Category Archives: Contagious

Crystal Healing Properties

Context:

The informant’s family was very spiritual and held belief in angels. They believe in the healing properties of crystals and nature. Her grandmother, specifically, would often gift crystals and essential oils to her.

Text:

In one of the crystal stores from the informant’s hometown, their family would put their hands on a large crystal for clearing the energy within them. The informant also notes that she has crystals in her car, home, and constantly around her.

Analysis:

This belief is a ritual belief in material culture as crystals act to influence inner emotions and balance. By placing their hands on crystals to “clear energy”, the informant and her family treat crystals as symbolic objects that produce intentional effects. This belief in the power of crystals creates meaning and a sense of comfort as seen in “Placebo Studies and Ritual Healing” by Ted Kaptchuk. The crystals themselves gain power through proximity, mirroring Frazer’s idea of contagious magic. As a belief held amongst the family, the act of buying and displaying crystals reinforces their sense of shared identity.

Kaveri Shankramana Festival

Age: 23

Context:

The informant comes from a cultural community that values agriculture. He comes from a distant line of native farmers and plantation owners. The festival is performed back in the city he is ancestrally from. It is not performed during a specific time, but instead depends on the progression of nature. The informant remembers his mother lamenting on the importance of this festival.

Text:

Kaveri Shankramana celebrates when fresh spring water flows into the Kaveri river. This is an approximate time and people tend to bathe in the river during this festival. Rice is thrown in celebration to honor the goddess Kaveri. A jug of the holy water from Kaveri is kept in each home and when people fall ill, they are to sip from the cup to heal them.

Analysis:

This festival acts as a ritual tied to the time of year according to nature. The acts of bathing in the river and throwing rice turn nature into a sacred, meaningful place that connects the informant to the goddess Kaveri. The use of the stored water for healing invokes the idea of sympathetic magic, as described by James George Frazer. Specifically, the healing property of water reflects contagious magic, in which contact with a sacred source continues to influence others even once separated from the original source itself. As a result, ritual healing appears to produce real perceived effects for those suffering from sickness.

Don’t Touch the Cross

Age: 18

Context: The following story was told on April 28th, 2026, in my dorm room to me by the informant, who is one of my close friends (I apologize for the amount of “likes”).

NB: “Okay. Um, in my house, there’s a cross from my grandpa’s grave that’s hung up on a door frame leading up to the stairwell. My mom and my grandma always told us never to touch it, never to disrespect it, or play with it because we used to throw like balls in the house, like just to entertain ourselves. And, um, they were, like, for real, like, listen, you can mess up everything else. You can knock over vases, whatnot. But one thing you cannot do is touch that cross and we’re like, okay. So when I was four, my oldest sister, I think she was about like 17 at the time. Thought it would be funny to take the cross off the door frame for a bit.”

Me: “Why would she do that?”

NB: “No, actually, it’s just like, she was like rebellious and like she just like didn’t believe in that stuff. So she just wanted to mess around and stuff. Um, and then somehow she lost it, and we couldn’t find it for about a week. But during that week, just horrible things happened. Everyone in my family who lived there at the time got really sick. My parents, my sister and I got into a really bad car accident. It was totaled, and my dad had to go to physical therapy after because he was in a lot of pain. My oldest sister got cheated on and dumped that week. There was a lot of bad energy in that house, I would say. It felt much gloomier and dark. Everyone was just really depressed and everyone had trouble sleeping, and for some reason at night, there was a lot of noise around our house. I don’t know if it was just…”

Me: “Wait, sorry, whose cross was it?”

NB: “It was my real grandpa’s. Not my Step Grandpa. Yeah, it was my real grandpa’s cross that was on his grave.”

Me: “And he also lived in the house?”

NB: “Yeah, he also did. I think he was like a part of like building that house or something before he passed away.”

Me: “Oh, [redacted]”

NB: “Um, and yeah, everyone just had trouble sleeping because, um, I remember the wind being like really powerful. I remember. But this is like a common thing in my house. We, uh, most of us have like experienced hearing whispers and hearing like children running and stuff like that. But we never understood why, because no, I don’t think anyone lived in that house previous to us, so… and it wasn’t our neighbors, because we live in a duplex and like, we know when our neighbors are like making noise and stuff, like the difference between our neighbors making noise and then us like hearing stuff going on and like, we’ve established that…that week especially, like, there was just so much going on that, like, there is no way It was our neighbors. And eventually, my mom found the cross when she was cleaning, hung it back up, and it was kind of weird how, like, everything just went back to normal. Yeah, my dad’s pain went away pretty quickly. Um, we all got better, like, from our sicknesses overnight. We were in so much better moods, and I just really don’t know what happened. It’s kind of blurry. I’m pretty sure there’s probably more that happened, but I was like so young at the time that I just don’t remember everything to the fullest, but that’s, yeah, one of my earliest memories.”

Me: “So, what do you think? Like, do you think it was, like, your grandpa’s, like, spirit, or it was, like, another spirit? like bad karma?”

