Category Archives: Digital

The Baby Monitor

Age: 19

Context:

This story was told to me during a car ride at night back from a camping trip with friends. Everyone started going around and telling creepy or weird paranormal experiences they’ve had and when the topic shifted to technology the informant went on and told this story about their experience with their baby sister’s baby monitor as a kid.

CL:

“So this happened when I was around fifteen, and I still don’t really know what to make of it. My baby sister had just been born, so my parents had one of those baby monitors set up in her room, the kind that only does audio.

My room was right next to hers, and since she cried a lot at night, I got used to hearing little noises through the monitor when my parents left it on in their room or in the hallway.

One night, I was home alone babysitting while my parents went out to dinner. My sister was asleep, and I was downstairs watching TV. Everything was normal. Then I heard the monitor crackle. At first I ignored it because it always made static noises.

But then I heard someone whisper. Like… an actual whisper. I couldn’t make out what it said, but it sounded like a woman’s voice. I muted the TV and just sat there listening. Then I heard it again. Really soft, like right into the monitor. It sounded like, ‘It’s okay… go back to sleep.’ I froze. I remember staring at the monitor and thinking maybe my mom had come home without me hearing, but I would’ve heard the front door or footsteps. So I ran upstairs. My sister was asleep in her crib. Nobody else was in the room. I checked the closet, under the crib, the bathroom, everything. Nothing.

I grabbed my sister and brought her downstairs with me because I was so freaked out. I called my mom crying and told her to come home. She thought I was overreacting until they got back. My dad brought my sister upstairs and plugged the monitor back in to prove it was just static or interference or whatever. And then we all heard it. The monitor crackled and this voice came through. ‘Shhhhhh…’ Like right into it. My mom literally unplugged it immediately. The next day my dad bought a new monitor and threw the old one away. And it never happened again.

Later, my dad said it was probably signal interference from another house because the monitor was old and not encrypted or whatever. Like maybe someone else’s monitor or a walkie-talkie got picked up. But… I don’t know. The voice sounded like it was in the room. Not through a machine. It sounded close. Like someone leaning over her crib.”

Interviewer:

“Did the voice sound threatening?”

CL:

“No, honestly that’s what made it weirder. It sounded calm. Like soothing. If it had sounded creepy, I think I would’ve just assumed it was in my head. But it sounded… normal.”

Interviewer:

“Do you think it was paranormal?”

CL:

“I don’t know. Probably not. The interference thing makes sense. But hearing it with my whole family there made it harder to brush off.”

The Informant’s Thoughts:

She does not fully believe the event was paranormal, but she remains disturbed by how clearly she remembers the voice. The fact that it happened twice, once when she was alone and again in front of her parents, validated her fear in the moment.

She says what scared her most was not the possibility of a ghost, but the idea that a real stranger’s voice could somehow reach into her house and speak to her baby sister. In some ways, that felt scarier than anything supernatural.

My Thoughts:

I think what makes this story so creepy is how realistic it feels. Unlike a lot of ghost stories where someone sees a full figure or something impossible happens, this one has an explanation that actually makes sense. The signal interference idea is believable, which somehow makes it even scarier because it could happen in real life.

I also think the fact that the voice sounded calm instead of threatening makes the story way more unsettling. If it had been some distorted or obviously creepy voice, it would almost feel fake. But the fact that it sounded normal and soothing makes it feel more personal and invasive.

I find it interesting how technology changes the way ghost stories are told. Instead of hearing strange voices in a hallway or through the walls, now people hear them through baby monitors, phones, or speakers. It’s like modern devices create new ways for people to interpret weird experiences as paranormal.

I think the scariest part of this story isn’t even the idea of a ghost. To me, the thought that it could have been an actual stranger’s voice somehow reaching into the house is worse. That makes the story feel less like a supernatural haunting and more like a real invasion of privacy.

New Years Grapes

Text: Every New Year’s Eve before midnight, you sit under a table and you eat 12 individual grapes, and supposedly it’s supposed to make it so that you find love or you make like a wish that comes true. The informant thinks you have to eat them all either before it hits midnight or as it hits midnight. 

Context: Informant in 20, half white half pacific islander, born in Washington and now going to school in Southern California. She herself has never practiced this tradition. She saw it on TikTok and was like what is this? And then she saw more TikToks and was like, now I know.

