Author Archives: Andrew Kassab

Sunday School Miracle

Context: “Growing up, my Dad had left the Catholic faith and my Mom was a non-practicing former buddhist. Me and my sister did not grow up religious. When we were 7 (first grade) and my sister was 2, our neighbor was a baptist and the wife would take us to Sunday school. My mom didn’t know how to dress us and would always send me in pants. One day they prayed for God to help Mom buy me a dress and then later that week, her mother took her to buy a dress. Therefore, she and her sister started believing in God in some capacity.”

Analysis:  The story is a personal story of my informant’s childhood. As the progenitor of the legend, she swears that it happened. Since she was raised completely secularly, this moment functioned as a sort of religious conversion in her life. While she is not devout or following any particular Christian orthodoxy, she still believes that some higher power exists to balance the scales of fate and reward goodness. While not quite Augustine’s Confessions, it still represents a moment that challenged and changed her secular perspective. It does share many similarities with other conversion stories, having a protagonist whose choice of faith is met with divine grace. Even to this day, the informant has a strange devotion to the idea of a higher power and good karma, which may be a vestige of her mother’s Buddhist past. 

Truthfully, I doubt that her prayers were truly answered. In actuality, it is likely that somebody just told her mother to buy her a dress for Sunday school after that ordeal. In hindsight, she likely believes this narrative too, considering even she said that she only believes in God “in some capacity.” However, the veracity of the story doesn’t matter. What really matters is that this event has helped shape my informant’s worldview since it happened. In her life, she views a “higher power” as a sort of hand on the scales of fate, helping push her life in certain directions. While she often facetiously thanks “good karma” for her fortunes, this mentality goes beyond mere jokes. This mentality has helped her cultivate a strong sense of responsibility and fairness that has turned her into a highly motivated and successful person. To her, the simple idea that God could have perhaps helped her fit in at Sunday school was enough to convince her that she had His backing to chase down her dreams. 

Emerson’s Local Witch

Context: “When I was a kid, there was a scary old lady in my neighborhood. [Amongst the kids] the story was that she was a witch. Whenever we used to go out [on our] bikes, we would never ride by her house. A couple months later, there was a kid we knew that just stopped coming to school. We were told he moved but [the local kids and I] always thought that he [had] biked by the old lady’s house and was kidnapped by the witch.”

Analysis: This legend exemplifies the idea of “children’s folklore.” As kids, we all have a less complete understanding of the world than most adults. As such, fantastical beliefs can easily disseminate to explain  certain things. In this case, to explain how an old lady could be scary and grumpy, the informant and his friends theorized and believed that she was a witch. To a child, someone randomly acting angrily or maliciously towards them is just as inexplicable as mystical lights coming from over a hill. While, as adults, we may look at this lady and think that she’s a widow or that she simply was having a bad day, the kids took this inexplicable demeanor and concluded that she had to be a witch. And as kids turned up with more and more stories of her meanness, they were transformed into memorates of the scary witch. This idea of memorates extends further into the story when the kid “disappeared.” In all likelihood, he did just move away without telling anyone; maybe there were certain circumstances in his life that he just didn’t share with others. However, this sudden disappearance was inexplicable in the minds of children. Thus, they turned to the familiar narrative of the evil witch to explain his disappearance, forming yet another memorate. Especially in the eyes of children who lack a robust understanding of the world, these folk beliefs and memorates allow them to make some sense of the world, regardless of how flawed that understanding ends up being. 

 The Cult Next Door

Context:  “So basically there used to be a cult right on [a local street] before they left because the police were investigating them. Even though The Cult [the name used to describe the complex they used to inhabit]  is abandoned, most of [the local kids] still think that some people live there. [Other kids] even said they actually saw people inside one time. What me and my friends used to do is we’d drive there at night and ding dong ditch them. One time [a friend of his] threw a rock through a window.”

Analysis: This legend is the informant’s (and my) town’s local legend. To the kids who still live there, the Cult acts like a modern rendition of a haunted house. Local kids, especially teenagers who just got their driver’s license, will go there to cause mischief and test their mettle in a scary environment. Also, just like many haunted houses, the cult remains locally infamous due to the horrors that happened within. “The Cult” was a conservative Christian sect called the Institute in Basic Life Principles that fled after allegations of sexual abuse. Locally, it is widely believed that the group took in young orphans and runaways and sexually abused them. It exists as a nasty stain on an otherwise peaceful town. In my opinion, it is this juxtaposition between peaceful town and horrifying abuse that draws so many kids seeking to partake in legend quests.  