NB: “Well mind you, like, that cross was at the funeral at his, like, grave for, like, a while. I’m thinking that maybe other spirits like latched onto it. Maybe bad spirits latch onto it, and just like, I don’t know why we took it. I don’t know why we have it in our house. I don’t know why we decided to hang it up. But, um, because of that, we just can’t take it down. It’s like kind of like Annabelle, like we can’t.”

Me: “Yeah, you can’t”

NB: “We actually can’t mess with it. So now it’s just hanging and yeah. I don’t know. Maybe that’s another reason why I have like weird stuff going on in my house and like paranormal stuff going on, but, um, yeah, it’s really weird.”

Personal thoughts and analysis: This was probably my favorite story im submitting because it’s either supernatural or the most insane coincidence of all time. Both are equally fascinating to me. Initially I interpreted it as the informants Grandpa maybe being a vengeful spirit so it was interesting to hear the informants take that a spirit may have latched onto the cross itself which makes more sense because both sides of the informants family were affected. The story follows a typical trope in ghost stories of some sort of family curse and it was interesting to see a twist on that, that the family curse in this case may be coming from outside the family. I also think it’s interesting that the informant comes from a multi-religious background and so it might have something to do with religious tensions between their families. Im also curious as to how the informants mom and grandma knew that the cross shouldn’t have been messed with. Overall a very interesting story.

GRANDPA’S FIRST EXORCISM

Age: 19

For this story, I spoke to my friend. He told me this story that he got from his grandfather. The following is told from his first person perspective about his grandfather.

INTERVIEWEE: “When my grandpa was 25 years old he was a deacon at a church in Riverside, California. During his time, he had some house calls regularly. He was a deacon until he was around 40 so he saw a lot of different stuff at peoples’ houses. They would typically send him to houses to pray over new houses, old people, deceased, etc. However, one time he was asked to come to a home to perform a literal exorcism which was very out of the ordinary for him.

He thought this was unusual because he had never done anything like this before. One day, the church sent him to this house to perform the exorcism on this teenage girl who was spasming out, blaspheming, and acting really funky in general. The parents had no idea what to do so they called up my grandpa who and some other people with then church. My grandpa showed up with a few other priests. The other priests must have brought a bible, a cross, and some holy water.

They went into the house and the parents directed them into the room where the teenage girl was. She couldn’t sit still. They did something and they got the demon out of her; repeating a prayer or splashing holy water on her. She tried to jump away from it, but eventually she hit the ground and started shaking and screaming for a couple minutes. During this, the priests recited the prayer again and again. Then she passes out.

The girl didn’t wake up until the following morning super exhausted. She ended up being totally fine afterwards, with no signs of possession or evil spirits holding inside her anymore yet having no idea what had happened. This actually was the last and only exorcism my grandpa had to perform during his time being a deacon; this being a very different experience for him.”

My thoughts: I find it super interesting that his grandfather never did another exorcism after this, nor having done one prior. Around this time, which was maybe the 1970’s, the first Exorcist film came out, which made exorcisms more believed in during this time perchance, which may be why he got this house call in particular. With this, the details such as the girl forgetting everything that had happened, as well as the possession itself, it makes this story very unique; especially in the perspective of someone who has never experienced something like this.

A Rattlesnake’s Rattle Has the Devil in It 

Text: The belief: the rattle of a rattlesnake is associated with the devil. You should never keep one. The legend that authorizes it: a man once found a rattle in the brush, thought it looked cool, and slipped it into his pocket. He carried it with him for some time. It made him slowly insane. He could not sleep well and would sometimes hear the rattle shaking in his pocket when no one else could hear it. One night he got up in the middle of the night, took a knife, and killed his entire family. He was found in the morning on his porch, rattle in hand, without memory of what he had done. 

Context: Told to me by my roommate JS, who attributes the story to his grandmother. JS’s grandmother is a devout Catholic and Tejano, who grew up in Texas. The legend, as his grandmother framed it, is a general cautionary tale, not something that happened to anyone she knew personally. JS does not believe the rattle is cursed but says he would not pick one up. 

Analysis: This is a classic example of a folkloric rule and a story that demonstrates the consequences of breaking it. The underlying idea is that the rattlesnake’s danger does not leave when the snake dies. The rattle keeps it, and whoever picks it up carries it home. The legend’s shape (find, want, keep, lose your mind, lose your family) is familiar among Latin American cursed-object stories, where the trouble begins whenever someone takes home an object that should have been left where it was. The story’s real work is what it did to JS, and through him to me: neither of us believes a rattle is literally dangerous, and yet neither of us would ever pick one up. The “devil” reading the grandmother gives the rattle is a Catholic name for an older unease, as the rattlesnake as a charged figure predates even the arrival of Catholics to the new world. The geography is also significant: the Texas-Mexico border is where the snakes have a real material presence, and Anglo and Tejano traditions have been swapping folkloric material about them for some time. The dangers of a live rattlesnake are clear, but the story extends the good form of avoiding them even to dead rattlesnakes.