Author Archives: Sofia Gonzalez

The Vibrating Bed

At Lupe’s house, in Roxxanne’s room in the middle of the night in her room and her and Vincent and ALbert have all experienced the same thing in the middle of the night the bed will vibrate like slightly so and then she’ll go around and ask people “Is that an earthquake, did you guys feel it” and nobody ever feels anything. It’s just her bed vibrates in the middle of the night.

My informant did not experience this piece of folklore firsthand and was told this story by her cousin. This story was told to me at a dinner where everyone was telling ghost stories and strange occurrences that happened to them. What I found interesting about this piece of folklore was that, in the setting that I was in, once people started telling ghost stories, everyone else wanted to chime in even if they had not experienced anything paranormal themselves. They just wanted to be part of the group.

Dream Premonitions: Yolanda

This had to be about like 15 years ago because we were in our late 20’s when she… umm… when this happened and I just remember it was the wednesday night before Thanksgiving. Yeah, Yolanda was a neighbor that we grew up… that I grew up with, that was a year older than me but her and I were in the same grade so we used to play together  as kids and then when we got older we kinda grew apart, we went to different high schools and we had, you know, different sets of friends and stuff and… so anyway the wednesday night before Thanksgiving  we were living in uptown Whittier in that little yellow house duplex that we had and I hadn’t talked to Yolanda, I hadn’t heard from her, I hadn’t seen her in years. As adults, we hadn’t seen each other in a long time. The last time I saw her she had just had a baby and she was walking her baby around in the neighborhood by my mother’s house and I remember going outside saying “Aww let me see your baby, she’s so cute!” and it was like two months… the baby was like two months old. So, I had this umm…I had this umm… dream about her and in my dream I was the same age I was as an adult. I think I was like 27 or 28 at the time and but Yolanda came to me as a little girl and how I remember her when she was little. When she got older, I mean the last… like I said the last time I saw her she had just had a baby but she had gained a lot of weight and I just assumed it was from the baby, but when we were little she was like the scrawny, boney little kid… little blond girl.And so, in my dream I was an adult but she was little girl and I don’t remember anything specific about the dream other than I dreamt about her and I just remember waking up in the morning on Thanksgiving morning thinking “God that was so weird, like why would I dream about her, I haven’t talked to her in a long time,” I haven’t like nothing in my mind had kind of provoked thinking about her other than to think, “Oh well maybe I’m gonna see her, because I’m gonna go to my mom’s house and if she goes to her mom’s house for Thanksgiving so … I… I figured well maybe I’ll see her today because I’m going to my mom’s house and maybe she’ll be at her mom’s for Thanksgiving.” So I remember going to grandma’s house and we were you know chopping food and getting things ready for Thanksgiving and I just remember asking grandma like, “Hey you know who I dreamt about last night, I dreamt about Yoli like have you talked to her, have you seen her?” And she’s like “No, I haven’t seen her in a long time.” You know and I said “Oh maybe she’s going to Emma’s today.” No big deal but we had the conversation Thanksgiving morning. I told her about my dream and that was that. The next day after Thanksgiving, friday morning, grandma called me and she’s like, “You’re not gonna believe what happened” she’s like “Yolanda died.” And Yolanda died wednesday night the night I had a dream about her and she had… she had what the newspaper reported as an accidental overdose. She was 28 years old and she mixed um… alcohol with prescription drugs and overdosed. And it just was like the weirdest thing to me that I dreamt about her on the night that she died when I hadn’t seen her or talked to her in years.

My informant told me this story in its entirety over dinner, though I had heard bits and pieces of it from her before. My informant experienced this strange phenomenon first-hand and after telling me her story, I found that other members including her mother had experienced the same thing. They all had dreams of friends or relatives on the night of or before they died. This story was very personal to my informant as she was close with the woman in the story, Yolanda.

The Young Man with the Small House

Shir Attias: So there’s this young man and he has a family and he has four kids and they live in this tiny little hut, err like a house, it’s like a small house and the man has all these kids in this very small house and he’s crowded and unhappy that he lives in such a small house so he goes to the old wise man and he tells him like pray to God for me, I need your prayers so that God will give me a bigger house and the wise man says, “Okay but do this first” and he says, “ take two goats and put them in your house” and the wise, err the young man thinks he’s like batshit crazy but he’s like “okay” and he like takes the two goats and puts them in his house so then a week passes, the house didn’t get any bigger. He goes back to the wise man, he’s like “It’s not getting any bigger and now there’s goat shit everywhere” he’s like “okay now take five rabbits put them in the house” so he goes back and he puts the five rabbits in his house and nothing changes and it’s only getting more crowded and there’s all these bunnies running around, the kids are so excited with the bunnies, and na na na, and he goes back to the wise man and this continues and the wise man tells him to put three cows in his house and he puts the cows in his house and then he tells him to put, to bring in more kids and host a party for everyone and he keeps telling him to bring more and more and more into the house and eventually one day the young man goes to the old wise man and he’s like “MY HOUSE IS SO SMALL! WHAT ARE YOU DOING YOUR PRAYERS AREN’T WORKING?!” and he says, “Okay alright now take everything I told you to put in your house and take it all out. So he goes back and he takes out the goats and the rabbits and the cows and everything and then he looks and he goes “OH MY GOODNESS, MY HOUSE IS SO BIG!” and he goes to the wise man and he’s like “OH IT’S SUCH A BIG HOUSE, what have you done, it’s a miracle you have performed, your prayers have worked!” And the young man is happy with all his children and that’s the end of the story.