Also, it is almost universally accepted amongst the local teenagers that people are still living in The Cult. Every now and then, kids will claim to have seen members of the cult hiding within, peeking out from windows or waiting behind the door for them to try and knock. While it is likely just kids trying to appear brave and impress their friends, these cultists act as a modern, disenchanted spin on revenants and vampires. Vampires and revenants in folklore are manifestations of unfinished business on Earth. To those who believe in them, evil doesn’t just leave the world in something as simple as death. It festers and propels a corpse to take up life and exact its will. In the case of The Cult, it is hard to just accept that something as evil as a cult of alleged sexual abusers and pedophiles can just leave its sins behind entirely and flee town. Just like the revenants, there is a folk belief in this town that The Cult is still inhabited by these evil, scary people who have returned after the organization’s “death” to haunt that property forever.

Story of My Father’s Escape from Communist China

Context: “My grandfather and Nai-Nai were in Chiang Kai-shek’s army when the Communists won. [Their escape from the country] was like the Underground Railroad: they could only move between safehouses at night. My dad [at the time] was only 1 year old and had to be quiet so he didn’t jeopardize their lives. One day, [the family] heard that the Communists had found their safehouse and were on their way. They had to just grab whatever they could find and run, but Nai-Nai couldn’t find [my father] and they just left. 3 long days later they met up at a new safehouse where they learned that one of the grandfather’s friends had grabbed and taken care of my father in the scuffle. He is now called “Uncle” because he saved my dad’s life.”

Analysis: This legend is a textbook example of a family legend. Despite there being no concrete proof of it happening, the story is treated as truth by the informant and her family and has been passed down for multiple generations. While the main claim of the story, that being the losing of the informant’s father for 3 whole days, may or may not be true, the story has persisted in the informant’s family because it represents the chaos and pain of the escape from China to Taiwan. The Chinese Civil War’s conclusion in 1949 was an upending of the social order. Following their victory, the CCP ruthlessly hunted down any remnants of the old China, both landowners and soldiers alike. In this mad dash to escape certain death, the informant’s family was thrust into a period of chaos and danger where all they had was each other and the clothes on their backs. While they were able to safely escape into Taiwan, they remember both their struggles and the strength of their community through this story. While the disappearance of the informant’s father in the chaos was a serious crisis, it was resolved by the strength of their family and solidarity.

Roseville Castle

Context: “There’s this house that’s known as the Roseville Castle. People say it’s haunted. Some very eccentric guy bought it and it’s like super creepy on the inside. It’s called the I-80 castle. I’ve never been inside but it [apparently] looks super medieval on the inside and it’s super creepy. It’s a weird mix of 70’s aesthetic and medieval. People are just put off by it. [I’ve heard that] there’s a hot tub in the bedroom that got filled in with concrete and is now a stripper pole.”

He also mentioned that he’s seen many references to the castle on social media platforms like TIkTok. The stories all vary but they appear somewhat frequently on his timeline. 

Analysis: After doing some more research on this local legend, it is even stranger than he described. A local radio station did a piece on it where they detailed the property and did an expose on the owners. The aforementioned “very eccentric guy” was an air force pilot and beauty school tycoon who fell in love with the idea of living in a castle when stationed in the UK. So, he built his own “poor man’s” version of a castle off the I-80 highway with his own hands. Now, after his wife left him, the castle has fallen into disrepair. Despite sources like this detailing the history of the castle, it still remains shrouded in mystery. The article makes many references to a myriad of rumors; some claim that the castle was built by the Shah of Iran and others say it is a maze littered with hidden rooms and passages. While these rumors are categorized as purely fiction, there is still a common sense of confusion and mystery surrounding it

This castle and the surrounding rumors represent a variation on the idea of a local legend. Much like a haunted house, the dubious origins of the castle and its out-of-place aesthetic makes it stick out in the public consciousness. Furthermore, the “eccentric billionaire” character has always captured the imagination. The whole archetype is a representation of what people would choose to do with almost unlimited resources. It is a fantasy not many get to live out, making their antics all the more alien to the rest of the population. In this case, the idea that a man with a ton of money would just build a castle because he liked one in England doesn’t fully satisfy the imagination. Thus, like a sort of memorate to explain his oddities, people draw upon the past and make up stories about mysterious passages and foreign princes to explain how something so out of the ordinary can exist in a small suburban town.