Author Archives: Logan Austin

About Logan Austin

Peachtree City, Georgia.

My Grandmother’s Aunt

Nationality: American
Age: 20
Occupation: Student
Residence: Phoenix, Arizona
Performance Date: 4/27/15
Primary Language: English

Informant: The subject in question is a 20 year old girl studying screenwriting at USC. She hails from Phoenix, Arizona, while most of her extended family comes from Western Kansas.

So I’m not really sure on the details of this one, another one my dad told me. A family story. And it centers around my grandmother’s aunt. She was in this abusive relationship with this guy who wasn’t a very nice guy. Which, abusive relationship, is kind of implied. And he would beat her and my family would ask what was wrong and she’d say nothing. And the violence would escalate and my family was worried and my family was worried that he was going crazy. And a few days pass and they go to her house. And she’s been killed. And he’s been killed too, in an apparent murder suicide. He shot her with a shotgun and then he shot himself in the face with a shotgun. So they had trouble identifying the body. And this was a long time ago, before forensics stuff, so they had a really hard time identifying the body but who else could it be? So several years later, my grandmother’s other aunt, the woman’s sister, is in another town in western Kansas. And she thinks she sees the husband. And she immediately hides and follows him with her eyes as he crosses the street. And to this day, no one knows if she actually saw him. ‘Cause she swears that she did but they never saw him again. It was an odd situation to begin with. And you never know for sure.
Who’d you hear it from?
My dad.
Why does it stick to you?
It feels like a real life murder mystery about people that I’m related to. Like it feels personal, but it also feels like it could be a really great story.

Analysis: Like the preceding entry, this story resembles an urban legend about a murder mystery or ghost story, but it’s status as a family story and memorate gives it a sense of closeness and reality that amplifies its unsettling nature. The near-fantastical nature of the murderer’s possible return is grounded in the very tragic reality that is domestic abuse, taking a rational fear and amplifying it, much in the same way that a horror film would.

A particular focus must be paid to the structure of this and many other urban legends. In terms of both language and character, the stories are never particularly detailed. They are delivered in primarily conversational diction and characters are rarely developed if even named. However, structurally, they follow a very well-established narrative pattern. An ordinary scenario is presented. A darker or more mysterious element is introduced and slowly amplified. And at the story’s end, an added twist either changes the direction of what is being told or changes the audience’s perspective of what has already been stated. The moment of shock generated by these twist endings gives these urban legends their impact and their long-lasting appeal.

The Horribles Parade

Nationality: American
Age: 19
Occupation: Student
Residence: Beverly Hills, Massachusetts
Performance Date: 4/28/15
Primary Language: English

Informant: The informant here is an Irish Catholic girl from Beverly, Massachusetts, a small town made out of the original Salem settlement and as such a traditionally superstitious area.

Transcription:

So where I’m from, the 4th of July is a big deal. People don’t handle it well. Like one year someone stole a police car and crashed it in the ocean and dragged it out and put it on a flatbed and had it in the parade the next day. And there’s this tradition they pick someone from our rival town the next over and get them belligerently drunk and then put them on a flatbed and they wake up and they’re being driven through town in the parade. I saw it for nineteen years, well maybe not every year, but at least ten times in my life. Just drunken assholes duct taped to a chair. It’s called the Horribles Parade, because the whole point of it is to make fun of people – drunk driving incidents, legal troubles, arrests in general, celebrities, old people. The old people love it though. They’re like the grandmasters of the parade. It’s like a huge roast over a couple miles. My grandfather’s doing it this year. He gets to get loaded and sit in a truck. It’s really fun and my grandfather grew up there and my mom grew up there and the whole 4th of July is really ritualistic. There’s races and sandcastle contests and a scavenger hunt, it’s like a whole week event, not just one day.

Analysis: Generally, holidays exist to celebrate the positives in life. However, on some occasions, the opposite impulse – the denigration of the negative – also crops up. The coinciding of such an event with the 4th of July makes logical sense – a celebration of freedom would be best expressed by taking advantage of such freedoms. Thus the Horribles parade. The particular tradition of taping a drunken out-of-towner to a parade float serves as a celebration of local pride on a holiday dedicated to national pride. Thus, the community celebrates any and all forms of collective identity, whether on the micro on the macro level while also creating an entertaining and hilarious celebration.

The Red Tide

Nationality: American
Age: 19
Occupation: Student
Residence: Beverly Hills, Massachusetts
Performance Date: 4/28/15
Primary Language: English

Informant: The informant here is an Irish Catholic girl from Beverly, Massachusetts, a small town made out of the original Salem settlement and as such a traditionally superstitious area.

