Tag Archives: Supernatural

Connecticut Ghost Story

Informant EM is 18 years old and a freshman at the University of Southern California. Her major is cinema and media stories. Here, she discusses her ghostly experience as a freshman in high school in Connecticut:

EM: “For my freshman year of high school, I went to boarding school in the middle of nowhere in Connecticut. It was kind of an isolated community so we had to tell each other stories to keep us entertained for the most part and a lot of those stories involve the founding of the school and the legacy of the people who founded the school. So I got the luck of moving into the oldest dorm on campus that had been around since the 1800’s and it was a scary place. It was drafty, it was cold, it was falling apart, so naturally we had a bunch of ghost stories about it. The most memorable one was the story of the ghost of Maria Bissell Hotchkiss who was the founder of the school. Legend had it that if you went out at night to the hallway and you went to the back staircase of the dormitory, which was named after her by the way, you would see a woman dressed in white in a Victorian costume, like very old fashioned clothing, walking back and forth throughout the hallway and she would go down the stairs and if you tried to follow her, she would disappear. A lot of this has to do with the fact that back part of the dorm used to be her home when the school was originally founded. It’s kind of like the idea that she is looking out for the students. She’s been known to be a benevolent ghost, nothing really scary about her, but it was still creepy and there were definitely tons of sightings. I remember in particular when we had a blackout, because we were snowed in, there was this horrible blizzard. I actually feel like I might have seen something. I like to think that there is a rational explanation because like again it’s an old building, but I heard footsteps out in the hallway and I had the room closest to the back staircase and there wasn’t anyone with me. My roommate was back in my room but she heard the footsteps too, but she didn’t see what I saw. I saw someone in the dark who was dressed in white and this figure was opening the back door to the staircase and going in and you know there could be many explanations obviously, but it definitely made me think and it was kind of a fun story to tell other people after.”

How did people react to your experience?               

EM: “Well there was this girl who was a daughter of a teacher and she lived in the house adjacent to the dorms, and she said that all throughout her childhood before even knowing who Maria Bissell was, she had actually seen the ghost in one of the rooms, which when we later went upstairs to look at it, it turned out to be my room because it is the closest to the back. So we were thinking that maybe this used to be Maria Bissell’s room when it was a house, so maybe that explains why she keeps going there. But the girl said she wasn’t scared of her as a young child. She said that she got the impression that this spirit was kind to children. She started a school so maybe she is still around just to keep looking out for her students to make sure that they are OK.”

How or from whom did you learn about your school’s history?

EM: “Well before I saw it with my own eyes, I had the background because it was a popular story to hear around Halloween from the older students. It was kind of like an initiation thing like I would hear it from like the girls who were proctors and were seniors and you would hear it from the faculty. But I remember that they would make this little ritual out of it on Halloween where they would take us to a graveyard. They would take us out on Halloween night to the grave of Maria Bissell. It was just to scare us and it was part of the initiation process. It was a big part of the school culture and especially the women who are a part of the school. The boys never heard about this kind of stuff that went on, only the girls were involved.”

Did any of the girls ever share this with the boys?

EM: “Never. No, actually it was very exclusive. I don’t know if it had to do with that the dorm was a girls dorm, but it was definitely women who passed it on to other women.”

Does your experience have any meaning to you?

EM: “Well I’m not sure, but I like to keep my mind open. I like to think of it more as a lucky encounter or a positive thing, almost like a good luck charm more than it would be like something that is very scary because it was a way in connecting with the history of the place and also it’s nice for a change to have like a mascot ghost that isn’t out to get you. It was definitely a positive experience.”

What context would you share your experience in?

EM: “Well it makes a great story for stuff like Halloween, but I feel like it’s probably easier to explain to people from my same background. So if I were to meet another girl who went to Hotchkiss, I would probably ask her if she heard about Maria Bissell and ask her of she experienced anything similar. Everyone has their own story on Maria Bissell, which kind of defines your belonging to group of Hotchkiss girls. It would definitely be a bonding thing.”

Analysis:

EM’s experience with the ghost of Maria Bissell Hotchkiss is a large part of the schools initiation process and part of the tradition of passing those experiences onto the new class of girls who are coming in. It represents belonging within the community and the spirit of Marie Bissell Hotchkiss is portrayed as a benevolent spirit who is a reminder that the girls of this community a part of a tradition that was upheld for decades. The shared experiences and stories brought the community together. It solidified the bond between the girls of the school. It also established a sense of identity for the girls who went to Hotchkiss. Many girls came from all over the U.S. and the world to earn an education at this school and through the many experiences of encountering Maria Bissell over generations brought a sense of community and a shared belief system that all the girls could relate to and understand.

