Category Archives: Legends

Narratives about belief.

Hide and Seek with a Teddy Bear

Nationality: Filipino
Age: 18
Occupation: Student
Residence: Sioux Falls, SD
Performance Date: April 24th, 2017
Primary Language: English

Background: My informant was a young Filipino  girl who was born and raised in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. She currently is a student at the University of Minnesota studying Double B.A. Global Studies and Cultural Studies.

NOTICE: This is the “same” folklore I reported in my Hitori Kakurenbo, but told from a different completely unrelated informant and using a slightly different series of steps. It is most interesting because they learned about it through hearsay rather than through media like the first informant. I will list what is the same below and then follow with a list of discrepancies between the two stories.

Performance Context: According to my informant, the story was told to her by her two friends who are of Chinese and Vietnamese descent. They are not Japanese, but due to their Asian heritage they may have had contact with the original story to some degree. They described the story as of “probably Japanese or Korean” origin.

The Same  

Main Piece: My informant described a strange sequence of rituals that is played by presumably young people who enact a “Bloody Mary”-style ritual to play hide and seek with a demon. You must complete a series of ritualistic actions in order to play with the demon through the medium of a doll. Again, like the original/prior reported, you first take a doll, name it, and you must fill up a bathtub with water. You are also again supposed to play alone and with all the lights off (though the informant did not mention electronics like the prior reported).

The Different

After this, there is many discrepancies in the story. Firstly, the doll is supposed to be something like a Teddy Bear, because you should not (according to the informant) use a human doll. Anything with limbs will do. Then you cut it open with something sharp, not necessarily a knife. In fact, it’s not recommended to be a knife as the doll is said to stab you with it (similar to the prior reported story). Next you must fill it with rice. After this, you have to put something of your body within as well. It can be fingernails or a drop of blood, but either way it must be from you. Then you have to sew it back up with red thread. You then stab the doll. You find a hiding spot. You put the teddy bear in the tub (as prior) and then you go hide. Then, the ending is similar to the other. With your knife, you go back into the bathroom, the teddy bear shouldn’t be there. Then you have to find it and then you have to stab it to kill it.

The informant thinks this type of supernatural event could be real. She did not know whether it was real or not, but she wouldn’t want to try because she wouldn’t want to find out. She seemed afraid and avoided eye contact with me a lot during her description of the story. This is very different from the last informant who previously described it as “psychotic”.

My Thoughts: I think it is interesting because it shows how there are different modes through which stories can be passed. Sometimes they are passed through authored and derivative work, and other times, hearsay and the internet spread the stories to the point of becoming beyond recognition of origin. This new story even used a specific non-Asian doll as the main centerpiece rather than a more traditional doll. It is really interesting to witness the multiplicity and variation myself, as I asked these two informants to separately provide me some folklore, neither of them knowing one another nor knowing they would tell me this story.

The Old Lady and Her Dog

Nationality: Filipino
Age: 18
Occupation: Student
Residence: Sioux Falls, SD
Performance Date: April 24th, 2017
Primary Language: English

Background: My informant was a young Filipino  girl who was born and raised in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. She currently is a student at the University of Minnesota studying Double B.A. Global Studies and Cultural Studies.

Performance Context: According to the informant, she was told this story a few weeks ago by her friend while they were camping. She then while listening remembered her own version of the stories. The two stories ended slightly different.

Main Piece: There was an old lady who lives by herself with a dog. Then there is this murderer going around killing people in “the town”, “wherever she lives”. She hears about it on the TV, so she gets really worried. She realizes that she lives by herself, kind of far from town, so she thinks he won’t come her. The dog normally lays next to her on the floor while she is sitting on her chair. To feel calm and to relax herself, she will always put her hand at the bottom of the chair and the dog will lick her hand. So one night, while she’s alone in her room sleeping, she wakes up kind of freaked out thinking of the murderer. While she’s laying on the bed, to reassure herself, she puts her hand down by her bed and her dog licks her hand. And then she goes back to sleep. Then she wakes up again and then she puts hand by the bedside again, and the dog licks her hand a second time. Then, what happens next differs between the two stories. In the story told by her friend, the morning comes and the woman goes to the backyard and she realizes that she accidentally left the dog tied up in the backyard all night. In the version my informant remembers, she goes to the bathroom and she opens the shower, where the dog is hanging and dead. On the wall of the shower written in blood is “you’re next.”

