Category Archives: Folk Beliefs

Sleep Paralysis Ghost

Nationality: Bangladeshis
Age: 18
Occupation: Student
Residence: Bangladesh / Boston, Massachusetts
Performance Date: March 13, 2017
Primary Language: English

Informant: The informant is Nabila. She is eighteen years old and is a freshman at Northeastern University. She grew up in Bangladesh.

Context of the Performance: We sat on the living room floor of a mutual friend’s house in Yonkers, New York over our spring breaks form college.

Original Script:

Informant: So basically, do you know about sleep paralysis?

Interviewer: Yes.

Informant: Basically, it’s a condition which doesn’t allow you to move or talk when you’re waking up or first falling asleep. In Asian culture, when that happens, people believe that it is a form of nightmare or that it is a ghost sitting on you. When you have sleep paralysis, since you can’t move, and you might be screaming out loud but can’t actually make any noise, people think that he’s sitting on you. Because he can’t speak, since he’s a ghost, you can’t speak either. I actually don’t believe it though. My mom told me this when I was about thirteen, but now I know that it’s actually sleep paralysis.

Interviewer: Why is this piece of folklore important to you?

Informant: It’s important to me in the sense that when it happened to me, it really scared me. I had a bunk bed, and it happened to me the first time I slept on the top bunk. So, I never slept on the top bunk again because I thought that the nightmare would happen again.

Personal Thoughts: I find this piece interesting because I have known about sleep paralysis for years now and have never heard of this type of fear of it. In fact, I, along with many of my friends, have tried to achieve sleep paralysis because you need to do so in order to lucid dream. Lucid dreaming is something so many people try to do, so it is compelling to me that Nabila and her family are so afraid of sleep paralysis.

Albanian Superstition

Nationality: American
Age: 18
Occupation: Student
Residence: Bronx, New York
Performance Date: March 17, 2017
Primary Language: English

Informant: The informant is Mrika. She has lived in the Bronx, New York for her whole life. She is eighteen years old and is a freshman at Fordham University in the Bronx, New York. She is of Albanian descent.

Context of the Performance: We sat across from each other at a table at a diner in Yonkers, New York during our spring breaks from college.

Original Script:

Informant: So, it was kind of like a superstition. Most Albanian superstitions are about luck, and they think that when you have bad luck, you’re not going to get married. As a kid, whenever I would hit my head on someone else’s head, people said that I was giving someone bad luck. To remove that bad luck, I’d have to bump heads again with that person. Then, it would go away. My grandma taught me this.

Interviewer: Why is this piece of folklore important to you?

Informant: It’s important to me because as a kid, I knew that the whole thing was dumb, and I didn’t believe it, but it’s something you hold onto. Someone older than me taught that- my grandma. It would always remind me of her. It was something that seemed like a game.

Personal Thoughts: This piece reminds me of the connection folklore gives people to other people. This superstition connects Mrika with her grandmother and her siblings and cousins with whom she spent time growing up. This piece also has a bit of humor to it, which helped Mrike to create childhood memories.

Albanian Broom Superstition

Nationality: American
Age: 18
Occupation: Student
Residence: Bronx, New York
Performance Date: March 17, 2017
Primary Language: English

Informant: The informant is Mrika. She has lived in the Bronx, New York for her whole life. She is eighteen years old and is a freshman at Fordham University in the Bronx, New York. She is of Albanian descent.

Context:We sat across from each other at a table at a diner in Yonkers, New York during our spring breaks from college.

Original Script:

Informant: So, if someone accidentally hit you with a broom while they were sweeping, it would be bad luck. If they hit your feet, people would say that you wouldn’t get married. It seemed like an allusion to slavery. Brooms deal with the ground and the dirt. You had to get rid of the bad luck. To do that, you have to spit on the broom.

Interviewer: Why is this piece of folklore important to you?

Informant: I learned about this while I was on vacation in Albania, so it reminds me of that culture. I must have been eight years old. This is the one superstition that makes me remember the month I spent in Albania when I was growing up.

