Informant Background:

This informant is a senior at USC in the Naval ROTC program. The daughter of a navy chaplain, she spent a lot of her life traveling. Despite having to move, she still claims she had a every enjoyable childhood and made many lifelong friends because of it. She can easily recount the many games and stories her and her friends would play.

Informant’s story:

“I’m not sure if this counts as folklore, but I have family who are cops and EMT’s and they all swear up and down that things are always busier on a full moon. My aunt’s an EMT and she actually has an alert on her phone to tell her when there’s a full moon.”

Analyses:

Through out history, the moon has been attributed to having a curious affect on humans. This can be turning them into a werewolf, or just being crazy. The word “lunatic”, meaning insane person, even stems from the latin word “luna” meaning moon. Though there is absolutely no evidence to support this idea, statistically it is true that hospitals and police stations become a hub of activity on moonlit nights. This could possibly be an evolutionary instinct bred into us before artificial light sources were created. When the moon was dim, early humans would be at an incredible disadvantage to any nocturnal predator. When the moon is out and in full intensity, early humans would be able to preform tasks at night and remain active through out it. This instinct could permeate through history to present day, allowing us to subconsciously notice the moon’s current phase and give us the suggestion to go out that night. Using statistics again, if more people are going out at one point in time, there is a higher chance for those people to get hurt, hurt others, party too hard, and other less than desirable actions. There is no evidence suggesting that lunar radiation has any affect on the human mind.