Category Archives: Legends

Narratives about belief.

The little sanatorium girl of Parnitha

Nationality: Greek American
Age: 76
Occupation: Retiree
Residence: Greece
Performance Date: 10/30/21
Primary Language: English

Background: The informant stated that she had a personal encounter with a deceased little girl who she believes she is the same person of the urban legend of the little girl of Parnitha (suburb in northern Athens, Greece). She first heard of the legend from the mother who would warn her not to wonder around that area alone. According to informant, she was fascinated by the story of the Parnitha’s little girl and wished she could meet her one day. This personal experience didn’t affect the informant as the encounter with the little girl was uneventful. It imprinted, however, a vivid memory and led the informant to question later as an adult, the existence of the tormented and unrested deceased girl.  

EE:This is an old legend. I can’t even remember when. It was,  I think, the story starts around 1914. You know, it starts with the story of the sanatorium. It was the church, I don’t remember the name, maybe, oh, I know Petraki, the monastery of Petraki that donated acres to build the sanatorium. It was the deadliest of times, couldn’t even say the name,  because it was so scary, the tuberculosis and everyone thought of it as a death sentence. People didn’t know how to help , I mean didn’t know of any treatment. There was nothing anyone could do, were left to die, they tried to keep them from infecting , you know the rest. But too many died, among them children. What could they do? No antibiotics to give , it was in the 60s that,  there were antibiotics and tuberculosis was cured. But this sanatorium,  they didn’t demolish it.   And I always wanted to go and look and play. Broken chairs and mattresses and everything that remained , we liked to explore. But the legend , we knew about the legend and didn’t stop us. And others were talking about it all, and about the girl dressed  in white  and the cold drafts and the screaming voices at night. But in the 60s, I think it was 1964,  I was, mmm, about 15 years old, or maybe a couple of years older, I won’t reveal my age (informant laughing)  and then, you know , we wouldn’t listen to our parents any more. It was one day after Christina’s birthday, Christina was my best friend, that we decided to go.  After the sun came down , in the darkness ,  we walked to the “Well of the Lady” to find the little girl. Because legend has it that she will appear after the sun sets. But didn’t see anything and we start laughing. Bored , we couldn’t stay , we had to get home. It was late. But when getting further from the “Well of the Lady”, I heard crying , and when I turned I saw a little girl, crying,  asking to drink water but she was far from the “well”. The faster I run  towards her, the more she fainted and I couldn’t see or find her. But,  I am certain I saw her, I heard her, I saw the blue ribbon around her waist. 

Me: Who do you believe was the little girl? 

She was, she was the unban legend of the little girl, very sick,  that died in her way to the “well” from the sanatorium to drink the healing waters. She believed that the water of the “well” would heal her. But she was too sick with tuberculosis, too sick. Left her last breath, trying to reach the healing waters of the “well”. I know it was her. She  looked exactly like the urban legend,  dressed in white and her blue ribbon. I couldn’t forget her blue ribbon and her cries.  

Me:  Did anyone else see her? 

EE: None of my friends saw her

Me: Why do you think they didn’t see her or hear her?

EE: She was crying for help. Who do you ask for help? My friends didn’t believe in the legend. Maybe,  I don’t know. Maybe ghosts are , they sense , I mean they know to whom to present themselves.  This girl was asking for help , maybe she sensed I could help her to get her to the well or I don’t know. I don’t know.  

Me: Do you think many people believe in the existence of the little sanatorium girl that appears at the “Well of the Lady” in the area of Parnitha? 

EE: Yes. Its  a legend. There is a history. After the sanatorium closed down, they tried to built a hotel . Named “Xenia” I think. But failed , bankruptcy. And then came , the government tried to open a school but it closed too.  And nothing could , I mean nothing good could come out of this place. Many have seen the little girl but I haven’t met any of them. 

Me: Did you share your experience with your parents back then? 

EE: I didn’t. They wouldn’t had believe me.  And I didn’t  want to get in trouble. These were other times. You either obeyed your parents or you would’ve been in big trouble (informant laughing).   

Me: What makes you believe that your mother who had told you about this legend wouldn’t had believed you? 

EE: I don’t think she believed it herself. Our parents could , you know, try to make us do things  without explaining . Fear was good. She thought if I get scared I would do or not do what she wanted.

Context: This piece was collected via a zoom meeting

Thoughts: It is interesting that the informant grew with this legend and although she  suspected that her mother used it as the means to scare her to obey her, she grew to have the one experience that contradicts this belief. The informant grew with this story and knew exactly how the little sanitarium girl    looked like. The fact the her friends didn’t see or hear anything that night may be interpreted as proof that the legend is passed on as the means to honor and remember the people, especially young children who suffered a horrible death due to a deadly disease so easily cured with the use of antibiotics a few decades  later.  Since the informant didn’t mention that she knows of any others who have seen the little girl with the blue ribbon around her waist,  I wonder if she just saw what she was expecting to see or hoped. The area is covered with dense trees which makes it very difficult to see things clearly even at daytime. Her vivid image of the little girl, dressed in white, with the detail of the blue ribbon around her waist, seen in the darkness, amidst  dense vegetation makes me skeptical. Or maybe, ghosts do choose to appear to the living with a more open mind and heart. Since it is an urban legend, I wonder if there could had been more confirmed sightings of people who had indeed a personal encounter with the Parnitha sanatorium little girl but are no longer living to confirm these sightings.       

