Category Archives: Folk Beliefs

Jewish Naming

Nationality: Jewish American
Age: 60
Occupation: Lawyer
Residence: Plano, TX
Performance Date: April 19, 2012
Primary Language: English

In the Jewish religion, you always name your kid after someone who has died, it was Jewish tradition. So, I’m named after my Mother’s father, who’s name is Jack. So I never quite figured out how Jane ended up being Jack, but whatever. He passed away within 24 hours of my birth. And I’m named after him.

My mom always told me that Papa Jack would watch over me from heaven because I was named after him. All of the kids are named after relatives she thought would keep watch on them from Heaven.

The most common Jewish reason associated with this has to do with fooling the angel of death—that if you name a baby after a living person, the angel might get confused and take the baby by accident. I can see how this oikotype would appear in my family because now and in America infant mortality rates are much lower than they were, so what becomes more important is having the children ‘looked after’. Whereas concern used to be on infant death, now it’s on the growing up process.

A window open at death

Nationality: Irish-American
Age: 62
Occupation: Pastor
Residence: Plano, TX
Performance Date: April 19, 2012
Primary Language: English

When someone was dying at home, you always had to have a window open so that their soul could leave, even in the dead of winter.

 

If the window was closed, the soul would be tormented. And then somebody in the house could get sick from what they had. When their soul left, it took the sickness with them.

 

I’m going to go with a naturalistic explanation on this one. I think that at death, especially in Ireland, the whole family would have gathered around them. With this many people in places that typically wouldn’t have ventilation, perhaps opening a window actually did blow away bacteria in the air and keep family members breathing relatively fresh air.

 

New Years Day, first person to walk through the door

Nationality: Irish-American
Age: 62
Occupation: Pastor
Residence: Plano, TX
Performance Date: April 19, 2012
Primary Language: English

New Years Day. The first person to cross your threshold (walk through your door) had to have dark hair. So my father had black hair, and New Tears Eve after midnight he had to walk through twenty fucking apartments because not many Irish people had black hair. And it had to be a man not a woman.

 

That was a sign of good luck. Anybody else that came in, you weren’t gonna have a good year.

 

Since more English people have black hair, or the Irish people that do have black hair are the black Irish, I think that it might be a sign of welcoming guests/foreigners. Or perhaps a preventative magic because the English would have had black hair. Or, simply the fact that black hair is rare, and so it entails rare things (good things) for the rest of the year.

Ghosts and Catholicism?

Nationality: American
Age: 20
Occupation: Student
Residence: Pennsylvania
Performance Date: April 2012
Primary Language: English
Language: Spanish

My informant has a diverse familial background. Her maternal side of the family has been living in Pennsylvania for about 300 years, and is deeply entrenched in the Pennsylvania Dutch folkloric traditions. Her paternal family has come to America fairly recently – her grandparents emigrated from Italy shortly before her father was born.

 

While visiting the local cemetery, my informant’s father told her the following story, which she recounted for me.

 

“When my sister was really little, she and my dad were in the cemetery. She pointed up on the hill and said, ‘Who are those people?’, but there weren’t any people there.

 

My dad is firmly convinced she saw ghosts. That probably stems from my grandmother, I guess. I didn’t really know her that well. She believed that when kids are little, they can see ghosts, or things that other people can’t, because they’re so close to heaven…kind of like when people say that dying people can see their loved ones who are dead because they are so close to heaven and they’re going to die soon. My grandmother was Catholic, and she always said it was until the first Holy Communion.”

 

This story is an example of the sometimes hazy boundaries between religion and folklore. Churches are institutions, but they have a lot of folkloric aspects. As Oring suggests, the two are differentiated by the methods through which information is communicated. Because there isn’t an official edict telling Catholics such as my informant’s grandmother that children can see the supernatural until their first Holy Communion, her belief is a folk belief, probably learned by talking to other people.

Don’t put your shoes on the table!

Nationality: American
Age: 20
Occupation: Student
Residence: Pennsylvania
Performance Date: April 2012
Primary Language: English
Language: Spanish

My informant has a diverse familial background. Her maternal side of the family has been living in Pennsylvania for about 300 years, and is deeply entrenched in the Pennsylvania Dutch folkloric traditions. Her paternal family has come to America fairly recently – her grandparents emigrated from Italy shortly before her father was born.

 

One night, my informant came over to my apartment and immediately panicked because my roommate had her feet on the coffee table.

 

“In my house, putting shoes on a table means the worst possible luck, usually some kind of death. My dad’s exceptionally superstitious, but this is one of his most strongly held superstitions, so much so that after I go shopping, he confirms that there are no shoes in the shopping bags I place on our table.”

 

My informant had no idea where superstition originated, or what it meant. Out of curiosity, we looked it up, and found that this was an old mining superstition. When miners died while at work, in mining accidents, their shoes were brought back to their houses and placed on the table.

 

After hearing this, my informant exclaimed that this made perfect sense. Her town was primarily a mining community, and both of her grandfathers were miners. Her father probably grew up hearing this superstition, and without knowing exactly what it meant, he passed it on his own daughter, who continues to believe in it.