Category Archives: Legends

Narratives about belief.

The Blood-Sucking Chicken

Nationality: Irish-American
Age: 24
Occupation: Works for a Production Company
Residence: Los Angeles (from CO)
Performance Date: April 25, 2012
Primary Language: English

The informant tells the story of the Blood-Sucking Chicken from his hometown in Idaho Springs, CO.

Bloodsucking chicken

The story of the blood-sucking chicken seems to have been made up by neighborhood children/his brothers from when the informant was a child. There is always a fascination with the dangerous, the scary, and the unknown, all three of which seem to be embodied in the story of the blood-sucking chicken. The informant said that there were a lot of shanties in the mountains around where he grew up. These shanties,

dangerous, abandoned, and most likely forbidden by parents for exploration, are themselves a rich source for spooky/ominous folklore, particularly around children who love to create stories to fit the atmosphere of particular surroundings. The shanties also bring into play the differentiation in class between the informant and his childhood friends and the inhabitants of the shanties in that what their parents deemed unsafe because of socioeconomic standing could have been accepted as dangerous by the children for a completely different reason, seeing as class isn’t usually a big issue among children. So, the shanties themselves provide a backdrop of eeriness and danger, which is augmented by the ominous barn and its mysterious and monstrous contents.

 

I see the blood-sucking chicken itself as the children’s imaginative way to make sense of the dead animals that were found around the ominous barn: the appearance of dead animals around the barn was left unexplained by a voice of authority (that is to say, their parents), so the next logical and most exciting conclusion the children could come up with was that there was some kind of monster inside the barn. And, seeing as the children could easily hear the sounds of the chickens in the scary barn though they couldn’t see them, it fit that the monster was a blood-sucking chicken that would escape from its coop and terrorize the barn’s surroundings at night. And thus, the blood-sucking chicken was born.

 

Another great thing about the blood-sucking chicken and its barn is that going to the barn and hearing the blood-sucking chicken became its own type of legend quest practiced by that informant and his friends, because going to the barn would be a way to show their bravery and to defy the foe that they themselves had created.

Dangerous Albinos on Hicks Rd, in Saratoga, CA

Nationality: Chinese-American
Age: 22
Occupation: student (Fine Arts Major)
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: April 24, 2012
Primary Language: English
Language: Cantonese

There’s one time in high school, there’s this huge myth. There’s this hill called Hicks road, Saratoga, there’s lots of hills and houses. Apparently there’s this albino community that lives there, and if you go on their property they’ll shoot you and you’ll never be found again. So a lot of people like to go on this road that has no street lights for 30 miles, and you can’t see anything in the middle of the night, and that’s where the albinos are with their shotguns. It was like a cool thing if you survived, but everyone survived. I think it came from some man who actually got shot by an albino, and they say it happens to a lot of people, but I think it’s just stupid kids going on their property. But the albinos hate the outsiders, it’s a whole community of albinos, so they say. We’d go cuz you didn’t know if you were gonna get shot. Like curious, mysterious things, because they’re intriguing, even if you know you’re not going to get shot. But it’s like what if you see somebody, an albino with a gun. Then it’s like, ‘it’s true!’ You’d go to say you did it. It’s fun, exciting.

My informant enjoyed this particular piece of folklore because for her, it played on the ‘what if’ factor of the legend: you never really knew one way or another whether there were dangerous albinos around unless you went there and experienced it yourself. She also enjoyed the dangerous aspect of the possibility of facing death at the hands of a scary creature because she found it exciting, even if everybody always made it out okay.

This piece of folklore is a good example of a Legend quest, in which one faces their fears by going down a dark road and encountering dangerous murderers to prove one’s courage and to test the truth behind the legend. This story also feeds into the ‘us vs. them’ mentality of the Others: albinos are societal outliers, and this is scary because it’s a group of marginalized oddities who hate and have it out for the ordinary inhabitants in the surrounding areas, and who will jump at the chance to harm the ‘normal’ people if they cross the property boundaries. The legend quest also involves a way of retaliating against authority: you have to drive down a long and scary road and maybe even sneak onto the bad guys’ property in an act of defiance that shows one’s courage in the face of danger and monsters.

