The Spirit Box

This piece folklore was gathered at the San Fransisco trauma recovery center. I met with a group of social workers and over the course of one hour we all got came together in a meeting room and in one big group we decided to go around the table and each discuss folklore from their lives. At the beginning of the discussion I gave a brief description about what folklore could be. After that everyone shared pieces of folklore from their lives.

“In Indian culture we have a very heavy emphasis on demons . I was always taught you know that you do not mess with demons. Demons are bad. So some backstory, typically the somebody buys a house in India they tie a ribbon around a tree. So you have to have a tree at your house so yo can tie a red ribbon to protect the entire house and the family members . So if like your dog starts barking a lot or if you start feeling weird like someones watching you, you can try spirit boxes which are very effective. So they say that spirits are one a different frequency then us so like demons for example are on a different frequency then us and they use things like radio signals to communicate with us and so a spirit box is basically like a wee gee board that connects to the frequency of the spirits. So a spirit box flips through lots of different radio signals to give you clear cut answers. So you can use them to have seance where you can communicate with the spirit and find out what it walks then fix that and the spirit will go away.”

Background information about the performance from the informant: “This is a crazy, crazy experience that I had last summer, no it was before last summer. I was still in college the this happened. My dog was barking a lot so I did a seance and we started asking questions and actually getting replies and one of the replies was red ribbon and I found out from my mom that she had carried a red ribbon under the ground and so we dug the ribbon up and put it on the tree and since then my do has stopped barking completely.”

Final thoughts: This is another example of a ghost story and like other types of folklore that center around people experiencing encounters with ghosts it shows how much more likely people are to believe in ghosts then in other supernatural creatures. It also interesting that because in indian folklore they believe ghosts and demons live on a different frequency then us they are more ready to believe in a spirit box because the way it functions chimes well with the way the folklore they already believe in.