Author Archives: spmccall

The Proctor House

Folklore Piece

“There’s this house in my hometown of Castro Valley, California called the Proctor House and it’s near Proctor Elementary School and it’s also near my house. It’s empty now, like no one lives in there, and it’s mostly populated by homeless people or drug addicts. But, basically like teenagers are dared to go in there and there’s this room that you go in and there are all these dolls lined up on the mantle. And the story goes that there was this couple that used to live there together and they um they’re foster parents, like they would bring in kids every so often, and one by one these foster kids would kinda just disappear from the foster system and no one knew why. And it was discovered that this couple had just kinda murdering their foster kids and they murdered like four kids. I heard this story when I was in the 7th grade from my friends when I went in the Proctor house. But I heard it throughout my teenage years. The dolls, like, had the spirits of the kids inside of them, or something.”

 

Background information

This story would mostly be performed by children around the playground or in social situations near his school and the house. As our informant mentioned, he learned this story first from his friends. He would later also tell me that all the parents knew about this story and wouldn’t let their kids go near the house. He said while this was probably because of the aforementioned homeless and drug addicted populations, many kids like the informant would interpret this as an affirmation of the mystic dangers of this house.

 

Personal Analysis

The dynamic between the children that recount this story and their parents are what I find to be most intriguing. The children believe the tall tale of the haunted house and the clichéd dolls-as-murdered-children horror story, most likely as its grandiose details are continuously reinforced in those kids’ social circles and media. The parents, however, know the house’s true nature, and that it is potentially very dangerous and filled with drug addicts and squatters. These harsh realities of life might be too much for a kid to hear, and so they simply say “Don’t go into the Proctor House.” Somewhat unintentionally, this furthers the legend of The Proctor House as being haunted. In my research, I couldn’t find any authored material on the Proctor House; this would suggest that this legend is relatively local and new. Perhaps the house became abandoned and overrun when the participant was young, spurring the rumors. When I asked the participant about the story’s origin, he said that he wasn’t sure.

Also interesting is the house’s role as a legend quest. When the kids are old enough to brave a trip into the Proctor House, it’s viewed as somewhat of a rite of passage, affirming their role as a “big kid”, or young adult. Ironically, though, it is their discovery of truth about the house, either firsthand or from their parents, and the loss of the childlike innocence about the house’s true state, that affirms their role as an adult.

Two Directors on a Tour

Folklore:

This participant performed this story as if he was on a college tour, since he learned it in his training to become a tour guide.  

“I don’t really know it that well, but I’ll try. So this right here is the School of the Cinematic Arts courtyard, and here you’ll see two buildings: the George Lucas building and the Steven Spielberg building. Now, does anyone know who actually went to USC? …  It was actually George Lucas, and Steven Spielberg was actually denied from USC, legend has it, not once, not twice, but three times. And um, so uh, the reason why the building is here, you’re probably wondering why this building is here when he didn’t go here. Well, legend has it that Steven Spielberg and George Lucas had a bet a long time ago, when Lucas was working on the first Star Was. The bet was, whoever’s movie did worse in the box office would have to donate to a building, or at least a large sum, to the others’ alma mater. So they agreed to this bet, blah blah blah, time goes on, and guess who’s movie did better? George Lucas’ because it was the first Star Wars. So Steven Spielberg, unfortunately, had to donate this building to George Lucas’ alma mater, which is the University of Southern California. Now we have two buildings at the School of the Cinematic Arts, well many buildings, but two facing each other the George Lucas building and the Steven Spielberg building.”

 

Context

This legend is told on tours to prospective film students. The participant doesn’t know if it’s actually true, and prefaces the story on his tours by saying so. This would be told in the cinematic arts school, in the courtyard between the Spielberg and Lucas buildings. In my collection, it was performed while working in the office.

 

Background information

There are a lot of legends in the Tour Guide’s office, both that are brought up by the tour guides and brought up by guests. If you were to ask tour guides to tell you about the legend of the Lucas and Spielberg bet, you would probably hear 100 different versions.  Just like you might hear 100 different tours all together, each of us have nuanced performances of each of our informative tours.

