Category Archives: Folk Beliefs

Death of a Crow

Nationality: Mexican
Age: 21
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: 4/29/14
Primary Language: English
Language: Spanish

Death of a Crow

Personal Background:

Stephanie is a junior at the University of Southern California studying biology. She has grown up with a lot of Mexican influence, and has even spent some time in Mexico with her parents and grandparents. She is living in Los Angeles at the moment and is very happy with some of the Mexican influence L.A. has.

Folk Belief:

            When Stephanie was about six years old, she visited Mexico with her family to see her grandparents. One thing she noticed that was odd was when a crow flew into a tree that was nearby. Everyone she was with started shooing the crow away in a panic. When she asked why her family did this, they said it was because a crow brings bad luck. Her parents told that when a black crow flies into a nearby tree and caws, it means someone is going to die soon. This scared the family because Stephanie had a great grandmother who was getting very old and sick at the time.

Stephanie still believes that will happen when crows are around. She gets very nervous when there are crows around, even if they are not in trees making noise. She did not lose her grandmother right when that happened, but it was enough to make her uncomfortable.

Analysis:

This story is a perfect example of folk belief and superstition. It is a belief Stephanie and her family has, and there is no actual rational belief behind it. They crow represents something evil the family does not want to be part of.

To me, it seems as if there are certain groups that have more beliefs than others. It seems as if the people in the small, rural areas tend to have the most folk beliefs. They focus on small signs for big signs.

Tusk

Nationality: White
Age: 53
Occupation: Admissions for University of Southern California
Residence: Huntington Beach, CA
Performance Date: 4/28/14
Primary Language: English

Tusk

Personal Background:

My mom works in admissions for a university. She grew up in Palos Verdes, California where her father was a dentist known throughout her entire community. She now lives in Huntington Beach with her family.

University Traditions:

When my mom was a junior at the University of Southern California, the band Fleetwood Mac came out with the song Tusk. What made this song so important for the university was that it was played with the Trojan marching band. The students who were there were able to see Fleetwood Mac perform this song during one of the many football games the university has. The marching band has been playing it ever since. It has become such a big part of the campus life that there is almost no sporting event where the band does not play it. What makes it so popular is the part in the middle where the students get to yell, “UCLA SUCKS!” With UCLA being the main rival of USC, it gives the team a lot of school spirit as they cheer for their team.

What makes this song so special to my mom is the fact that it was done by a band she absolutely loved at the time, and she loves that it is still being done today. When she goes to a USC football game nowadays, she is brought back to a time when she was watching the game with her sorority sisters as a student. She loves being able to see the new students keeping some of the old traditions the same as she remembers.

Analysis:

This is a tradition that has been around for about 30 years now, and it does not look like it will be ending anytime soon. USC has become its own culture, and each football game has  a festival like feeling. There are so many different traditions that are going on during game days, it seems as if USC is its own city.

To me, this song is a way to bring the alumni and students together. Most students do not listen to Fleetwood Mac, but they do listen to this song. It is a way to connect the two different generations.

Bloody Mary

Nationality: Mexican
Age: 19
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: 4/29/14
Primary Language: English

Bloody Mary

Personal Background:

Heidi is a freshman at the University of Southern California and is studying psychology. She has grown up in Los Angeles with a lot of Mexican/American influence. She really enjoyed being able to have part of the two different cultures come together.

Legend:

Heidi heard a lot of the legendary people who tend to haunt a lot of Mexican culture, but the one about Bloody Mary is the one she liked the most.

“When you are looking in the bathroom mirror, you say her name three times and she appears. The room has to be dark, and it has to be at night. She then comes out and kills you.”

This was all Heidi was able to remember. She did say she heard something about Bloody Mary being related to the Queen Mary. She thinks Mary might have been killed in a dark room while looking in a mirror, which is why she comes out of mirrors. She said she heard about this when she was watching TV when she was younger, and it just happened that everyone knew what she was while she was at school. It scared her terribly when she was younger, and still scares her today. She has never tried it, and says she will never try because she thinks it might be the one time Bloody Mary will appear.

Analysis:

This legend has been a big part of a lot of children horror. Bloody Mary could have been someone who existed at one time, but she has become a legend. She is a story told to young children as a way to scare them.

To me, this story has been told so many times I do not believe it anymore. My older brother used to try to scare me with in when I was younger by trying it. It did not work, so there was no need to believe it. Even if I think of if that way, it is something that keeps getting revised, and will keep changing for the new generations.

There are more versions at “Mary, Mary, Bloody Mary.” VideoHound’s Golden Movie Retriever. Ed. Jim Craddock. 2012 ed. Detroit: Gale, 2011. 602. Gale Virtual Reference Library. Web. 2 May 2014.

