Informant Data:

The informant is a Romanian American who was born in Bucharest, Romania in 1935. At age 37, my informant left Ceausescu’s Romania and arrived in the United States in 1972. She is a skin care specialist who currently resides in Los Angeles, California. She speaks slowly but very impassionedly.

Contextual Data:

When I was over at my house in Santa Monica over the weekend to spend time with my family, and I was having dinner with my family, my sister knocked over the salt shaker and some salt spilled out of it. My informant gasped and told my sister to throw the salt over her shoulder three times. I wanted to see what the reasoning was that made the informant believe that not throwing salt over the shoulder is bad luck as well as possibly know where she learned this folk belief. I asked if I could record her, and she agreed.

When asked who taught her this folk belief, my informant said that it was her mother and that she had taught the informant this when the informant was very young.

Item:

(Audio recording transcribed)

“So if you spill salt, it’s bad. It means there’s going to be a fight in the house. So one way to cure that is that you take salt that you spilled…let’s say you spilled it on the counter or on the table…so you take a little a bit of it, like this with your fingers and you throw it over your shoulder three times. Don’t ask me why, I don’t know why. But that’s a cure for spilling the salt and preventing fighting with somebody.”

Analysis:

Perhaps this folk belief arose from the fact that salt was very valuable since it was important to preserving things before refrigerators or freezers were invented. Because it would’ve been bad to lose something of value, the folk belief naturally arose as an arbitrary way of counteracting the bad luck of wasting something of value.

Informant Data:

The informant is a Romanian American who was born in Bucharest, Romania in 1957. At age 19, my informant left Ceausescu’s Romania and arrived in the United States in 1976. She is a real estate agent who currently resides in Los Angeles, California.

Contextual Data:

When I was back home one weekend (my home is near USC), my informant asked me to take the trash out. I must confess that I did not take out the trash when my informant asked me to take it out. When night came, and my informant asked if I had taken out the trash, I stood up to take the trash out. My informant stopped me. She told me that I shouldn’t take the trash out night because it means you’re throwing your luck away.

When I asked my informant where she first heard this from, she said she was first told this by her grandmother (who had heard it from her parents) when she was a child living in Bucharest, Romania.

Item:

“Don’t take the trash out at night. You’re taking your luck and throwing it away.”

Analysis:

I believe this superstition perhaps comes from the fact that around a hundred years ago or so in the countryside, more than likely if one were to take one’s trash out at night, one would be risking encountering any of the many wolves, bears, or other dangerous wildlife that live in the vast Romanian wilderness. So even though in suburbia in the present-day, there doesn’t seem to be any risk in taking out the trash at night, the superstition that taking the trash out at night is bad luck must’ve been formed at a point when it was logical to not take the trash out at night, and that it was simply passed down from generation to generation until the danger no longer existed but the superstition still remained.

For another version of this, please see:

“Graveyard Shift/Krusty Love.” Spongebob Squarepants. Writ. Stephen Hillenburg. Dir. Stephen Hillenburg. MTV Networks International, 2002. DVD.

Informant Data:

The informant is a Romanian American who was born in Bucharest, Romania in 1957. At age 19, my informant left Ceausescu’s Romania and arrived in the United States in 1976. She is a real estate agent who currently resides in Los Angeles, California.

Contextual Data:

My informant and I just finished watching Francis Ford Coppola’s film Bram Stoker’s Dracula when I asked my informant how she liked the film. The conservation soon change to me asking the information if she had ever been told any stories about Dracula growing up as a kid in Romania. My informant told me in response that she was told a story as a child that has to do with vampires, but it’s different. She prefaced her account by stating that what people now see in horror movies about Dracula did not influence the stories she was told because, according to my informant, at the time my informant was told this story and people were circulating this story, few Romanians had read Bram Stoker’s Dracula. My informant also mentioned that it was her grandmother who shared this folk belief with her when she was a child and that when she asked her grandmother if she saw this happen herself, her grandmother said she didn’t but she knows her grandmother saw it.

Item:

(Audio recording transcribed)

“It used to be believed in the countryside that if somebody died…you know, in the old days, people, when they died…they were not taken to a chapel. They were, you know, tended to at home…and then the first night after they passed away before they were actually buried, the entire family stayed around, and they spent the night staying up and talking, telling stories about the departed one, and so on and so forth…but another reason that this was done was to prevent any animals, especially a cat, from jumping over the table where the dead person was, because if that happened, they would become undead. And…but they wouldn’t be any difference in the way they look. And people would bury them. But they would come back and take family members with them. And they would see this happening where somebody died, and thirty days later or sixty days later, another family member died, and so on and so forth. Or maybe even six months. And it’s not just one family member that can die, it can happen to more. And that’s because they’re coming back to take their family. And so my grandma said that what they needed to do, if that happened…they needed to go back and…with the priest…and they would have take them out of the ground and do this entire, almost like an exorcism, using a wooden stake to the heart. And lo and behold, my grandmother said, and when they did that, the person would just turn.”

Analysis:

It is interesting to note that this folk belief seems to have some strong connection, or perhaps even inspired, the whole mythology behind vampires and Dracula, especially the part where a wooden stake to the heart can kill a vampire. It seems very likely that Bram Stoker’s stories about Dracula came from old folk beliefs like the one shared above.

However, that still doesn’t answer the question why this folk belief was passed down generation to generation. My theory is that the reason this folk belief interested people was because this belief appealed to people’s fear of disease. The notion that there is a risk of disease in dead bodies combined with the notion that animals often spread disease (consider the Bubonic Plague) perhaps formed the foundation of this folk belief, and so people then perhaps believed that by ensuring this didn’t happen, they would be able to protect themselves.