To the informant, it’s just a scary campside story. It’s scary because of the idea of a strange person licking your hand. It’s a fear based out of the idea of invasion of privacy.

My Thoughts: I think it is interesting because it talks a lot about how Americans often play this thematic motif of invasion of privacy. It derives out of our inability to cope with the idea, in a world that people find perhaps more confusing as information spreads, that there might be people in the unknown that may do unspeakable or strange twisted acts that disrupt our natural understanding of social boundaries and cultural rules. It’s an extension of the fear of the unknown as well as xenophobia.

Bongcheong-Dong Ghost

Nationality: Filipino
Age: 18
Occupation: Student
Residence: Sioux Falls, SD
Performance Date: April 26th, 2017
Primary Language: English

Background: My informant was a young Filipino girl who was born and raised in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. She currently is a student at the University of Minnesota studying Double B.A. Global Studies and Cultural Studies.

Performance Context: According to my informant, the story was told to her by her two friends who are of Chinese and Vietnamese descent. However, she claims that it is a fairly common and famous online example of Korean comics on the internet, especially in horror circles.

Main Piece: The story is based on the 2002 suicide of a woman in South Korea. It is a comic that tells a ghost story supposedly based on true stories about the ghost of this woman who haunts an apartment complex in Bongcheong-Dong. According to the informant and the comic, the woman supposedly killed herself because she was being separated from her daughter due to divorce. In the story, a young girl is on her way home as she heads to the apartment complex. Along the way she encounters a strange otherworldly woman whose joints seem “twisted every way”. The woman demands that the girl tell her where her “baby” is, upon which the girl, too scared to know what else to do, points a random direction to send the woman. The woman then goes off in the direction that the girl points. The girl tries to run away at this point, but soonafter hears a scream from the direction of the woman, having discovered that nothing was in that direction. The woman quickly rushes the girl, and the girl awakens to find out that her neighbors found her passed out.

The comic is interwoven with two jump scares and sound in order to complete the experience.

To the informant, she wonders whether this story is really based on true stories. It seems to be derivative, but according to her, the story was made for a contest. This puts into question the authenticity of the stories origin and whether or not it had actually come from oral traditions. The suicide is supposedly real, and the rumors of the spirit seem to be true, but if they were not, it would not be hard for my informant to believe.

My informant is mainly interested in the story because of how it is meant to be spread to others as a sort of game. It is a viral comic that you want to show your friends because then you can watch as they are horrified as well. It is a sort of bonding that is made by spreading the story. In some ways, the story works in the same regard as many oral campfire traditions in uniting and making connection with others through the oral act of storytelling.

My Thoughts: I think it is interesting because of the reasons that the informant explicitly stated. Storytelling is generally regarded as a form of communication and there is no reason that the discourse of that story cannot also be a way to communicate with others. The horror of the comic serves as a sort of initiation to a inner circle of those that have experienced it versus those that have not and whom can be spread to. There is a special bond formed through the esoteric knowledge of the experience.

Slender Man

Background: My informant was a young American male. He is a game design student studying at the University of Southern California and currently works as a VR Design Intern at Gadget-Bot.

Performance Context: According to my informant, he came to learn the story through viral media. Enough people had talked about it on platforms such as YouTube that he grew interested and looked into the story himself.

Main Piece: In 2009, a comedy website called Something Awful launched a Photoshop contest to create the “biggest creepy pasta”. Creepy pasta is a internet term for scary short-form horror tales that originate and spread on the internet. As part of this contest, some people photoshopped an original creature into some old photographs from a newspaper. The newspaper articles make reference to several children who have disappeared or vanished. My informant says that this is so that the creature could be passed of as even more real. Because of the use of the newspapers, people of the internet started to believe in this creature who became known as Slender Man, for his tall, skinny figure.

