Author Archives: Holly McCauley

Hush little baby…

Content:

“Hush little baby, don’t say a word

Mama’s gonna buy you a mockingbird

And if that mockingbird won’t sing, 

Mama’s gonna buy you a diamond ring

And if that diamond ring turns to brass,

Mama’s gonna buy you a looking glass.

And if that looking glass gets broke,

Mama’s gonna buy you a mountain goat.”

Background: The informant, S, is a 21 year old who grew up in the southeast United States. Her mother often sang her this song to get her to fall asleep as a child. S’s mother and grandmother are from the southeast U.S., as well. 

Context: S asked her mother what the lyrics to the “mockingbird lullaby” she often sang to S were. S then typed the lyrics and sent them to me via email. 

Analysis: This song, which is sung to babies to fall asleep, is thought to be a regional lullaby for the Southeast United States. It was first collected in Virginia in 1918, and another version with different lyrics was found shortly after in North Carolina. S heard this song when she was living in Georgia. 

See also: For a published literary adaptation of this lullaby, see: Frazee, Marla. Hush, Little Baby: A Folk Song with Pictures. United States, Browndeer Press, 2003.

The Desk Fairy

Content:

LC: In my class, we do the desk fairy. So, she sometimes comes if your desk is really clean and she leaves you a treat. The, so what I do is not, I don’t do it regularly. I probably should do it more than I do. Um, but my students are in first grade, so they have some responsibility for their belongings. Um, they know that they need to, you know, keep their desk neat. They know if they don’t have a pencil that they can always get another one. But if you got one this morning, you really should be able to keep up with it for the day. Um, things like that. And our school specifically requires them to be ready, respectful, and responsible. That is our like mantra or whatever every day. And so one way that I teach responsibility is that you have to keep your desk clean. And so a few times a year, I probably should do it like monthly, but you get busy, you forget. But a few times a year I will go through, especially like maybe right before a day when we’re gonna be gone for a week or more. And I don’t want ants and things. Um, I will tell them to clean their desk out, like on a Friday or whatever. And then I go through after school. And if it’s clean enough to my standards where I feel like they can find everything, stuff’s not falling out of their desks, they don’t have trash in it. Then I give them a little treat. Sometimes it’s like this year it’s been little Smarties, you know? Um, they get that on a note that says that the desk fairy visited them. Um, and so it’s really fun to do it. Like the first time you do it, it’s really fun to have, like, almost everybody get one. Cause then they know what’s at stake. But then like as the year goes on, I might walk around the room and only, you know, six kids really have neat desks. And so they come in that morning and like those six kids are super pumped that the desk fairy visited them. But the other kids they’re like, Hmm. And some kids really don’t care and they’re like, my desk is gonna be a mess all the time. And then other kids they will actually clean their desk that day and hope the fairy will come right back and leave them something. So it’s just kind of a way to teach them to keep their space neat and just reward those that all always have their stuff together.

Me: Where did you get the idea for the desk fairy from?

LC: I think it originally, I think maybe I heard it from a, a colleague or a friend or I saw it like on Pinterest or something. Um, or Teachers Pay Teachers. The, the little note that I stick on it is from Teachers Pay Teachers. It’s like, it was a free resource that somebody posted. I know that it’s something that I had growing up. I think a couple of my teachers did it over the years.  

Background: LC has taught first grade in a suburb of Atlanta, Georgia for seven years. She graduated from the same school district that she now works in. Teachers Pay Teachers is an educational resource sharing website. 

Context: This story was told to me over a phone call. Analysis: This immediately reminded me of another classroom tradition I collected, the leprechaun that visits on St. Patrick’s Day. However, I found it interesting that the Desk Fairy doesn’t have a specific time associated with her arrival. L said that the fairy often comes before a break, or when the classroom is getting particularly messy, but the continuation of the fairy tradition is ultimately up to the teacher.

Black Mariah

Content:

B: The only real thing that I really have was, uh, the story of Black Mariah that my mother used to tell and I had kind of forgotten a lot of the details. So I did reach out to, to uh, K, uh, my aunt who, uh, obviously was more familiar with it and remembered it because what it was was Black Mariah was supposedly a witch that lived under the steps of their house, the steps going up to the second floor.

Me: Where was this house?

B: In? Uh, Liberty. South Carolina.

Me: Okay. So it lived under the stairs to the second floor?

B: Yeah, the house still stands, but uh, and apparently, uh, she, she was used to, uh, threaten the kids by my grandmother. And after, after K told me this, uh, yesterday I remembered my mother telling me this, but it was used, uh, if you don’t behave, we’re gonna put you underneath the steps with Black Mariah. And so K said she wouldn’t even go upstairs because she didn’t wanna be around those steps. Now, when I came along, none of that was ever really still, uh, in play. I’d go to my grandparents’ house. And I went upstairs all the time and was never even, you know, it was never even talked about too much then, but Mom brought it up to me. Uh, and years later she’s, she’s brought, brought it up several times. And uh, one of the reasons that she brought it up was because one of my early bands, uh, before I ever moved away from home, we had called Mariah. And so she then brought up, uh, the Black Mariah story and was convinced years later in her old age. That is what we called the band black Mariah, but it was just Mariah, but it triggered that memory in her. And so she, she kind of associated it and uh, but that was the, that’s the story. And they, you know, apparently used it to keep their kids in line, I guess.

