Category Archives: Legends

Narratives about belief.

Ghost in Blues Hall

Nationality: American/Italian/Irish
Age: 19
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: 4/12/18
Primary Language: English

Main Piece: Ghost Legend

My aunt on my mother’s side lives in a small town in Mississippi that’s called bay St. Louis. And she and her husband after Catrina moved out of the house because of bad juju and stuff: they were the only house to survive on the street so they wanted to leave. They didn’t leave the town but they moved to a blues hall up the road, and this specific blues hall is special because during the prohibition all of the town mostly black population gathered in the blues hall had live music dancing and alcohol, and notoriously when you are doing thing that are illegal, bad things are going to happen. Because of their illegal escapades, there were deaths in the hall. My aunt and uncle knew this when they moved in, but they renovated half of it to be a home, and then left the other half and created a business throwing events. About a year or so after living in the blues hall, my aunt calls my mom and says “you wont believe this the craziest thing just happened” she explained to my mom that she heard illegible voices, mumbles, incoherent, coming from somewhere in her house. She walks into the party room and watches her 12 foot table get dragged across the room. But there was no one else in the room. Now she claims that she hears voices an’ that things will get misplaced, and she is very adamant about this. She thinks this is supernatural. Nothing harmful has happened.

 

Background Information:

  • Why does informant know this piece?

It was told to her by her maternal aunt.

  • Where did they learn this piece?

Learned this 5 years ago at a gathering.

  • What does it mean to them?

It’s a story that made her believe in ghosts.

 

Context:

In main piece above

 

Personal Thoughts:

Inexplicable events are often assumed to be the work of ghosts. Even if an event is not witnessed by the person themselves, if they hear it from a trusted relative, they are likely to believe it and therefore believe in the supernatural entity described in the story.

One Way to Scratch an Itch

Nationality: American
Age: 61
Occupation: Homemaker
Residence: Southern California
Performance Date: March 24, 2018
Primary Language: English

My maternal grandpa was from the poorest part of Birmingham, Alabama. His birth father died in a dynamite factory explosion when he was two years old, and his mother remarried a few years after that. Even with a new man, their family was poorer than poor. Some winters, they’d resort to eating shoe leather out of desperate hunger. He had one pair of overalls, and later became an expert marksman out of necessity (he could hit a squirrel between the eyes from 30 yards out). He climbed out of poverty via the GI Bill which he used to get an education here at USC, and then a job as a salesman of medicinal gasses to airline companies and hospitals. He didn’t much like talking about when he was poor – it was not his proudest moment. The one thing he did enjoy talking about from back then was family. Even when you have no money, you have family. As his sister June put it, “it never felt like we were poor. We had so much love in the household.”

 

My mom imbued this same sense of family on me through different stories she’d heard as a small girl from her dad, my grandpa. I’d heard this story before, but it had slipped to the back of my mind. Driving home from lunch one sunny afternoon, I ask her and my dad if they have any stories about the inexplicable that I could use for my folklore project. My mom starts:

 

“When your great uncle – great, great uncle – had… his leg amputated, it was itching itching itching, the stump was itching.  So his family said, ‘go dig up the stump and see if there’s anything wrong with it.  And he did and it was covered with ants.  And so he properly buried it and the itching stopped.  And that was a common belief of the time, in Alabama among Christians a couple generations ago.”

 

I love this story because it plays on so many different levels. On the one hand, it’s a story of a very strange folk belief that has found its way into mainstream medicine.  Phantom pains are a common phenomenon in the paraplegic world. To stop it, many doctors put a mirror up to the intact limb, making it look like their missing limb is still there. Almost immediately, the pains stop, and even when the mirror is removed, the pains are not felt. On the other hand, this story works through the familial lens, as it provides a rather sincere snapshot into life in rural Alabama so many years ago.  In a strange way, it makes perfect sense to dig up the withered limb and clean it off to stop the itching. It’s not like there was any other information out there, they just did what they thought would work and it worked.

 

A Train to Alcatraz: A Contemporary Legend

Nationality: American
Age: 58
Occupation: Attorney
Residence: Tiburon, CA
Performance Date: 4/20/18
Primary Language: English

So they’d convicted Al Capone for tax evasion in Chicago and sent him to prison in the Midwest, uhh Atlanta, I think. When they transferred him to Alcatraz, y’know maximum security – no one gets outta there, and they say his gang was planning to break him out during transit when he was coming through Tiburon on the uhh traintracks– you know the bike train used to be traintracks.

 So the exact route for ‘is move to Alcatraz was… top secret. What they did was made it sound like he was going by either armored truck, maybe by train to San Francisco… But they, uhh, they secretly put him on this train car and chained him to the floor – I mean, they chained him to the floor.

And so the train come into the train depot downtown, where Café Acri is now, and they used cranes to lift the entire car onto a ferry, a uhh uh uh, barge with Al Capone chained to it and then barged him to Alcatraz and completely avoided San Francisco.

This is story I’ve heard numerous times. My dad (aka Paul) has a knack for saying the same thing over and over, paraphrasing himself, retelling stories. My dad mainly tells this story whenever he’s showing someone from out of the area around Tiburon. I may have heard it before, but I still love this story. I remember one day we were walking along the bike trail, the former train tracks, and we worked out that my Great Grandfather almost certainly watched from the porch as the heavily guarded train car passed by his, now our, house.

