Category Archives: Folk Beliefs

The Domovoi

Nationality: Macedonian
Age: 21
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles, CA
Performance Date: 4/24/17
Primary Language: English
Language: Macedonian

Background:

My informant is a twenty-one year old USC student; she’s studying human biology and is currently applying to medical school. She was born in Macedonia, and immigrated to the Long Beach, CA with her mother and stepfather at the age of five. Her father still lives and works as a doctor in Macedonia, and my informant visits each summer. She speaks the language fluently.

Performance:

“My grandparents always had a bunch of stories, that were like, supposed to make me do their bidding (laughs) but my grandmother had this story about a little house elf called a Domovoi. It’s spelled — (she struggles to spell it, and I tell her I’ll look it up later) Okay, but yeah, these little house elves would like, live in your house and protects it and neatens up at night. But if you were bad — like, made a mess, broke stuff, tracked dirt in — he’d get angry and start making scary noises all over the house. I remember once I broke a vase or something and that night while I was trying to sleep there was this thumping on my door and I remember being so fucking scared because I’d pissed off this elf and I thought he was going to like, murder me or something. I was a lot more careful around the house after that.”

Thoughts:

This seems to be a classic example of adults using folklore to control and discipline children. This household beast shares a lot in common with characters from other cultural traditions, like brownies, hobgoblins, and even the Roman concept of a household god. The adults use the creature as an incentive for children to respect their home and keep things neat — in other words, to prevent them from adding to their parent’s workload.

Changelings

Nationality: American
Age: 22
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles, CA
Performance Date: 4/25/17
Primary Language: English

Background:

My informant is a twenty-two year old student at USC. She is originally from Pennsylvania and came to LA to study screenwriting. As a writer, she makes it her business to be familiar with a variety of legendary creatures from different regions and cultures; she is ethnically Jewish.

Performance:

“This is one of my favorites. There was that Angelina Jolie movie about it, and everything, but that kind of sucked (laughter) so I first heard this from my grandmother sometime in high school, just kind of like, a scary story or something. But I’ve done more research and the basic story shows up across a bunch of different cultures and whatnot. So basically, we think of fairies as like, Tinkerbell, right? Well in most old cultures, fairies were not that fucking benign. Like, at all. Fairies were these sort of horrendous creatures that would sneak into your house and steal your babies and drive you crazy. Like, parents would hang iron over their baby’s crib to keep fairies from getting in and taking their kids. This whole legend grew up around that idea; when people were wondering if their kid was their kid or the fairy replacement, they’d call them ‘changelings.’ Basically, what a fairy leaves behind to mimic your child while the real thing lives on in the fairy realm. Some stories say that these changeling kids were kind of brutal, monstrous little things, and others just say they’re sort of…off, I guess? There’s a lot of variety, which makes it a cool story to build stories off of, if that makes sense. A lot of wiggle room.”

Thoughts:

This legend seems almost mythic, in the sense that it’s a story that was created as a means of explaining and understanding the world around us. As Kieryn mentioned, the changeling story appears in a variety of different traditions; it appears here: https://www.britannica.com/art/changeling-folklore and http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/scanchange.html and elsewhere across print and digital resources. Nowadays, you hear stories about a child one day “changing” and becoming “someone else;” all of a sudden, an otherwise sweet baby grows disobedient or angry or difficult. We would usually go straight to an autism diagnosis or some other psychological explanation, but this offers a more spiritual explanation. According to one of the articles above, there were myths about how to have your child returned from the fairy world, many of which included torture. This story in particular speaks to mankind’s understanding and treatment of mental illness and disability.

Nursing Superstitions

Nationality: American
Age: 21
Occupation: Student, Nursing
Residence: Boston, MA
Performance Date: 2/12/17
Primary Language: English

Background:

My informant is a twenty-one-year-old college student in Boston, Massachusetts. She is studying to be a nurse and has worked in the emergency room at both Massachusetts General Hospital and Brigham and Women’s Hospital.

