Me, my friend, and the goblin stared at each other frozen for about 3 sec.
Around midnight one night in 2020, two best friends were walking across a golf course in Chihuahua, Mexico, following the cart path, when something came out of a bush ahead and started across.
Skunk, was the first thought. Something pointed and striped stuck up from it like a raised tail, and a skunk was the only thing that made sense. 'Is that a skunk?' But as they got closer, they could see it was walking on two legs. And it was only about 30 centimetres tall.
Then it noticed them. It turned around with the look of someone caught in the act, and they heard it gasp. For about three seconds the two friends and the little figure just stood there frozen, staring at each other. Only its eyes moved, and they were human-looking eyes.
It had the body of a baby and a tiny adult face. It wore nothing but white underpants that looked like a diaper made of rags, no shirt, no shoes. Its black hair was piled up in a cone with a thick white stripe down the middle, which was the 'skunk tail'. Its expressions looked almost cartoonish.
The friend broke the silence by screaming, 'What is that? Is that a child? Is that a baby?' And honestly, that's what it looked like: something the size of a two-month-old walking smoothly across a golf course at midnight. At the screaming it ran off across the fairway, little legs moving incredibly fast, and was gone. Neither of them thought about following it.
They walked home without talking about it and didn't bring it up until the next day. Both had always been skeptical of duendes, the little people a lot of Mexicans grow up hearing about. Three years later, the one who posted drew it as exactly as they could, the pose and the startled face, because the memory was fading. That night changed their mind about a lot of things.