Lady of the Lake

Nationality: American
Age: 18
Occupation: Student
Residence: Lake Highlands, TX
Performance Date: 11/3/2021
Primary Language: English

AJ: It was a dark, dark night. It was very late and very cold in Dallas. A guy was driving home from work along White Rock Lake when he sees a lady. She’s wearing a white dress and is soaking wet. He pulls up next to her and asks “Do you need help? Do you need a ride?” She says “Yes, I live on the other side of the lake.” He drives her around the lake and pulls up to her house. He asked the owner of the house if he could bring her inside, but when he looked back in the car, nothing was there.

All that was left in the back seat was a puddle. He described her to the man who lived there and he told him that she was a woman who had lived there years ago and had drowned in White Rock Lake on her wedding day. She appears to people in the shallows of the lake or on the road asking for a ride.

Me: How did you hear about the Lady of the Lake

AJ: I guess like family friends? When we would have family nights, my dad and all his friends who grew up in Dallas talk about it. She’s supposed to be bad luck too, so they warn us about going out late and seeing her.

Me: Do you believe in her

AJ: Kind of – I don’t believe that I’ll ever interact with her, but I’ll believe that someone died in the lake and haunts it. Especially when I’m near the dam. That’s where I’m like ‘If I were to see the lady of the lake, it’d be here’.

Personally, I want to know more about the Lady of the Lake before I believe in her. Spurned women ghosts tend to come from other places – why did she just happen to drown on her wedding day? If she had been killed by her fiance or had more of a reason for being a ghost, I think she would have a more interesting story.

Ghost in photography

Nationality: Chinese
Age: 18
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: Oct 29th
Primary Language: Chinese
Language: English

Me: Have you ever heard some ghost stories from your parents or grandparents?

S: Yes. I once heard a scary story from my parents.

Me: Why did they tell you this story?

S:You know, adults like to make fun of kids by telling them ghost stories and see how they are terrified.

Me: What is the story then?

S: It happened in a ‘Village-In-The-City’. A boy died of traffic accident and a funeral was held for him. Several girls passed by and one of them picked a flower from the wreath for the boy. She was going to a photo studio, hence she put the flower on her hair and took the photo. When the photographer developed the film, he barely saw a boy’s face behind the girl. He waited for the girl to come back and take the photo, but the girl never returned. He managed to get in contact with the friends of the girl, only to be told that the girl had died due to another traffic accident.

Context: The information was collected in a informal private conversation.

Interpretation: Both photos and ‘Village-In-The-City’ are related to ghost in Chinese cultural background. When photography was first introduced to China, people were terrified because they thought that the soul of human would be captured by the photos. So, when the girl picked the flower from wreath, an action that was considered to be irreverent, the soul of the dead boy might just followed her and was captured by the photo. ‘Village-In-The-City’ may be a special phenomenon in China when the city area expanded so fast that the original village is unable to move away. It is kind of a liminal space where the urban area overlaps with rural area, providing a good background for ghost stories.

Taxi Ghost

Nationality: Chinese
Age: 17
Occupation: student
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: Oct 30th
Primary Language: Chinese
Language: English

Me: Could you tell me a ghost story that you heard before?

Z: Sure. I can even create a new story for you.

Me: Really? How is it like?

Z: Listen here. There was a taxi driver who often work during nights. When day, a woman in red took his car, telling him to go to a house in a small village. On the way, the woman was talking with someone through mobile phone. The driver heard from the conversation that the woman’s family was preparing a big meal and was waiting for her. When he finally arrived at the destination, he found that the woman was gone. He then came to knock the door of the house and ask the people inside about the woman. They told him that the woman died last year and they were preparing a meal to commemorate her since it was her anniversary.

context: the story was told in an informal private conversation.

interpretation: Taxi is a kind of common motif in ghost stories. There are also some stories in Japanese culture that are similar to this story, where a ghost, usually a woman, takes the taxi and then disappear when they arrive at the destination, which is usually his/her home. This may be because of the shared tradition of East Asia traditions to commemorate the death at a particular time point when the dead is considered to come back home. These related rituals and motifs are so common in East Asia sense of ghost story telling that they appeared in this improvised story by my friend when trying to create a ‘typical’ ghost story.

Three-foot-high, Solid, and White

Nationality: American
Age: 77
Occupation: Filmmaker
Residence: Buhl, Idaho
Performance Date: 10/26/21
Primary Language: English
Language: Spanish

Context: The informant is a family friend who relates a story that he heard from an associate he met when he lived in the Philippines. I know the informant personally and have no reason to doubt that his telling of the story is accurate. The story was told to the informant in District 2, Barangay Gamu Centro, Isabela Province, Luzon, The Philippines in November, 2014. The language in which the story was told to him is in English.

Text: 

Me: Have you heard of any strange or supernatural stories in your life?

