Tag Archives: devil

The Devil is the Smurfs

Background: The informant was raised east of Los Angeles by a mother who was a practicing Jehovah’s Witness and was very active in the church. The informant was and is not religious herself, and her father was not a member of the church either. This was told to me in person.

Informant: I wasn’t allowed to watch the Smurfs as a child because my mom said they were demonic… but I don’t know if that’s folklore, that’s just my childhood.

Thoughts: I’d never heard of anything like this before, but I feel that anything that is viewed as demonic even though it isn’t specifically stated to be is very interesting to me. Looking into it, it also appears that this wasn’t just isolated to my informant and her mother. I found a book called Turmoil in the Toybox, written by Phil Phillips, who claims that many childhood books, shows, and toys have a satanic and demonic presence that are supposed to “program and influence the minds of our children towards the occult and witchcraft.” The show The Smurfs was included in this book, being branded as “undead corpses,” as they are “blue with black lips,” and the Lake Hamilton Bible Camp spreads the notion that children who have Smurf toys are more likely to be attacked by vampires. For more, there is a brief excerpt of the originally 90-minute long video interview between Phil Phillips, and Pastor Gary Greenwald included in this article:

Emmett, Neil. “‘Turmoil in the Toy Box’ Revisited.” Cartoon Brew, 23 Oct. 2013, https://www.cartoonbrew.com/ideas-commentary/turmoil-in-the-toy-box-revisited-90147.html.

Lajabless

BACKGROUND: My informant, OR, was born in the US. Her parents are both immigrants from Grenada. OR is always joking about Carribeans being a very superstitious people and this piece is just one story out of the many that OR told me about her family’s beliefs. OR had previously told me about soucouyants and this story is in a similar vein, depicting a seductive, villainous female/creature character.

CONTEXT: This piece is from a conversation with my friend to discuss the role of superstition in Caribbean culture. 

OR: There’s also, um, Lajabless, which, I don’t even know how this is f-cking spelled. I think it comes from the French, like La Diablesse, like a female devil. She’s got — usually in like depiction the of her she’s got like this wide flopping, brim hat. One of her feet is normal, but I think the other one is like a goat hoof or a horse hoof or like a… 

Me: She’s got a hoof.

OR: (laughs) Yeah she’s got a hoof. And the story is like, it’s mostly like an old wives’ text. The story is like some drunk asshole goes at night and sees this lady with her floppy brim hat and her skirt (which is covering her hoof) and flirts with her. Then Lajabless reveals her face under the hat and it’s like a skull face. (laughs) The — the guy’s like so freaked out. He like falls off of a cliff dies.

THOUGHTS: I think that a lot of cultures have a story of a female “seductress” leading to a man’s downfall. In biblical lore, Lilith is often portrayed as a sexual temptress. However, as the story goes, Lilith was only cast out of Eden because of her desire to be equal to Adam. I think a similar thread happens in this story. As OR tells it, Lajabless was minding her own business when a drunk and leery man makes an advance on her. It is interesting to me how women in legends are often painted as more villainous than they are when they are able to stand up to or retaliate against their male counterparts.

The Soucouyant

BACKGROUND: My informant, OR, was born in the US. Her parents are both immigrants from Grenada. OR is always joking about Carribeans being a very superstitious people and this piece is just one story out of the many that OR told me about her family’s beliefs. This story in particular stood out to OR because her parents always jokingly warn her brother to watch out for seductive soucouyants. 

CONTEXT: This piece is from a conversation with my friend to discuss the role of superstition in Caribbean culture. 

OR: Okay. So basically, um, the soucouyant is kind of like half vampire, half fireball. 

Me: Fireball?

OR: She’s like a blood-sucking hag, essentially. I think other islands literally just call her the hag. She sucks your blood and… okay, she usually appears like, um, either a woman or like a reeeally sexy woman during the day. And then at night, she peels off her skin and puts it in a mortar and pestle and grinds it up. (laughs) And then she turns into a literal fireball and like runs around the sky at night and she can enter your home through like a keyhole or like any crevices, or if you like leave the windows cracked. So you gotta close the windows. And um, they say, if you want her to not come in your house, you have to drop, um, like rice outside your house and you have to drop a lot because basically, she will be counting the rice until morning. I think the Haitians actually call it the Lougarou, but in Grenada, Lugar is actually a totally different thing.

