Tag Archives: cemetery

“GPS and Cemetery are a bad combo.”

Context:
Informant is a 50 year-old Taiwanese woman and this is her memorate happened on a camping trip. The interview was conducted through a facetime call.

Text:
Informant: It was during summer a couple years ago. I took the kids on a camping trip about an hour away from the city. One of my sister’s kids said that she had something earlier that day and asked us to pick her up at a nearby train station. We arrived at the site in the afternoon and by the time I was supposed to pick her up, it was pitch black outside. There was a cemetery on the side of the road at about halfway between the train station and the camping site. I remembered it because we saw that earlier when we were heading to the site. I remembered setting the GPS map to the train station and I took a quick glance at where the route would be, nothing unusual, just one big straight road that leads to the town where the station is. I started driving and as I was approaching where the cemetery is located, the map start asking me to turn right. There is one small muddy road cutting through the cemetery and the GPS kept asking me to go through there, but it makes no sense at all because the station should be straight ahead down the big road. The closer I got to the intersection, the more I felt weird about the entire situation. The street lights were flickering and glowing in a strange tone and I just felt this uncanny feeling that the something is trying to pull me into the cemetery, down that road. I didn’t dare to look through the passenger window because I was convinced that I might see things that I shouldn’t see. As I drove past and away from the intersection that I was asked to turn by the GPS, the street lights seemed to go back to the normal, dimmed, warm-yellow tone and the strange feeling went away. Anyways, that is why you should always have a basic sense of where you are going and don’t fully rely on GPS. God knows what would have happened if I had just followed the GPS.

Analysis:
The memorate demonstrates the common Taiwanese belief of the existence of ghosts. Cemetery are usually seen as a cursed or bad place where the wandering spirits or hostile ghosts will try to haunt or harm someone, either out of fun or malicious intention. In Taiwan, you often heard that GPS or other technologies involving energy wave passing through air and space often malfunction when the device is near the cemetery. The scientific explanation of this is still unclear. This type of experience therefore was explained way by the common belief of ghost.

Redash Cemetery

Context:

DS is one of my best friends from my hometown in Tennessee. She is twenty years old and goes to our community college. I called to get her version of the folk-legends about the infamous cemetery in the town next to ours, since she has been there multiple times. The cemetery’s name is Redash and is nestled down a long windy abandoned road we call “ ‘ole 63.”

Main Piece:

DS- Redash is a small, super old graveyard on the back road of 63. Everything on that road is just creepy anyway like all the burnt buildings and how it seems to always look dark even during the daytime. Even driving to get there will freak ya out.

Interviewer-Okay so tell me about the legend of Redash itself, like things that are common knowledge about it, even if you haven’t been there.

DS- It’s like a very known and accepted legend around here. So, there are like two different storylines about Redash. One is that there is some kind of half-man-half-goat that will run you out of the cemetery if it thinks you are there to like screw around and be disrespectful. The other one, which is the most common, is about the witch’s grave. She will be sitting on her grave crying over it and people leave coins on her grave if she doesn’t bother them. The major no-no is taking money off her tombstone; apparently horrific accidents have happened to several people who did that. There’s also just a bunch of weird paranormal stuff that kind of varies depending on personal experience.

Interviewer- Okay, so now give me your take on what happens, since you’ve been many times.

DS- I know it sounds crazy, but just walking up to the graveyard has made my stomach absolutely drop every time, and not in like a nervous way. It’s a feeling that I can’t explain and everyone that I’ve asked feels instantly uneasy when they get out of the car too. There really is a women buried there from the 1800s that was said to be a witch and there is always money there, but I would never touch it. I can’t say I have seen her, but I swear I have heard cries. One time we could have sworn we heard someone scream at us to leave and then we all felt such a bad aura that we left. But some of my friends that have gone had terrifying experiences, like after one girl got back in her car, she had scratches all over her body. Oh, and the red eyes, that’s a very common sight from almost everyone.

Analysis:

DS’s account of Redash is an example of a memorate, and supernatural experiences that have a strong impact like hers are the fuel that keep local folk-legends alive. This ghost story contains many of the classic supernatural characteristics like cryptozoology, a witch, and a cemetery. The legend of Redash also contains an aspect of spirits upholding moral standards by the witch cursing someone if they steal money from her tombstone. This follows Valk’s idea that spirits in legends are purposeful and can serve as a warning to the living. Valk also asserts that ghosts can be a way for the living to deal with economic changes, which is relevant to the history of the area where Redash is located. It used to be a booming coal town, but it has been completely desolate for at least half a century. Perhaps the memorate that started the Redash legend was influenced by the economic uncertainties that were to come.

The Whaley House

Context: Z is a 21 year old Filipino American man. Growing up with a close community of Filipino friends and family. Z went to an elementary school within California. This story was collected over a Discord audio call.

