Tag Archives: ghost

Bloody Mary in the Bathroom – Legend

Context:

J is a screenwriting second-year at USC, raised in Canada but moved to American when J was 10 years old. The below text is a story told among the female students at J’s elementary school.

Text:

When J was in elementary school, there was a bathroom where people said that a girl had died in while she was a student in school who continued to haunt the bathroom because of how gruesome her death was without finding peace. Her spirit believed to be lingering there resulted in the creation of their own version of Bloody Mary. Students would say that “Bloody Mary lives in that bathroom.” They could tell because it was the very last stall and one of the pipes on the toilet had a splash of red paint on it, which students thought was blood. J themselves would go to the stall at the end of the day, and never got haunted by Bloody Mary. But, J was always on edge in the bathroom, where every little noise or motion may “summon” Bloody Mary, so J never did the “summoning” (saying Bloody Mary) to not chance the possibility of the ghost.

Analysis:

This narrative takes advantage of two legend themes: ghosts and Bloody Mary. Ghosts are an entity that lives on liminal boundaries: the line between life and death, human and non-human, and science and will power. The legend of a ghost forces the audience to question if one’s will truly is strong enough to overrule death, if a death with regret strong enough truly can provide haunting, or if there really is a line between life and death that is invisible to the living. Death itself is enigmatic and frightening for the living, so ghosts are a way people cope with it. For an audience as young as elementary students, ghosts not only become a way to deal with the permanence of death, but also a way to refuse grieving or accepting death, tying ghost narrative back to anti-hegemonic childhood folklore. So, the ghost itself as a literary object in a story subtly questions much of the real world’s ideas of death, maybe even denying them outright. Furthermore, because the legend is also about Bloody Mary, the story also becomes a coming-of-age for young girls. Bloody Mary serves the mark women’s menstrual cycle, a point at which blood comes out of the body, the girl is no longer chained to childhood and has to face harsh reality. Avoiding the bathroom stall avoids Bloody Mary, avoiding growing up as a young woman. An acknowledgement that Bloody Mary is not real (this childhood rumor is not real) marks a turning point in the young female world, that they have “risen above” childhood, gotten their period (marked by blood..Bloody Mary) and became women.

“GPS and Cemetery are a bad combo.”

Context:
Informant is a 50 year-old Taiwanese woman and this is her memorate happened on a camping trip. The interview was conducted through a facetime call.

Text:
Informant: It was during summer a couple years ago. I took the kids on a camping trip about an hour away from the city. One of my sister’s kids said that she had something earlier that day and asked us to pick her up at a nearby train station. We arrived at the site in the afternoon and by the time I was supposed to pick her up, it was pitch black outside. There was a cemetery on the side of the road at about halfway between the train station and the camping site. I remembered it because we saw that earlier when we were heading to the site. I remembered setting the GPS map to the train station and I took a quick glance at where the route would be, nothing unusual, just one big straight road that leads to the town where the station is. I started driving and as I was approaching where the cemetery is located, the map start asking me to turn right. There is one small muddy road cutting through the cemetery and the GPS kept asking me to go through there, but it makes no sense at all because the station should be straight ahead down the big road. The closer I got to the intersection, the more I felt weird about the entire situation. The street lights were flickering and glowing in a strange tone and I just felt this uncanny feeling that the something is trying to pull me into the cemetery, down that road. I didn’t dare to look through the passenger window because I was convinced that I might see things that I shouldn’t see. As I drove past and away from the intersection that I was asked to turn by the GPS, the street lights seemed to go back to the normal, dimmed, warm-yellow tone and the strange feeling went away. Anyways, that is why you should always have a basic sense of where you are going and don’t fully rely on GPS. God knows what would have happened if I had just followed the GPS.

Analysis:
The memorate demonstrates the common Taiwanese belief of the existence of ghosts. Cemetery are usually seen as a cursed or bad place where the wandering spirits or hostile ghosts will try to haunt or harm someone, either out of fun or malicious intention. In Taiwan, you often heard that GPS or other technologies involving energy wave passing through air and space often malfunction when the device is near the cemetery. The scientific explanation of this is still unclear. This type of experience therefore was explained way by the common belief of ghost.

Loira do Banheiro/the Blonde in the Bathroom

Text:

SS: Loira do Banheiro, which is the Blonde in the Bathroom. There are a couple clips online to demonstrate what happened, people acting it out. Basically the story goes that there’s this blonde who went to public school, but she was pretty and kind and had all these nice characteristics, but she got bullied a lot: there were a bunch of people who gave her a hard time, who were rude to her, who didn’t treat her well. The story goes that she went to the bathroom, and that was especially where she got bullied. Something happened where she got in a fight, and the girls who were bullying her were like, pushing her around, and she hit her head. So she died in the bathroom. The idea is that she stays in the bathroom ready to haunt all the bullies and taunt them. So what happened is that my cousin and I tried it. It’s super similar to the American Bloody Mary: there are all these things you can do online. Go to the bathroom, like spin around three times, spin around three times, say her name three times. My cousin and I said every single one trying to summon her. But then as soon as we left, our aunts were like—I’m positive they were messing with us—but they said we saw her, that everything we did worked. And it’s a super popular story.

