Category Archives: Legends

Narratives about belief.

Child Spirits Still Haunt the Orphanage

Nationality: Caucasian American
Age: 23
Occupation: Student (Screenwriting)
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: 4/24/12
Primary Language: English

Informant Bio

My informant is a USC student who hails from Detroit, Michigan. He grew up in the suburbs around Detroit and attended a private Catholic school, and has great pride in his city. He has a large family with whom he is very close.

He told me this story when I asked him about childhood in Detroit. He said that though sneaking into old buildings was not a huge part of his childhood, visiting the orphanage was something that he remembers doing more than once because he and his friends wanted to see a ghost.

The Abandoned Orphanage

Near where my informant lived in Michigan he recalls a fenced off compound of brownstone buildings that as long as he could remember had never been occupied. He never gave much thought to what it was until one day when a friend of his in school asked him if he wanted to explore it with her.

They were twelve years old when my informant’s friend (I’ll call her Marie) took him into the compound. He found out from her that it had once been an orphanage, but now it was abandoned.. They slipped under the fence at a place where it had been pulled up a bit. Marie’s sixteen year old brother led the way because he had been there before.

When they got inside, Marie’s brother began to narrate their tour of the dusty, empty hallways with stories about how the place was haunted. He said that the orphanage was still haunted by the spirits of the kids who were never adopted.

My informant couldn’t remember any stories specifically, but he does remember thinking that Marie’s brother was not telling the stories well. The stories didn’t have much of a point and it soon became clear that he was only telling them to scare his younger sister.

My informant never saw a ghost in the orphanage, though he, Marie and their friends did sneak back in on other occasions without Marie’s brother. The place large and empty – and they never found anything too interesting there. Barely any furniture or other items remained. Looking back now he’s quite relieved that they never came across anyone who had decided to squat there.

Other children also had stories that they had heard about ghosts in the place, and the ghosts were always the spirits of children. However my informant claims that none of the stories told how the children died, simply that “little Susan” or “Jim Bob” was never adopted, so they haunted the empty halls, still waiting to be taken to a good home. It seems almost as if the stories imply that the children were abandoned there with the building.

Bob’s Frieghter Jump

Nationality: Caucasian American
Age: 23
Occupation: Student (Screenwriting)
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: 4/24/12
Primary Language: English

Informant Bio

My informant is a student at USC who hails from Detroit, Michigan. He grew up in the suburbs around Detroit, attended a private Catholic school there, and has great pride in his city. He has a large family with whom he is very close.

Bob

In the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, my informant’s family has a lake house that they use for family gatherings in the summer. His family is rather large, so these gatherings involve three or four sets of grandparents, anywhere from four to six sets of aunts and uncles, plus my informant’s parents, and up to ten of my informant’s cousins along with him and his two siblings.

At these family gatherings one year, someone brought up a story that they’d heard about a man who leapt off a freighter into Lake Michigan and had never been found. No one knew who that man was, or why he jumped. The family together tried to research the incident online, but couldn’t find a single news story that sounded similar.

Over time the story has been brought up at the gatherings and has become a joke for my informant’s family. Someone in the family decided that the man’s name was Bob, and that somehow Bob was still hanging around the Upper Peninsula. My informant’s sister along with some other young kids from a nearby lake house once came across a large slab of broken rock that they declared “Bob’s Tomb.”

The story has circulated around the lakeside community, and has become a popular legend of the Upper Peninsula. But to my informant, it remains a family joke.

What we call a clothes-pin

Nationality: Caucasian American
Age: 21
Occupation: Film Student (Assistant Cameraman, Director of Photography)
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: 4/7/12
Primary Language: English

Context and Informant Bio

My informant is a female USC film student who is studying to become a director of photography (or DP: the crew member on a film set responsible for lighting scenes and composing shots with the camera). She started learning set procedure and lingo even before taking film classes at USC by volunteering to help out on student sets. Today she is well-versed in set terminology and, as a senior film student, enjoys teaching younger students set protocol.

On this set of a USC student project,  my informant worked as the 1st A/C (first assistant cameraman – assistant to the camera operator). At one point she asked a freshman production assistant (or PA:  a person who can help any department on the set with small tasks, such as running errands) to give her the “C47” she had clipped to her sweater. The PA was unsure what my informant meant, so my informant pointed to the clothes-pin clipped to the PA’s sweater. She then gave the following explanation.

 Transcript

PA: What is, C47?

Informant: Uh, it was a term that was developed back in the day. On equipment lists of stuff, it was listed under C47, so they called them C47s.

Me: And what is it that you’re holding?

Informant: A wooden clothes-pin.

