Author Archives: Kayla Carlisle

Bermuda Triangle

Nationality: Caucasian
Age: 20
Occupation: Student
Residence: Florida
Performance Date: April 16, 2013
Primary Language: English
Language: Basic French

So when I was a kid, uh, when I was like 4 or 5 probably, I first heard about this whole thing with the Bermuda Triangle? My brother told me about it, probably. And he told me that basically it’s this place in the Atlantic Ocean where if you fly over it you, like any of the planes that would fly over it would crash, they’d all crash, and like everyone would die. That’s like the 7 year old kid version, I guess. But . . . and then over the years I heard that it was more like there were mysterious disappearances and stuff, um. Wait, who was the famous pilot? There was a famous pilot, uh, uh, uh . . . um, Amelia Earheart, maybe? . . . There was a famous pilot who went down in the Bermuda Triangle. And there were a bunch of maybe World war 2 related things as well, where planes went down mysteriously, like, without any weather or anything, they would just go off radar, and then they would, the plane would disappear. Um, so a lot of people would dispute that it was like aliens or something. Some sort of mysterious energy, like magnetic energy over this triangular area of the ocean that made planes crash, and then the pilots were like abducted or something, or taken by, by the squid people of the Bermuda, I don—something like that.
It was kinda scary, cause we traveled a lot when I was younger. And we would fly over the Bermuda Triangle sometimes, and I would be like, “Uh, oh! We’re going to die! We’re gonna get captured by the squid people!”

The unexplained disappearances and technological failures of the Bermuda Triangle remain fascinating, because in a world where all seems explainable, all of us still feel helpless and ignorant in the face of the ocean, or when in an airplane flying across the globe. American explanations for the Bermuda Triangle tend to be exclusively scientific, or science fiction oriented. American is obsessed with science and the future, but when we were pushing the limits of technology during the time when circumnavigating the globe by airplane was becoming possible, planes, such as Amelia Earhart’s, would at times disappear without a trace. That mankind still did not possess the technology to fully explore the globe by air fascinated the nation. Even now the legend of the Bermuda Triangle is prevalent. My friend is particularly fascinated by it because he traveled as a child and was very frightened of their plane getting lost.
In this case his older brother, who did not believe the story, told him the story to scare him. When my friend grew older, however, he no longer believed the story either. Growing out of believing in stories like the Bermuda Triangle or the Loch Ness monster are signs one is maturing and entering adulthood.

Walt Disney Frozen and Buried at Cal Arts

Nationality: Caucasian
Age: 57
Occupation: USC Professor of Animation
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: May 1, 2013
Primary Language: English

Walt Disney is buried under the unfinished, in, well, Walt Disney is buried in the unfinished sublevel. And frozen. Well it’s just gotten around. When I had the CSSSA students, I told them Walt Disney was frozen in the sublevel. And one night we found them downstairs trying all the doors, because when we took the kids and we took them to Disney studios, they asked the animators there, “Is Walt Disney really frozen and buried in the sublevel at Cal Arts?” And they all said, “Yes, of course he is.” And so that’s passed on through generation after generation. He died in 60, 67. Which is when Cal Arts started building, it was built, 69, 70.

CSSSA animators are high school students enrolled in a summer course at Cal Arts in the hopes of being accepted to the world famous animation school when applying for college. Here my professor told her CSSSA students that Walt Disney was buried in campus because they were uninitiated into the Cal Arts Animation family and couldn’t know any better. The animators the students visited at Disney backed up this story because they, too, were initiated members of the animation industry. The students eventually learned that their mentors were pulling their collective leg, and by learning this started the process of becoming indoctrinated as members of the animation culture, and potentially as future Cal Arts students.

Adam Beckett, the Optical Printer Ghost

Nationality: Caucasian
Age: 57
Occupation: USC Professor of Animation
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: April 29, 2013
Primary Language: English

So this is the story of Adam Beckett. He was an experimental animator at Cal Arts, and, who did, do you remember I showed, no maybe I didn’t show you, but really important historically, he’s important as an animator, he did a lot of work with the optical printing, and step printing and things like that. And he would spend hours upon hours, and days upon days in the printer room at Cal Arts. On the first floor. Adam Beckett was an extreme person. And somehow he managed to electrocute himself in his bathtub when he was quite young. This was in the late 70s. And so at Cal Arts there were always rumors that Adam Beckett haunted the optical printer room. And many students of mine, at Cal Arts, came to tell me that Adam Beckett was haunting their films. Film reels were flying around the room. And so to this day, there’s still rumors that he haunts the optical printer room, but, the only thing is, the question is whether it’s the optical printer or the printer room, because they’ve changed over the years.

