Category Archives: Legends

Narratives about belief.

Spook Road

Nationality: American
Age: 21
Occupation: Student
Residence: Sioux Falls, SD
Performance Date: April 23rd, 2017
Primary Language: English

Background: My informant was young Caucasian man who was born and raised in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. He currently attends the University of Sioux Falls for Biology and History.

Main Piece: My informant made me aware of a historical location known as Spook Road, that exists just outside of the small town of Brandon, SD. Brandon is a suburb of the Sioux Falls Metropolitan area. In this area, there is a county road that is known as Spook Road to local residents. This is because there are many accounts of supernatural events occuring within this location. The most famous has to do with a ritual that many young people take, especially during Halloween. The idea is that there once was a girl there who hung herself on a bridge. What one is supposed to do is, during the middle of the night, you and your friends get in a car and drive down spook road between the main road and the highway. On the way through, you should pass over a series of bridges. You should count the bridges as you cross them going on way, turn around, and then do the same on the way back.  You should count 5 bridges on your way, one-way. However, it is said that if on your way back, you count 4 bridges, you should be very scared. There are various reports of strange happenings on this very long, very narrow road. However, this story has created strong cultural ties for the people. The road is long and narrow, so there have been many attempts to fix it and improve the road, to reduce traffic accidents. However, many in the community have slowed down this progress even to a halt, petitioning to protect the “historical landmark”. The informant also says that there are also old reports of witchcraft happening in the area, though they do not know how accurate or likely this is.

Performance Context: According to the informant, this road is particularly famous in Sioux Falls, especially since many Brandon youth visit the main city. The relative closeness to the main city means Brandon folklore is often spread through hearsay and most people know about Spook Road as a result.

My Thoughts: I think it is interesting because it has gone from being a spooky story to a sort of rite of passage of many of the youth. There is a ritualistic action that many take upon themselves due to the relative ease of access to the story and also the challenge it seems to prod at. It is also something that is very easy to drag your friends into on a cold Halloween night, where everyone is out trying to have a good time.

The 1973 Gitchie Manitou Murders

Nationality: American
Age: 21
Occupation: Student
Residence: Sioux Falls, SD
Performance Date: April 23rd, 2017
Primary Language: English

Background: My informant was young Caucasian man who was born and raised in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. He currently attends the University of Sioux Falls for Biology and History.

Main Piece: My informant told me about the famous 1973 Gitchie Manitou Murders. This story is the story of a young group of teenagers who went to Gitchie Manitou State Preserve in Lyon Country, Iowa. The teenagers were all killed, save for one, who was raped and provided testimony to put the alleged behind bars for life. Back in 1973, these teenagers from Sioux Falls, went camping at Gitchie Manitou, when they were approached by a group of three men who proceeded to kill them using shotguns from their trucks. They then kidnapped one of the girls, brought her to their farm and raped her before driving her home. All the while, they were impersonating themselves as narcotics officers claiming that this was within their rights as officers. Later, a real trooper drove the young woman around until she identified the farm and the truck they had been using. This has spawned a novel by her called “Gitchie Girl” that was released in 2016. It is still a hot topic amongst teenagers and has spawned numerous stories about the ghosts of those that died on that fateful night.

Performance Context: According to my informant, this story is common hearsay, mostly because it is something that was horrific that happened in the town’s history.

My Thoughts: I think it is interesting because it tells us that our ghost stories don’t just come from past crimes, they also come from various historical events that happen even as recent as in the early 70s. We continue to make folklore and even find ways to reflect on the dead through stories about their potential spirits. Although most people will dismiss it, it is probably told very often to children who are camping late at night, as this happened during a camping incident.

Anansi Goat Man

Nationality: American
Age: 21
Occupation: Student
Performance Date: April 25th, 2017
Primary Language: English

Background: My informant was a American who has lived across the country and has learned a lot of stories about other people through her travels.She is currently a student at the University of Southern California studying game design.

Main Piece: My informant told me a story known as the “Anasi Goat Man”. It is a very long form “creepy pasta” (internet horror story) about a group of young teenagers who go out campiong in the woods of Alabama. Throughout the story, the children encounter the smell of ozone, a copper-like smell, that indicates that the Anasi Goat Man is in their presence. At first, the kids are unaware of the creature and search their RV for an electrical malfunction. One of the kids owns a cabin in that area as well where they also own some pigs. They find that the pigs have been ripped up and eaten, which freaks out and scares all of the group. They also see the visage of a man in the woods, although they only see his back. They also begin to hear a “gibbering” from the woods that changes in volume and comes from all around throughout most of the rest of the story. They discover that he is a man with the head of a goat, who gets into groups by disguising itself like a Wendigo, before hunting the group members. The original group started out as 12, but the number dwindles down to 8. Towards the end of the story, they bar themselves into a larger cabin owned by one of the friends cousin. There they barricade themselves in and arm themselves with weapons and wait out the night. Throughout the night, something keeps approaching the door screaming to be let in, banging on the door. Meanwhile the gibbering continues to fade in and out throughout the rest of the night and the smell of copper turns to the smell of blood. Morning comes and the children leave the place. The storyteller who is recounting the tale, however, ends the story by talking about one of the friends who came to them two days after the event. Two days after the strange event in the woods, one of the friends had been nodding off to sleep, when he caught one girl walking out of the bathroom and begin sleeping in the middle of the room as everyone else was. Out of curiosity, he counted the members of the room, and there were one too many. The rest of the night he could not sleep and watched this one girl, even as they left. He was too scared to act against her because he thought the creature might kill all of them, or in their fear, they might use the guns on one another. As he kept his eye on her as they left the campsite, at one point, she slipped away and went into the forest.

