On a clear morning 36 years ago, Kevin Woods was taking his boxer for a walk on a mountain behind his house in rural Ireland. He claims to have come upon three tiny men, sitting on a rock, chatting. The dog and its owner were frozen by the sight, until the men — leprechauns, in his telling — vanished under the rock.
Back home, few believed Mr. Woods. No matter: A few weeks later, on the same walk, he says he encountered another man, scarcely 18 inches tall and named Carraig, who told him the legend of the 236 leprechauns left in Ireland. He asked Mr. Woods to spread the word that these creatures still existed.
Now a hale 81, Mr. Woods calls himself Ireland’s last leprechaun whisperer, a title that reflects the weekly conversations he says he still carries on with them. But he’s more precisely a leprechaun promoter, building a tidy business from books, merchandise and guided tours of the cozy leprechaun cavern he dug in a small park in front of his home, in the coastal town of Carlingford, north of Dublin.
“Look, there’s people that don’t believe,” Mr. Woods says equably as he shows a visitor around the cave twinkling with red and white lights, which he says is connected by a tunnel to another cavern under the mountain, where the leprechauns live. “But there’s people that don’t believe in God.”
Mr. Woods’ little friends have inspired a new animated TV series, “Carlichauns,” which its backers hope to debut in up to 160 countries next year, after pitching it to companies from Disney to Netflix. He is a shareholder in the venture and acts as its adviser and creative conscience. Except that these cartoon leprechauns are not the aging, bearded, red-haired, green-hatted men that Mr. Woods says he communes with.
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