Loira do Banheiro

Transliteration: Loira → blonde / do → of / Banheiro → Bathroom

Translation: the Blonde in the Bathroom

Context: SS is my roommate and close friend, a recent graduate of USC who was born in Brazil but moved to the United States soon after. She frequently flies back with her parents and brother to visit her family in Brazil. She learned this particular legend from her cousins, not her parents, while she visited Brazil and decided to test it out.


Analysis: When I went to elementary school, we had our own version of Bloody Mary, which was activated by saying her name three times in our school restroom. Even in this analysis, I find myself wanting to make sure I don’t say her name too many times… obviously, it’s text, so the question is whether or not it would count, but I find myself not wanting to take too many chances. SS was the opposite, purposefully seeking her out in order to test the limits of the legend—a legend quest. The Internet definitely affected her perception. While she initially learned of the legend from her cousins, researching on the Internet became a large part of proving the ghost story’s validity. Her testing of the ghost story in this way could have only occurred in modern day—it veers into the realm of creepypasta and other online forums for ghost stories. The proliferation of information on this ghost story via the internet changed the way that future generations will interpret it. Knowing both Brazilian and American cultures gave her a unique perspective because she was able to recognize the similarities for herself, affecting the way she interpreted the legend’s validity.

Hanged Mom in the Basement

Text:

GJ: I was in fourth grade. That summer, we moved into a bungalow. The very first day when we were moving in, there was a ring at the doorbell. I opened up the door, and there was this little girl who asked “is there a little girl here?” She had seen my little sister. They went up to play, and I joined them… I was only a year apart from my sister, so we were pretty close. This neighbor from down the street, she proceeded to tell us how her best friend had lived in this house before us, but on the day of her birthday, after her birthday party, her mom committed suicide and hung herself in the basement. Of course, we were really freaked out by this, so we were like maybe she made this up. So we go downstairs, and there were all the streamers and birthday decorations still hanging downstairs. Needless to say, we were scared of the basement. It was an unfinished basement that was very dark, and there was a big part of the basement that you couldn’t see from the bottom of the stairs, and that happened to be where the laundry room was. The laundry room was in front of where the stairs let out, and the rest of the basement was just dark. We… of course, this might have been led by fear, but we were convinced we heard sounds in the darkness, maybe even bits of light, enough to make us race back upstairs. It was quite some time before we worked up the courage to turn the lights on and start playing in the basement. Gradually the fear went away, but that was what it was like when we first moved in for several months.

Context: GJ is a Canadian immigrant who moved to Los Angeles from Toronto, Ontario when he was in his thirties. He grew up in Alberta. Because of his parents’ divorce and his father’s work flipping houses, he frequently moved around. His family prides themselves on being logical, and as such, when I first asked for folklore, he said that he didn’t have any because all of the things he was told were either “religious or true.” It took some pressing before he told me the ghost story detailed here.

GJ: “There had been a teacher’s strike right before that, so I was at a different school. Months passed and it went into the summer so I never got the contact information from my previous friends that summer, so I didn’t have any friends.”

Analysis: This legend of a ghost became a memorate… the story GJ heard about the death in his basement became translated into his own personal experience when he began experiencing things that verged on paranormal, such as the blinking lights and darkness. His avoidance of the basement could be read as ostentation. The fact that GJ was isolated moving in might have contributed to the way that he interpreted the story. He went from being in a large social circle to having no one. The fact that the very first person he meets in a new, unfamiliar neighborhood tells him a frightening story about the very place he lives in might have made him even more scared of it. The girl telling him this story caught him at a vulnerable time in which he was scrambling for security and belief, similar to how college students find themselves questioning whether or not they believe in ghosts. It’s a moment of turmoil in which he had to reinvent himself and redefine his own beliefs. Later, he regarded the story with more of his self-defined rationality, but the evidence remains that he thoroughly believed it at that point in his life.

Baptisms for the Dead and Spirits – ghost story

Text:

“You’re going to think I’m crazy, but ok so in my religion we have a practice called Baptisms for the dead. It’s not about like forcing anyone to join the religion, but it’s about giving people who have passed the opportunity to be saved if they accept it [the baptism]. So, I did one for my grandparents, and they were like very present. I don’t know how else to describe it. My grandma had the sweetest spirit when she was alive, and while performing the baptism, just this sweet presence come over me, I can’t really describe what it felt like, but I knew it was her.”

Context:

T is from Joshua Tree, California. She told me this story while we were in our dorm room together. She is Christian, along with the rest of her family. Baptisms for the Dead is a common practice at her church. This practice she learned from her church, but she experienced feeling the presence of her relatives herself.

Analysis:

This is an example of a personal narrative, specifically a ghost story. She does not use the word ghost, but instead utilizes the word spirit. This phrasing shows how this story is held close to her. Often when we are talking about ghosts, it is in a much less personal context and is discussed with less reverence. When we use the word spirit, it is often in relation to a family member or an important figure, however both are essentially referring to the same thing: some sort of apparition of someone who has died. This connotation can help distinguish how truthful and unbiased a personal narrative is. Every event a person experiences is influenced by their emotions and beliefs, especially one as personal as seeing/feeling family members who have passed. Personal narratives are an important part of folklore, because they often blend many aspects of a cultural group into the narrative. For example, if there is not an already strong held belief in spirits or the soul within the cultural group, then it is less likely someone will experience seeing a spirit.