Category Archives: Legends

Narratives about belief.

Golem of Prague

Nationality: Latino, American, Jewish
Age: 23
Occupation: User Researcher
Residence: Los Angles, CA
Performance Date: May 2nd, 2021
Primary Language: English
Language: Spanish

The informant tells the story of a famous golem from Prague, its demise, and its supposed future reselection when the Jewish people need him.


M: When I was very young, my grandpa told me a story that he heard from his folks, about the, uh, golem that lives in the old new synagogue attic– of the attic of the old new attic in Prague. Basically like, my understanding of it– I’ve done more research about it in recent years, because its really interesting. 

  But the way I always heard this story growing up is the rabbi of that shul, um, he built a golem, who, i think, originally helped out with, um, like farm work. And helped out in the fields, with the upkeep of the synagogue, so he made him out of clay. And um, put a — he made a necklace that had the word for “life” around it, and he put it around the golem’s neck. So that brought the golem to life, and he, like, kept the shul safe from burglars. He helped out around town. But no one ever saw him except for the rabbi. 

Until one day, he fell in love with a, um, with a German girl. 

L: The Golem?

M: The Golem, yes. And Um, that meant, that a bunch of, uh. . .  anti-semites descended upon the village trying to, like, kill the Golem and his maker. So, what the rabbi ended up having to do is take the necklace off of him so he wouldn’t get killed ‘cause he convinced everyone that the golem didn’t exist. 

And legend has it that the Golem is waiting in the synagogue for the next time the Jewish people need him, to keep us safe. 

Thoughts:
When I heard this story, I like how it fits in with the overall feeling of other Jewish folklore this informant told me. In a separate conversation about another piece of folklore, the informant told me that there is a lot of anxiety and worrying about other Jews in Jewish culture. And the golem, as a protector figure, really showcases and highlights this anxiety. Not only is the golem worried about the Jewish people in this story, but the Jewish people in the story are also worried about the golem and do not want to see him die.

The Origin of Bloody Mary

Nationality: China
Age: "No no no, don't tell them my age"
Occupation: Elementary School Teacher
Residence: Shenyang, Liaoning, China
Performance Date: 2/24/2021
Primary Language: Chinese

Backgrounds:

Ms. Z is an elementary school Maths and Chinese teacher in Shenyang, China. We were having dinner together when I mentioned my folklore collection project. She then shared some of the interesting folklores she’s learned of from the kids in her class or from her colleagues.

The Main Piece:

Z: I recall this ghost story about Bloody Mary going around among my students. So, basically, this Bloody Mary used to be a prostitute. She hated the way men treated her, so she wanted to revenge. Since then, every time when she was hired by a man, she would kill him and then drink his blood. And after she dies she becomes a ghost.

Me: So how do we call her out. I know other versions of this story, and they had their own ways of calling her to appear.

Z: If a boy walks into a dark bathroom, turn off all the lights and then say “Bloody Mary” three times facing the mirror, the ghost’s disfigured face will appear in the mirror, and she’ll scare the boy to death.

Analysis:

The Bloody Mary story might be one of the most famous ghost stories, this time not around America, but around the world, since the elementary school Z works in is in China. It is interesting to see that there are so many different versions of the orginin of Bloody Mary, how to summon the ghost, and the consequences of summoning her. Through all the different versions, we can see how a piece of folklore can have different variations in difference places. I know of classic origin stories of Bloody Mary that is linked to European history, or linked to religion (Virgin Mary). I guess for the reason why the ghost’s origin becomes a prostitute in the Chinese elementary school is this: the kids in the elementary school has little or no knowledge about western religion or western history, because they aren’t taught about them in elementary school. So, their cultural backgrounds and knowledge doesn’t allow for such origin stories. Therefore, the origin of the ghost might then turn into a more relatable story, prostitutes, which exist in almost all cultures, unlike religious or historical figures that are known only to a specific group of people that share the same culture.

For another version of the story, see Bloody Mary by Austen Le

http://uscfolklorearc.wpenginepowered.com/bloody-mary-10/


The White Witch of Rose Hall

Nationality: Jamaican, Chinese
Age: 79
Occupation: Retired
Residence: San Antonio, TX
Performance Date: 3/14/2021
Primary Language: English

This performance is a ghost story told by my grandpa. Now 79 years old, he lived the first 26 years of his life in a crowded house in Old Harbour, Jamaica. He moved to New York in ‘68 and has lived in the US since. A lot of his family still live in Jamaica and the country is still the place of his roots. He is Jamaican, Chinese, and Indian. He has a thick Jamaican accent so if you can read this in a Jamaican accent it may add to the experience. This is a transcribed script of what was said in the story, with the various “umm’s” and “uhh’s” omitted. 

