THE DOGTOWN DEVIL IS SIGHTED AGAIN

Polk: From out of nowhere a little peach-colored man, no bigger than a small dog, jumped up on the side of a single lane country bridge over the dry creek bed outside Dogtown, IA, on January 21st. The sudden appearance of the little person nearly caused three teenage boys to lose there lives. Mike Bartlett, Bill Brodie, and Andy Mazzocca lost control of their car, struck the side of the bridge, and careened to a halt in the ravine on the other side. Their reaction was shock, disbelief, and terror.

     "He slinked over to the car on all fours, but he wasn't no animal, it was like a little man, with long fingers and thumbs, he had a big head and a real skinny neck. His eyes were big, black, and didn't blink at all, I don't think he had lids. I didn't notice any nose or mouth, and he didn't have no ears. I think he was a kind of devil." the Bartlett boy said. The name is familiar to the residents of the area. A similar sighting of the Dogtown Devil occurs almost once a month, like clockwork, though the locals normally shy away from publicity. This is the first instance in which there was any kind of property damage and a report had to be filed with the authorities.

     "He was totally naked," said Bill Brodie, 15, "His skin was shiny and kind of a pale orange color. I guess if he stood straight up, he'd be three feet tall. It looked a little like a mutant baby, or something, and it kind of hopped along. It was really weird, I thought I might be going crazy or something, but they saw it too."

     "We all saw it," Andy Mazzocca added. "It came over and jumped up on the car and looked in at us, and we were all just screaming and going nuts. I noticed it had hands for feet. Like a monkey, but this thing wasn't like any monkey I ever saw in the zoo, or in a book. We all heard about the Devil, but never really believed it. My mom said it come for us because we were out driving and talking about girls. She says it eats impure thoughts. I think that's bullshit, but who knows?"

     After staring at the boys for some time, perhaps savoring the last vestiges of their terror until driven away by their pleas for deliverance, the tiny man-beast loped off into the night.

     Tales of strange and diminutive manlike creatures go back into antiquity. Ancient Christian monks in Britain wrote of strange folk, hobgoblins, demons, and dwarfs in accounts that were often too bizarre to make any sense. Sightings of strange creatures, as our readers are aware, are still common today.