Informant: Yes, I have. So, uhh, the last person in the world I would have suspected to, um, tell me a story of that sort is a very good friend of mine, let’s, uh, call him Kay. Kay grew up in a working class family near, uh, the docks in Liverpool. His father and uncles worked in a factory nearby. And, uh, Liverpool is actually the Beatles hometown, and as a teenager he told me that he used to occasionally catch their act at the Cavern Club.

Me: When and where did you meet Kay?

Informant: I met him in, umm, let’s see here, uhh, I believe it was 2014. He was our landlord in the small village on the island of Luzon in the northern Philippines. We lived there for, uhh, a year in a tidy little cottage behind Kay and his wife’s house.

Kay met and married his wife in Dubai, let’s call her, um, Jay. Kay then quit his job as a power plant engineer for the Saudi Arabian national oil company, and, uh, they moved to Jay’s home village in the Philippines to take life easy.

Kay was a big man, a real tough man, who had worked in the murderous heat of the Saudi oil fields for about, uhh, 25 years from what I recall. It’s hot in the Philippines, too, and when we first met him, Kay was dressed in his daily uniform of, um, a pair of loose shorts and flip flops. I remember how *chuckle* Kay bragged that he hadn’t worn a shirt in ten years, and I *chuckle* I never saw Kay in a shirt once during that year we lived in his house.

Me: So what was the story that Kay told you?

Informant: I’ll get to that, but first you have to know that, uh, there was nothing fancy about Kay. He was a westerner, and, um, he prided himself on being tough, belligerent, outspoken, and being able to design and build anything he could imagine in his wonderfully creative mind. You can imagine my surprise, when he told us this story:

Jay, Kay’s Filipina wife, was, um, how should I say it, somewhat superstitious. She wouldn’t wear red when lightning prowled about during the typhoon season, and, uh, undoubtedly had all the supernatural fears and phobias typical of her neighbors. Kay didn’t fear anything, but he loved Jay and wasn’t too surprised when one day she told him about, get at this, the chicken.

Me: The chicken?!

Informant: The chicken! First it was Jay, and then it was their teenage daughter, let’s, uhh, call her May. They both saw it. Not an ordinary chicken, mind you. They had each seen a three-foot-high chicken walk through their house, out the kitchen door and disappear. A three-foot-high white chicken. *chuckle* It didn’t make a sound, didn’t look right or left, just walked from the veranda, through the sitting room, into the kitchen, out the door, then disappeared.

And, um, this didn’t happen just once, mind you. The chicken showed up from time to time, no special time a matter of fact. Not on Christmas or a birthday! First, Jay and May saw it independently; Jay saw it when May was at school, and then, uhh, Jay saw it when May and her sister-in-law were out back scrubbing clothes in the wash tub. But then, Jay and May *chuckle* saw it together at the same time! A three-foot white chicken calmly walking through their house. 

Kay didn’t see it! He didn’t believe in it! But he just went along with it so as to not make waves with his wife and daughter. Let them see whatever they want to see was the way Kay handled it.  He was totally accustomed to the often unusual beliefs of his friends and relatives in the village.

But that all changed the day Kay was in the house alone, tinkering with the ever problematic air conditioner in the, uhh, sitting room. He turned away to grab a screwdriver or wrench from his tool box, and there it was: A three-foot-high, solid, white chicken strolling through the sitting room not ten feet away! The chicken didn’t make a sound, didn’t look right or left. It just, uhh, sauntered into the kitchen and out the door to the yard. Kay didn’t believe it, but there it was. All of his experience working big power projects in Saudi Arabia and Indonesia, all his drinking and brawling before he met Jay, all his settling down to his farm and taxi business in the Philippines. None explained the three-foot chicken!

Kay didn’t tell Jay and May about it at first. He dismissed the whole thing, until it *chuckle* happened again! Again! And Again! Finally, he had to admit it to Jay and May. They just nodded. They understood. As they said, that’s just the way things happen in the rural Philippines! *laughs*

And after a while, the chicken, uhh, didn’t come back. Kay and Jay and May were all glad about that. Kay especially because the three-foot white chicken was the one thing in his life he never figured out.

Now I, uhh, left out one tiny little detail. Very recently before the sightings of the supernaturally large chicken, Kay’s brother unfortunately passed away. Maybe, just maybe, those dots can be connected!

Thoughts: The story told is an example of a memorate. The informant related a supernatural occurrence as it was told to him by a close friend. The informant also originally wrote down the story to preserve it. I am further protecting the integrity of the story by recording it in the USC Digital Folklore Archives. The story illustrates how supernatural events are perceived differently by persons of different cultures. For example, the wife and the daughter (Filipinos) easily accepted the supernatural events, while the husband and father (Westerner) initially rejected it. The informant told me that this doesn’t suggest that the wife and daughter are not intelligent or perfectly capable individuals. They are simply a product of their rural Filipino culture. The informant himself is at a loss to determine the veracity of the story, and so am I. Furthermore, the informant has no reason to doubt the integrity of the friend who told him this story because he knew the storyteller to be honest and forthright. This is an example of how our credulity is heavily influenced by our personal relationships.