Gravity Hill, Pasadena

Nationality: Taiwanese/Chinese-American
Age: 23
Occupation: Intern at a Film Production company
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: April 25, 2012
Primary Language: English

‘There’s this place in Pasadena called Gravity Hill, and it’s this very foresty, old area of Pasadena where there’s a lot of oak knolls. And I never done it myself, but I remember people from my high school would go. You need a car, first of all, and you drive up to the top of the hill, right at the precipice, and they sit there for a while, and I dunno when exactly, but they somehow feel like they’re levitating. It’s like gravity is reversed there, right at that one sweet spot. But I’ve heard it from many different people that they’ve all felt the same way. And they felt like everything was lifting up right now. They stay in the car and they don’t lift up out of the car but the car itself feels like it’s levitating. You go because it’s a myth, and it seems cool, but it’s also spooky in a kind of, you have to find out yourself kind of way. ‘

This piece of folklore is a legend quest of sorts because it’s an event action that you undertake to prove or disprove the theory going around about the weird things that happen on Gravity Hill. This legend quest is also particularly intriguing because it involves the mysteries of the supernatural and the unexplainable, which is always fascinating and also exciting, because it’s unknowable what will happen when you’re there. The remote location is also key in this piece of folklore because it means that the participants have to undertake a sort of journey to get to the special location where magical things await them.

Tommyknockers

Nationality: Irish-American
Age: 24
Occupation: Works for a Production Company
Residence: Los Angeles (from CO)
Performance Date: April 24, 2012
Primary Language: English

The informant tells the story of the Tommyknockers in his town

Tommyknocker

My informant, who comes from a small mining town in Colorado, says that everybody in his town knows about the Tommyknockers and the mining tunnels. However, he does note that they are indigenous to Idaho Springs, because nowhere else he’s gone has he heard about Tommyknockers, and even people down in Denver don’t know about these creatures and their interactions with the miners.

The story of the Tommyknockers is interesting and rife with cultural history. Most of the people of Idaho Springs either work or have parents who worked in the mines and quarries, which is one reason why the legend of the Tommyknockers is still so well known in the immediate community. These little creatures are of particular importance because of their interesting relationship with the miners of the town. Mining is a very laborious and dangerous job often held by less educated working-class citizens. With these two aspects compounded, it makes sense that the belief in and acceptance of these sprites is so widespread, because Tommyknockers can either lead a miner to a wealth of gold, or to their death, but the miner has no way of knowing one way or another. In this way, Tommyknockers mirror the way the miners live every day down in the mines: they might leave the mines a rich man, or not leave them at all.

Tommyknockers are similar to the leprechauns and other earth spirits in Celtic and English lore in appearance as well as in their defining characteristics. Just like traditional Celtic earth spirits, Tommyknockers are mysterious, dwarfy/leprechaun-type looking wily creatures that can either help or harm the miners in the tunnels of the mines. Not surprisingly, most of the miners in the mining town are of Irish decent, which makes sense why there Tommyknockers are in such close similarity with Irish sí and Celtic earth spirits.

Not only are Tommyknockers very demographic-specific, they are also incredibly location specific. Performing a piece of folklore about—in fact even knowing about—Tommyknockers immediately ties the person to Idaho Springs. And Idaho Springs has taken on Tommyknockers as a sort of town mascot, much like the Irish have done with the leprechaun. Not only do Tommyknockers bring a sense of community to the town with the lore surrounding the mines in which many work, but they also exist outside the realm of work: the town bar is called Tommyknocker Brewery & Pub and features a friendly, miner helmet-wearing Tommyknocker on both its awning and on the bottles of Tommyknocker beer that they brew, showing that the Tommyknocker has been adopted as a sort of mascot of the town, representing the town’s spirit as well as its past.

The Legend of Schloss Rannariedl in Austria

Nationality: Austrian
Age: 25
Occupation: Engineer
Residence: From Austria, currently traveling around North America
Performance Date: April 24, 2012
Primary Language: German
Language: English

The informant shares the legend of Rannariedl Castle in Upper Austria:

Rannariedl

My informant, a native Austrian couch surfing across North America, said that he knew this story because he learned it in school, but that he remembered particularly because the castle, or at least the remains of the castle are 20 km (~12.5 miles) away from the house that he grew up in.

The legend is one of stolen property, which, after many hardships, is serendipitously returned to the rightful owner who had always been a good man. Many different folklore tropes come into play here: the idea of good karma and what goes around comes around plays a large role in the story, as does the idea that eventually, everything will find its rightful place.

Seeing as the story was taught in his history class, there is a large base of belief surrounding the happenings of the story itself, even if it was hard for me to find similar, and as detailed evidence of the truth-value of the story, particularly when the infant boy is sent down the river in a walnut shell. However, it could be possible that there was something lost in translation in the informant’s performance of the piece, seeing as English is not his native tongue, even though he speaks it very well.

This legend can also be found here (text in German, legend is number ‘*104’): http://www.sagen.at/texte/sagen/oesterreich/oberoesterreich/allgemein/schatzheben.html