Tag Archives: ghost stories

The Blue Light

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Background:

My informant for this piece grew up in rural, northern Wisconsin. I know from personal experience that living in an isolated area such as this one can cause serious boredom, especially during adolescence. Because of this, people who grow up away from the city often make their own fun, creating games and exploring the landscape. Occasionally, in the dark of night, strange things tend to occur.

Context:

As a teenager, looking for “the Blue Light” was both an exciting pastime and rite of passage in my informant’s hometown; everyone knew about it. On late nights, those individuals who thought themselves daring enough would go out in an attempt to experience the lore themselves. Luckily–although I may never get to experience it myself–I was able to live this tradition vicariously while he told me about it during an over-the-phone interview for the USC folklore archives.

Main Piece:

“When we were in high school… It was called the blue light. And there was a bridge on a country road, and you would go park on the bridge at night and people would go there all the time. And if you look out off the bridge sometimes people would see a blue light moving through the woods, and I saw it once, and my friends did too. The rumor was that there was an old farmer who hung himself off the bridge and his ghost haunted those woods.”

Analysis:

A few years ago, I remember hearing about some kind of phenomenon similar to the Blue Light that was supposedly proven false. Instead, these strange colors that people were seeing in the woods at night were reasoned to be the release of natural gas from a swamp, which would have a luminescent glow for a few seconds before dissipating. While this seems a more likely explanation, it hasn’t stopped the legend hunters who, apparently, continue to go out in search of the Blue Light even to this day. Though I would like to believe in the story and to pursue the Blue Light for myself, this continued interest in the phenomenon as the embodiment of a ghost is probably due to the human tendency of belief perseverance. In other words, teens in that region may have been given the information to know that the Blue light is probably just swamp gas, but they continue to believe in the story because it’s what they’ve always known.

For a Similar Narrative, See:

Carlisle, John. “Mysterious Light Draws Thrill Seekers to a U.P. Forest.” Detroit Free Press, 9 July 2018, eu.freep.com/story/news/columnists/john-carlisle/2016/09/04/mysterious-paulding-light-upper-peninsula-michigan/89275134.

The Black Stallion and Creature With Three Red Eyes: Don’t Walk Alone at Midnight in Guatemala

I heard this legend while many of my housemates were gathered around a table and drinking. The first time the speaker shared this story, he mentioned that his grandfather never drank after he saw a red-eyed figure in Guatemala. When I asked him to retell his story for collection, he gave much more detail about the two creatures his grandfather feared.

*

The speaker’s grandfather used to tell this story when he would get drunk: he saw two creatures. One was a being with red eyes, the other was a black horse. In 1960 in San Rafael, Guatemala at exactly 12 am, neighbors in a village of only 15 or 20 houses could hear a black stallion. And if stragglers outside a home were caught alone, they would hear a horse running after them. They wouldn’t see the horse. If they managed to slip inside their house and close the door, they would hear the horse pounding at the threshold until 12:01. Then they would not hear it anymore.

If the horse caught stragglers, they would die of an underlying disease like cardiac arrest or drug overdose, something “easy to explain.” In those days, a lot of children went missing in the wilderness because the area was “unexplored.”

One night, the speaker’s grandfather and his friend left a larger group of friends playing soccer to walk home around midnight. They were both drunk. Suddenly, the speaker’s grandfather felt dread. Every step they took felt “like mud” and the speaker’s grandfather felt like he was being watched. Both friends turned around to see a seven-foot-tall humanoid figure with three red eyes watching “like a little kid goes onto a tree and just sticks his head sideways and stays staring at you.”

The speaker did not know how his grandfather got home that night, but the friend went missing for over a week. “They did find the guy, his friend, my grandpa’s friend. And so he just told me that this dude was torn. Like torn apart. “

When asked what this creature was, the speaker said that “It’s from the time before even that place was colonized by Spain… around the Mayan time… the Mayans just disappeared one day. They were so advanced for their time.” He went on to say that his grandfather believed that the Mayans, who the speaker mentioned were polytheistic built massive pyramids, disappeared because they were killed by these strange creatures. “These things that they [victims] see now are from times that we can’t even comprehend because he’s like, yeah, they’re from the future. And I was like, What the hell do you mean the future?” The speaker trailed off.

“I’m not sure if it’s real or not, I’m going to believe because the way he will talk to me, he would stare me down in the eyes,” the speaker continued. “And my grandma would also support that, because even she would hear the black horse because that another story my grandma told me when my grandpa was asleep, was, he couldn’t sleep at night, most of the time in Guatemala, because he said that that’s the human figure would haunt him because of his friend.”

The speaker noted that black stallions were also a status symbol in Guatemala reserved for members of the military.

