Tag Archives: bride

The Woman In The Corner – Ghost Story

Main Piece

Informant KO recalled a memorate from when she was in middle school after moving with her family to a new home. While renovations were being performed on the home, she and her family found a number of strange things: “a child’s train tracks, a weird oil permit…a picture of this woman in the wall.”

KO and her family started asking and telling each other stories about who this woman in the portrait might be: “What if she was someone’s mistress? What if she was murdered? [My family and I] went to all the dark stuff first.”

One night, while asleep in her bedroom, KO randomly woke up in the middle of the night – unusual for her – and recalls that it was either exactly 3 or 3:30am. She looked towards the corner of her room and saw the woman standing there “in a long white dress, with long black hair.”

She recalls that she was very tired and more nervous than afraid at the time, and “hoped she’d go away if [she] just hid,” so she pulled the covers over her head and tried to go back to sleep. When she woke up in the morning, the woman in the corner was gone.

KO told her parents and a few friends about the experience. When told, her Mom said that she’d been “hearing footsteps down the hallway” but didn’t want to say anything and scare KO’s little sister.

KO and her family have been living in the house ever since, but KO has never seen the woman again. She questions whether the experience was just a dream.

Interpretation

Informant’s Interpretation: KO, as stated, questions whether the whole affair was just a dream and thinks her “brain was primed to see a ghost” because of what had been found in the house and her mom’s observations. She finds it to be a classic example of thinking you may have seen a ghost, and key to her uncertainty about ghosts’ existence.

Personal Interpretation: I see this story and experience as reactive to and inclusive of the environment it takes place in, similar to many ghost stories. The context of moving, renovation (altering the old), and being confronted with unknown pieces of physical history set the stage to wonder and consider who lived in this house beforehand, and speaks to a human curiosity towards trying to understand the unknown. I also feel that this experience seems like it sticks out in KO’s memory so prominently because of the age she was when it took place–at a time when kids are starting to process their own place in the world and sort out what is real from what is, an personal experience with one of these unknowns holds a great impact. The actual appearance in the corner being a woman wearing a long white dress evoked wedding-esque symbolism to me, and I can recall many ghost stories focused on brides / the marriage status of a woman, particularly in relation to death and household spirits.

Background

Informant KO is a current student at USC pursuing a degree in Narrative Studies from Seattle, Washington. Her family (mom, dad, younger sister) still lives in the house noted in the story. KO remains unsure whether she believes in ghosts, but thinks of this as a key part of her belief that they “maybe” exist.

KO is white and of Canadian and Swedish descent, and is female-presenting.

Assistants to the Bride

Informant AM is a graduate student from San Jose California, whose family is originally from Ethiopia. There is a strong Ethiopian diasporic community in San Jose, where much of its traditions live on.

Text: 

“It’s not necessarily the younger cousins, it’s the ones that they think are next to get married. For example, my cousin got married, she’s 8 years older than me, but they assume I’m the next cousin to get married so I have to be her right hand woman — well it was me and my cousin because we’re around the same age. We call it ‘Protocol,’ but it’s like an assistant to the bride.”

Context:

Informant AM witnessed this tradition in primarily Ethiopian Orthodox Christian weddings. Ethiopia is a country with 36 million Orthodox Christians as of 2017, according to the Pew Research Center (Diamant). Ethiopian Orthodox culture, like many others, places heavy emphasis on the marriage. In Orthodox Christinaity, the marriage reflects the original bond of Adam and Eve and subsequent bonds between husband and wife, such as that between the biblical figures Abraham and Sarah. In fact, Ethiopians will often give a new couple a blessing which translates roughly to “May your marriage be like Abraham and Sarah’s.”

Analysis:

This tradition resembles other wedding traditions that intensify the importance of marriage in a community, such as the tradition where the bride throws a bouquet of flowers behind her, and the person who catches the bouquet is likely the person to be married next. Both traditions serve to intensify and perpetuate the importance of marriage in a community by encouraging the next person in line to consider marriage, and reflects the importance of marriage in the American and Ethiopian communities which practice this tradition. This tradition also reflects the syncretism which takes place when traditional Ethiopian weddings mix with their American settings. Informant AM mentioned that the assistants are labeled ‘protocol,’ but the word “protocol” is meant to be used in a sentence spoken in Amharic, a language in Ethiopia. Effectively, this English word has been adopted into the Amharic language as a result of its prolonged exposure. From my own observation, another word that fits this description is the word “program,” which Amharic speakers in the United States and Ethiopia slip effortlessly into their otherwise Amharic sentences.

