Tag Archives: school girls

Bay Area Catholic School Ghost Story

Text:

“My all girls Catholic school was founded by these nuns in the 1950s but before it was a school it was a mansion called the Cole mansion, built in like 1916 or something. It was owned by this guy, Frederick Cole, we call him Freddy. He was a young wealthy dude who’s dad made money in steel production. He’s basically a trust fund baby, so he builds a nice mansion in the Burlingame hills overlooking the San Francisco Bay. And so Freddy built his beautiful mansion, it’s pretty big with a working elevator, bunch of servants, big bedroom. He’s living there with his wife. At the time, it’s all the rage to have a maid from France. And so his wife is like, a huge entertainer at their house, and she’s like “I need to have a French maid for my parties.” And so she sends a letter to her aunt in France who’s visiting, and she’s like “While you’re in France, can you pick me up a french maid?” So when her aunt comes back she brings an 18 year old girl named Annette. Annette speaks no English, like very very little, and she works at the house. While she’s there, Freddy, the little pervert, is all creepy on her. He’s like harassing her and will not stop bugging her. She’s like not having it, but the wife of Freddy is like “Oh my god my husband is jealous of this 18 year old I brought into the house, I’m going to get her fired. And not only am I going to get her fired, I’m going to tell all the other people in the Bay Area, all the other rich people, that she had sex with my husband and she’s an adulterer.” And so the wife went around telling everyone that Annette had sex with her husband and was all like, not holy or whatever. So she fires Annette, Annette can’t get hired anywhere, so you know what she does? She files a wrongful termination lawsuit in the San Francisco court in like, early 1900s, and she wins! Which is so rare. Then Freddy takes her to court to try and overturn it, and he’s going down the elevator to the courtroom and when the elevator opens, he sees Annette. And Annette just looks at him and tells him he lied, pulls out a pistol, and shoots him in the stomach. So this man is rushed to the hospital and they stich him up, but they leave the lead bullet in him, and Annette gets deported back to France. Freddy is recovering, but the bullets’ still inside him. So he tells people that he’s started receiving these postcards, and each one says “I will see you soon, from Annette.” And each one gets closer and closer, so it starts in France, then there’s one from England, then there’s one from New York, then she goes through Canada down to Washington, then to Portland. She books herself a boat from Portland to China, but there’s a stop in San Francisco. She gets out there, and the postcards stop. And the next day Freddy is found hanging in his mansion. And so people don’t know if he killed himself because he was worried Annette was gonna get him or if she got to him or if she even was there, because he still had the lead bullet in him and lead makes you go insane. And so people think he imagined it all, it’s like totally up to interpretation, people don’t know. Anyways, Freddy is now a ghost in the mansion and my ceramics teacher has seen him multiple times, people believe he still exists in the mansion on campus. My ceramics teacher had to go to the kiln on the bottom floor right by the servants’ stairs. Freddy was renowned for hanging out in the servants chambers and hitting on them. So she was in the basement unloading the kiln for pottery class, and she was bending over the kiln and she feels someone grab her waist. She turns around and no ones there. So she thinks it was him hitting on her, cause he’s a creep.” 

Context:

B is an 18-year-old college student from the Bay Area, California. She used to go to a Catholic all girls school, where she says teachers would tell this ghost story about the campus. She doesn’t know which facts are certifiably true, but she says she was first told this story while on a campus tour by an old nun who she trusts to be reliable. Teachers share this story with the students around the school. 

Analysis:

This story is a legend about Freddy’s ghost. It’s told to me as a “friend of a friend” story, so the speaker has never actually had an interaction with this supposed ghost. It’s clearly a legend because it could possibly be true, or it could not. No one really knows why Freddy died. This uncertainty about his death could be the reason for his haunting. Ghost stories tend to follow people who weren’t properly buried or their death wasn’t settled, because it’s very important for communities that their community members get the proper burial and death rituals. If the ritual is done wrong, it leads to haunting. It’s particularly interesting that this story is spread around a Catholic school, as in the Christian religion killing oneself is a sin. If Freddy really did hang himself, that’s a hard conversation for Christians to have because it means he went to hell. Ghosts probably form around these figures that die in ways that Christians don’t see to be natural to serve both as a warning to others against sinning, and as a way of understanding and reconciling what happens to someone who dies in a sinful manner. Another aspect of this ghost story is the way in which it is performed. When this story was told to me it was told by a girl the same age as Annette, and the school is an all-girls school so almost everyone who tells and knows this story is a girl. By looking at the social context of the story, we see how it takes a very feminist lean. It’s almost a satisfying revenge story for women, as they watch the lying creep suffer for his actions against the young girl. If this were told by someone else, Annette may be the villain. But both the speaker and the audience receive the story as a triumph for Annette. This bias can be seen in the vocabulary the speaker uses, calling him a “little pervert” and “creep.” It makes sense that this story would circulate amongst a group of young women as a victory for them against this creepy man. It reminds me of murder ballads, which is a type of legend that often details the murder of a young woman and paints the male killer in a positive light as opposed to a condemning one. In an environment filled with young women, the same plot instead is inverted to declare Annette as the victorious hero. Looking again at the social context, the audience was a group of young women the same age as the speaker, and she was often interrupted by expletives denouncing Freddy as a pervert as well.