Analysis: This tradition no longer has roots, it isn’t traveling in the same way other traditions used to before the internet, as we’ve talked about before in class. The brothers Grimm and other proponents of ethnonationalism would have a stroke. My informant is still a passive bearer, but not in the usual way, she didn’t learn it from a group she’s in and doesn’t know where it came from originally. But weirdly if you think about it she does still have a group and that group is TikTok, a large nebulous group but a group all the same. I, who does not use TikTok, did not know this tradition, or I wasn’t in the right algorithm to see it when it came to Instagram. The algorithm opens up a whole other part of the interaction between digital orality and folklore groups. Folklore no longer can be tracked by location but what you know does tell us things about how you interact with the digital space.

Fan Death

Text: “In Korea you cannot sleep with the fan on in a closed room. You will die. My mom would come into my room at night and turn the fan off, and if she found me sleeping with it on, she would wake me up and get mad.” IW explained that some say the fan creates a vacuum and you suffocate, some say it lowers your body temperature too much and you get hypothermia and die. The fans they sell in Korea come with a built-in timer for this reason.

Context: IO is a Korean American student whose parents are first-generation immigrants from Korea. She heard the belief from her mother growing up. Within South Korea the belief is widespread enough that mainstream Korean newspapers have historically reported “death by electric fan” as a cause of overnight death, that the Korean Consumer Protection Board has issued formal warnings. IO does not really believe the fan can kill her, but she will not sleep with one running and still uses one that features a timer. 

Analysis: Fan death is one of the cleanest cases of a modern technological folk belief. Electric fans are 20th-century technology, so the belief cannot be ancient, yet it has matured remarkably quickly. Already a namesake of parent-to-child transmission at bedtime, multiple proposed mechanisms (of death) that vary by account, and a thick web of social and material reinforcement, from newspaper death reports to government warnings to the physical timers built into the fans sold in Korea. 

Sleep Paralysis and The Hat Man

Text: The Hat Man is a recurring figure in LS’s sleep paralysis episodes. He is tall, faceless, dressed in a trenchcoat, and wears a wide-brimmed hat, like a big fedora. He stands in the corner of the room, watching, while the sleeper is awake but unable to move. He does not speak or approach. After a few minutes he is gone. 

Context: Told to me by my friend LS, who experiences recurrent sleep paralysis. LS had encountered testimonies of the Hat Man online both before and after her first sleep paralysis episode featuring him, notably on Reddit’s r/sleepparalysis and YouTube. He has appeared in several of LS’s subsequent episodes, almost always the same way. 

Analysis: Sleep paralysis itself is well-documented neurology: during REM the body is paralyzed to keep us from acting out dreams, and on waking the paralysis sometimes outlasts consciousness, producing hallucinations of intruders, pressure on the chest, and shadowy figures. What is folkloric is the figure. Different cultures have produced their own intruder for the same neurological event: the Old Hag in Newfoundland, the Pisadeira in Brazil, Kanashibari in Japan, the night-mare of medieval Europe. The Hat Man is the contemporary English-language version, relatively common on internet forums and YouTube in the 2000s. It’s interesting how in lockstep different accounts of the Hat Man align with each other, and I wonder if it is a natural phenomenon that causes this similarity of accounts or if it is the sharing of the accounts that causes the Hat Man to appear in such a consistent form. 

“Just a Little Something I Learned in the War”

Text: My good friend KH, who has never been in any war, has installed the line “Just a little something I learned in the war” as a personal signature, dropped after she performs an act of trivial competence. Two recent examples: following up a successful U-turn in her car, “Just a little something I learned in the war.” Another, she twisted off a stuck cap from a soda bottle with some difficulty and said, “Just a little something I learned in the war.” She uses the line straight-faced, without further commentary, which usually makes it even funnier.

Context: KH does not appear to have inherited the phrase from a parent or grandparent; she has identified social media (primarily TikTok) as the point of contact, where the formula has circulated as a stock comic move. 

Analysis: The catchphrase is a piece of folk speech that works through deliberate, comedic over-attribution: KH credits a tiny bit of everyday competence to a vast, unverifiable, fictitious, catastrophic past. The joke depends on both speaker and audience knowing there was obviously no war. The gap between the trigger (a U-turn, a bottle cap) and the dramatic framing is the entire setup. It’s like wider American comic phrases such as “Vietnam flashbacks,” “Back in ‘Nam,” “in the trenches,” and “old Army trick.” All these dresses something small in the language of something terrible and huge, for comedic effect.