When asked why he first told the story, the speaker noted that ” Usually when I’m under the influence, then the story comes out But usually, when you’re impaired or under the influence, you see, I wouldn’t say another dimension, but you see something else? Like you see? We see different.”

The speaker’s grandfather worried that these two creatures would come for him after he moved to the U.S. He later died of a heart attack.

*

This speaker is a good friend but he embellishes stories a lot. He later told me that he believed that he’d seen the red-eyed creature in the U.S. even though he called both of these creatures “just legends” in the recording. I also happen to know that in telling these stories, he was trying to get me to trust him again after a breakup. After, he often offered to tell similar stories. But I think he was being genuine when he told me what he knew and what he had seen.

This speaker also struggles with drinking alcoholic beverages. Telling this story may be a way for him to express the fear he feels drinking to suppress emotions or escape responsibility.

He later asked me not to tease him about ghosts because to him, these stories are very real. I might not believe these stories in the daylight, but I will never walk alone at midnight in Guatemala.

The Pocono Devil

As a child, the informant attended a summer camp in the Poconos in Pennsylvania. He tells the story of an urban legend that haunts the camp grounds– the Pocono Devil.

M: Pocono Devil? That is a story that I heard a couple of years ago when I went to camp in the Pocono mountains in Pennsylvania. There’s a story that I heard about a monster that lived in the woods. Basically, the story I always heard was that the camp opened in the 40s, and in the 50s, uh, there was a camper who got buried alive by his sister by the lake. 

And the story goes that that kid rose from the grave as the Pocono Devil, who’s a demon who stalks the woods looking for revenge on his sister. So you go into the woods, wearing, at night, wearing a Pine Forest T-shirt–Pine Forest is the name of the camp– the Pocono Devil will come after you thinking you’re his sister.

It might be a story that they told campers to make sure they didn’t go into the woods in the middle of the night, or something that older kids 30 years ago came up with to scare younger kids. 

There’s also this big, gnarled tree thing in the center of camp called the Ten Year Tree. Any person who’s either attended the camp for 10 years, or worked there for ten years, gets their name on a metal stamp bolted to the tree. And if you look for it, uh, right in the middle, there’s one for the Pocono Devil. 

Thoughts:

It’s classic for a summer camp to have haunting stories. Like the informant said, this story was probably either made to keep campers out of the woods at night to keep them safe or was made by older campers to freak out the younger ones. Either way, this story has very obviously become greatly entangled with the identity of the camp as they have a name plate in honor of it.

A story like this also helps increase the popularity of the camp. The name Pine Forest piggy backs on the story of the Pocono Devil, thus increasing the width of the camp’s brands reach as well as tempting kids to join next summer.

Bunshinsaba

Main Piece: Interviewer: In my middle school, the movie Bunshinsaba was quite popular at that time. One day after the final exam, my roommates and I decided to summon Bunshinsaba and ask her how did our exam go. We sat around the table in the dormitory and held a pen together. As soon as we read the incantation silently, the pen started to move on the paper automatically and a number gradually appeared. Everyone was shocked by what we have just seen. Then, according to the tradition, after the rite, we should properly bury the pen so that the Bunshinsaba can be peacefully sent away, but we were too lazy to do that so we just left the pen in our dormitory. Soon, we heard a loud sound from next door: the chandelier in that dorm fell from the roof! More horribly, after checking the chandelier, the maintenance guys affirmed that there was nothing wrong with the chandelier and they could not explain why this situation happened. We were scared by it, and we thought it must be a warning from Bunshinsaba. Therefore, the next day, we bury the pen in the school’s garden, and then everything returned to normal.  

Background: Bunshinsaba was from one of the oldest witchcrafts in ancient China. Bunshinsaba is the ghost of a dead person who can come back to humans’ world and answer people’s doubts through a certain rite. It originated in the worship of a legendary spiritual goddess. Normally, we think it started from Tang Dynasty but some experts believe it is much longer than we thought. Initially, some Taoist priest used it for divination, and then, it became more popular among ordinary people.   

Context: I sent a message to my interviewer, who is one of my best friends, and asked her to tell me some unusual or supernatural things that have happened to her. Then she sent me a long message to illustrate this story and I asked for several details afterward. It was a relaxing and fun chat as she thought it was a memorable and interesting part of her school life. 

Thoughts: People do not like uncertain and unknown future, and they try to figure it out through summoning Bunshinsaba. I felt very unbelievable and frightened when I first heard this story, so I looked up some relevant information online. Some scientists explained that this is simply because people had some psychological hints during the process that make them inadvertently move their pens. More importantly, I think the story tells us not to do these ghost rituals casually, no matter how curious you are, because you do not know if something terrible will happen if you annoy the ghost.