Performance:

“I’m not technically a nurse yet so I’ve only really seen this stuff happen…but you kind of catch on. The biggest one I think is to never say that you’re having a “quiet” day, because that’s when everything like, blows up in your face. I’ve had nurses seriously freak out at each other for saying that. That’s the big one, I think…there are also a few nurses, no one that I know really well, but some people say that if you tie a nurse in a patient’s sheets they’ll live through your shift. They’d only do it to the really sick people — you know like bad accidents, or kids, or something. I don’t know if it works, necessarily, but I will say that when we think we’re keeping our patients alive, we’re working a lot harder and people tend to stay alive just a little bit longer, if that makes sense.”

Thoughts:

The never-say-quiet superstition makes a lot of sense, though I’m not sure if it’s specific to nursing. I remember at my high school job scooping ice cream, we had a similar rule about not saying that the store was “slow” because that would mean a rush was imminent. The superstition about the knot, however, it interesting. It’s like the nurse is trying to create a bond between their patient’s life and the physical world; like they’re trying to keep the patient physically tied to their life. Though a simple gesture, it speaks to how seriously nurses take their work. They’ll do anything to keep their patient’s alive, even if its as simple as a knot in a bed sheet.

No New Waves

Nationality: American
Age: 25
Occupation: Research Assistant
Residence: La Jolla, CA
Performance Date: 4/22/17
Primary Language: English

Background:

My informant is a twenty-five year old USC graduate who splits his time between Los Angeles and his home in La Jolla, CA. The informant is a lab assistant but spends the majority of his free time surfing. It’s both a personal passion and family activity that has taken him all over the world.

Performance:

“Another one is that you never leave waves to find waves. That was one of the first ones that I learned, my Dad is super, like, intense about it. Basically it means that if you have waves, if you’ve found like, decent conditions, you shouldn’t leave to find something better because you’ll never find it. I don’t know if it’s supposed to be like, philosophical or something, but it’s honestly true. Every time I’m like, ‘oh, these waves suck, let’s go to this beach’ or whatever, the waves totally suck. Like I’m cursed because I couldn’t appreciate what I had. So just, like, stay in the moment. It’s worth it.”

Thoughts:

This is another superstition that sheds a light on the spiritual side of surfing. There’s a whole set of beliefs behind the sport and culture. As Doron mentioned, this seems to be equal parts philosophy and superstition. The message is to “stay in the moment” and appreciate what’s in front of you rather than running off to chase something that might be better. Unlike traditional American discourse, this piece of folklore is anti-future; it insists that the surfer lives fully within the present moment and focuses only on what is happening around them.

Never Say Goodbye

Nationality: American
Age: 25
Occupation: Research Assistant
Residence: La Jolla, CA
Performance Date: 4/22/17
Primary Language: English

Background:

My informant is a twenty-five year old USC graduate who splits his time between Los Angeles and his home in La Jolla, CA. The informant is a lab assistant but spends the majority of his free time surfing. It’s both a personal passion and family activity that has taken him all over the world.

Performance:

“Surfers are pretty superstitious, which is crazy just because of how, like, chill we’re supposed to be (chuckles). But one thing is that you never tell people you’re leaving…like, if you’re out there and you know that you’re going to just like, get one more and then go in, you don’t say it. You just paddle in and like, you’re done. If you tell people, like, ‘hey I’m going to go’ it basically brings like, really awful conditions. Like, no waves and stuff for anyone else. Not cool. Don’t do it!”

Thoughts:

This is both etiquette and superstition. It seems to speak to the limited time most people have available to surf. People tend to talk about surfing and surf culture like it’s pseudo-religious; there is a spiritual importance to the individuality of a surfing experience. In this case, it seems like the act of ending your own session is tantamount to ending everyone else’s. You’re supposed to let everyone have as much or as little of their own time to surf and do your own thing.