Shir learned this story from her grandfather, who used to tell this tale to her when she was little and would complain about having a small bedroom. Shir’s grandfather is from Israel which is where her grandfather likely learned the story in the first place. The purpose of the tale was to make the listener feel grateful for what they had no matter how small their living space was. Shir performed this story in our room while she and  a friend were sharing some Jewish folk tales with me. I thought this peace was interesting. It was very simple and easy to understand. I felt like the animals in the story could have been replaced with anything that took up space in the house, and the message still would have come across.

The Lady

So when I was in 5th grade there was this lady that we called her, “The Lady,” but really when I got older I found out she was only 16 but because we were in 5th grade at the time, she was older to us and she was scary so we called her “The Lady.” Umm… but when I was in 5th grade we had finished recess and we were all lined up getting ready to go back into class at umm… at St. Hilary and all of the sudden people started umm… Running into the classrooms and one of the teachers was like, “GET INSIDE HURRY UP RUN!” And they all swarmed to this one specific area like where the third grade class was lined up. But none of us really knew what was going on so it was like this mass chaos. We all just ran into the classrooms and I remember like we were in the classroom trying to barricade the door, there was no adult  inside and we were in 5th grade and umm… we were all scared and someone kept closing the doors um… “Hide, Hide, Hide!” Everyone, you know there was a lady on campus but we just were scared and we didn’t even know why and I remember specifically Anne-Marie Maizer was like, “I’M TOO YOUNG TO DIE!” And so that made me scared because I was like okay something’s happening and I might die and so I just remember we kept closing the windows and stupid Marco Martinez kept opening them back up and we were like, “NO, MARCO NO!” and he… we would close them back up but to be a bunch of 5th grade kids in a classroom by ourselves without the teacher… well our teacher was one of the few male teachers on campus and he was one of the ones that told us “GET INSIDE” and ran over to “The Lady” and so come to find out there was a lady that the… the rumor was that there was a lady on campus who was a devil worshipper and umm… she was there to kill us and… because we were a Catholic school and so she wanted to kill the kids in the Catholic school. And she lived in the apartment building behind the Catholic school and so it was around the same time that Richard Ramirez was in the news so we were already scared of “the night stalker” who was also a… a satanic ritual kind of, you know, into that thing, yeah serial killer and so… I just remember being terrified like I literally would umm… she had… one of the teachers told us that he… she had said to him, “COVER YOUR CROSS!” Like she couldn’t look at his cross because it was too religious for her and she was a devil worshipper so it was like evil to her and so I walked around with a rosary because I wanted a cross with me at all times. And I kept it under my pillow along with like a kitchen knife because I was just terrified. I mean for that entire year even into our 6th grade year I remember people were like, “Oh the lady, we saw the lady, the lady’s coming on campus.” And instantly I would just like remember getting uh… so nervous about it and we were  terrified and we remember that like she was umm… there to kill us like we were scared about that, about “The Lady.” What’s interesting about that story though was that when I became an adult, I ended up working with Art, who was the teacher that was my teacher at the time. So I got to ask him as an adult like, “So what was going on with this lady, like the legend of the lady, and what really happened?” and he… come to find that… so she was… she did live in the apartments behind the school, she was 16 years old, she… she was high on PCP is what he said. She was definitely on some hallucination of her drug and she did umm… she did say stuff that was umm… that made her sound like a devil worshipper and that umm.. They had to call the police on her several times. I mean but the… the story was out of control, there was a story about her having a machete, a bazooka, and like you know, I’m sure kids embellish along the way, yeah definitely. But I just remember that he did say there was weird things that were happening in the church and that umm… that they ended up going to her apartment to like arrest her and that she had like a goat’s head altar and he was like, “No she was really a devil worshipper and on top of that she was on drugs.”

My informant experience this horror story firsthand and was quite traumatized by it. She never even found out “The Lady’s” real name. She told me this story, while everyone else of our family and friends were telling ghost and horror stories. This folk narrative was interesting to me because it consisted of several elements and genres of folklore. There was the “The Legend of the Lady,” that began as just a rumor but ultimately, as my informant found out later in life, turned out to be true. In the story my informant uses relics and objects that she believes will protect her from this “Lady,” such as a rosary or kitchen knife. There is also an element of children telling each other rumors and over exaggerating the truth and of course there is also belief in folk magic and rituals such as “The Lady” and her devil worship or belief in Catholicism in the story.

Freshman Traditions

St. Mary was an all girl’s school and Cantwell that was an all boys school at the time, now they’re mixed, umm… but they made the freshman at Cantwell come and sell us rolls of toilet paper for a quarter and they were like “You wanna buy some toilet paper”(IN A DEEP VOICE) They were all like embarrassed about it and I was like “NO!”

My informant experienced this high school tradition while she was an eighth grader at school and freshmen boys were forced to sell toilet paper to the younger students. This came a tradition and sort of an initiation for the freshmen boys. I enjoyed this piece of folklore because it reminded me of the freshmen traditions at my own high school. The seniors would make the freshmen pay them money in exchange for a ticket to get in to the pool on the roof of the gym, however this pool did not exist. My informant grew up around the Montebello, California area where this piece of folklore took place.