Transcription:

I’ll tell you about the Girl Scout leader. She’s kinda scary. Okay, so yeah, Salem, I’m from there. My Girl Scout leader, and her family, the Estes, were one of the big Salem families and they’re direct descendants of Rebecca Nurse, one of the witches who was killed. And supposedly if a woman has two different-colored eyes, then she was a witch, and a really powerful one. And my Girl Scout leader was probably like eighty-five and she had two different-colored eyes so everyone said “oh, there’s the witch” and she was actually so nice, we had no reason to assume she was a witch. And when she was really young, around my mom’s age, she had a baby and the baby pulled the TV down on himself and died and that night it was, I think the blizzard of ’78. Some blizzard in the seventies where a bunch of people died and it was that night or the next day. And when Mrs. Estes died at eighty-something and of natural causes, a red tide rolled in and it killed all of the seafood for several months. So witches. Natural energy. My mom was the one who told me all of this. And I guess the story was pretty common in my tiny little town amongst the townies, like the Estes are the witches, that’s just who they are. Kinda common in my town. Scary as hell.

Analysis:

Elements of the supernatural are a common trend in folklore, but rarely are they taken seriously. A major exception to this occurred in Salem, Massachusetts during Puritan times, in which nearly a dozen citizens were burned at the stake for suspicion of being witches. The area remained superstitious up to the modern day, with the later generations of these supposed “witches” finding more mundane professions, like a Girl Scout leader. The idea that a person can be more in tune with the natural order things or possess some extranormal, occasionally malevolent, power pervades much folklore due to both the wish fulfillment nature of such stories and the element of fear that attaches to it. And when human events and greater climatological events coincide, one can never be truly certain that they’re just coincidence.

The Corner at Ipswich

Nationality: American
Age: 19
Occupation: Student
Residence: Beverly Hills, Massachusetts
Performance Date: 4/28/15
Primary Language: English

Informant: The informant here is an Irish Catholic girl from Beverly, Massachusetts, a small town made out of the original Salem settlement and as such a traditionally superstitious area.

Transcription:

In high school, one of my good friends was a volunteer fireman and he was from a really small town next to mine and he did a lot of work because they didn’t have much permanent staff and he was going to deal with a car crash in Ipswich, which is also near Salem. A car rolled off the road after going round a bend and thank god no one was hurt, and the police wouldn’t talk to the people who had been in the accident, saying they should go to the hospital. And my friend said we should talk to these people and figure out what happened, I mean these people weren’t drunk and they said “you don’t want to know this story”. And he goes to talk to the people as they’re getting loaded into the ambulance and they said that a little kid ran in front of their car while they were driving and they swerved to avoid him. And he asked “did you find the kid after? Is he okay?” and they said that they couldn’t find him and they ran all over the place. And he told the police officers what they had said and they just shook their heads and said “this happens at least once a year and has for the past fifty years. It just happens. At this corner, in Ipswich, and someone wrecks their car. And I guess some kid actually died there in the sixties or seventies. So. I think I remember it because I heard it from someone so close to my age because like with my grandfather it feels kinda folklore-y like an urban legend but with him it was like “oh shit’ this actually happened if you believe in it, which I do.

Analysis:

Ghost stories possess a strange resonance that other scary stories do not – for that reason, many scary stories are simply called ghost stories regardless of their subject matter. After death, the memory of a loved one can still “haunt” for years on end. As such, the idea of the human being themself sticking around to do the haunting is just as powerful. These ghosts are rarely ever depicted as malevolent, merely concerned with the same things that they were concerned with in their moments before passing. In this story, the ghost of the little boy is supposedly just as innocent as a the boy playing by the road before getting struck would be – regardless of how many deaths he unknowingly causes.

The Music in the Woods

Nationality: American
Age: 19
Occupation: Student
Residence: Beverly Hills, Massachusetts
Performance Date: 4/28/15
Primary Language: English

Informant: The informant here is an Irish Catholic girl from Beverly, Massachusetts, a small town made out of the original Salem settlement and as such a traditionally superstitious area.

Transcription:
The one that scared me the most when I was little and even now – my grandfather told me this – and apparently when he was a little kid, in my town, which is not Salem but was in the original settlement, there was a slew of child abductions. And all of the families told the police that they heard music outside their house that night. And they didn’t recognize the tune and they couldn’t tell where it was coming from. And so there were all these stories about fairies in the wood. And actual fairies are terrifying, they’d tell stories about them abducting people and replacing them with other people but anyways. As the story goes, these kids went missing and in the summer, you can still hear that music but now you can hear the voices of little children singing along. And when I was a kid I freaked out because I thought I could hear the voices too.
Where?
I heard that story my grandpa, who was born and raised in Beverly, Massachusetts.
Why did that stick with you?
Probably because he told it to me when I was a kid and I live in the woods that those stories all supposedly come from. When I was a little kid I thought that was gonna be me. And still I can’t drive through the roads – the only road – through those woods and I still have to keep my doors locked. I drive down this one street and I still get shivers sometimes. It’s a pretty old story, at least eighty or so years old.

Analysis: This story achieves its resonance through its unsettling nature. The image of children mysteriously vanishing is terrifying to both a guardian’s parental instincts and to a child’s sense of self-preservation. The reference to fairies – not in the modern, mass culture variety, but the original, more European fairies, who were oftentimes menacing figures – gives the story a darker mystery than a simple disappearance would. The nature of New England – shadowy, forested, and very, very old – causes scary stories such as these to be more naturally resonant than they would be anywhere else in the nation.