Story

“I was telling them (my family in Texas) ghost stories at the Mo-Ranch… but we call them duppy stories instead of ghost stories. In Jamaica we call them duppy instead of ghosts. I was there telling them around the fireplace duppy stories… but when we told ghost stories in Jamaica no one wants to go to bed because they are too afraid to go to bed. And then the following day I ask them if any of them dream about ghosts. And then Noah (my cousin: 14 y/o) said, “ya, at 3 in the morning it feel like someone was touching my toes.” In Jamaica there’s a true story about a white witch who rose on… near Montego Bay there’s a county, we call it a parish, it’s called Lucy, and there was a lady there from America I think. She had a big estate back in the 1800s and they had a lot of plantations where they did sugarcane and she had hundreds of slaves and she would work them so hard. When they died they would just bury them on the property. And she got so old that… she still had slaves and all that on her plantation… and when she died she used to have a big stallion, a big white horse, that she rides around the property, and it’s rumored that she died and she was still riding around the property on this white horse, a lot of people saw her, or think they see her on this white horse, and they’d be scared of her. So I was telling the kids about this story, saying that this woman would come into your bed and scare you tonight. I guess that’s why Noah dreamt why someone was holding on to his foot that night.” 

Analysis

My grandpa had told this story over zoom to me and the rest of the family, but it was brought up when they were talking about the family’s trip to Mo-Ranch. While sitting around the campfire and entertaining both the kids and the adults, my grandpa told them this story to try to scare the kids. Luckily, the two youngest were not phased and slept soundly through the night. I am not sure where my grandpa learned this story, and neither is he, but to him, it seemed like a fairly common story among his generation of Jamaicans. 

I personally really enjoyed this story from my grandpa. Even though it can be difficult to understand him at times (the Jamaican accent and many paths in the story really don’t mix well) it was still an interesting story. I thought it was funny that he opened by saying how the story was true. I looked the story up and found that there were indeed some elements of it that were true. The story is known around Jamaica as The White Witch of Rose Hall. The story I found on other websites was considerably more in-depth and gruesome than the one my grandpa had told. Perhaps he was censoring it a little so it could be told to the kids. Perhaps his memory was a little splotchy and he just missed some things. Or perhaps that was just the way he had heard the story told. 

Some things missed in the story from other folklore accounts included the name of the ‘White Witch.’ Her name was Annie Palmer, and from other accounts, it said that she was a cruel person. It is said that she had killed not one, not two, but three husbands and enjoyed torturing and killing her slaves. When she died (killed by her slave lover Takoo), a voodoo ritual was performed on her but it was done incorrectly and her spirit was released into Rose Hall. So there were things that my grandpa missed, but he got the overall essence of the story, how a cruel woman now haunted a plantation in Jamaica. 

For another reference to this story, see the link below. https://exemplore.com/paranormal/The-White-Witch-of-Rose-Hall-A-Jamaican-Ghost-Story

Girl Finds Gold

Age: 74
Occupation: Retired
Residence: Oregon
Performance Date: 4/28/21
Primary Language: English

Intro

The following is a folk-legend from my grandpa that heard the story from his mother. My grandpa grew up in the northwest United States and went into the Navy when he was 18. He is now 74 years old. I was told this story when asking about any possible stories that his family had when he was growing up, as he had lived an exciting life, doing many crazy things with his time. He now enjoys fishing and gold mining. I recorded him via phone call. This is a direct transcribed script of what was said in the story, with the various “umm’s” and “uhh’s” omitted.

