Category Archives: Legends

Narratives about belief.

Never Let a Cat Near a Baby

Nationality: American
Age: 53
Residence: NC
Performance Date: 2000
Primary Language: English

My informant for this story is my friend’s mother.

She has always loved cats.  When I would spend time at their house, I would see the cats and pet them and I developed an appreciation for them.  This was fairly new to me, because my family had always preferred dogs so I had never had a great deal of experience with cats.  One time, the cat swiped its claws at my hand and scratched it deep enough to draw blood.

My friend’s mother felt bad and she mentioned something about the fact that cats shouldn’t ever be around babies.  I asked her why and what that meant and she explained the superstition that cats such the breath out of a baby and kill it.  She also explained that the basis for this fear is the multitude of times in history when a cat would smell the milk or lactic acid on a baby’s breath and jump up on to the baby and put its own mouth near the baby’s mouth.  Most times, as is imaginable, the parents thought this was very cute and left it.  But, sometimes the cat would be too heavy and would constrict the baby’s lungs or airway, causing them to suffocate and die.  It is understandable that with the proximity of the cat’s mouth to the baby’s mouth, an association would be made that resembled a cat sucking the life out of a baby.

A Burning Ring of Fire

Nationality: American
Age: 53
Residence: NC
Performance Date: 2002
Primary Language: English

In the mountains of North Carolina, there is still a presence and reverence for Native Americans.  Pieces of folklore are still retold today including the tale of fire.  My informant for this story was my friend’s mother who told it to us on the way to school one day.  The tale starts at the beginning of the world when the bear owned fire.  He used it to warm his people through the cold nights.  One day, bear set part of a forest on fire to roast some acorns for his people.  The fire soared for a while, but then began to die down and called out to Bear to feed it so it could go on burning.  Bear didn’t hear the fire’s cries, but someone else did and he fed it all kinds of sticks and wood.  Bear came back to get fire, but fire was mad that bear had left him to die and he was now owned by man.

My informant recalls hearing this story from her relatives as a child.  She thinks it may serve as a form of remembrance as to how we treat the Earth and how we came to “own” nature and everything it entails.  This Native American tale is certainly unique among the others I’ve heard as it doesn’t appeal to someone’s logic as much as other pieces of folklore.

Daniel Boone’s Ghost

Nationality: American
Age: 53
Residence: NC
Performance Date: 2002
Primary Language: English

The informant for this story was my friend’s mother.  She used to tell us the ghost story of Daniel Boone, a famous North Carolinian.  As she told the piece of folklore, Daniel Boone was fire hunting one night which involves using the light from fire to spot deer’s eyes in the dark night.  As the tale goes, Daniel Boone saw a glimpse of eyes in the night and began to aim his rifle, but he couldn’t bring himself to shoot because he had never seen a blue eyed deer before.  He followed the deer into the moonlight only to find out it was a young lady, not a deer.  Daniel Boone was smitten and they were later married.

Daniel Boone is quite famous in North Carolina and a popular mountain town is named after him.  My friend’s mother told us this story as young men as a way of teaching us about love and chivalry.  I suppose she thought of it as a guide about how to treat women, as Daniel Boone had to woo the young woman.

Devil’s Tramping Ground

Nationality: American
Age: 53
Residence: NC
Performance Date: 2003
Primary Language: English

My informant for this piece of folklore is my friend’s mother.  She relayed a story about how in the “olden days,” farmers in the mountains of North Carolina would wake up in the morning to find that their crops had been trampled during the night.  She described the patterns as circles that looked like people had been dancing around in the fields all night, stomping down the crops.  They couldn’t figure out what was doing it even put out cameras and watchmen at night to try and catch someone in the act.  The perpetrator was never found and it was assumed that it was the devil trampling the crops during the night.

My informant explained that this was not the “crop circles” that most people refer to. It was never a consideration or possibility that aliens were making designs in the crops.  It very well may have been a prank by some foolish kids, but everyone believed it was the devil because they never found any clues as to who could have done such a thing.

Slushbucket

Nationality: Japanese-American
Age: 29
Occupation: Teacher
Residence: Northridge, CA
Performance Date: March 2012
Primary Language: English

“Not too long ago, there was a truck driver whose job was to drive across the country.  But he wasn’t just an ordinary truck driver.  He transported dead bodies.  For 20 years he did this, driving back and forth across the country and never had any problems…

But one day, he was driving through a horrible blizzard on a narrow mountain road.  Suddenly, the truck hit a patch of ice, swerved off the road and was stranded in a ditch on the side of the mountain.  The crash knocked the driver unconscious and by the time he woke up, the truck was completely enclosed in snow.  He tried to open his doors, but he couldn’t get out.

For days, he was stuck in the truck and was forced to eat leather from the car seats.  But after weeks, the starving truck driver had no other choice.  He made his way to the back door of the truck, into the storage container.  He was so ravenous that he opened the caskets and quickly began feeding on the dead corpses… and to keep warm, he used the skins as a coat.  The truck driver now acquired a taste for human flesh.  No one ever found the truck until the snow melted that spring, but only open coffins and scattered bones were found.  There was no sign of the driver…

On one dark and rainy night, a young girl was babysitting.  She had already put the two children to bed and was watching TV, when all of a sudden; she heard a faint noise outdoors,

‘Slushbucket, slushbucket, slushbucket…’

Thinking it was either the TV or the sound of the falling rain outside, she hesitantly returned to watching her program.  After a few minutes, she started to hear creaking, and then footsteps on the second floor of the house.  But thinking it was just the kids getting up for a glass of water, she didn’t pay it any mind, until she heard a voice,

‘Slushbucket, slushbucket, slushbucket…’

This time she heard it much clearer and much louder than before, and it was coming from upstairs!  The babysitter just thought it was the kids playing a joke on her, so she walked upstairs so that she could put the children back to bed.

Soon after, the parents came home, but the house was completely quiet.  They called for the babysitter, and no answer.  Then they went upstairs to check on the children.  Maybe the babysitter was in their room.

But as they opened the door to the kids’ room, they found the babysitter on the floor, with a pool of blood by her side. It looked as if a person had bit off mouthfuls of flesh!  Horrified, they rushed to the children and threw off their covers.  They too had been eaten!  As they turned to rush for the phone, they were stopped in their tracks as they heard staggering footsteps coming from the hallway towards the room, and a rasping whisper with each step,

‘Slushbucket, slushbucket, slushbucket…’”

 

 

My informant first heard this horror story when she was a teenager at summer camp.  She hates scary stories, so she remembers being really scared by this one.  She says she probably retold the story hundreds of times when she was younger to her siblings right before bed and friends around the campfire.  She explained that she hadn’t told the story in such a long time, so she probably added details that weren’t in the version she heard, but she tried to keep the sequence of events the same.  “Horror stories are all about the details,” she said.

The “Slushbucket” story is really similar to other babysitter-themed horror stories, which play on the eeriness and vulnerability of being the only one awake in the house after the kids go to sleep.  Therefore, this story is mostly directed toward teenagers, the age group that is just beginning to baby-sit.  The tale also seems to scare its audience into being apprehensive while babysitting, by showing the fatal result of the nonchalant babysitter in the story.  “Slushbucket” also includes elements of cannibalism, which adds to the horror.  Interestingly enough, when I looked up the definition of “slushbucket,” one of the meanings is “a foul feeder.”  Therefore, this term most likely refers to the fact that the killer is a cannibal.  It’s already bad when a mass murderer is on the loose with knife, but a cannibalistic killer who eats you alive is probably worse.