Analysis and Background

There are several variations on the story my informant told about the term “C47” for a clothes pin. Generally the story involves an official equipment order form, as my informant described, on which the order code for clothes pins was C47. Another version of the story I’ve heard plays on the common stereotype of frugal movie studio executives, and tells that when executives saw equipment listed on order forms that they could not divine the purpose of, they would deny the order. So when reporting equipment orders to the executives, DPs would list C47 instead of clothes pins because the number made the item look like important equipment.

Clothes pins are an item found on film sets that it may be hard to think of a purpose for, but they are in fact very helpful. Wooden clothes pins are what the lighting crew use to clip colored filters (called gels) onto lights to give the light a particular hue.

Film sets are full of strange terms for common objects. The legend about C47s justifies the terms with a simple explanation that basically amounts to: that’s just what we call them. More important than the story about the origin of the term however is the use of the story. The story is never told to a seasoned crew member on a set, it is always brought up in the context of explaining the term to a newcomer, like the freshman production assistant in this instance. Learning terms like C47 and the stories behind them is part of the process of learning set protocol. Once you know the terms, you become an accepted part of the crew, and often this basic knowledge allows a crew member to move up from production assistant to grip (crew member in the lighting department), and beyond in climbing the ladder of crew positions.

 

Brady’s Leap

Nationality: Caucasian American
Age: 48
Occupation: Database Manager
Residence: Monterey, CA
Performance Date: 4/19/12
Primary Language: English

Informant Bio

My informant grew up in Kent, Ohio in the 1960s and 1970s. At that time the area was not rural, but it wasn’t urban in the modern sense. Neighborhoods were spread out with forests, lakes, and rivers dividing them. My informant spent much of her time walking and biking along trails to her friends’ homes, and in the summer they would spend much of their time swimming in the lakes. She lived most of her life in Ohio, attending college at Bowling Green State University and living for over ten years in Lakewood, a suburb of Cleveland, Ohio. She considers herself every bit a midwesterner, though she currently resides in California.

My informant told me this story while discussing her plans to visit her family in Ohio this summer.

Legend of Brady’s Leap

My informant remembers first hearing this story in the 7th grade because that was, “around when we studied the Revolutionary War.”

Brady’s Leap is the name for a particular spot on the Cuyahoga River. My informant’s story told of a Captain Brady, who was sent by the American army to scout for the British camp in the Sandusky territory, which today is a large swath of Northeast Ohio. Brady and his men were captured by the British, but Brady escaped and tried to make his way back to the army camp near Pittsburgh. My informant’s story goes that Brady was discovered by Indians (Native Americans), and he was forced to run. When he reached the banks of the Cuyahoga River he was stuck, but to go back meant either re-capture by the British or death at the hands of the Indians. So instead, he took a flying leap across the river and miraculously made it to the other side.

My informant points out that between Brady’s flying leap and today, the river has been widened at that point. She says it was widened to let large supply ships through when the Erie canals were being built. To look at the spot now the leap would be impossible, but back then my informant believes the gap must have been no more than 20 feet for him to have made it across.

Learning the story in school, my informant said it was a way to relate the nation’s history to the area – to give the students a sense of connection to their home and to their country. The story does seem to have a patriotic message about the abilities of the early Americans, and though the legend does not specifically say that Brady was born in or lived in the Ohio territory, by claiming him as a local hero through the naming of a place on the river, it can give the locals a sense of pride in their history.

Certo’s Tailor Shop

Nationality: Caucasian American
Age: 50
Occupation: Professor of Creative Writing
Residence: Monterey, CA
Performance Date: 4/8/12
Primary Language: English

Informant Bio

My informant grew up in New Jersey in the 1960s and 1970s, a classic period of Italian mafia activity in the United States. As a child he lived in Secaucus, New Jersey with his parents and three siblings. His father worked driving a cement truck for the Teamsters Local 560, the union local that was run by the mob boss Tony Provenzano.

My informant now lives in Monterey, California, and will occasionally tell stories about New Jersey when his family from Jersey comes to visit. I was able to take notes on this story during one such family gathering.

Certo’s

According to my informant, Certo’s Tailor Shop was a store in his hometown of Secaucus, New Jersey that was perhaps not-so-secretly run by or, at least used by, the mob. My informant does not know if it was ever proven, but as he put it: “It was reputed that interesting people gathered there, and that interesting things would sometimes be kept there overnight until they could be… uh, well, buried.”

My informant’s belief that Certo’s could have been used to store bodies for the mob temporarily is absolutely plausible to him. Hudson County, New Jersey, where Secaucus is located was the home of notorious Italian mob boss Tony Provenzano, and so stores that were “fronts” for mob activity were simply a fact of life. My informant explained that this was accepted and never something that caused him or his family any anxiety as a child. “This was the lore of the area,” he told me. “And it wasn’t untrue.”