I’ve never killed anything in my life, until he visited my family.

Ok, yes, I’ve killed my share of mosquitoes, bees, flies, spiders and other nuisance bugs. But I had never killed anything like a bird, dog, or cat. Hell, I've never even set down one mouse trap. To think I killed a person, a living breathing human, haunts me to this moment.

The thing is, I’m not sure he was a human, even now it’s unclear. But I did kill him, I know this because his head’s buried in one corner of our yard and his body in the other.

Every few months when it’s late at night and the kids are asleep, and Janet, my wife, watches from our bedroom window. I take shovel to dirt and make sure he’s still buried and dead.

I nod up to my wife as I pat the earth back down and the look of fear washes from her face.

It was a year ago, and let this be a cautionary story about the truth in the old axiom; that all myths, legends, and folk tales are born out of reality. A sometimes scary and horrific reality.

My twins, Trey and Benji, had just turned five, and came home from school in a whirlwind of excitement. They were given an assignment to build a Leprechaun trap. A device that would catch the diminutive little sprite, luring him in with candy.

The goal was to hold the Leprechaun hostage, demanding more candy in exchange for his release. When you think about it, the message of teaching a couple of five-year-olds to kidnap and ransom to get what you want, seemed a little hardcore, but it was a fun little project that would tap into their imagination.

It’s such a sliver of time when young kids believe there’s actual magic in the world, that things like dragons, unicorns, Santa Claus and Tooth Fairies might really exist. As parents you try to keep that belief alive as long as you can.

Janet was still at her office when I started working on the Leprechaun trap with my boys. The first and most important hurdle we overcame was them working together to build one trap.

The second hurdle was to keep me from taking it over. This trap thing was right up my alley as an architect. Plans and schematics came alive in my head. The use of wood and pulleys and weights and even a wire noose to hold onto one leg of the mythical man.

But once Janet came home, a cooler head prevailed and we were working with construction paper, pipe-cleaners, and some colored sprinkles. A bowl of leftover candy-corn from Halloween was the pot-o-gold at the end of the rainbow. A little note explained what the boys wanted and how they’d let him go once they got their sweets.

After dinner some cookies and green milk, which had the boys giggling all the way through their baths, put a cap on the night.

The trap was laid out by the fireplace, which seemed to be mixing our myths and legends up, but that’s where the boys wanted to leave it.

That night Janet and I bolted out of bed together. What sounded like a wrestling battle royale going down in our living room, tore us from our sleep. It was as if furniture and lamps were being thrown around in some furious fit of rage.

Janet rushed to Trey and Benji’s room, calling 9-1-1.

I grabbed a baseball bat from under the bed and rushed downstairs. Janet yelled at me to not go, but that macho “this is my house” stupidity had taken over.

As I touched down on the bottom step a chair came rocketing out of the darkened living room towards my head. It slammed and shattered against the wall behind me.

I was pissed, ready to match violence for violence.

I rushed into the living room to do battle, which meant I'd lost my sanity since whoever was trashing our house might have a gun.

The first thing I saw was the utter demolition of our Ikea furnished den. It was like the Tasmanian Devil’s family decided to have a reunion there.

A complete mess.

And then in the corner of the room, I saw him, and even now it seems funny to say, but there was a Leprechaun.

About four-feet tall with a beard, red and bushy, which seemed to have things crawling in and out of it. His hands were big for his body, the size of oven-mittens. But his fingers were long and thin with fingernails that looked like pointed daggers.

His red eyes, were sunken deep into his face, a face that looked like it had been beaten to a pulp several times and never healed. His outfit was mostly black, a suit and pants, except for his green shoes.

He pointed at me and screamed in some foreign language, his teeth exposed as he yelled, they were yellow and pointed. This was not the logo of the Boston Celtics, or that guy that roamed the Notre Dame sidelines at football games. This thing, this man, looked evil and angry.

I raised the bat and screamed at it. In a blink of an eye, at a speed that was inhumanly possible, it rushed past me, knocking me over as it did and was out the front door.

The cops filed a report and said it was probably a bunch of drunk teenagers causing mischief.

It was that time of year, whenever you saw the calendar creep towards Halloween, St. Patrick’s Day or the 4th of July, things like vandalism and public drunkenness kicked in.

They told us to contact our insurance and they’d see what any of the neighbors Ring cameras showed, since we seemed to be the only one on the block that didn’t have one.

Janet gave me the shake of the head when she heard that. She'd been telling me we needed a camera the whole year, ever since we’d had a few Amazon packages stolen.

The thing was, I knew it wasn’t a bunch of drunk kids. I didn’t tell the cops what I saw because I knew they’d give me the old side-eye. And to be honest I wasn’t sure what I’d seen at that point. It was dark, I had just woken up…what did I really see?

The cops told us not to clean up so the insurance company could confirm the extent of the damage, so we left the place a shambles.

Janet headed back upstairs and I went around checking to make sure all the windows and doors were locked. As I made my rounds I found the boy’s Leprechaun trap, torn to shreds. I spotted their note as well, but someone had scrawled something on the other side of it, in red.

I held it up to the light. It seemed to be gibberish – “Ba mhaith liom cad is liomsa nó ní lonróidh a gcuid soilse. Óir ar mo shon-sa nó bás a thabhairt duit.”

Time to fire up the Google machine.