The Bad Lady

Nationality: American
Age: 20
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles/Tampa
Performance Date: April 17, 2014
Primary Language: English

I collected this piece of folkore from a co-worker who grew up in Tampa, Florida. He told me about a common story that was used to scare children into behaving. His learned it from his parents, who would tell him the story in order to make him behave. Nowadays, he finds the story amusing, but when he was a child he took it very seriously and was very scared of it.

“Sometimes she’s referred to as “the bad lady” other times she’s referred to as “the swamp lady” The common theme of the story and the story I was told as a child was that there was a woman who would live in the swamps in the Everglades who was kind of like a witch who would have whole groupings of gators that would live on her property in these swamps, that she would be very close to and have a deep-seated connection to, like she could speak to them, control them and if you were bad your parents would threaten to drive you into the swamp and she would put you in a cage above the gators and depending on how bad you were she would lower you farther and farther into the lake and you’d have to try to survive with these gators. If you were really bad, your parents would just say “put him in” and you would be thrown to the gators and she would control them to whether or not they were going to kill you or how they were going to go about it based on her judgment of your crime.

So, I remember when I was five years old, I really didn’t want to go to church, and I knew I wasn’t allowed to go to church if I didn’t have shoes on, so I told my parents ‘I’m not going to put my shoes on. You can’t make me go.’ And they threatened to take me to the bad lady and leave me there with a ‘he goes straight to the gators’ thing and I very quickly put on my shoes and went to church. I was devastated when I was a little bit older and I realized there was no woman who would do this, that was against the law! But, I don’t know, it was a really common thing growing up, I would talk to my friends and be like ‘Did your mom tell you you were going to go to the bad lady?’ and they were like ‘Yeah, she’s real’. It was like Santa Claus”

This piece of folklore feels very specific to the location it comes from, since swamps and alligators don’t exist outside of a specific geographic region. So, it makes sense that the swamp lady would be in Florida, and that this specific story probably wouldn’t exist in a different state. It’s also interesting that children learned the story from their parents, and not from other children.

Reincarnation

Nationality: Indian-American
Age: 23
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles/Palo Alto
Performance Date: April 1, 2014
Primary Language: English

This piece was performed by my co-worker. She was born in India but moved to the United States when she was three months old. Her mother comes from Delhi, but her father’s family is originally from the area that is now Pakistan. She told me this story of learning about reincarnation from her grandmother and learning that her family believed that she (the informant) had been reincarnated.

“So, when I was in middle school… I don’t know it came up but someone asked me once if I believed in reincarnation and I was like, actually I don’t know that much about it even though I am Indian. So I asked my grandma about it when I went home and she was like, ‘Actually we believe that you were partially reincarnated.’ And I was like, ‘Whoa this is really cool!’ So I asked her how she knew and she told me basically after my great-grandpa died (so her grandfather) after he died she did a little prayer, and there’s this whole ritual that you do in India….Basically she did this prayer for about a week, and at the end of the week you have this dream that tells you, or shows you what the person who you’re asking about is doing. In the dream, if you see them praying at a temple, or a mandir as you would say in Hindi, it means that they’re going to stay in the afterlife. Their soul is not coming back, but if you see them, I don’t know, doing something else that would hint they were coming back, they were coming back. My grandmother did it, I think twice, for my great-grandfather and then he, the first time, was definitely staying there. And then later on, when my mom was pregnant with me it was actually…somehow he ended up coming back, supposedly. The reason why it was weird is because this only works, you can only tell if someone is going to be reincarnated if someone else in the family becomes pregnant within six months of the person dying. So, the person died, grandma tried the thing the first time, didn’t work out. but she tried it again later, I think, and then that time… the first time it said he wasn’t coming back,  the second time he wasn’t but it was so close to me being born that we thought, maybe he is. And so when I was growing up, and the signs of reincarnation supposedly are within the first five years of life, my grandma said I used to walk exactly like him and that’s a little sketch maybe that doesn’t mean that much, you could walk like a bunch of different people and it’s not that really specific, but he had such a specific gait that they thought, wow, he’s in her, I guess. And I had a bunch of other things, like the way I would talk, it would be just like him.”

Q: Is it common to try multiple times to see what will happen?

“I don’t think so, my grandma just was curious. I think that was the first time she had ever done it, too. I know there was little bit of confusion when she interpreted, in fact I think that may be why she did it the second time because of the interpretation, and she wasn’t sure.”

 

Even though reincarnation is a fairly well-known kind of folklore, this piece is interesting because it shows that folklore doesn’t necessarily work the same way every time. The informant’s grandmother didn’t seem very experienced with the rituals, so she had to try a second time to make sure she got it right. However, that didn’t make the ritual any less legitimate, as her family still believes she was reincarnated.