Beyond the broad theological reconstruction of Velnias as an ambivalent chthonic god later flattened into a comic demon, Lithuanian and Latvian folklore preserves a specific, recurring tale type that gives the Perkunas and Velnias conflict a concrete narrative shape: Velnias, fleeing the thunder god's pursuit, hides in turn inside a tree, inside a haystack, behind a particular animal, or even, in some tellings, inside a human being, and Perkunas's lightning strikes each hiding place in turn as he searches, an etiological story folklorists have recorded in numerous regional variants explaining, among other things, why lightning is popularly said to strike tall trees, particularly oaks, more often than open ground. Some versions extend the chase across a whole sequence of hiding places before Velnias is finally caught or escapes, giving the tale something of the rhythm of a folk chase-narrative rather than a single decisive theological confrontation.
Folklorists including Algirdas Julius Greimas, who studied this material as part of a broader structural analysis of Baltic mythology, treat the hiding and striking sequence as a genuinely old narrative core likely predating its later Christian-era reinterpretation, since the specific etiological function, explaining a real natural phenomenon, lightning's apparent preference for trees, gives the story a practical, observational anchor independent of whatever theological gloss was later applied to Velnias himself. The tale is a useful reminder that even a figure whose theology survives only in fragmentary, debated reconstruction can leave behind a concrete, specific story that ordinary storytellers kept retelling for its own narrative satisfaction long after its connection to any coherent pagan system had faded from view.