Celebration of Springfest at an All-Female High School

Main Piece:

The informant explained to me that there was a tradition of celebrating Springfest at their all-girls high school. Each year the juniors would all wear white dresses and the seniors would wear dresses of any color. The whole school from grades 5-12 would go sit in the chapel, while the juniors and seniors would be a part of the ceremony. The organist would always play a sort of calming, “water” music on the organ. After the music had been playing for a bit, the ceremony would start. A senior and junior would walk towards one another. Then the senior would hand off an orchid to the junior and they would cross their paths, making them intertwine. The informant explained it was supposed to symbolize handing down the leadership of the school to the juniors. 

In addition to the ceremony, each year there was a Springfest Princess and a Springfest Queen. The Queen was always a junior and the Princess was a fifth grader. The whole school would vote for the Queen and as the informant explained “everyone would vote for the nicest person in the junior class”. The Queen had to wear a floor length, white dress that looked like a wedding dress, provided by the school. She had two flower girls and they would walk in front of her when she walked down the aisle. The Princess went before the Queen and would get a bouquet of flowers. Then the Queen from last year would be wearing a crown and standing at the end of the aisle waiting for her. After the Princess walked, the next Queen would walk and kneel down in front of the old Queen. She would place the crown on the new Queen’s head.

Background:

The informant attended an all-girls, Episcopalian school in the southern United States. This tradition has occurred since before the informant’s Mother went to the same high school. The school mostly consists of girls from white, affluent families.

Context:

The informant explained this tradition to me when they were reminiscing about their high school experience. This festival would always occur in April near the end of the school year, in the midst of spring.

My Thoughts:

Springfest aligns closely with other spring celebrations such as the Swedish Midsummer festival, as it celebrates the springtime with an emphasis on young women. Given that this is an all-girls school, the presentation of girls in all white feels closely to Vaz da Silva’s analysis of white in his article discussing “Chromatic Symbolism in Womanhood in Fairy Tales”. He states “white stands for luminosity and untainted sheen, thus for luminous heaven as much as for purity” (245). These girls are dressed in white to appear as the pure maidens, ready for entering a new stage of their lives. This festival mimics a wedding as the girls are walked down the aisle in all white, being presented to the school as the new leaders. Instead of meeting a husband at the end of the aisle, they are meeting new responsibilities. This moves them one step closer to adulthood.

Citation:

Vaz da Silva, Francisco. 2007 “Red as Blood, White as Snow, Black as Crow: Chromatic Symbolism of Womanhood in Fairy Tales”. Marvels and Tales: Journal of Fairy-Tale Studies. 21: 240-252.



Gray Thursday and Black Friday

Main Piece:

Within the private schools in the greater Memphis, Tennessee area the informant explained to me there is a tradition of Black Friday and Gray Thursday. This description is the informant’s personal experience with Black Friday. 

Black Friday was the day before the seniors were going to graduate. Before Black Friday the informant said they would have Gray Thursday where the seniors would stay overnight in the school. A few teachers were there to chaperone but as the informant describes it, “the whole thing was a shit-show”. The students would stay up all night writing notes to lower classmen and setting up pranks. The notes would be tapped to the lockers of girls and the next day it was like a popularity contest to see who got the most letters. The pranks were equally a big part. The informant said “one year they tapped all the phones to the ceiling, one year the seniors printed out every college rejection letter they ever got and hung it in the junior’s hallway”.

On Black Friday, after being in school the whole night, the seniors would come to class wearing all black and crazy makeup. Then they would interrupt chapel by saying the senior class had an announcement to make. The whole senior class would go up to the altar and sing songs. At the informant’s school, they would always sing “Tonight” by Fun! and “Wonderwall”. By the end of it, all of them would be crying in a big celebration of their graduation. After their ceremony ended, the seniors would all leave. The informant then said “juniors would then take off their sweatshirts revealing a class shirt they had designed and they would move up to the senior section of pews in the chapel”.