Slender Man has now become a legend about this mysterious creature with tentacles who comes, preys and steal children. He is a tall, slender figure with no hair, no face, and white skin. He is often depicted wearing a suit, appearing almost like a man in a morph suit with a business suit over that. Nobody knows why he does so as the origin comes only from photographs. Because people believed in the story so much as real, it spread as a viral internet phenomenon. Also, as a result, people began discussing ways to commercialize and spread the idea of Slender Man. Movies, games, short stories were produced en masse to explain this creature and his behaviors. One of the most famous of these is Slender: The 8 Pages, a horror game that became very popular on the internet through the game platform Steam. Sequels to the games and short films have also been produced and there are “even talks of a full-length feature film”. According to my informant, these derivative works are all a part of a large movement to “cash in” on the idea of this character. To them, they believe he was became so popular not just because people believed he was real, but also because to teh creature’s believers, how genuine and original he seemed. They said it was refreshing to see a story where the character seemed not only frightening, but also “genuinely original”. My informant says that people come up with myths all the time, but that a genuine modern myth that isn’t a rehash or remix of something else was interesting and made it all the more real.

My Thoughts: I think it is interesting because it not only comes across the originality of ideas, but also the canonization and commercialization of these stories as products. To tell stories not only encourages the spread of those stories, but also the ways in which those that hear it want to capitalize and market that story in one or many forms. The way the story was turned from a photograph that had been photo shopped into all sorts of other media suggests that not only is the story can be spread in any or all formats, but that it can also be warped and changed to suit those need and strengths of those mediums. That the story itself has no need for origin as long as it retains the sense of originality and outside of that scope, can be warped to become whatever it needs to be to those that wish to indulge in that media. I think it’s interesting to ponder whether the original form of a story is necessary or perhaps that it might be just a stepping stone for the true potential of a story to deliver an experience to its viewers. It’s a sort of idea that suggests that mutation is inherently a part of the story and that variation should be encouraged rather than discouraged, unlike some other stories that we suggest should have a “proper”, “authentic” or “original form.

The Ghost Girl of Siquijor Cebu

Nationality: Filipino
Age: 41
Occupation: Denial Analyst
Residence: Sioux Falls, SD
Performance Date: April 23rd, 2017
Primary Language: English
Language: Tagalog

Background: My informant was a Filipino immigrant who came to America when she was 12. She was born and raised in Manila before coming to America, her father seeking out new opportunities. She then got married and moved to Sioux Falls, South Dakota and currently works as a Denial Analyst for the Sanford Health Network, the largest hospital network in the Siouxland area.

Main Piece: My informant told me a story about a young girl that her mother told her about. In the small town of Siquijor Cebu, there was a girl who was a very unhappy girl. When my informant’s mother was a young girl, the girl hanged herself on a tree. When she was growing up, people would say that you should never walk pass the tree when it gets dark out. They say if you do, you will hear the girl crying to this day. These kinds of stories are very commonplace in the area, because there are a lot of people that are said to be crazy. The area is known as the Visayas. It is one of the three major groups of islands of the Philippines, being in the center. According to my informant, people that are not Visayans often refer to the area as a place of witches and mythical creatures because of some of the more remote places where strange things are said to occur. However, what most people view this as is the idea that even if it cannot be proven, we are made aware that there are forces beyond our control. Ghost stories and other supernatural tellings are quite common because of this. The informant says that people now probably don’t believe in this anymore, but maybe that they still remain cautious of that kind of thing, in the case that it is true. Witches putting curses on you, and voodoo stories were quite common when my informant was growing up, and maybe that has changed, but perhaps not. After all, they still believe in injuries and afflictions that only faith healers can heal.

Performance Context: According to my informant, the story originates from her mother, who is from Siquijor Cebu.

My Thoughts: I think it is interesting because it talks a lot about the idea of vengeful spirits. This is a quite common motif in stories throughout the world and the idea that some things cannot be explained is quite common in the fiction of every culture. There is also the strong idea that is shown here and shown in the reaction of many people to many stories that we fear their power. That if we cannot say for certain that they are not true or that they hold no weight, we remain wary, just in case. It’s that just in case that makes these kinds of stories all the more interesting.