 

Personal Analysis

This legend is interesting because of the dynamic between the tour guide and the guest. The guest comes to USC to get an informative experience that will aide them in their decision of what college to go to. While tour guides do not claim to know the true validity of this legend on their tours, it is still interesting in that it leaves an impression upon the student.

The tour guides also are taught these legends, either formally or informally, through their training to become a tour guide. So while the validity of the bet remains a mystery, its perpetuation year after year, through the teaching of new workers, gives the story credit in it of itself.

The Two Wolves Inside

Folklore Piece

 “Ok so, there’s this young uh kid who’s talking to his Grandpa. This is a Native American proverb. So he’s talking to his Grandpa and he’s having a really hard time kind of, uh, with life and making certain decisions and his Grandpa says ‘Well listen there are two wolves inside of you. When you face hard times, when you’re facing hard decisions, I see it as there are these two wolves constantly battling inside of you. You have one wolf that represents, kind of, the evil and represents anger and has all the negativity that’s bottled up the way that you could react to things by looking at it cynically. But there’s also this other wolf that’s fighting for happiness and its fighting to work as hard as you can to enjoy life and for positivity and for love and compassion.’

So you have these two wolves that are constantly battling. So the kid says to his grandfather, ‘Well Grandpa, but which one wins?’ and he responds ‘The one that you feed.'”

 

Background information

The informant said that he really liked this piece because it helped him get through some tough decisions. He thinks about it often when he’s faced with a lot of stress or negativity in his life. He first heard it at his camp in northern wisconsin. He has no Native American heritage.

 

Context

 The informant often tells this to people when they’re going through a tough time, and to all of his campers during the summer that he is a camp counselor. He really identifies with it, and so shares it with many people that he is close to.

 

Analysis

This was a very hard piece of folklore to categorize because it’s a piece of meta-folklore. The whole story is in narrative form, and would best be described as a legend. However, the essence of this folklore is embedded within the story, regarding the two wolves constantly battling and the fight between good and evil.

Native American tribes often use animals to describe the natural world and humanistic nature. I believe that this story about the two wolves is originally in a mythical format, describing the origin of conflicting ethical dilemmas. It is both outside this world, in that it features spiritual wolves, and helps explain the origin of one facet of human nature.

Another thing I found interesting was that the informant learned this story at a summer camp in the woods of northern Wisconsin. While he is from the suburbs, he would spend every summer out in this area. The woods, and natural American landscape is associated with Native Americans. Therefore, it is interesting that he would learn this story in that context; he is still removed from the Native American heritage, but experiencing their sacred truths in an environment that they would inhabit.

The Lollypop Guild

Folklore Piece

“So I’m from Culver City, and it’s kind of “The Heart of Screen Land” is what it’s called. So a lot of the movies, productions that were made in the earlier 1900s that were said to be made in Hollywood were actually made in culver city. And since we didn’t have a lot of entertainment life around us, we had a lot of entertainment related happenings. So we have this hotel, called the Culver Hotel, and it’s said to be haunted, of course, cause why wouldn’t it be. But also, there’s this story about the munchkins from The Lollipop Guild, from, uh, The Wizard of Oz. So The Wizard of Oz was filmed in Culver City, and so to house all of the people, the stuck them all in the Culver Hotel. The Hotel is really small, so I don’t even know, how they even, I don’t know. That’s like a clown car, like, hotel I guess. But the munchkins were said to be, like, really, really, rambunctious, and just like crazy Lollipop Guild kids. But they were adults! And so they were on the top floor, or something like that, and they got raging drunk, and destroyed the room, threw stuff out of windows, jumped off of stuff, and it was just crazy. And like, I don’t know if it’s true or not.

