A couple times a year, Bryson travels to Sun Valley with family and friends to go skiing and snowboarding. Bryson and his friends perform a handshake when they go up chairlift 13. This handshake consists of shaking both the left and the right hands individually with their gloves on, then touching both of their boots, followed by shaking both hands individually again with their gloves off, and finally re-shaking just their right hand with their gloves back on. They perform the handshake three times on their way up the chairlift. Successfully completing the handshake three times guarantees that they will hot have a bad fall on their way down the mountain.
In addition, Bryson and his family never say the phrase “This is our last run.” They are superstitious that it is bad luck to say that phrase because someone could get injured. Specifically, one time Bryson’s dad said, “this is our last run” at the end of the day, and he tore his ACL. Because of the bad luck associated with saying “this is our last run,” Bryson and his family and friends never say it. Instead, they will say, “Let’s go check the bottom of the mountain out.”
Author Archives: Wilson Knapp
Fiji Hold Down
Robbie’s family and his family friends used to go to Tavarua every year during Thanksgiving for a week. This island of Tavarua is a small island in Fiji that only takes about 10 minutes to walk all the way around. It is known for being very haunted. The main haunting is known as a “Hold Down.”
Robbie said that he and a big group of family and friends, about 40 people, were all out one night having dinner. The weather was super windy. By the time it was 10:30-11:00, everyone went back to their burrow to sleep. Robbie falls asleep not too long after. At exactly 2 am, Robbie randomly wakes up, without knowing what exactly woke him up. He said he can’t explain what did it, but it felt like he took shots of caffeine. He had a bunch of adrenaline: he was breathing heavily and his heart was pounding. He tried to calm himself down by walking around, and eventually lies in bed, attempting to close his eyes and fall back to sleep. At 2:10, he hears his sister scream at top of her lungs. Everyone in the family wakes up to see what has happened. Robbie’s sister is crying and sobbing, in a state of complete panic. She was saying that she was held down and paralyzed, stuck in a sleep position, all she could see were white images flashing through her eyes of her past memories. The family did not know what to make of this besides being a night terror of some sort. Eventually, they all go back to sleep.
When they woke up, they started asking around Tavarua island about the experience Roxy had at 2:10. People on the island said that it happens all the time, they even have a name for it: “hold down.” Robbie’s dad asks a maid about it. The maid said a Hold Down happened to her daughter at 1:50 in the morning that same night, so only twenty minutes a part.
The story behind the Hold Down, is that the island used to be a carnivorous island. Every animal and person who lived on the island would eat meat, and sometimes would cannibalize. It is said that many spirits of people who were cannibalized or improperly buried haunt the island. One woman in particular is associated with the Hold Down. She has been doing it to guests and people living on the island for years.
49ers Beer Wall superstition
Sam is from San Francisco, and his football team he roots for is the 49ers. He and his friends go to every play off game the 49ers play at home. Sam and his friends always sit in the same box at the corner of the end zone. For luck, they take their beers that they drink and put them in a wall across the balcony of the box. When the wall is complete, meaning it reaches from one side of the rail to the next, then the 49ers will have draw from the strength of the wall and win the game. For every consecutive round the 49ers make it to in the playoffs, the more rows of beer need to be added to the wall.
Within the past three years of doing it, the 49ers never lost at home during the playoffs when the beer wall was complete. The past Super Bowl, the 49ers did not play at home, and Sam and his friends could not build the wall. Unfortunately, the 49ers lost. If they would have played in San Francisco, it may have been another scenario.
At the moment, Sam’s superstition has been completely accurate, and is still waiting to fail. However, it is inevitable that the beer wall will fail because a team cannot win every play off game at home forever.
Sign of the Cross Scuba
Whenever my friend Kenny and his Dad go scuba diving, they dive down to the bottom of the ocean and kneel on the sand. They both perform the sign of the cross, where they take their right hand and touch their forehead, move their hand down to their sternum, and then cross to their heart and the opposite side of their heart. After they perform the sign of the cross, they look up to the sun. They perform this ritual every time they go diving together in order to keep them safe while they are under water.
Summer Lei Luck Ritual
Every summer, Braeden and his family go to the Hawaiian island of Kawaii. On the first Saturday that everyone in his family is together, they gather around the dinner table, and his grandma grabs a bunch of leis. Everyone at the table closes their eyes while the grandma walks around and places a lei on each person. One by one, each person guesses the color of their lei, either pink or white or yellow, and then opens his or her eyes to see if they guessed correctly. If you guess correctly, then you will have good luck for the rest of the time they are in Hawaii. That good luck can entail you being more likely to get the best wave of the day, being more likely to see a dolphin or whale or turtle, or even having a less chance of getting a mosquito bite. There is no consequence if someone at the table does not guess correctly, it just means that they won’t be extra lucky. Additionally, if by chance everyone at the table guesses correctly, then it means the whole family will have luck for the rest of the year. Unfortunately, Braeden says that everyone at the table all guessed correctly. On the other hand, if nobody at the table correctly guesses the color of his or her lei than the whole family will have bad luck for the rest of the year. Luckily, Braeden says that has also never happened.