Tag Archives: Los Angeles

L.A. Hand Sign

Nationality: American
Age: 19
Occupation: Student
Residence: San Diego, California, United States
Performance Date: 2-23-2023
Primary Language: English

Text:

Context:

The informant learned this at a summer camp in San Diego from some girls from Los Angelos (L.A.).

Analysis:

The gesture is representative of an “L” and an “A.” As the initials of the city of Los Angeles, these two letters are an easy connection to the city. While this sign could be a gesture used to identify with other citizens of Los Angeles, the arrangement of the hands does not seem intuitive enough to me to align with this. Instead, I think this gesture is connected with experimentation on what shapes one’s hands can create. Like the hand llama this gesture could be used in a variety of ways and it stretches the traditional uses of hands.

LA Parking Prayer

Nationality: Brazilian-American
Age: 32
Occupation: Marketer
Residence: Salt Lake City, UT
Performance Date: 2/24/23
Primary Language: English

Background

This short prayer was given to the informant by a friend who had grown up in Los Angeles. The interviewee is currently living in Salt Lake City, Utah, but lived in Los Angeles for ten years. This is a prayer to find a parking spot in LA, only meant to be invoked in true desperation. She is of Latin American descent.

Text

MM: Um, Okay. It is “Mary, Mary, full of grace, help me find a parking space” and it’s used to help you find a parking space, uh, when you are looking for street parking or in a car park, a crowded parking lot.

MM: Um, and, but you have to use it very sparingly. I can’t, you can’t just like at, for, you know, you have to have been looking for a minute before you can use it.

MM: Um, I first heard it from a friend who grew up in LA and she pulled it out after we’d been searching for parking for quite a while and she said she keeps it in her back pocket for absolute emergencies. We found a parking spot immediately and it has not failed me since, but again, only used in emergencies.

Interviewer: Sparingly.

MM: Sparingly. Yes. Yes. And by emergency, I mean, you know, a Los Angeles emergency, which is there’s no valet.

Interviewer: Haha, yeah.

MM: Truly an emergency.

Analysis

This is an example of folk speech, more specifically a prayer. I had heard this prayer from the interviewee some time ago and knew it would be perfect for the archive.

As any LA driver can attest, it can be extremely difficult to find parking on the streets of Los Angeles. One can find themselves driving around endlessly, and this prayer is meant to save them from the struggle. As the interviewee states, the prayer cannot be used in any situation. Instead, it can only be invoked at a time of desperation or emergency, when hope is nearly lost for finding a parking space. This maintains a certain significance to the prayer; if it does not work, the situation might not have been desperate enough.

This example of folk speech likely evolved through the converging influences of car culture and Catholicism on Los Angeles. This prayer is invoked almost in jest, rather than it being attached to any true religious belief. The informant, notably, does not have any ties to Catholicism. Still, the prayer mentions Mary, most likely the Virgin Mary, pointing to its roots in Catholic belief. This prayer is an excellent example of how folk belief evolves from the environment and culture it finds itself in.

Cahuenga Pass is Haunted

T is 70 years old. He is a retired teacher. He was born in Southern California and raised in Hawaii. He was 7 years old when his family moved there in 1959. He is very animated and speaks very quickly. He told me about the bad vibes he gets at Cahuenga Pass in conversation.

“There was a battle uh… like in the 1800s… something like that, I always have weird vibes in the Cahuenga pass. I think it was the battle of Cahuenga Pass, it changed the leadership of where the valley was going at the time… the end of where like Universal Studios is, that’s the haunted part. A Mexican governor, no one liked him, and a wealthy landowner, no one liked him either… they were fighting over it. Only two people were killed, not the governor or the landowner go figure, but the two that died, they’re the ones that haunt the place. I always got bad energy from the pass. I feel I attract ghosts too easily.”

There were two battles for Cahuenga pass in the 1800s, T’s story refers to the original Battle of Cahuenga Pass, the second was known as the Battle of Providencia (or the Second Battle of Cahuenga Pass) There are stories about the pass being cursed. Apparently, parcels of stolen treasure are buried somewhere along the pass but everyone who’s ever come close to finding it has suddenly and mysteriously died! So maybe it is cursed and haunted. For more information see https://bizarrela.com/2016/11/cahuenga-pass/.  

“Have a spicy salad,”

“Have a spicy salad,”

Paula: Um…there’s gotta be some midwife’s tales, right? Um…like, uh, have a spicy salad. Or something. If- if you look that up, you’ll find that’s something that midwives used to tell women.

Me: …Tell pregnant women to have a spicy salad?

Paula: …to have the baby come.

My mother wasn’t entirely sure where she heard this from, but in my own research on the topic, it seems this saying was born from a local restaurant in LA. At this restaurant, they serve a certain spicy salad that is believed to help induce labor in pregnant women, and they have a chalkboard dedicated to all the women who went into labor shortly after eating this salad. Its a really interesting piece of folklore to me because of how, as my mother said, it seems like something a midwife would say to an expectant mother, but it was ultimately born from an entirely different place out of, most likely, sheer circumstance.

The Haunting of Greystone Mansion

Nationality: American
Age: 65
Occupation: Filmmaker
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: 4/29/21
Primary Language: English

BACKGROUND: GH is the interviewer’s father. A first assistant director for movies and TV shows, he has worked many times at Greystone Mansion, a famous estate in Beverly Hills, now open to the public and a popular site for film shoots. Rumors of hauntings and horror stories have been going back since the mansion was built.


TRANSCRIPT:
GH: “We were shooting at Greystone for two days. After the first days, some young sound guys thought it’d be fun to leave their equipment running all night, see if they could hear anything when we got back in the morning, prove any of those old rumors. We get back to set the next day. They’re going through the audio, and there’s absolutely nothing. They start speeding through… still nothing… until a huge crash is heard. They slow it back down to normal, and find that for two or three minutes, sometime in the wee hours of the morning, every door in that house slammed open, shut, open, shut. A few minutes later, it ceased, and silence for the rest of the night.”


ANALYSIS: Estates in Los Angeles are ripe for any number of ghost stories or hauntings, are an intrinsic part of the city’s folklore. Such is the case with Greystone. This story is a chilling example of a ghost narrative.