Category Archives: Protection

Lifting your feet over the drawbridge

Interviewer: “Ever since I could remember, whenever we drove over a drawbridge, you always told my brother and me to lift our feet over a drawbridge. Could you please explain why?”

D: “It’s always been that way. My dad had told me my whole life as well; it was just a thing, you cross over a drawbridge, so you lift your feet. I had to pass it on to my family as well.”

Interviewer: “Do you have any idea what it means, why you do it?”

D: “It’s for luck, not necessarily luck for your day, but more so luck for your future drives. You don’t want your feet touching the car floor when you feel the bumpy road from the texture of the bridge. Even I lift my feet up. Sure, I’ll have a little bit on the gas pedal, but otherwise I’m lifting my feet until the road is flat again.”

Context: Ever since I was a little kid I remeber driving with my dad. Anytime we would pass over a draw bridge, you had to lift your feet up. No matter how long or short the bumps of the bridge lasted. He would start with a warning by saying “ok get ready to lift your feet up!” and then when we hit the bridge said “Go!” and everyone in the car would lift both their feet off of the ground. Sometimes it would be difficukt to hold them up for a while – as an impatient child, but it would be over soon enough, and no way was anyone letting their feet touch the car floor. As soon as the car left the brdige he would say “good” and everyone would put their feet back down immediatly. I am unsure where this supersition came from, but from the interview I gathered my dad had done it his own life and took it on from his dad. My grandpa would say it to all of his 9 kids whenever passing over a draw bridge. This would take place most often from the drives from upstate NY to NYC, but happened anytime there was a drawbridge.

Analysis: This tradition is a form of family folklore that uses superstition and ritual to create a shared sense of meaning during an otherwise ordinary activity. The act of lifting feet over a drawbridge, framed as bringing “luck” for future drives, reflects how belief does not need a clear origin or logic to feel important. This supersition not only prvoides luck for the rest of the drive and future drives, but acts as a shared identity within the family.

Ghost Month and Not Swimming During Zhongyuan Festival

Date: 04/21/2026

Speaker: “When I was little, adults always told us not to go swimming during Zhongyuan Festival. That is the Ghost Festival, around the fifteenth day of the seventh lunar month.

People say that during that time, the gates of the underworld open, so ghosts can come out. We call it ‘opening the ghost gate.’ Because of that, people think the whole month is unlucky, especially near rivers, lakes, beaches, and the ocean.

Adults would always say that if you go swimming during Ghost Month, water ghosts might try to pull you down. They would say the ghosts want someone to take their place, so they look for people near the water. Even if nobody fully believed it, people still avoided swimming because it felt unlucky.

During that month, people also burn paper money and other paper offerings for ancestors and wandering spirits. Families might burn paper houses, paper clothes, paper gold, or paper money. It’s basically an idea is that the dead can use those things in the afterlife.

A lot of families in places like Fujian, Taiwan, and Guangzhou still follow these traditions. Even younger people who do not really believe in ghosts might still avoid swimming during Ghost Month, just in case.

There is also a Taiwanese animated movie called Grandma and Her Ghosts that has a lot of these kinds of Ghost Month ideas in it. It is about ghosts, family, and traditional beliefs, so a lot of Taiwanese people know it from when they were kids.”

Interviewer: “Did you actually believe it when you were younger?”

Speaker: “When I was little, yes, definitely. If an adult tells you not to swim because ghosts will pull you underwater, of course you believe it. Even now, I still feel a little weird about swimming during Ghost Month.”

Interviewer: “So people still follow these traditions even if they do not fully believe them?”

Speaker: “Yeah. Even if people do not completely believe it, they still do not want to risk it. It is one of those traditions where people think, ‘It is better to be safe than sorry.’”

Context: This conversation took place during an informal discussion about Ghost Month traditions in southern Chinese culture. It was originally in Chinese and I use AI tools to translate. The speaker described beliefs surrounding Zhongyuan Festival, especially the idea that the gates of the underworld open during the seventh lunar month. She explained that many families in Fujian, Taiwan, and Guangzhou avoid swimming during that time because of stories about water ghosts pulling people underwater. She also mentioned the practice of burning paper offerings for the dead and connected these beliefs to childhood memories and Taiwanese popular culture.

Analysis: Ghost Month folklores remain especially strong in southern Chinese communities, particularly in Fujian, Taiwan, and parts of Guangdong. The belief that the “ghost gate” opens during the seventh lunar month creates a period associated with danger, bad luck, and wandering spirits. Water is often seen as especially dangerous because of stories about ghosts looking for living people to replace them. Even when people no longer fully believe these stories, they often continue following the customs because of family pressure, cultural habit, or superstition. The continued popularity of works like Grandma and Her Ghosts also shows how these beliefs are passed down through both folklore and popular media.

Pre-Performance Rituals in a Chinese High School Drama Club

“Back in high school, I was in this drama club, and whenever we had anything to do with performing on stage, there were always these rituals before the show. Like, unwritten rules. You couldn’t cut your hair the day before a performance, you couldn’t shave either. And then there were certain colors you weren’t allowed to wear — which ones depended on whatever show you were doing at the time. None of it really had an explanation. It was kind of… random? Like, rituals that were made up just for the fun of it, almost like a joke.

Oh, and there’s another one — this one’s more universal in drama circles — you can’t say ‘Macbeth’ onstage. Like, you just don’t say his name. Because supposedly it’ll bring bad luck to your whole company. Because Macbeth is a traitor, right. Yeah. So that one’s more of a real thing.

But the other ones, like the hair and the colors, those were just ours. No real reason behind them.”

Context: This piece was collected in a one-on-one interview with a college student who was a member of a drama club during high school in China. The conversation happened casually and organically, with the informant recalling these customs in a relaxed, amused tone. At one point, the interviewer drew a comparison to the folk belief that athletes should abstain from sex before a game for physical reasons — the informant acknowledged the similarity but pointed out the difference: the athletic belief has a concrete physical rationale, whereas the drama club rules had none at all, which almost seemed to be the point.

Analysis: The pre-performance rituals described here fit into a well-documented tradition of occupational folklore among performers. These kinds of customs are common in theater communities worldwide, serving to build group identity, mark the mental shift into “performance mode,” and give people a structured way to deal with pre-show nerves. What’s interesting here is that the informant herself doesn’t fully buy into them — she describes the club-specific rules as arbitrary, almost comedic. And yet they were still followed. This speaks to how folk practices can persist even without belief, because the ritual itself becomes part of what it means to belong to the group.

The “Macbeth taboo” is one of the most widely recognized superstitions in Western theater, often traced back to early modern English stage tradition. The fact that it showed up in a Chinese high school drama club is a small but telling sign of how theatrical culture — and its accompanying folklore — has traveled globally. The club-specific rules, on the other hand, represent something more local and invented: customs that don’t need history or logic to survive, just a group of people who keep doing them together.

Mud on a Bee Sting

Context:

The informant’s family is incredibly spiritual and has beliefs in the natural world. They do not rely as much on traditional medicine and have alternative ways to deal with pain and healing.

Text: On a camping trip, the informant got stung by a bee and her family put mud on the bee sting to draw out the bee sting.

Analysis:

By putting mud on a bee sting, the informant’s family practiced folk medicine and healing. In folk medicine, natural materials are used to treat injury outside of institutional settings. This connects to Frazer’s account of homeopathic magic, where the mud draws out the sting with its physical healing properties. In this way, folklore allows for alternative practices that do not arise from scientific knowledge, but rather from culturally meaningful practices that directly respond to the body’s needs in that moment.

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.