Z: “The one that I thought of the other day, which is ‘spooky’ but not really, is The Whaley House. Which is like the only ghost house I know of, like, a unified school district takes everyone in the school district out of class to go visit it for like a week. There’s like a bunch of weird stories, and I don’t know a lot of the history off of the top of my head, but I know there was a family that lived there in the 1800s, and they all had some untimely deaths. Then there was some guy who was hanged who got buried in the graveyard adjacent to it.” 

Intv: “So there were just a ton of stories surrounding the place?”

Z: “Oh yeah, and you know one thing that I think really contributed to that, were the people who would always be walking around in period dress, like era accurate garb to the 1800s and you’d wonder if you saw a ghost. You know, it’s supposedly one of the most haunted houses in America, but I’ve never seen a ghost there, and I don’t know if I really believe in all of it. I think it’s probably just an old house, but it at least made an old house fun.” 

Analysis: I find it very interesting that the Unified School District of San Diego actually pulls  children out of class for a week to go and study the myths of The Whaley House. While some historical activities are present (like children learning how early settlers panned for gold) it really is a week that glorifies to the children of San Diego just how important culturally folklore can be. As Old Town and The Whaley House are two major tourist attractions within an already tourist heavy city. 

Holding Your Breath As You Pass A Cemetery

Main Piece:

Subject: Well. Whenever I pass cemetery, I hold my breath because I don’t want to disrespect the spirits who aren’t as lucky as I am to breathe. Because then they might come and haunt me.

Interviewer: Where did you hear that?

Subject: Um… from my older sister. Yeah you do it because you don’t want to disrespect the ghosts as you pass by. They’ll literally haunt you. Because they’re like, “Fuck you. You can breathe and I can’t.” You’ll piss off the spirits. I also used to think that you could like literally breathe them into your lungs. Like if you inhaled when you went past a cemetery, then they would enter you through your lungs.

Context: The subject is my 17-year-old younger brother in his senior year of high school. He is supposed to attend Yale in Fall of 2020. He is of Ashkenazi Jewish and Russian descent. We have been quarantined together due to the Coronavirus pandemic and staying at our home in Charleston, South Carolina. After dinner, we were sitting in the dark in the living room and I asked him to tell me any folklore he could think of off the top of his head.

Interpretation: I remember being taught this superstition from my older sister as well. It was a very appealing superstition as a kid because it felt like a game. Whenever I would pass a particularly large cemetery, it was a great challenge between my siblings and I of who could hold our breath the longest. Related to this superstition is the act of covering your mouth when we yawn. Breath has always been associated with life and spirit, so it makes perfect sense that breathing when you passed the dead would be offensive. I thought it was interesting how this superstition seems to specifically in the context of driving in a car. It’s not realistic for a person to hold their breath as they walk past a cemetery, so it suggests that this superstition practice is modern. The old version of the superstition seems to go back to The Black Plague, when it was believed that the illness could be transmitted from dead bodies because of people inhaling as they passed by. The “spirit” that possessed people was actually the plague.

Eid and Indonesian Cemeteries

Main Piece (direct transcription):

S: “In Indonesia, When Ramadan, or the thirty days of fasting has past, Eid is the last day.  On Eid, it’s tradition to go to the mosque in the morning, and after the mosque, you go directly to the cemetery where all your relatives are.  Sometimes, in my case, some of my relatives are in different cemeteries so we’ll go to the first cemetery, and then the next.  It’s tradition to go to the cemetery and bring water, food, and flowers.  We bring gallons of water and water bottles, and then we open the water bottle and pour it over the grave to hydrate the dead and feed them since it’s Eid, and it’s the last day of fasting.  We also put the food near the headstones.  The headstones look a little different than traditional American headstones.  Even though it’s important to bring flowers and such on other occasions to the cemetery, it’s especially important to bring these things on Eid after going to the mosque.”

Me: “Can you describe what the headstones look like?”

S: “They’re not very large.  In America, it’s really funny because in cemeteries, the bodies are very spread apart, and very far from each other, but in Indonesia, they’re very, very close together.  What would be two burial sports in America would be around six to eight in Indonesia.  They are VERY close together.”

 

Context: I was skyping my friend S, who is a student at University of Seattle and went to middle and high school with me in Albuquerque.  She is half Indonesian from her mother’s side and grew up with both Muslim and Catholic faith.  I was asking her about her about Indonesian traditions and folklore since she’s visited the country regularly to see her Indonesian family, and I hadn’t really heard anything about Indonesian folklore before.  Since her Muslim faith is closely intertwined with her Indonesian heritage, she told me that she had a lot of traditions and stories that reflected both Indonesia and Muslim faith in her family.

 

My thoughts: I like this piece because it not only gives insight to Muslim faith and their traditions after Ramadan, but also about how Indonesian culture treats life after death, and their loved ones who have passed on.  She told me this through her experience from visiting Indonesia during Ramadan, which I think is really special because she has first-hand experience with this tradition during Eid.  I thought that her description of the cemeteries and the closeness of the graves in Indonesia were helpful to envision what the actual event is like, and she later told me that she thinks it symbolizes the closeness of Indonesian culture, and how Indonesian individuals really like being close to one another, and forming a close community.