My informant is a 23 year old filmmaker who lost his father when he was nine years old.

“So the first story is the story of my dead father appearing to me. Um, so this happened about three months after my father passed away. I had just turned nine and we were having lunch in, uh, the kitchen of our house. And I’m with my friends and my brother and my mom’s making us chicken nuggets because chicken nuggets are the greatest. Uh, and I look up and directly across from me, standing in the doorway of the kitchen, in um, in a hallway, is my father. Plain as day. And i just instinctively say, “Hi Dad!” Everyone looks up and my mom just dismisses it saying, “Honey, no one’s there.” She later then approached me saying “I saw him too.” And since then I have seen my father on ten occasions.”

This would be told when recounting stories of lost loved ones or paranormal activity.

Analysis:

My informant was clearly missing his father. I and others I know often see images of those they have lost, especially if they were young when their loved one died. It is not out of the ordinary to think you’ve seen your loved one after they’ve passed, especially for children.

My informant is a 19 year old student who enjoys creating films.

“Alright, so when I went to summer camp as a kid, we – there was, uh, we went to camp on this, um, sort of reserve in Costa Mesa. And there was this old adobe building that stood there. And it’s probably about a hundred years old. And, uh, it was real dark inside, you know, uh – when you first got to camp, you noticed it, but you didn’t really pay much attention to it… until storytime, when uh, some of the older kids would tell stories about the house. And they would talk about how old it was and how people were murdered on the property and how there were ghosts inside of the house, and that there was one ooold man living inside the house. There were days where me and a couple other kids would go up to the house, and you’d be full of nerves, and you’d just be like really, really… you know – just scared of the house. Um, and uh, one time, one kid was looking in the window, and he, he *laughs* he felt his legs go numb and fell while looking at the house. That freaked the shit outta everybody. And we all ran away. Me and another kid picked him up and carried him away. We were screaming and, um, so for the longest time, you know, I used to think that house had paranormal…connections. Until I worked there as a counselor. And um, I, one day we were outside and I notice a tour group going inside of the house. And um, it turns out that the bodies that we saw inside of the house were just a bunch of mannequins. Yeah, there were like creepy mannequins. It just turned out to be an old historic site. It was like on of the first adobes built in Costa Mesa. The mannequins were just there to be kind of like “this is how they dressed back in the time” you know. But those mannequins, like, it was just silhouettes ‘cause of the light, and sometimes you think they would move. But of course, that was just children’s imagination.”

This story would be performed when sharing scary or strange stories.

Analysis:

My informant, like most children, was taught by his peers to fear things that were out of the ordinary. As humans, we put people and things into groups to better understand and process the world around us. But when we are young, we fear the things we do not understand or do not know how to label. Therefore, we end up assigning paranormal or fantastical stories to the strange. My informant realized this and understood it when he grew older.

My informant is a 19 year old student who enjoys reading and acting. She grew up in a predominantly homogenous neighborhood.

“So, in elementary school, we had really short fences. You could see- our elementary school was in a neighborhood, so through the short little fences you could see all the surrounding houses. Most of them were pretty normal, you know. Not all picket-fence houses, but like they were like pretty well-groomed lawns, just like, normal, normal little houses. Except for this one… on the corner. It was on the corner of .. *laughs* except for this one! It was on the corner of, I think, Agette and Clearbrooke, I wanna say but I’m not quite sure. So this one house on the corner had a dead lawn, and this was before the drought – they could’ve watered it. It was a completely- it had crabgrass all over it, it was brown and unwatered, unkempt. The house had chipping paint and one of the, the window panes was knocked out, there was only a screen in it. So, naturally we were all creeped out by it. In first grade, I think this was, we were terrified by this house because it threatened our sense of first-grade normalcy. And so we made up all these stories about it. We said that the house was owned by an old man that knocks the window pane out so that he could look at the school more easily and like spy on us. We said that like wild dogs lived in the house and, like, they came out at night and like ran the school. Um, and then, this one day, like after all these stories that we had like, you know, we were sharing them. This one day, this giant wheelbarrow like appeared on the lawn. We don’t know where it came from. And we assumed that the house was abandoned, ya know, we don’t really believe that like wild dogs ran it. So we were so confused as to what happened to it. You know, like who brought the wheelbarrow in, why they put it there, what was in it – that was the biggest question. So more rumors spread, you know, like that the old man was getting ready to go on some hunt or like harvest and he was going to put all his reapings in the wheelbarrow whether that be human heads, or like, wheat, or whatever it would be. *laughs* So, we got really excited, even though we were scared, you know. Um, and like our imaginations were just runnin’ wild. This wheelbarrow, this simple wheelbarrow like had caused all this, right. And I hadn’t thought of this before, but I just asked my mom like if she knew who lived in the house. And she was like “Oh yeah, um, the person that lived there was really old and he passed away but his daughter owns it now and they’re gonna renovate it. And they were just, they’re clearing out the house.” Something really simple and boring. And it just goes to show that your imagination is always better than reality.”

This story would be performed when sharing tales of childhood and stories about things out of the ordinary.

Analysis:

As children, we are most often taught that things that are different are bad. Seeing a house that was out of the ordinary did not fit into the schema of my informant and her friends of their neighborhood. Therefore, they assigned bizarre tales to this house and theorized as to why it was so different. In the end, she realized that it really was not that different at all.