Personal Thoughts: I find it interesting that not only did Mrika explain the piece of folklore, but she also had developed a sense of the potential meaning behind its reason. Usually, people do not really know where the folklore they follow comes from or its meaning, yet Mrika, as she got older, was able to infer why getting hit with a broom is considered bad luck.

The Legend of Rozafa Castle

Nationality: American
Age: 18
Occupation: Student
Residence: Bronx, New York
Performance Date: March 17, 2017
Primary Language: English

Informant: The informant is Mrika. She has lived in the Bronx, New York for her whole life. She is eighteen years old and is a freshman at Fordham University in the Bronx, New York. She is of Albanian descent.

Context of the Performance: We sat across from each other at a table at a diner in Yonkers, New York during our spring breaks from college.

Original Script:

Informant: In Albania, there is a castle called Rozafa Castle, and it’s not in the best condition right now. These three brothers were trying to build the castle. They would work all day, but when they would go home at night and come back in the morning, the walls would all fall down. So, one day, they came across an old man who said the walls would only stay standing if they sacrificed someone. So the three brothers couldn’t decide what the right thing to do was. The ended up deciding to sacrifice one of their wives. Their wives would always drop off lunch for them while they worked. They were going to sacrifice the first wife who showed up, so that it would be by chance. They promised not to tell their wives about their plan, but two of the brothers lied and told their wives not to bring them lunch the next day. The youngest brother was honest, and when she came, they buried within the castle’s walls. Her name was Rozafa, which is the name of the castle. She accepted this because she thought it was her fate. She figured the city needed the castle, so she could do this for the city, but this role was put on her. It wasn’t actually her fate to show up first. Anyway, she gave in because she thought it was her destiny. She said that she was only worried about her infant son. So she asked to be buried in the wall with one of her breasts out so that she could breastfeed him and one of her arms out so that she could caress him. When the brothers buried her in the wall and came back the next day, the walls were still standing.

Interviewer: Why is this piece of folklore important to you?

Informant: This is important to me because it’s a story about the city where my parents grew up- Shkoder, or Shkodra. My mom told me this legend when we saw the castle while we visited Albania. She believed it to be true, and learned it from my grandma, who also believed it. It has been passed on through my family. Also, the name Rozafa was kept in my family. My cousin’s name is Rozafa.

Personal Thoughts: This legend is definitely compelling, and it is interesting to see Mrika’s connection to it. I loved hearing about how she visited the castle when she was in Albania and that her cousin was named after Rozafa. I actually graduated high school in a church called Our Lady of Shkodra, but I never knew anything about the city itself. Hearing this story made me think about how often I neglect the background information of different places I have visited, even if they are important to me.

Tips Come in Waves

Nationality: American
Age: 18
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: April 28
Primary Language: English

“Alright so I worked in ummm…. I worked in like multiple restaurants since I was like a freshman in high school and ummm…. one thing that they’ve always had in common was ummm…. was that there was a superstition around how servers got their tips. So the superstition was that just sort of that they come in waves and like servers take it very seriously like on a day where they get like… zero dollars in tips from multiple tables and they’re not bringing home that much money, they like… it’s really easy to get down about it. but in restaurants there is this attitude that’s like incubated that like what goes around comes around… kind of… so like if they get zero dollars from multiple tables and don’t bring home that much money one day, the next shift they’re very confident that they’ll get a lot of money and because they’re confident that that system will work, they probably serve better and they probably get better tips because of that so it’s sort of like a self fulfilling prophecy so because like, when a server has a bad day for tips because they believe in that philosophy that they’ll have a better day next time they actually do which is very interesting”

What I enjoyed about this superstition is that the informant realized how the superstition worked and how it was a self fulfilling prophecy within the superstition. Aside from that it’s also this superstition within the job as Tok Thompson has said is a way for the people within the job to control something out of their control. In this case it was the servers trying to control how many tips the get.