Interestingly enough, the legend turns out to be true. Around 40 inmates were being moved from an Atlanta prison to “The Rock,” also known as Alcatraz. The warden discovered a plot to free Al Capone in route because an escape from Alcatraz was reportedly impossible. Capone was transported with extra security and, seeing the biggest weakness in security would be the trek through San Francisco, opted to go through Tiburon instead. Al Capone’s train car was placed on a barge and towed via tugboat directly to Alcatraz. There were apparently guards at the Tiburon ferry terminal and in small boats to make sure no other boats came close to the barge.

For more information on this legend, see the following articles from local newspapers like Mercury News and the MarinIJ.

 

The Lighthouse

Nationality: American
Age: 19
Occupation: University Student
Residence: Los Angeles, California
Performance Date: 03/27/2018
Primary Language: English

Main Piece: Lighthouse Point Vicente  

The following was a story told to me by a friend of mine, BS, in my Anthropology lab, and I am DM. The story was about a haunted lighthouse in Palo Verde.

BS: As a kid, I grew up looking at this lighthouse every night. I always saw a women, but I never knew the story of why she was up there. When I began to work at a like local culture center, I finally heard the story about that women. A long time ago, there was a boat called the SS Destroyer, which was an army ship, and they were in a boat wreck. One of the crew member’s wife jumped off the lighthouse after she heard the news of her husband. Now, every night she will go out on to the lighthouse and moan for her dead husband.

Background/Context:

The participant is nineteen years old in his first year of college at the University of Southern California. He is American. In my Anthropology lab, we were sharing folklore with one another for our final project and BS decided to share with us a ghost story he had from his hometown.

DM:Why do you know this ghost story/ Why do you like telling this ghost story?

BS: I know this story because they told me stories as a kid. I also learned more about the story when I began to work in the cultural center.  I like talking about it with other people who saw her and know about the history.

DM: Where/who did they learn it from?

BS: I saw it as a kid, then people told stories about it, then  at the cultural center I saw the story again. I finally looked it up online when I wanted to know more.

DM: Why is this ghost story important to you?

BS: This is important to me because it was my first ghost encounter or experience. This is also important to me because I will never forget how scary it was seeing her every night or sometimes during the day.

Analysis/ My Thoughts:

There was another version of this story which involved the richest family in Palo Verde, the Vanderlipp’s. They say that the lady that is moaning in the night is Mrs. Vanderlipp because they owned that lighthouse. It is more of a claiming her territory type of thing. In class, we talked about how ghosts can cause a real estate problem because the ghosts feel entitled to the land. The land is actually supposed to be passed down to their family, but when it gets sold to other people, the spirits on the property get angry. 

One can also find this story at:

Walton, Stephanie. “A Lighthouse Legend.” Daily Breeze, Daily Breeze, 6 Sept. 2017, www.dailybreeze.com/2008/04/18/a-lighthouse-legend/. This article talks about the same thing as my interviewee said only with more descriptions and more of the facts. The article has more information about what exactly happened to the lady on the lighthouse.

 

 

Padre Sin Cabeza

Nationality: Mexican
Age: 52
Occupation: Housewife
Residence: Los Angeles, California
Performance Date: 04/19/2018
Primary Language: Spanish
Language: English

Main Piece: Padre Sin Cabeza  

The following was an interview of a Participant/interviewee about ghost stories of her hometown. She is marked as MS. I am marked as DM.

MS: Algo que paso ahi donde yo nací. En la iglesia que está en el pueblo que yo nací se muere un sacerdote. La iglesia era una iglesia antigua donde siempre se celebran las fiestas de la virgen de guadalupe. Entonces cada cierto tiempo pasaba que el padre que se murió dicen que le cortaron la cabeza. El alma de ese padre bajaba en la iglesia desde aparte de atrás de la iglesia hasta el frente de la iglesia. En las noches si oía cuando el padre salía y arrastraba las cadenas y el padre murmuraba y lloraba por el patio de toda la iglesia. Mucha gente en el pueblo sabían que era el padre porque mucha gente lo llego a mirar. Hoy, todavía se puede oír las cadenas del padre.   

Translate:

MS: In the church that is in the village that I was born in, a priest died. The church was an ancient church where the festivities of the Virgin of Guadalupe are always celebrated. Then every once in a while they heard the father who died, people said they cut off his head. That Father’s soul was coming down into the church from  the back of the church to the front of the church. In the evenings one could hear when the father went out and dragged the chains and the Father murmured and his cries in the courtyard of the whole church. A lot of people in town knew it was the father because a lot of people saw him. Today, you can still hear the father’s chains.

Background/Context:

The participant is 52 years old. She grew up in Michoacan, Mexico. Maria, who is marked as MS, is my grandma. In her hometown, there is a lot of superstition beliefs that spread throughout the whole town. In this specific story, almost everyone in town heard the chains and cries of the decapitated priest.They heard the priest mostly at night around 12. Below is a conversation I had with MS for more background/context of the remedy, which was originally in Spanish.  

DM:Why do you know this ghost story?

MS: I know this story because I am the one who lived through it. Me and my sister heard stories about the church and we went to see for ourselves what it was like.

DM: Why do you like telling this ghost story?

MS:  I like telling this story because it is something I want people to know what I have been through.

DM: Where/who did they learn it from?

MS: There was stories already in my town of the priest, but I never heard him it until that time walking with my sister.

DM: Why is this ghost story important to you?

MS: Whenever there is a family gather I will be able to tell what I lived through and what my town believed. I want my kids and grandkids to tell it to keep this story alive because I feel like it’s apart of my hometown.

Analysis/ My Thoughts:

This story shows how universal this story was in MS’s hometown. If she was able to hear about it from others, then experience it herself it means that this is true. MS explains to me how her and her sister heard a lot about the priest’s cry before they heard it.