They were ice skating, doing acrobatics.
Our witness's stepfather was born in the 1940s, a dry, devout Christian with no patience for superstition. So it caught everyone off guard when, at a family dinner in 2006, in the middle of a conversation about a football game, he told a story in a tone that could only be described as a confession.
Around 1980 he was riding the commuter train from Chicago up toward Kenosha, Wisconsin, on a near-empty car. It was an ordinary Midwest winter day with snow falling lightly. As the train slowed near Winthrop Harbor, at the Illinois-Wisconsin line, he looked out of the window at a small frozen pond barely ten feet from the tracks.
On the ice were about a dozen small men in green outfits. Some wore top hats. Others wore pointed hats of red and gold. And they were ice skating, gliding around the little pond and doing acrobatics as they went.
He was so astonished he spoke to the only other passenger nearby, a woman sitting across the aisle. She had seen them too. The two of them watched together, fascinated and, he said, frightened. Nobody else in the car seemed to notice. Then the train began to move and the pond slid out of sight.
As teenagers, the children tried every explanation. Perhaps it was a trick of scale, perhaps they were further off and ordinary-sized? He was adamant. The pond was tiny and right beside the train, and the figures were small, perhaps a foot tall or less.
Years later their husband told a story of his own. At nineteen, lying in bed playing a handheld game at about nine at night in a Catholic group home, he noticed a little man with a pointed hat at the foot of his bed. It looked old, frightening and curious. The hat seemed to have a sheer, veil-like fabric that held its shape when the little man darted under the covers and vanished. His roommate saw nothing.
They have no explanation for either, and say only that their stepfather was the last person in the world they would have expected to tell a story like that.