 

For another version of this legend, check out this article written by Stephanie Thomas:

http://www.hotchkiss.org/abouthotchkiss/hotchkiss-today/last-bissell-halloween-walk/index.aspx

Citation:

Thomas, Stephanie. “Origins of the Bissell Halloween Walk.” The Hotchkiss School. N.p., 2014. Web. Apr. 2016.

 

 

The Backyard Clown

Title: The Backyard Clown

Interviewee: Adrian Vigil

Ethnicity: Mexican-American

Age: 20

Situation (Location, ambience, gathering of people?):

AJ is sitting on a sofa in front of the Trojan Knights house, it is a calm warm Sunday in South Central Los Angeles. It is a group of 10 male students from the University of Southern California sitting on the front porch, sharing stories. All of these men are members of Trojan Knights, and are relaxing after having started cooking homemade friend chicken. All of these men are close to one another, including the interviewer. AJ says he has a good one as he puts his drink down.

Piece of Folklore:

Interviewee- “Okay here we go. This is long one, but I have a good scary story that happened to my friend. I think it could have been a ghost, but I don’t know. Okay here we go you cannoli (see post “What a Cannoli”). Okay so my friend lives in these suburbs of Houston.”

Interviewer- “Texas?”

Interviewee- “Of course you cannoli (see post “What a Cannoli”)! Ok so he lives in the suburbs, and his house has this back yard. It’s pretty big back there not going to lie. And so the backyard is all grass and surrounding the backyard he has bushes that act like a wall between his backyard and other peoples yards you know? Ok so he has this backyard, and his bedroom is the on the second floor, and he has this one big window looking back over the backyard. So this is where it gets creepy. This one night, he was sleeping, and he is a really light sleeper so stuff wakes him easily. Ok so one night he was sleeping, and he wakes up because he hears something weird in the backyard. So he walks to his window, and he sees this stupid clown dude just stumbling around in the backyard, looked like he was drunk or on something to be sure. My friend told me thought it was funny to see this guy bumbling around. So my friend then went back to bed and made a mental note to tell his parents that they should make sure drunk people can’t stumble onto their backyard anymore. So my friend went to bed that night laughing to himself. He told his parents the next morning, and his parents waved it off saying that that was a one-time thing. So my friend goes about his day as normal. Only thing is, is that he wakes up the next night, and hears things coming from his backyard, but the sounds are different. Immediately he is more upset at the noises, and more on edge about the whole situation. So he walks slowly to the window, and sees into his backyard. And in the backyard, with a shovel, is the clown. The clown isn’t bumbling about anymore, and he has a shovel in his hand. The clown is digging, digging into his backyard, and at this point my friend is thoroughly freaked out. He walks back from the window, makes sure all the doors in the house are locked and windows, and goes back to bed to try to sleep, but the sound of the digging kept him up. The next day he tells his parents, and they say that he’s seeing things and he is just a silly guy who always tries to pull something on his parents. They say that it was probably a dog digging for something, because dogs usually do that and the hole left in the back was just a dog and they would fix it soon and have someone come to fill it up. They did admit however that it was quite a big hole, a hole that is far bigger than most dogs can make. They dismiss the idea of the clown none the less. Then came the third night. Once again, my friend woke up in the middle of the night, around three am I think it was. But something is wrong, something is very different this time. A feeling of dread came upon him as he realized he was awake. He knew something was wrong. He didn’t hear anything coming from outside, but he didn’t know why he was awake. He kept telling himself to just go back to bed, to ignore everything in his imagination and just go back to sleep. He told himself not to get out of his bed, but he did. He told himself not to walk across his room over to the window, but he did. He told himself not to look out the window into the backyard, but he did. And there was the clown, with his back to my friend, and he was staring at the hole he had made the night before. In that hole there was a coffin. My friend was very confused. Then the clown bent down and opened the coffin, it was empty. My friend was confused, he didn’t know what was happening. Then the clown turned around and stared at my friend in the eyes. He knew he had been watching. My friend was paralyzed with fear. The clown just stared and him, then the clown pointed at the coffin, and started to laugh. My friend realized the coffin was meant for him. He shook his head to say no, and the clown tilted his head in confusion, even putting his hands on his hips in a comical way. He pointed again at the coffin, and my friend again shook his head. The clown grew upset and now frowned, even showing his teeth a little in hatred. Then the clown once again pointed at the coffin this time forcefully. My friend started to walk backwards slowly, to go tell his parents, but then in a blink the clown was gone, like he had just disappeared, so my friend went up to the window to look and see where the clown had gone. That’s when he heard his closet door creak open, and a creepy laugh coming from behind him.”