A Broom and Salt as Housewarming Presents

Main piece: If you move into a new house, you have to take a broom and salt. The salt is so that there’s no tears or unhappiness in the house, and the broom is because you need a clean broom for your new house. My mother-in-law bought me a broom, and she said you don’t want to bring some old dirty broom into your house, and bring the dirt from the old house into the new house. You should have a new broom. 

Background: My informant is a fifty-three year old Jewish woman from Los Angeles, California. Her mother-in-law is a seventy-nine year old Jewish woman from Baltimore, Maryland. She describes herself as a follower of “bubbe-meises” (Yiddish), translated to “grandmother’s fables”, or a more serious version of old wive’s tales that are often accompanied by superstitions. 

Context: There was a discussion of house-warming parties and traditions. My informant, who never had a house-warming party when she moved into her first house with her husband, offered this tradition. While she and her husband had lived together before they were married, they moved cities and into their first house (previously they had lived in an apartment) a little over a year after their wedding. 

Analysis: Moving into a first home with one’s spouse has historically been a momentous and tense situation. In the past, moving into a first home with one’s new husband marks the first time the woman/bride has left her family’s house, and there is the expectation that she will be the one to clean/provide the upkeep on the home, doing most (if not all) of the cooking and cleaning. In Judaism, salt is historically used as a preservative for food, in cooking as a seasoning, and a way to help disinfect wounds, all jobs that would historically have been associated with the wife. The broom, too, would be used by her to help clean the house, and, especially had this been her first home, she may have shared a broom with her mother doing chores at her family home, but wouldn’t have brought that with her when she got married. Additionally, marriage (especially for brides) creates the opportunity for a clean slate, moving fully from the sphere of the family’s home into an adult life, and she wouldn’t use the broom in her father’s house that she would in her husband’s. Although my informant is the primary provider in her marriage, and she and her husband share household responsibilities, the tradition of a mother-in-law giving the new bride a broom and salt to help take care of her son still remained. Additionally, the mother-in-law in question did take care of the household in her own marriage. My informant, despite the misogynistic historical connotations provided with the gift of a new broom and salt, did not find the gift at all offensive, in fact she informed me that she still uses the broom to this day (twenty or so years after it was first given). Whether this is because there was a gap in the amount of time the gift was given (this was not a bridal present, but rather a house-warming one several months after her marriage), or because she understood that it was a tradition, it is unclear. 

Ghanaian wedding tradition

BACKGROUND: My informant, CE, was born in Ghana and immigrated to the US about two decades ago. The following piece is a tradition within Ghanaian culture, something commonly performed at weddings.

CONTEXT: This piece is from a conversation I had with my mom about Ghanaian traditions.

CE: You already know this one but… during a wedding the man, the uh, the groom is supposed to pick the bride out of a line of other covered ladies. He’s supposed to choose the right one [his wife] to prove that he loves her.

Me: I remember from [redacted]’s wedding but have you ever seen something where the groom picks the wrong bride?

CE: They always tell the groom before which one is his bride. So if he chooses wrong he’s in big trouble!

THOUGHTS: The thought of this being a tradition seems pretty horrific to me. I’ve been to quite a few Ghanaian weddings and each time I still clench in fear when the groom has to find his bride. I used to wonder why it was necessary to go through this extra stress, but after learning more about how pranks and shenanigans like this were common in weddings all over the world, it started to become clear that these jokes were not exclusive to Africa. In Germany, for example, it is common for the bride to be “kidnapped” as a wedding day joke.

A Polish Wedding Joke

Main Piece

QJ: “Can it be a dirty joke?”

Collector: “Yes.”

QJ: “A lot of the jokes I grew up with are kind of dirty…most Polish ones are…I think one that my grandfather would say asks what is long and hard that a Polish bride gets on her wedding night?”

Collector: “What?”

QJ: “A new last name.”

Analysis

This joke seems to be fairly popular among Polish people, and I have heard it beyond my informant. In fact, I have heard it outside of the realm of Polish culture, and have seen different ethnic backgrounds attached to it. It seems that many prideful Slavic people make light of their often long and hard to pronounce last names through jokes like these. Given my informant’s background for the joke and explaining that he heard ones like these growing up, I would also assume that his culture and family have more of an openness to tell dirty jokes in front of younger audience. Generally, it would seem that older people have more of a relaxed ability to tell jokes that otherwise would not seem appropriate. This joke also implies a patriarchal society, where a woman would receive something from her husband in any interpretation of the joke, but no jokes suggest the woman giving the man anything.