Little People's Village

In the woods off Straits Turnpike in Middlebury, Connecticut, there's a stone seat people call a throne. The legend that teenagers dare each other on is short: sit on it, and you'll be dead within seven years.

The throne is part of a strange little ruin. Scattered through the trees near the Middlebury–Waterbury line is a cluster of two-foot-tall buildings — concrete and brick and ceramic houses, a miniature church, a toy-sized lighthouse, stone steps that climb to nothing, small pools that catch rainwater. Some were once wired for electric light. People call the whole place Little People's Village.

The story tellers give it a dark origin. A couple lived out here, the version goes, and the wife began hearing voices — little people, fairies, demons, depending on who's telling it — who named her their queen and told her to build them a village. They also told her to kill her husband, and she did. Another version puts a lone man in the stone house, hearing the same voices, building until the whispers drove him mad and then to suicide.

None of that happened. No one died here, no madness, no murder. The truth is more ordinary and somehow stranger for it. A gas-station owner named William Lannen bought this land in the mid-1920s. When a new road blasted through Pine Rock in 1928 and routed the traffic away, his station was finished — so he turned the property into a roadside nursery and built a miniature "toytown" to draw people in. It never caught on. By the late 1930s he'd given it up, gone to work for the power company, and walked away. He died in 1958.

The town historian, Robert Rafford, says it's the thing he's asked about more than anything else in town. He's petitioned the state to mark it historic, because the land is state-owned now, and a planned redesign of the I-84 ramps runs close enough that what's left could be cleared.

The houses are still out there. So is the throne — and the teenagers keep taking turns in it, and keep turning up alive to say so.