This ghost story is part of the Cal Arts college community. My professor told this story very dramatically, because she was actually trying to scare me and make me believe it. Perhaps this is because she believes the story, but it seemed more to me that she was trying to sell the tale to me because I am one of the uninitiated animators who don’t fit into the Cal Arts clique of the study and profession of animated film. Those who study Cal Arts might believe this story, or they might tell it as an inside joke to scare new students and outsiders, or as a joke or excuse to cover why they didn’t finish their optical printing assignment to their instructor. Whether they believe it or not, the ghost story gives Cal Arts students and staff a sense of community, and their school’s prestigious history in the field of animation.

The Gray Man

Nationality: Icelander
Age: 32
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: May 1, 2013
Language: Icelandic (Primary Language), English (Secondary)

This is an Icelandic folktale. There was a farmer and his wife who lived out in the countryside. They never locked their door at night. One night an extremely large, gray man appeared. Without saying a word he went to their pantry, sat down and drank their milk. He then left.
The second night he came back, drank the milk and left again without a word.
The third night he came again, drank the milk but as he was about to leave he turned around and addressed the farmer and his wife: You would do well to lock your door, there are a lot worse things out there than me.

This a myth about Iceland’s hidden people. It illustrates the relationship between the people of Iceland and these fairy-like creatures. The farmer and his wife know the spirit keeps returning to their house, but they allow it and see the visits as benign. However the story is also a cautionary tale, and could be a bogeyman-type story to caution or encourage children, or even adults, to keep the doors of the house locked. The myth observes the rule of 3, which is predominant in the West.

The Berkeley-Stanford Ax Story

Nationality: Caucasian
Age: 19
Occupation: Berkeley Biology Student
Residence: Berkeley
Performance Date: April 27, 2013
Primary Language: English
Language: Spanish

In the late 1800s, there were two universities in the Bay area. One of them was the University of California in Berkeley and the other was a small junior college across the bay founded by the criminal Leland Stanford Junior. These schools had a sports “rivalry.” Basically, each year, Cal would Beat the junior college in track, football, baseball, and other sports. The Junior college were running low on money to fund their failing sports program. They were so desperate that they were considering cutting down their redwood tree mascot. However, before they could, a meteor came down and crashed in the sewage at Stanford. This sewage splashed on the walls of all the buildings of the college. To this day, the buildings are still covered with this excrement which give the buildings at Leland Stanford Junior College their distinctive adobe appearance and smell. The female college students decided to take the meteor to a blacksmith and have it shaped into an ax They would use this ax to rally around during sports games. Only the female Stanford students were strong enough to carry it, and to this day, any male Stanford student who is able to lift the as, all by himself, will be crowned King of Bowdell Hall ( the women’s dorm). Anyway, the Stanfurdians brought this ax to the Cal-Stanford games with no effect. During the first football game with the ax, which Stanfurd naturally lost, some Cal athletes watching the game decided to steal the ax for a trophy. They were pursued by Stanfurd students to San Francisco where the Cal students had decided to get the handle taken off the ax,. There was a crazy pursuit through San Francisco. The police searched all Cal students on their way back to Berkeley through Oakland but were unable to find the ax since a Cal student hid it under an old girlfriend’s skirt. The next year, Stanford almost stole the ax back. Cal was just about to catch the Stanfurdians as they crossed a bridge on their way back to Palo Alto, but the bridge was raised before they could cross it. It was later discovered that the bridge operator was a suma cum laude graduate from the Leland Stanford Junior College Engineering school. It was the best job he could find. Cal and Stanford continued to steal the ax from each other. The robberies grew so intense that the leaders of the respective schools decided that the ax would be awarded to whoever won Big Game each year.

This funny story is told to freshman Berkeley students as a means of initiation. The story gives a history of the school, the Ax tradtion, and it’s age-old rivalry with the nearby Stanford, telling how these things came to be. Any true UC Berkeley student or alumni would be intimately familiar with this story and able to recount it as a member of the Cal community. Often the story is recounted over a bonfire to get students excited for the “Big Game.”