Story

“Oh I got a story for you. My mother was born in Butte, Montana. Her father, my grandad, when they listed his occupation they listed it as miner. He was a gold miner. And mom tells a story that he told her, some miners were up in the mountains, they were at a camp. It was like seeing the pictures on TV, you know like they do with gold towns? That’s where she was raised until she was about six or seven years old. And there was a creek that her dad, my grandad, that they were operating a sluice box on this creek, they were gold mining. And mom used to say that grandpa used to tell her a story about a girl that had lived there. The girls dad would tell her ‘go off and play, we’re working.’ Well there was another little stream that was near there, and that girl would go and play in the stream… this was in the summertime. And she looked down the stream and there were all these really pretty yellow rocks. So she gathered up all these yellow rocks and put them in her skirt, or whatever she was wearing. Went back to camp and she had a cigar box that she would keep all her precious momentos, in this cigar box. Well she took these yellow rocks and she put them in this cigar box. So one day, her dad was sitting down to eat dinner and he was like ‘oh I hit it big today’ and he pulls out of his pocket a few of these little yellow stones. And the girl was like ‘I got more than that sitting in the creek.’ And he says ‘what!’ So she went back to the cigar box and got these handful of yellow stones out and put them on the table and he about went berserk. And so he said ‘where’d you get these’ and she says ‘in the creek right there.’ So they went back to mine that creek and they found a lot of gold in that creek. Ya, and the only reason they mined it was because of what she found. And she was only like six years old.”

Analysis

This legend about a girl finding gold in a creek that my grandpa told me was something that he thought to be true. He is a big gold miner himself, often just using pans or a sluice box. He taught my dad how to do it and now we sometimes go out to the Rogue River to look for gold with him. It didn’t surprise me that one of the folk-stories he was able to tell me was about gold mining. When trying to find other forms of this story I wasn’t able to find any about a young girl finding gold in the creek. I also don’t know what the creek or river is so that made it impossible to specify if it actually happened. 

The story is also interesting to me because it probably originated sometime in the heart of the gold rush. I think that there may have been a bunch of other gold rush folk stories about people finding a ton of gold in creeks and rivers across the west coast. If I had to guess, I would say that this story my grandpa told me was more specific to the region his mom had been from, but there are many more to be heard around the west.

Pigs Eat Everything

Age: 74
Occupation: Retired
Residence: Oregon
Performance Date: 4/28/21
Primary Language: English

Intro

The following is a folk story from my grandpa. My grandpa grew up in the northwest United States, and went into the Navy when he was 18. He is now 74 years old. I was told this story when asking about any possible stories that his family had when he was growing up, as he had lived an exciting life, doing many crazy things with his time. He now enjoys fishing and gold mining. I recorded him via phone call. This is a direct transcribed script of what was said in the story, with the various “umm’s” and “uhh’s” omitted.

Story

“One thing that I always was told was that pigs, they’ll eat anything. Oh, here’s a story. In 1939 the war started. In 1942 I think the Japanese got into the war. On the west coast, they decided to develop… At least I’m told this was the story (he had heard the story in his days in the Navy), Terminal Island was just a big open gigantic field before it became a port for the government. The army took it over and they built all these port facilities, they had to ship out all this equipment to the people fighting the war against Japan. And so Terminal Island at the time was nothing but a sage brush sticker bush desert. It was full of rattlesnakes, and so how they got rid of the rattlesnakes was they turned pigs loose. Rattlesnakes can’t hurt pigs because they got too much fat. Doesn’t get into the bloodstream. And the pigs would stomp the rattlesnakes and eat em. So whether that’s true or not I don’t know.

But I do know something that happened up here where I live a number of years ago. There was this crazy lady that had these two guys working for her. They got into some kind of conflict and she killed both of them. She chopped up their bodies and fed her pigs. That’s what I’ve been told, I don’t know if it’s true or not. But they say she fed her pigs with the two guys that worked for her. They haven’t been able to find them. So when you hear a story about a pig will eat anything… it will eat anything.”

Analysis

Hearing this weird thing from my grandpa was very interesting. I have no idea how the conversation even came up, I think he might have just remembered a story from his Navy days. But this claim that pigs eat anything is also one that I haven’t heard before. This story has three folklore pieces wrapped into one. The first is the fact about pigs. The second is the story about Terminal Island. And the third is the story about the crazy lady that fed her workers to her pigs. The claim that pigs eat anything is one that I could find many other sources saying similar things. As for the second piece, I couldn’t find any evidence that they actually used pigs to clear out all the snakes. However, it is entirely possible. Terminal Island at one time was called Rattlesnake Island so there were indeed a lot of snakes there. Pigs have also been known to kill snakes out of instinct so the story could be true. The third one I couldn’t find any evidence for being true but that makes sense as it seems like more of a local legend. It was difficult getting stories out of my grandpa that he didn’t experience himself, but when I finally did get some, they proved to be just as wacky as I thought they’d be.