It’s supposedly from an account from an actual person, but the informant says that it probably is just because people want to be scared or want to feel like they have had some sort of supernatural event. It doesn’t seem to be much more than an urban legend to her. She doesn’t buy into most urban legends or ghost “crap”.

Performance Context: According to the informant, she read it in an old book before she looked it up online.

My Thoughts: I think it is interesting because it is an example of a much longer form narrative that forms a series of internet ghost stories. There is also special attention made towards making it seem as if an actual account, to not only immerse the reader in its possibility, but also I believe to fall into the recent trend of stories that are from first person youth perspectives such as Cloverfield and other such “found footage” stories.

Russian Sleep Experiment

Nationality: American
Age: 21
Occupation: Student
Performance Date: April 25th, 2017
Primary Language: English

Background: My informant was a American who has lived across the country and has learned a lot of stories about other people through her travels.She is currently a student at the University of Southern California studying game design.

Main Piece: The Russian Sleep Experiment is a story about how they were trying to figure out in a perhaps-WWII era the effects of sleep deprevation on their soldiers. They put a group of soldiers in a room with a porthole. Then, they poured in gas that keeps them awake into the room. For a while, it goes normal, up to a week without any real observable effects. At this time, the mics stop responding and the researchers are only able to look into the room via the viewport.  However, the porthole gets covered some sort of liquid. The researchers attempt to talk to the subjects, but they get no response, at first. They end up turning off the gas and opening up the door. Inside, there are only a small group of the subjects left alive. The rest have been disembowled with blood everywhere, the same liquid on the porthole. The one that are still alive had portions of their body missing, and some of them had their own skin ripped off. Evidence suggested that there were no markings of teeth, and it is suggested that the portions of them missing were by hand. The subjects alive begin shouting and panicking, asking the scientists to turn the gas back on.

They become hysterical as they were screaming to put the gas back on. The scientists tried restraining them, but like in a superhero story, they threw one of the researchers across the room, as if a ridiculous strong superhuman.  Eventually, they wrangle down the subjects. They tried to inject them with morphine, 10x normal dose, did nothing. They try to operate on them, they were immune to sedatives. They put them under anesthetics, his heart stops, and in the autopsy, they discover their is triple the amount of oxygen in the blood of the first subject. The second person had his vocal cords ripped, and wanted to be operated without anesthetic. The doctors operating on the subjects said it’s medically impossible for them to still be alive. Once they were finished, the patient wanted to write a message. When they let them write their message it just said “keep cutting”. Afterwards, only two subjects were left alive. The scientists began to monitor the position of the two that live and noticed that the EEG would hard line several times. They were suffering from repeated brain death at various times.

Then the story ends “really stupidly”, according to the informant. One of the soldiers kills themselves, the other broke out. When they caught the other, the scientists asks what they are. The remaining soldier goes on a rant saying “We are you, we are the madness within you, we are what you hide from at night.” The End. To the informant, this last part makes the story seem the most absurd and unworthy of redemption. The informant said it was “stupid as fuck” and it just another example of stupid internet stories run wild.  “It’s just a lot of gore.”

Performance Context: According to my informant, someone linked it through the internet because they said they thought she was Russian.

My Thoughts: I think it is interesting because it another example of creepy pasta that is on the internet of these strange twisted stories that almost seem to have no evidence, and yet is compelling enough that people read anyways. It makes you question whether the insanity of the story is of value or rather the insanity of its construction at all.

The Wendigo

Nationality: American
Age: 21
Occupation: Student
Performance Date: April 25th, 2017
Primary Language: English

Background: My informant was a American who has lived across the country and has learned a lot of stories about other people through her travels.She is currently a student at the University of Southern California studying game design.

Main Piece: The Wendigo is a Native American story of a cannibal evil spirit. It is an animal-human hybrid that had white skin pulled hard over its bones so that you can see the skeleton. It’s eyes are pushed all the way back so they looked deep. It’s nails would go through its skin, making it bloody. It would eat people. They would explain it, when they would go crazy in the Native American camps, they would lose their minds and try to eat other people. The Windigo was tied to greed. If you got too greedy, you would become a Windigo.

Performance Context: According to my informant, it’s an old folklore that she knew growing up because she was interested in Native American culture. She might have heard it from one of the Native American camps that she visited while growing up when she was doing her own research.

My Thoughts: I think it is interesting because it talks a lot about how cultures apply value to virtue and “sin” (to use a Christian idea). The idea that greed can cause one to lose one’s one mind and succumb to a disease that robs you of your humanity as a marker that lust for money and things are not only deplorable, but by nature they are unnatural and condemnable. This is an interesting idea and strongly suggests the ideals of the Native American culture, esp. of the tribes where this story is prominent and/or originates.