Category Archives: Legends

Narratives about belief.

Mami Wata

Interview: “Essentially its like a water spirit that protects people — but she’s kind of like a mermaid-siren fusion. And she is there to protect people and keep people safe, but also she can lure people in that are ignorant, or other people in that are looking for trouble. And then she’ll trap them in the water and then take them.

I think its kind of along the lines of legends like the Loch Ness Monster and Bigfoot, like they’re native, and they’re there for the land.

I think the reason, like historically the reason it was probably birthed is because of slavery, but it’s just turned into a thing that people are very afraid of now. Even now like my parents, if I were to text my mommy like: can you tell me about Mami Wata, she’d be like: don’t say that name. So its very taboo.

In Terms of experiences, like stories that I heard from family and friends, you know they’ll be out late walking by the beach when they shouldn’t be, like they’re sneaking out of the house or whatever. They’re near the ocean and they start to hear these chants calling them in, and they’re lured in and they go deeper and further into the water and then they’re attacked.

Context: The informant is from a Nigerian Family, but was raised in the US. She remembers hearing the story on multiple occasions from her parents or other Nigerian friends and family.

Analysis: As mentioned by the informant, the legend seems to bear some similarities to guardian spirits seen commonly in folklore, with Mami Wata apparently interested in protecting both the beaches and the people from dangers, although she is not always friendly. The informant also mentioned the theory that the legend either arose, or took on new meaning with the arrival of the slave trade in Nigeria, as a cautionary tale to keep people away from the shore.

Saint George and the Dragon

Interview:

G: “So St. George [pause] well i dont know what order this happened in, but St George was a Roman soldier, and he was told to start killing people who were Catholic, and then the king tortured him and killed him.
At some point there was, in a town, there was a dragon. And he would come every day and they would pull straws for who he would take. And then St. George came and killed it, and i think saved a princess.”

Interviewer: “Is this a true story, do you think, or more of a fairy tale? Do you think there have ever been dragons?”

G: “Yes. Yes, but not like real dragons, maybe the devil.”

Context: The informant comes from a Catholic family. He first learned the story from his mother.

Analysis: There are some interesting similarities between the Legend with the dragon, and the more plausible story of St George’s Martyrdom, with both stories centering around George confronting a powerful force of evil to stop the slaughter of innocents. Perhaps the story of the dragon emerged as a metaphor for the emperor Diocletian, who is said to have put St. George to death.

A’Tix – Yukon Legend

Age: 60s

Context: The informant is now retired, but used to tell the story every year at a summer camp i attended. He does not remember where he first heard the story, but believes it to be at least partially based on real events.


Interview:
H: “I’ll just give you the synopsis, the real story would take twenty minutes… Essentially there were these Americans up in the Yukon in Alaska, two guys, big game hunters. They come to a trading post asking about a good place to hunt, and the natives tell them to stay away from the valley. Well they went anyway. They thought the natives were trying to keep them away because that’s where the best hunting is.

Interviewer: “And what did you say the name of the tribe was?”

H: “Its the Kaska Dena: K-A-S-K-A.
So they went down into the valley, and they don’t find anything the first day. In the night they here a thumping noise in the forest. They had a dog with them, so they wake up in the night and the dog is all ripped to pieces.

Well they decided to stay the night anyway. And when one of the guys woke up, he saw the other guy dismembered too, just like the dog, and no animal tracks or anything, no signs, except there was blood on the branches of the big tree, and he hears the thumping again coming from the tree.

So the guy just starts running, and finally makes it back to the horses. They had to leave the horses because they couldn’t get down into the valley. But when he got back to the village, well not the village but the little trading post, he was all cut up and bruised from running through the bushes and everything. And obviously his mental state was pretty messed up. I think he pretty much went mad.

It’s a real disappearance too, you can look it up.”

Interviewer: “And do you know what the name for the demon is?”

H: “Oh, yes. I think the Kaska call it A’tix.”

Analysis: The story seems to be a combination of several different elements. The Kaska Dena are a real tribe spanning a massive area of Canada and Alaska, and A’tix seems to be a real legend associated with them. As far as I can tell, the Legend of A’tix does not really have much to do with the real disappearance mentioned, which was most likely a reference to the Nahanni Valley, or the “Valley of Headless Men”. While both A’tix and the Valley of Headless men are quite poorly documented online, some accounts claim that over 40 headless bodies were discovered in the valley in the early 1900’s.

It is not difficult to see how these two stories may have become associated, with the legend of A’tix, a man-eating demon serving as the solution to the mysterious corpses, With both taking place in the Yukon, when it was still largely unknown to Americans.

Bigfoot:

Text: 

Interviewer: Can I ask about Bigfoot? 

Dad: Oh, yeah. Big in our family. 

Interviewer: Yeah, can I ask you to explain a bit of why and what it is? 

Dad: It was just growing up in the Pacific Northwest, in the woods. I mean, you gotta figure where my parents’ house is. There was always, I remember, I thought I saw him in the creek… one night. I swear I saw something standing in the creek. And it was long enough that, like, 20-30 seconds of watching something, and then watching something like stand there, like frozen… in the moonlight and then move on. 

Interviewer: And how do you know it wasn’t a person? 

Dad: Because it was 3 o’clock in the freaking morning, and it was at my parents’ house. 

Interviewer: That’s fair. 

Later in the interview:

Interviewer: Can you describe Bigfoot to me?

Dad: Well, Bigfoot was supposed to be, like, a cross between a man, or, say, if, you know, a man and, uh, ape, or Nathander… Neanderthal. So it was like this hybrid creature. With huge feet. And they had all these casts of all the footprints that he’d made over the years, and they proved it, that it had to be, the footprint had to be real, um, because they did weight analysis.

Interviewer: In real life or in the movie?

Dad:  In real life, in like, documentaries. You know, “Searching for Bigfoot”, all sorts of things. 

Context: 

My Dad is white, 60, and has lived in Washington State his entire life. When he was growing up his parents house was fairly remote. It was in a small town, plus the actual house was a bit away from the road, in the forest, and nestled about twenty feet above a creek. He thinks he was 14-15 when this story takes place.

My dad remembers Bigfoot being a huge craze in the 80s and 90s. Everyone was looking for him. He recalls there even being a movie, called about Harry Harry and the Hendersons, about Hendersons running into Bigfoot and taking him home. My parents said that everyone really wanted it to live in their backyard, they were scared of it but also thought it wouldn’t be cool? It was the talk of the town, everyone who believed in big foot (probably half the population) believed they’d have a sighting of bigfoot.

Analysis: 

I think people believe in the Bigfoot legend because it’s fun and plausible. The pacific northwest is undeniably weird and mysterious, there is still forests and undeveloped land, especially back when my dad was growing up, parts that haven’t been really touched by humanity though now that is slowly disappearing. The legend of big foot is a primitive being, some sort of ancestor (either and ape or a neanderthal) who still inhabits the place we have moved away from, the wilderness. It’s something that is close enough to us that we can relate to it but far enough away that it’s novel. It’s close resemblance to humans also means that sightings can happen more commonly and there is room for a greater debate in belief. Did we see a human or big foot? Are those footsteps big enough? My dad’s memorate of this is a clear example, on the surface he just saw a man outside his window, but then you provide the context that it would be very unlikely for a man to be standing in the creak at my grandparents house at 3 AM. One might say probably not, but there is a kernel of mystery and ability to argue and thus the debate continues.

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.