This story was told to me by a friend in college when I told him about my project and he mentioned that he didn’t know much folk lore but he had heard of one ghost story.

“In Yellowstone at Old Faithful theres the Old Faithful Inn which is this very historically significant place. It’s kind of synonymous with Yellowstone and there are a lot of ghost stories that take place within the Inn because its such an old artifact and theres one in particular about this lady that was murdered by her husband in one of the rooms in the second floor. The story goes that she was taking a bath and her husband came in one night very drunk and decapitated her with his big knife. So the legend is that every night at midnight she descends from the crows nest, which is like a very high place in the main cavern of the lodge, and she descends and floats down to the room, I think its room 129, and she stands outside the room holding her decanted head looking for revenge on her now dearly departed husband.”

Background information about the performance from the informant: “I heard about this story because I actually went to Yellowstone and I stayed at The Yellowstone Inn  and I actually stayed in the room that it happened.”

Final thoughts: The piece is interesting for how it deals with the relation of ghosts to some kind of physical place. Most ghost stories seem to connect the idea of ghost to the idea of spacial memory. I think that these types of ghost stories relate to the idea of older physical locations that have a long past. The idea that the remnants of events which happened at a place could still have some tangible impact on the place in the present is powerful one and influences a lot of these ghost stories.

This piece folklore was gathered at the San Fransisco trauma recovery center. I met with a group of social workers and over the course of one hour we all got came together in a meeting room and in one big group we decided to go around the table and each discuss folklore from their lives. At the beginning of the discussion I gave a brief description about what folklore could be. After that everyone shared pieces of folklore from their lives.

“In Indian culture we have a very heavy emphasis on demons . I was always taught you know that you do not mess with demons. Demons are bad. So some backstory, typically the somebody buys a house in India they tie a ribbon around a tree. So you have to have a tree at your house so yo can tie a red ribbon to protect the entire house and the family members . So if like your dog starts barking a lot or if you start feeling weird like someones watching you, you can try spirit boxes which are very effective. So they say that spirits are one a different frequency then us so like demons for example are on a different frequency then us and they use things like radio signals to communicate with us and so a spirit box is basically like a wee gee board that connects to the frequency of the spirits. So a spirit box flips through lots of different radio signals to give you clear cut answers. So you can use them to have seance where you can communicate with the spirit and find out what it walks then fix that and the spirit will go away.”

Background information about the performance from the informant: “This is a crazy, crazy experience that I had last summer, no it was before last summer. I was still in college the this happened. My dog was barking a lot so I did a seance and we started asking questions and actually getting replies and one of the replies was red ribbon and I found out from my mom that she had carried a red ribbon under the ground and so we dug the ribbon up and put it on the tree and since then my do has stopped barking completely.”

Final thoughts: This is another example of a ghost story and like other types of folklore that center around people experiencing encounters with ghosts it shows how much more likely people are to believe in ghosts then in other supernatural creatures. It also interesting that because in indian folklore they believe ghosts and demons live on a different frequency then us they are more ready to believe in a spirit box because the way it functions chimes well with the way the folklore they already believe in.

This piece folklore was gathered at the San Fransisco trauma recovery center. I met with a group of social workers and over the course of one hour we all got came together in a meeting room and in one big group we decided to go around the table and each discuss folklore from their lives. At the beginning of the discussion I gave a brief description about what folklore could be. After that everyone shared pieces of folklore from their lives.

“I don’t know what to call it but there was this incident in the first house I had ever rented right after I had moved away to college and everything. Me and my older cousin rented this house and when we arrived it just seemed fishy. The door was unlocked when it shouldn’t have been and we got really scared and started to think, “Oh god is somebody in the house.” The logical thing was that there was some kind of squatter living in the house thinking it was empty or some other logical reason but we felt horrible about it and while we were there my aunt was like, “It smells really bad.” I was like “its smells like what” and she said, “it smaller like something dead. It just smells horrible in here.” Both doors were opened, the front and the back and my mother just kept going on about what it smelled like and before we finished checking the house my cousins was like “I don’t feel really good” and my aunt asked him if he felt nauseated and he was like “yeah a little.” so after it saw all said and done she was like “see there is something in this house.It opened the door and it wants you to get out. theres some kind of spirit an it wants you to leave.” So my mother just had this huge belief that there was a spirit telling us to get out. Me and my cousin still rented thee house and we sill lived there for like a year and there were a couple of times where the doors did open suddenly and scared the crap out of us and my mother came with like sage and laurels and like holy water and she did a ceremony where she blessed the house and everything. She went to each side of the house and did a different ritual in each place. Since she did that we never had an incident.”

Final thoughts: One interesting thing is that the only folklore I collected where people seemed to believe that what happened might be real is ghost related folk lore. For some reason people seem extremely ready to believe in the existing of ghost over other supernatural concepts.