(Long pause)

Interviewer- “Is that it? Did anything else happen?”

Interviewee- “Nope that’s it. It turned out to be nothing although my friend doesn’t sleep in that room anymore and hates clowns now. His parents still think he was dreaming.”

Interviewer- “Do you?”

Interviewee- “Ummm no. I think he was telling the truth, at least the truth from his perspective. Maybe he had nightmares that seemed too real, or he had nightmares that were real for him.”

Analyzation:

So there are many parts to this story, and they all seem to work together. There are multiple versions of this story going around, especially recently with the internet being as big as it is today. I personally have read an online story that sounded very similar. In that respect, there are certain things that give it away as being a story that has been told many times. That is not to say that it did not happen, more so to say that it has been converted into a form that is easy to remember and relay to other people. Firstly, the fact that the clown appears in the backyard three times, and the third time is the time that something big happens. Likewise, further into the story, when the clown is pointing at the coffin, he points three times, and the third time is again when something happens. This is prevalent in western culture, this fixation on the number three. Beginning with the Holy Trinity in the Catholic faith, to the three colors of the American flag and many other flags and such. Three strikes and you’re out, the list goes on and on. The number three is integrated heavily into our culture, but natural things do not usually occur in threes, so when things like that do happen in stories, and even twice within the same story, one can discern that it has morphed into more of a story than an actual account of what happened.

Tags: Horror Story, Clown, Backyard

Winchester Mystery House Tourist Site

The Winchester Mystery House is a house that was built in San Jose, California, in the 1800s, occupied by a husband and wife. As the story goes, as relayed by the informant, the woman in the story was paranoid that her husband’s ghost and others in the house would attempt to haunt her. Then, the woman, to avoid collisions with the supernatural, built several traps to fool her husband’s ghost: staircases that led nowhere, extra rooms, dead-ends, etc.

Interestingly, the house has since been turned into a tourist property, where, playing off the above legend, visits can pay for night tours through the “haunted house”. The Winchester Mystery House remains open to the public. Tours can be scheduled at its official website: http://www.winchestermysteryhouse.com/

It is impossible to know if the folklore surrounding the property caused the site to become a tourist attraction–or if the folklore was fabricated in order to promote the tourist attraction.

 

Haunted Neighborhood

“Ok, so where we lived, I used to live in Chandler, Arizona. And where we lived, it was like a newly renovated area. So the land was usually farmland, often used by the Native Americans, because they used to have a reserve there, and then it was bought by the government and turned into farmland. So we had this house built like in a new community of new houses and model homes. So it was weird because my mom’s best friend Andy moved into her house and then um my mom and y dad moved into our house, and then three of my sister’s friend groups moved into the same street we were still on. But you know when you get the eerie, negative, cold vibe, so I could never sleep in that house at all and I am a deep sleeper so it was weird that I couldn’t sleep in the house.

And one night, my neighbors were like hey Abbey, do you want to watch our house because they were going to a party and they had a cat that I loved. So I was like yeah I’ll watch your house, and so I was watching their house, and there was a blackout at their house, and only their house. So I brought the cat over to my mom’s house and it was all fine. But then random houses started getting blackouts so we thought it was an electricity problem. Well it wasn’t an electricity problem, and then everyone in my family started getting sick, people across the street started getting sick, and it was like a bronchitis, like coughing sickness. I missed two weeks of school because of it. And they found black mold, like the kind that needs to be aged over ten years to be like that, and the house was brand new so that was weird, they thought it was like some chemical so they had to fumigate our house and we had to get vaccines.