It wasn’t gibberish, but Gaelic, old Irish. After I ran it through translator I sat back, horrified at what it read – “I want what's mine or their lights won't shine. Gold for me or death to thee.”

It was a threat against my family. A mortal challenge to the safety of my wife and kids. I knew who left it. Not a liquored up high schooler, but a terrifying Leprechaun that we somehow conjured up with our trap.

Or maybe, it was just a punk ass note. Someone having some fun at my expense.

My head was spinning. I folded it up and stuffed it into my sweatpants and called it a night.

The next day Janet was on the phone with a security company. She made sure our house's new surveillance cameras would put Area 51 to shame. The insurance broker came and said we’d probably get a third of what we really needed to replace the stuff.

Trey and Benji had no real clue as to what happened, they only knew what we told them. Silly Daddy had left the windows open and a terrible wind blew everything around in our living room.

They were also thrilled that their trap worked. The huge bowl of mini-Snickers and Milky Way bars on the kitchen counter confirmed it.

Dinner, books, and bed. It was a miracle the boys went to sleep since they had consumed about half the bowl of candy bars.

Janet and I woke up again in the middle of the night, but this time it was Trey and Benji screaming that rustled us up.

We both clambered into their room together. The twins were huddled up, in hysterical tears on Benji’s bed, pointing into their closet. They said there was a little man in there and he had red eyes and was whispering to them.

Janet wrapped them in her arms and whisked them out of the room, calming them with the mantra, “It was only a dream...a bad dream.”

But how could they both have the same nightmare?

Alone in their room, I inched to the closet, no baseball bat in hand.

I felt a little vulnerable.

I whisked open the closet door. No Leprechaun. But a bunch of Trey and Benji’s shirts were ripped to shreds, torn with a knife or fingernails.

I knew I had to tell Janet what I had seen the night before and the terrifying evidence in the boy’s closet. Whether she believed me or not, didn’t matter, she had to know.

The boys were laying on our bed, Janet had managed to calm them down. I wanted to confide in her, as crazy as it sounded, but with the boys there it was impossible.

I got into bed, Trey and Benji corralled between Janet and I.

Laying there my mind was working out how to explain the note and the torn clothes and the short man I had seen in our house. Debating internally on how I was going to tell Janet I think I saw a Leprechaun.

But I didn’t have to, Janet saw him.

The bedroom door burst open. Standing there with a wooden club in his hand was the Leprechaun.

Janet screamed.

The Leprechaun swung the club and smashed it into one of the posts on our four-poster bed. He hit it with such force it snapped like a toothpick.

The twins were wailing in terror. I slowly rose from the bed, calm and cool. I asked him what did he want.

In a deep voice and with a thick Irish accent he muttered out, “What’s mine.” His scraggly finger pointed to Janet.

She muttered out, “M...m...me?”

The Leprechaun shook his head, “The gold be mine that you owns or you and your kin be bones.”

I looked over to Janet and saw her wedding band on her finger. I shouted at her, “Take it off, give it to him…your ring.”

God bless Janet, because she didn’t think twice, the lives of her children mattered more than some stupid symbol of love.

She tossed it at the Leprechaun. He caught it mid-air.

I told him to go, he got what he wanted.

But he said, “More, you owe me more, for wasting me time. Get me more or you all be shown hells door.”

And then he was gone.

But like any blackmailer or extortionist, we knew he’d never be satisfied. He’d always be a threat to our lives, our children's lives.

So, we decided we’d build a real Leprechaun trap, and we wouldn’t ask him for more candy when we caught him.

We’d kill him.

Janet and I called in sick the next day and the boys went to visit their Uncle Jeff the next town over.

The plans for the snare I had in my head when I was with Trey and Benji at the kitchen table days earlier came to life. After a few internet searches on tiger and lion traps as well as Irish folk lore, Janet and I were hammering and sawing away. Two trips to Home Depot and re-purposing our shed as the trap, doubling as a cave, and we were ready.

Janet gathered up each and every piece of jewelry she owned as well as the silver place settings we got as a wedding present. We piled it all in huge plastic bin and stuck it in the middle of the shed.

Then we waited. Janet upstairs, with a knife in her hand, watching from the bedroom window.

And me outside the shed, without any weapon, since I didn’t want to alarm the Leprechaun in any way.

Right before midnight he arrived, as if out of nowhere.

His eyes seemed to turn a darker shade of crimson when he spotted his treasure in the shed.

I watched as he entered, he didn’t have a clue as to what was going to happen.

His green shoe tripped the thin nylon line that set it all in motion. A wire snare released around his foot and lifted him in the air.

A two-by-four full of nails then swung down and slammed into his face and chest. The final bit of destruction was two cinderblocks that came down from either side of the inner shed, and like pendulums came together on his skull.

His screams filled the air, black colored blood oozed out of him. He fought to get free. I was amazed he was still alive.

I reached behind the shed and grabbed the ax. I'd read that to kill a Leprechaun you had to sever its head from its body.

The ax raised and ready to swing down. I paused as the Leprechaun spoke his last words, “You can’t get rid of me, I’ll rise from the dead you see…I also got family.”

It took three chops, but his head was clear of his body.

It’s a year later, and we’ve checked his buried remains every month since that night. We always make sure we check today, St. Patrick’s day, the anniversary of when it first happened.

He hasn’t come back. But we live in fear, terrified of his final words, “…I got family.”