Background: B was born in Batesburg, South Carolina in 1960. This story comes from his mother and aunt, both of whom were born in Liberty, South Carolina in the 1930s. 

Context: This story was told to me over a phone call. 

Analysis: After hearing this story, I attempted to track down the origin of Black Mariah. The only thing that I could find that would’ve been around while the story was happening was the police vans that were sometimes called Black Mariahs in the south. Tom Waits acknowledged this naming of police vans in his 1985 song “Big Black Mariah.” I also tracked the name Black Mariah back to a move in poker, but it’s unclear when the poker term came to be. Later, Black Mariah would become a Marvel comic character, but only decades after the story takes place. 

Richmond ghost story

Content:

D: So growing up, you know, I moved into that house when I was five years old. And so it was just became knowledge that there was something else in the house with us, but we were never taught to be afraid of it. And we were never, it never really scared us. It never really gave us, you know, an evil feel to it.

Me: Where was this house?

D: Richmond, Virginia. 

Me: Okay. What did you know about the ghost?

D: Well, I never saw a visual of him, but my mom saw him twice. And he was a dark headed man in a uniform, a soldier type uniform. And our house was built over an old battlefield, old battleground for the revolutionary war. And so we always felt like he was a soldier that died young and he seemed to be most active when the three of us kids were living in the house. And once we grew up and moved out the activity decreased. So Mom always felt like he either connected with people closer to his age or, um, felt like he died too soon and you know, was looking for something. She just felt like he was kind of watching over us to some, some degree.

Me: So when you say that you had experiences with him, what were those like?

D: Um, a lot of things. The, the one thing that most people experienced in and outside of our family, um, is that we would be sitting in the living room watching TV or talking or whatever, and we would hear the front door open and close and back then, you know, people didn’t knock to come in if they were family or neighbors or whatever, they would just kind of open the door and just kind of holler, “Hey, it’s me,” you know, as they were coming into the house and we would all hear the door open and close and the dog would bark and run to the French doors and look out onto the sun porch, which was what our front door came into, and the dog would stand there and wait. And we’d all look towards the French doors to see who was, you know, coming over to visit and nobody would come through and we’d get up and look, and the front door would be locked and there would be nobody there. And that happened multiple times and people that were not in our immediate family heard and experienced that. But then I also experienced cold spots most often. And the house didn’t, the house didn’t have central air. It only had heat. And we had one window unit in the living room and one small window unit in my parents’ bedroom and we didn’t turn it on during the day when we weren’t there. We wouldn’t even turn it on until after four o’clock in the afternoons when we would get home from school and work and stuff. So the house was always really hot, especially, you know, in the, you know, late afternoon, early evenings until the, the air could cool it down. And even with the house being that hot, there would be a significant temperature change and it would be something that you could stick your hand in and pull back out and feel the temperature change. That happened to me a lot. So, I mean, that was, it, it almost became, you know, like a family thing to exchange, you know, your experiences and stuff like that.

Background: D was born in Richmond, Virginia in 1963. This story revolves around the house she grew up in with her parents and brothers. 

Context: This story was told to me over a phone call. Analysis: D’s story connected her family’s ghost to the haunted battlegrounds of Revolutionary War and Civil War era Virginia. The experiences that she had with the ghost are common in ghost stories as well, such as the feeling of cold spots when in the presence of a spirit. Many ghost stories also rely on the reactions of pets to support a supernatural claim, like D does when mentioning how her dog reacted to hearing the door open while no one was there.

Plant ghost

Content:

D: Um, I mean, neighbors used to just gather in the front yard and you know, if they were both working in the yard, they, you know, people would gather in the street and just kind of, you know, chat and catch up. So I think my mom saw the neighbor one day, P, and she was like, what in the world happened to your plant? And that’s when she said, oh, every so often I’ll get up and it’ll look like somebody has walked through the middle of my plant and it was a big, huge plant. And when she did some research, she found out that the original front door to her house was where that plant was and they had taken the front door out and moved it to the side and put in a bay window.

Me: Oh, okay. So something was trying to walk through the old door?

D: Yeah. So she felt like it was, you know, they must have been trying to get through where the door used to be. Um, and so she would, you know, pull the plant, you know, nurse it back and get it all where it’s looking good. And she said, and then, you know, a few weeks later the same thing would happen. And so she ended up having to move her plant somewhere else because it would get trampled during the night and you could see footprints and stuff like that through it. 

Background: D grew up in the southeast United States in the 1960s and 70s. Her mother and neighbor had both lived in the area for years. 

Context: This story was told to me over a phone call. 

Analysis: This reminded me of the trope we often see in supernatural stories, where spirits seem to be trapped in the version of a space that existed when they were alive. This is where we get the idea of ghosts walking through walls, or spending time around the place where they died. What was particularly interesting about this story, however, was the effect that the ghost had on the physical realm. I didn’t see that happening in the other supernatural stories I collected.