And ok, so we have this basement in that house which was weird because Arizona doesn’t get tornadoes. But we had a basement and um we had above the basement was a hallway where me and my sister’s room was. And when I was in junior high and she was in fourth grade, and my parents left, and the dog was downstairs with us. And we heard stomping, and I called my mom and dad and they weren’t there, so I went upstairs and checked it out, and didn’t find anything so I got my sisters and we got some knives and we went into the closet in the basement. And we sat there for hours, and so the closet we went to was the storage room and it was right underneath the stairs that led to underneath the basement. And we heard footsteps coming down the stairs. And we were silent for an hour, and then we heard footsteps coming down the stairs again, but there were no footsteps going back up the stairs. So when my parents got home, they found the front door open, but it was weird because we never heard footsteps going back up the stairs and my dad didn’t find anyone in the house. So after that day, I refused to sleep by myself.

And then a bunch of bad things started happening in our house. My mom and dad started fighting all the time, my mom and dad were fighting one night and the pots started shaking at the bar, like started shaking. And then my mom’s best friend’s son got in a really bad car accident coming out of the neighborhood. Then there was a fire in a neighboring area and it brought in a bunch of scorpions over, and then my parents got divorced. And then in the exact order that everyone moved into the neighborhood, all of the parents got divorced. So like everyone in the neighborhood got divorced. So I was doing research later in life, and nobody from that neighborhood ever talked again and it was weird. And I was doing research about that area and we found out that it used to be a Native American reservation, which we didn’t know before.

And then we found out it used to be a tribal ritual ground, and my mom got so freaked out she called people from the actual community and they apologized for not disclosing the information because it had happened fifteen years before that and they only have to disclose information if it’s only been less than five years. So my best friend had a house there, and her family moved to Arkansas, so my friend came back one break, and we went over to her old house in that community to see if someone was living there, and it was completely deserted and everyone thought it was haunted. So we went in and the front door was wide open, which was weird, and we went into where her closet was and we found a headless baby doll in the closet. So I was like I’m done, I refuse to go back there, like I will drive around that whole property when I am in Arizona to avoid it. I won’t even go near it. And everybody is a different religion like Catholic, Jewish, Hindu, Buddhists, and even an atheist and they all agree that it was weirdly haunted.”

 

Informant: The Informant is twenty-one years old, and of Spanish, Italian, and Mexican heritage. She grew up in Arizona, and now works for an event planning company. She is a public relations major with an Italian minor at the University of Southern California.

 

Analysis:

Usually ghost stories that circulate focus on one odd event or a series of odd circumstances, and this story is one such story. It is not unusual to find stories about the supernatural because so many Americans share this belief in it. Like most of these stories, it brings to light the question of belief, as it is told from the personal experience as a memorate, it is more likely to be believed if one knows the informant. In addition, the last portion of the story mentions how people of all different religions, including an atheist, acknowledge that the events that unfolded within this story could only have unfolded from supernatural occurrences.

This narrative contains many elements traditionally found in stories about the supernatural. For instance, black mold, swarms of scorpions, everyone suddenly becoming ill and getting divorced one by one, are events that can only be explained by external forces. The attribution of the supernatural to these events helps to explain how such things could occur, and why they did. In addition, the portion of the story about the footsteps down the stairs is particularly interesting, because no one could explain why there were never any footsteps going back up the stairs. Therefore, it would make sense to consider this a supernatural event. Furthermore, an explanation as to why pots started shaking while the informant’s parents were fighting is difficult to come by scientifically.

Serving as an explanation for why such a string of unfortunate events could occur, the supernatural is an important element in this narrative. It is also supported by the fact that none of the new residents in the neighborhood knew that they were living on what was once a sacred ritual ground to Native Americans. This is an integral element in the story as it distinguishes why an entire neighborhood could be victim to such events. It is also important because Native American reservations strive to protect their sacred ground, and building on top of this sacred land is a violation of this sacredness. This could serve as a possible explanation as to why such events occurred. Overall, this story includes many elements traditionally found in narratives about the supernatural, as the informant is seeking to determine why such events could occur.

Mothman

Mothman is a large creature that’s a cross between a man and a giant moth, and he supposedly lives somewhere on the East Coast. He has glowing red eyes and likes to fly at people’s car windshields when they’re driving. People claim that he was the cause of a collapsed bridge. Some news reports attribute Mothman sightings to large flying birds, however.

—

Informant is not American but knows a lot about contemporary American culture. He frequents Reddit, a “social network” very concerned with current events and urban legends. Mothman is an interesting piece of folklore because many have claimed to have seen it, like sightings of UFOs or Nessie, and the legends surrounding this creature are abound.