, the dark jar in my aunt’s hand, and the way she said “It’s a shony” like she was naming a weed.

What do you do when your rational mind wants a diagnosis and your heart is stuck in a story you can’t unsee?

And then, as if the universe was determined to keep pressing the bruises, I heard another tale—older, passed like a warning between friends.

Years ago, a group of anthropology students went into a remote archaeological area in Chiapas. They were excited, noisy, young enough to believe the world would forgive their arrogance. On the way to their campsite, they found small stone circles, low and neat—structures the guide treated with the kind of respect you reserve for graves.

Some of the students destroyed them for fun.

The guide warned them. The professor scolded them. The students laughed.

That night, as they set up camp, the lights began to dim. They saw pairs of red glints low in the brush, as if dozens of tiny eyes had opened all at once. The professor tried to reassure everyone that it was probably wild cats or nocturnal animals.

Then every lamp went out.

Then the fire began to die.

Then the sound came—fast footsteps, all around them, no higher than knee-level. The students ran. The ones who had destroyed the stone circles screamed the loudest.

By morning, the camp was wrecked. Supplies torn apart. Tents shredded. The students who had been disrespectful were scratched and bruised in ways that didn’t look accidental.

The guide returned and wasn’t surprised.

He said if they wanted peace, they needed to rebuild what they had ruined and leave an offering. So they did—stone by stone, apology by apology.

When the professor demanded to know why the guide hadn’t explained the consequences earlier, the guide answered with one sentence that hit too close to everything I’d lived:

“And you would have believed me?”

That line has haunted me for years.

Because it’s the same question my mother asked me with her eyes the night Sandy lay weak on the patio. The same question my aunt never had to ask because, in her world, the answer was already obvious. The same question I asked myself when my son said, “They were taking me and you weren’t there.”

Belief is complicated. So is motherhood. So is the invisible line between folklore and fear.

Here’s what I do know.

There are places in this world—houses, gardens, forests, old roads at the edge of towns—that hold stories inside them like trapped breath. Sometimes those stories are nothing more than the way wind hits a window at the wrong angle. Sometimes they’re animals you can’t find because they move when you sleep and hide when you search. Sometimes they’re the human brain doing what it must to survive grief, stress, exhaustion.

And sometimes… sometimes you see what you see.

I don’t tell these stories because I want to make anyone panic. I tell them because we love pretending that fear only belongs to people who don’t “know better.” But any parent who has sat up all night watching their child breathe knows how thin the door between “normal” and “unthinkable” really is.

When you’ve almost lost a baby before they even exist in the world, your whole body becomes a sensor. Every creak matters. Every shadow feels personal. Every unusual silence feels like a warning.

That’s the part people don’t say out loud.

We talk about duendes like they’re a spooky joke. We share memes. We laugh. We reduce centuries of belief into something disposable because it’s easier than admitting that sometimes we are the ones who feel small in the dark.

Maybe those “little ones” are real. Maybe they’re cultural memory given a face. Maybe they’re cautionary tales designed to teach respect for land and boundaries. Or maybe they’re a mirror that shows us how reckless we can be when we think we own everything we touch.

I can live with not having a neat answer.

But I can’t pretend the feelings weren’t real.

I still remember the damp smell of the floor that night in Huatulco. The way my wet feet nearly slipped as I ran. The way the darkness under the stairs seemed to swell. The sharp panic that tasted like metal in my mouth. The way my son’s tiny body felt too light for the terror in the air.

I also remember the morning after.

How sunlight can make even the most impossible night look like it never happened.

How a toddler can ask you about his “friends” with pure innocence and no idea he’s cracking open the shell of your composure.

How you can be a mother who would fight a storm with bare hands, yet still be terrified of something you can’t name.

If you’re reading this and rolling your eyes, that’s okay. I used to be you. If you’re reading this and feeling your skin crawl because you’ve heard something in your house you can’t explain, I won’t shame you either.

Fear is more universal than belief.

And respect—real respect for places, for stories, for what we don’t understand—is never a weakness.

Sometimes I wonder what would’ve happened if I hadn’t reached my son in time. If I had been a second slower. If the under-stairs darkness had swallowed the moment whole.

Sometimes I wonder what else my aunt knew. What she would have told me about shonys, about gardens, about why some people live quietly with plants as if the world beyond their fences isn’t safe.

Sometimes I wonder about that woman with the rocking chair, and whether the thing she saw was a creature, a trick of sleep, or a warning her exhausted body dressed in a shape her mind could understand.

And sometimes I wonder if the most terrifying truth is that motherhood changes the way you interpret reality forever.

Because after you become responsible for a life that small, nothing is just a noise. Nothing is just a shadow. Nothing is “probably nothing.”

It becomes your job to decide what counts as danger.

That weight is heavier than any story about duendes.

Still, on certain nights, when my house is quiet and the air feels too still, I catch myself glancing at corners I never used to notice. I turn on a hallway light even when I don’t need it. I check that doors are properly shut. I take a breath and remind myself that fear doesn’t get to parent my child for me.

But I also don’t mock the old warnings anymore.

Maybe that’s the compromise adulthood forces on us: to live between skepticism and humility.

So if you’ve ever heard your child say something that made your blood turn to ice, if you’ve ever stepped into a room and felt like the air had changed shape, if you’ve ever realized that being “strong” doesn’t mean being fearless—only being willing to act anyway—then you know why these stories stay alive.

Not because we need monsters.

But because we need language for the moments that break our sense of safety.

And if you’re a parent reading this, I’ll ask you the question that still circles me like a restless moth around light:

If your child told you, with absolute innocence, that someone you couldn’t see tried to take them… would you call it a dream?

Or would you start sealing doors you never knew were open?