My favorite example of this is on the island of Flores, where old local folklore says that, in the woods and caves, you can sometimes find hairy, tiny ape people.

Cue homo floresiensis, an early branch of humanity that lived on the island for a long time before homo sapians sapians showed up and had some overlapping time with them. They are very short based on what skeletons we have found....and their anatomy suggests that they looked closer to apes than humans.