THOUGHTS: I really like this story for its specificity. The concept of a half-vampire half-hag half-skinless witch creature really says a lot about the specific fears and taboos of this community. The fact that this story was aimed at OR’s brother and not OR points to the fact that the Caribbean community may fear the control that women can possess over men. OR mentioned that the story is a variation of the European version of a vampire so I think the gender swap is notable in examing the significance of this story in Caribbean culture.

For another version of this legend, see: Simpson, George Eaton. “Loup Garou and Loa Tales from Northern Haiti.” The Journal of American Folklore, vol. 55, no. 218, 1942, pp. 219–227. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/535864.

The Black Dog

Main Piece:

My grandma would tell me these stories about black dogs, or the black dog I guess. Basically, she said that when you see the black dog, it’s a sign of bad luck or death. It’s not just any black dogs, but you would know if you see one because this dog has red eyes and would just randomly appear and disappear without you noticing. The Black Dog apparently is a ghost who works for the Devil himself, and seeing the Dog basically means that the Devil will eventually get to you. She told me this story of when she was little, she visited her dead grandparents at a graveyard. She supposedly saw the Black Dog there, and apparently she lost her aunt from a cancer a few months after. I haven’t bothered to check up on how true the story was, but it did scare me when I was little. My family even avoided getting a black colored dog when we first got our puppy. My dog is beige.

Background:

My informant is of Irish and Scottish descent, his parents being immigrants from those respective countries. He grew up heavily influenced by both cultures, and he’s told me that he relates more with Irish and Scottish cultures more so than Irish American or Scottish American identities. The Black Dog is a popular motif and a mythical creature in European countries, especially in Britain, Scotland, and Wales. While the details of the story varies per region, but in general the Black Dog is believed to bring terrible news. It’s also the motif behind the famous Sherlock Holmes story “the Hound of the Baskervilles”.

Context:

The informant relayed this piece of information during our lunch at my apartment, near USC campus. There no other people present during our talk, and we were dining as we talked. It was a comfortable setting.

My thoughts:

Because there’s so much cultural positive rep for dogs in western viewpoint, I found it fascinating that there’s a very old and famous European belief that a dog could ever be this sinister and evil. The color black being associated with Satan and the Devil seemed appropriate for Europeans to do so. From my understanding, to say “I have a black dog” nowadays means that someone suffers from depression, and it was helpful to understand where the phrase originated from.

For more information on the Black Dog, please see:

Quaile, Sheilagh. “The black dog that worries you at home: The Black Dog Motif in Modern English Folklore and Literary Culture.” The Great Lakes Journal of Undergraduate History, vol.1 article 3, 2013.

Moment with the Devil

The following is a somewhat of a ghost story, but also a demonic encounter.  The informant is represented by L and I am represented by K.

Piece:

K: Tell me about your story.

L: Okay… I heard this from my mom, and my mom told it to me when I was younger, that… back when she was living in Mexico, when she was coming home from school with her- with my aunt… and that… the girl who lives next to them… she was like, very bratty and just very mean to her mom, didn’t want to go to work with her, didn’t go help her out to like get money and get food, and she was just… not a nice person at all.  And my mom said when she was coming home from school, she just heard like… a shrilling scream… and her- the girl comes out and she was just sobbing and crying and my mom, it took her- it took my mom a while to calm her down and.. uhm… and she said that.. that the Devil… that the Devil came for her because she was just being so- she was being a bitch, and that… what only she saw was like the black and long and like scary hands with like the fur and stuff. And then my mom stayed with her- my mom and my aunt stayed with her until… her mom got home and then her mom took her to a priest to go… to go bless her, but uhm… I guess what it means to me is just, it kept me in line as a kid ’cause like I can’t be disrespectful to my mom because I don’t want that to happen to me.

Context:

The informant was sitting at a dining room table.  There was a group of 5 of us and we had all just celebrated Easter together.  We were sitting at the dining room table sharing folklore and she had a lot of Mexican folklore that she wanted to share with us.

My Thoughts:

I thought this piece of folklore was interesting because it’s kind of a ghost story, but also kind of just a demonic encounter. I think it was really interesting because this could totally be a real experience or it could be a story that was made up in an effort to keep children in check.  I, personally, think it’s a real story and was told as a way for the informant’s mother to make her behave well when she was younger, but I definitely think it’s real. I also think it’s interesting because, it’s somewhat of a variation of a ghost story, but in this context, the ghost happens to be the Devil.  I think it’s super interesting because people who aren’t religious, but believe in ghosts would probably say it was just a ghost, but people who don’t believe in ghosts, but are religious, might say it’s really just the Devil.