What is it about a good story of the ‘wee folk’ that gets people so fascinated, yet terrified of them?

I myself enjoy any readings or documentaries in which legends, folklore or eyewitness accounts recount the strange encounters with fairies or gnomes. Yes, you can say that this is just all myth and fairy-tales. No pun intended. I grew up with these stories and with an innate fear of such little creatures existing. There was a book I read a long time ago about a certain “Coke Bottle Man”. This story has fascinated me ever since.
To this day, I don’t remember the name of the book in which the story appeared but I’ve found the excerpt of that particular story floating about the internet. I wrote about it in the post “Lilliputian hallucinations: A theory on the ‘wee folk’ “.

This is the only reference of the “Coke Man” gnome that I’ve found online:

Source: Mail-Archive

A traditional Tsalagi (Cherokee) legend may possibly throw
some light on a couple of modern diminutive humanoid sightings from
North Carolina. The best-known modern “mini-man” was probably the “Coke
bottle man” seen near Dunn, North Carolina in October 1976 by an
8-year-old boy and a 20-year-old woman two weeks apart is one of the
best best-known modern reports of “mini-men” a few inches to less than
two feet tall. The Cherokee tradition suggests that “mini-men” may have
been sighted in the southeastern United States for cenuries.

Little Tonnlie Barefoot was playing in a cornfield near his home
on October 12, 1876, when he saw a little man “not much bigger than a
Coke bottle,” wearing a black “German-type hat,” a white tie, a blue top
and trousers, and black boots. He reached for something in his pocket,
froze, squeaked like a mouse, and ran off through the cornstalks,
leaving behind footprints 2 1/4 long by 1 inch wide with bootmarks. Two
weeks later, Shirley Ann McCrimmon, coming home from a party just before
daybreak on October 25, saw a little man with light-brown skin, wearing
boots and a thin garment. He shone a tiny bright yellow light in her
eyes, and ran away when she screamed. Dogs also barked at him.
Footprints were again found, in hard ground, but none in the soft ground
where he had stood, and in the cornfield the footprints ended abruptly.

For some reason, these “wee folk” have been on my mind recently and I wanted to share with you an interesting show on them.