Again, this is highly unlikely. Both in Antiquity and the Medieval Period, there was an outright expectation that there could be Incredibly Weird Things in areas sufficiently far away to be exotic. In Antiquity, that could literally be "the other side of Greece." In the Middle Ages, it was closer to "the far edge of Europe," likely due to the lingering effects of the Roman Empire linking Europe together.
And we aren't just talking like, people with weird eyes or funny skin tones. We're talking literal dog-headed people. Including--I am not joking--medieval iconographic depictions of an actual Orthodox saint with a dog's head. (Specifically, St. Christopher.) They had absolutely no trouble believing that a man with a dog's head, coming from a nation of dog-headed people, had served in the (pre-Christian) Roman Legions before receiving baptism and eventually being martyred.
The "everyone is either intensely curious or intensely fearful" thing is part of the false Dung Ages fable. Modern pop-history has swallowed, hook line and sinker, 15th century Italian propaganda about how their period of history was totally THE turning point from "darkness" (even though you can find "renaissance"-like flowerings of art and literature hundreds of years earlier in other countries) into "enlightenment."
It really isn't nearly as unlikely as you'd think. One of the genuine, actual effects of what is called "the" Renaissance was that it really did represent a fundamental shift in the West's zeitgeist regarding the nature of reality. Prior to the Renaissance, even very learned men were quite willing to accept fully supernatural explanations for things. E.g., the medieval "scientific" experiment which claimed to demonstrate spontaneous generation (via mice "spontaneously" being generated from stored grain). This worldview existed right alongside empiricism for at least two full millennia, from the time of Socrates to the time of Newton--because he, himself, was one of the last great alchemists, despite also developing differential calculus, being the father of modern optics, and establishing the nigh-unquestionable laws of physics for almost two centuries after his death.
This fundamental shift in how we see reality--in our very understanding of what "reality" itself is--cannot be overstated. To the typical medieval person, the idea that magic was real and productive wasn't even a hypothesis, it was a self-evident fact. The dark forest wasn't simply frightening because humans don't like dark places and predators live there. It was supernaturally frightening.
I mean, for God's sake (literally!), St. Augustine laid down the official Catholic doctrine of what werewolves were. Because, unlike witches, werewolves were considered to be at least theoretically real. (Witches, on the other hand, were known to not be real. It was officially Catholic doctrine that witches did not exist, and claiming they did was actually heresy! Yet another of those lovely, pernicious modern myths about what Medieval people thought or believed.)
Point being: To a truly medieval mindset, the idea that the forest outside of town had fairies in it wasn't silly superstition. It was objective fact. Even if you never saw any fairies yourself, you believed the people who said they did. So seeing a person with horns, or a talking cat, or any number of other supernatural things? Probably a bit spooky in some cases, but hardly worthy of losing your mind over. You had too much stuff to do to worry about that.
