Tag Archives: axe murderer

Chop N Holler

--Informant Info--
Nationality: American
Age: 19
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles
Date of Performance/Collection: 4/20/17
Primary Language: English
Other Language(s):

This ghost story was told when the informant was retelling the local legends that inspires her writing.

“Ok, so my mom is from this dinky little town called Bulls Gap Tennessee,and it’s real rural, real small and all the roads are like one lane pretty much but kind of shitty and there’s this one particular road that cuts through this forest, and it leads to a waterfall that the locals call “Serenity”. And that particular road is called Chop N Holler. The legend is, is that there was a guy who lived there and there was a family who lived across the way from him and they were really really loud, annoyed him so much, that he took is axe, uncrossed the way, and murdered them all. And obviously he hung for it after, and if you roll down your windows all the way at night and play your music very, very loud, he’ll stand in the middle of the road with his axe, that’s the legend and I remember my mom would take me down that road, and obviously she was fucking with me but she would be like “I’m going to turn the music up” and I would be like “ah, no please!” and I think that it impacted my life in the sense, that idk, my mom got me really interested in ghouls and goblins and stuff like that to this day I still write horror stuff in that weird vein.”

Analysis:

The story was told so simply that it shows that there is an element of supernatural horror within these small towns and local places. Every place has a name that is different from the official name because of the heritage of the people living there. This name is obviously quite macabre, but it is still used as a simple fact of life.

The Stump Murderer

--Informant Info--
Nationality: USA
Age: 22
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles, CA
Date of Performance/Collection: 4/23/16
Primary Language: English
Other Language(s):

Folklore Piece

“So this is just an old ghost story from camp, in northern Wisconsin. But this guy who was an old janitor at the camp went out to the woods to start chopping trees to make room for this new court they wanted to build. So he started chopping down trees with an axe and he cut off his leg. So he only had one leg after that, and um, so he uh, filled that with a stump that he had found and used that as his leg. This scared the campers so much that the camp fired him and sent him away. But what ended up happening that next summer, a boy was taking a shower on his own at the shower house at night. And then he would hear footsteps and a log kind of dragging. The story is that each year he comes back once and takes one kid and buries them in the back.”

Background

“Yeah I like the story, It’s pretty morbid actually. I mean, like, here we have these pretty young campers, talking about someone chopping his leg off and stealing children, and yet, like, it’s totally OK, because it’s summer camp. How crazy is that, when you think about it, really? Like, ok, if I went up to some kid at a school, and I told the same story about a janitor working in the woodshop, like, I’d probably be arrested! It’s just funny to me. But, uh, yeah, I love telling this story”

Context:

“We’d usually do the whole campfire thing. You know, uh like we would get all the campers around at night and go around telling stories. We would tell this story one of, like, the first nights. It’s actually a pretty clever way to get them to, like, stick together”

 

Analysis: Upon first listen, I didn’t think much of this story. It seemed like a hodgepodge of a number of different classic folk-tales: the peg-legged pirate, the axe murderer, the former camper turned raging homicidal maniac, etc. However, I think there is something deeper to be found here. At the centerpiece of the story is this rivalry between the janitor and the camp. The camp’s work is what made him lose his leg, and yet the camp are the ones who banished him. Then, when he comes back, he takes retribution upon the camp in the form of taking kids that are alone. This serves two functions. First, it teaches the kids to respect the camp and its dangers, but more importantly, and implicitly, to never wander off alone. The informant mentioned later, once I prompted him with this question, that it is why they tell this story, for fun but also so that they don’t go wandering out at night alone.

As someone who did not grow up going to sleepaway camp, it was also intriguing to me that these nights of sharing scary stories around a campfire during summer camp actually happen. It sounds like a modern ritual to me if I’d ever heard one. The ambiance of the night time, the fire, and the stillness of the forest all provide the perfectly eerie ambiance for a scary ghost story, and now because of its association, one cannot come without the other.