 

Background information

“Well, the hotel is in Culver City, like downtown Culver City, so I spent a lot of my childhood there. Movie theaters there, and a lot of eateries there and stuff. So any time I walked past it, not like anytime, but like when I asked ‘Oh what is that?’ because I never really knew what it was, it was just kind of a nondescript building in the middle of downtown, they would say “Oh, that’s the Culver Hotel, did you hear about the time when The Lollipop Guild just wrecked it.” I think I just accepted the story because it’s a funny story, if the story was like ‘The Lollipop Guild was just awesome, they were just pristine visitors’…”

Context

“I think this is one of the first times that I’ve actually told this story. I’m not, like, that culturally diverse or anything and there aren’t many things from my hometown so I’ve never really had to think about it. But yeah, I mean, I guess that’s one of them.”

Analysis

This legend about The Lollipop Guild is hilarious. In the movie, sure, they can seem creepy and adult-like to a viewer, but they’re dressed up in little kid outfits doing a jig and singing along with the rest of the crazy characters. It’s clear even in the movie that these are full grown men, both by their voices and their faces, but they’re also clearly not dressed in the manliest attire.

Oftentimes, legends and humorous stories are so funny because they subvert the preconceived notion of what that person or figure should be acting like. In this circumstance, it is that we wouldn’t expect The Lollipop Guild to get blackout drunk and destroy a hotel room. If a group of college students, or a rock band, were to do it, then who cares? But The Lollipop Guild? Now that’s good.

Also interesting is the type of folklore that this participant shared. I asked her if there were any traditions, or cultural artifacts, or jokes, or anything that she could tell me. “I mean, we’re funny people. But we don’t believe in pre-written jokes.” She’d also say “I mean, I’m American, I don’t have anything like that.” She almost seemed to begrudgingly give this story, because she said she felt she “lacked a cultural identity or ethnicity.” In this sense, folklore can be exclusionary of some people entirely; not in that they don’t have folklore to share, but that they don’t have any that they identify with or take pride in.

The Stump Murderer

Folklore Piece

“So this is just an old ghost story from camp, in northern Wisconsin. But this guy who was an old janitor at the camp went out to the woods to start chopping trees to make room for this new court they wanted to build. So he started chopping down trees with an axe and he cut off his leg. So he only had one leg after that, and um, so he uh, filled that with a stump that he had found and used that as his leg. This scared the campers so much that the camp fired him and sent him away. But what ended up happening that next summer, a boy was taking a shower on his own at the shower house at night. And then he would hear footsteps and a log kind of dragging. The story is that each year he comes back once and takes one kid and buries them in the back.”

Background

“Yeah I like the story, It’s pretty morbid actually. I mean, like, here we have these pretty young campers, talking about someone chopping his leg off and stealing children, and yet, like, it’s totally OK, because it’s summer camp. How crazy is that, when you think about it, really? Like, ok, if I went up to some kid at a school, and I told the same story about a janitor working in the woodshop, like, I’d probably be arrested! It’s just funny to me. But, uh, yeah, I love telling this story”

Context:

“We’d usually do the whole campfire thing. You know, uh like we would get all the campers around at night and go around telling stories. We would tell this story one of, like, the first nights. It’s actually a pretty clever way to get them to, like, stick together”

 

Analysis: Upon first listen, I didn’t think much of this story. It seemed like a hodgepodge of a number of different classic folk-tales: the peg-legged pirate, the axe murderer, the former camper turned raging homicidal maniac, etc. However, I think there is something deeper to be found here. At the centerpiece of the story is this rivalry between the janitor and the camp. The camp’s work is what made him lose his leg, and yet the camp are the ones who banished him. Then, when he comes back, he takes retribution upon the camp in the form of taking kids that are alone. This serves two functions. First, it teaches the kids to respect the camp and its dangers, but more importantly, and implicitly, to never wander off alone. The informant mentioned later, once I prompted him with this question, that it is why they tell this story, for fun but also so that they don’t go wandering out at night alone.

As someone who did not grow up going to sleepaway camp, it was also intriguing to me that these nights of sharing scary stories around a campfire during summer camp actually happen. It sounds like a modern ritual to me if I’d ever heard one. The ambiance of the night time, the fire, and the stillness of the forest all provide the perfectly eerie ambiance for a scary ghost story, and now because of its association, one cannot come without the other.