Background:

This occurred at the informant’s all-girls, private, Episcopalian high school in Memphis, Tennessee. It was an ongoing tradition that girls looked forward to every year.

Context:

The informant explained this tradition to me when they were reminiscing about their high school experience.

Thoughts:

This tradition takes place at a liminal moment in these girl’s lives. The Friday before graduation they do not have the responsibilities of a student but they are not technically a graduate. This allows for a tradition to be created, such as Gray Thursday and Black Friday, similar to jokes made at weddings and other liminal moments in people’s lives. The creation of this tradition allows the girls to be cathartic and find some sort of “closure” on this chapter of their lives. Also this example of Black Friday took place at a school that was for grades 5-12, so these girls had been with each other for a majority of their lives. This might explain the commitment these girls felt to saying goodbye in an exaggerated way.

Derby Day

Main Piece:

The informant described to me a tradition at her all-girls, private high school known as Derby Day. It is a day at the very beginning of the year, reserved for just the high school aged girls because the school is for grades 5-12. The high school girls would not go to class in the morning and instead play games and have cheer contests. 

In the afternoon, each grade was required to bring a different product. Freshman always had to bring ice cream. Sophomores had to bring oreos and jell-o. Juniors had to bring chocolate syrup. Seniors had to bring whipped cream. After the morning activities, the student council would “dump all of these things into kiddie pools on the field. When the set-up was complete, the freshman and sophomores had to sit in big circles” said the informant. Then the seniors would dump all of the jell-o, oreos, ice cream, etc. on the freshman and the juniors would do the same to the sophomores. The informant explained it was sort of an affectionate thing, “if you were a freshman and had a senior friend you would just get disgusting but it was out of love”.

After all of the dumping was complete, there was a water slide the informant’s school would rent. This was the only way to get cleaned off but it was an unspoken rule that the seniors could skip anyone in line and the juniors could skip anyone but seniors. So the freshman would wait in line to get cleaned off but never could.

Background:

This occurred at the informant’s all-girls, private, Episcopalian high school in Memphis, Tennessee. It was an ongoing tradition that girls looked forward to every year.

Context:

The informant explained this tradition to me when they were reminiscing about their high school experience.

Thoughts:

This tradition acts as a way for the high school aged girls to feel as though they have really grown up at the start of the year. It is common for students to go through types of hazing as underclassmen and then transition into being the hazers. Being able to dump chocolate syrup on someone’s head is looked at like a rite of passage at this high school. As the informant explained it to me, she held the day in such reverence it clearly is an important memory to her. She included the feelings of being an underclassman and upperclassman, participating in this. This tradition emphasizes the changes to the high school classes, as newfound juniors those students can establish themselves as upperclassmen by getting the opportunity to dump oreos on the heads of their peers. It is a funny, but important way to demonstrate the girls have grown over the past year.

Clapping game rhyme/song

Context: The informant is a Pakistani-American 11-year-old girl and a 6th grader at a public school in Torrance, CA.  The following clapping rhyme is a two-person game she learned in first grade.

Content:

“I went to a Chinese restaurant

To buy a loaf of bread, bread, bread

She asked me what my name was

And this is what i said, said, said

My name is

L-I-L-I, Pickle-eye pickle-eye

pom-pom beauty, sleeping beauty

Then she told me to freeze freeze freeze

And whoever moves, loses.”

The word “freeze” may be said either once or three times, and at that moment the players must both freeze. The informant also showed me the two kinds of clapping sequence that are used for the two parts of the game, one for the first four lines, and the other for lines 6-8.

Analysis: At first glance, the rhyme seems like complete nonsense; but upon further examination, the rhyme could conceal casual racism. “Li” could be an East Asian name. Rhyming it with “pickle-eye” (which itself could be referring to culturally unfamiliar food which is automatically dismissed as unnatural or revolting–for instance recall the urban legend where neighborhood cats/dogs were disappearing after immigrants from [insert Asian country here] moved in), which is essentially a nonsense word, could be meant to show disrespect towards all people with similarly “Asian” names. Then referring to oneself as a “pom-pom beauty” (perhaps referring to a cheerleader’s pom-poms) and “sleeping beauty” (the classic western fairy tale) as a contrast to the “Li” lady is like proclaiming, I am an all-American girl, like a cheerleader or Sleeping Beauty, and you are not.