Category Archives: Legends

Narratives about belief.

Hell’s Gate and the Seven Arches, Indiana

Nationality: American
Age: 29
Occupation: Writer
Residence: Diamond, Indiana
Performance Date: 4/2/12
Primary Language: English

This is an rumor  that has circulated around my informant’s county of rural Indiana, for a long time. Everyone in his high school always knew it, and my informant isn’t certain how far back it goes. There’s rumored to be a tunnel somewhere in the southern part of the Diamond, Indiana called The Seven Arches. My informant and his friends used to go out on the weekends looking for it. They never found it, but someone always knew at least one person that had been there (allegedly).

According to legend, there was a train derailment in the tunnel, and now it’s haunted with spirits. The story was that if you go there at midnight (sometimes it had to be Friday the 13th, as well depending on who told the story) and heard a train coming, that the gates of hell would be open for a short period of time. If you stop your car at night, you will hear laughing, screaming, and then the crash of the train, as if it is derailing over and over again. The graffiti will glow and the walls will drip blood, and if you see your name on the walls of the Arches, you’re certain to die.

 

Slenderman

Nationality: Farmer
Age: 20
Occupation: Student
Residence: Brea, California
Performance Date: 15 February 2012
Primary Language: English

My informant told me about the urban legend of Slenderman, who is a tall, lanky man with extra long limbs that wears a black suit. Slenderman has no face and is very reminiscent of the men in black. The legend of Slenderman is very interesting because he is always seen around children and then after that the children will disappear. The way that she found out about Slenderman was through a youtube series by a channel named Marble Hornets. In the videos, the kid that created the channel explains that his roommate had increasingly gotten crazier while making a student film he called Marble Hornets. While making the film he would get very temperamental and one day he said he was transferring schools and told his friend to burn all the reels of his film. The kid did not what was going on and since he felt bad about throwing away the film reels, he kept them and did not watch them until months after his roommate had left. When they finally watched the reels, the kid realized there were no shots of the Marble Hornets movie, it was all short clips of his roommate; there were also sound clips of heavy breathing. In certain clips, they supposedly see Slenderman and realize that the kid’s roommate feels like he is being followed or haunted.

This youtube series, though fictional, introduced the legend of Slenderman to the mass public. No one actually knows where the idea of Slenderman came from, but there are many pictures online where he is supposedly in the background lurking around. And then, the kids in the photographs have been said to have mysteriously disappeared. Nowadays, my roommate and I often kid around that Slenderman causes the mysterious mishaps in our lives, like lights flickering or mysterious texts that we receive. It seems that ghost stories are always so popular in our modern society. I think that the reason the Slenderman legend might have been made was to scare children into staying with their parents and keeping safe. Supposedly, Slenderman has a hypnotic effect on children like the Pied Piper and kidnaps them that way. If we pair that similarity then with his Men in Black physicality, it is almost like a satirical myth about the secret government and Area 51, a tall man capturing children.

Annotation/Additional Comments: These are current sources for information on Slenderman: http://www.mythicalcreaturesguide.com/page/Slender+Man, http://www.youtube.com/user/MarbleHornets?feature=watch: Marble Hornets is probably the most well known sharer of the Slenderman legend. The Slenderman legend started out from nowhere, but is now so widespread that there are tumblrs and twitter accounts dedicated to him.

The Bunny Man Myth

Nationality: Irish
Age: 30
Occupation: Exec. Assistant of the Dean of USC School of Architecture
Residence: Los Angeles, CA
Performance Date: 25 April 2012
Primary Language: English

“Halloween Night comes around. Nothing happens until midnight. Right before midnight supposedly a bunny or two enters the bridge. Right before midnight his soul (a dim light) walks the tracks above the bridge. When Midnight hits, his soul stops right above the bridge (dead center), and disappears, only to reappear inside the bridge. From then on it’s his soul which lights up the whole area, so brightly that you can’t even see him. That’s when he instantly kills you by slitting your throat and slashing your chest, only to hang you at the edge of the bridge. You can even see the rub marks that have worn away at the rock where the body’s were swinging. Who ever is inside the bridge ends up dead.” -Forbes

This informant grew up in Washington D.C., she would always hear about the urban legend of The Bunny Man Bridge in Virginia, which she claims was also the inspiration for the bunny in Donnie Darko. There is a very old tunnel with an overpass in Virginia. She says that in the early 19th century, an accident occured over the tunnel and it was transporting all these convicts, violent types. Some of the passengers escaped and the police were eventually able to find all of them except for one men. When they were searching for these men, they kept finding half eaten rabbits. So, they named him The Bunny Man and now that tunnel is called The Bunny Man Bridge. Also, my informant said that she heard from her friends if you go to the bridge and you walk halfway through and then turn around you will see The Bunnyman standing there. She had never tried it, but many of her friends had.

The legend of the Bunny Man is actually a very prominent legend in Virginia. The tale goes back to 1903 in Clifton, Virginia where there used to be an asylum, which was later relocated and is now called “Lorton Prison”. In Fall of 1904, many convicts were put on a bus and to get sent to the prison, but an accident happened and many of them fled to try to escape into the woods. They actually had trouble finding two of the convicts, Marcus and Douglas. However, they never found, Marcus, whom they later named The Bunny Man. Then, that October, people started seeing dead bunny’s along the roads again. On midnight Halloween night, a few kids that had gone to the bridge saw a bright light in the tunnel and then were murdered by the same kind of tool that they found in Marcus’ hand almost a year before. “Not only were their throats slashed, but all up and down their chests were long slashes gutting them” and then both guys were hung from the bridge and then the woman on the other side. This then happened for many years in the same way.

So, for this piece of folklore there was a legend component as well as a myth. My informant told me that many teens today still go and try to see the Bunny Man, but the murders only occurred around midnight on Halloween night. Some of the variations on the legend also involve the murderer wearing a bunny suit. Although this story seems farfetched, many of the articles regarding it swear on its truth. I think that these kinds of myths represent the country’s fascination with ghost stories and mysterious unknown. Also, by creating haunting figures and urban legends like the Bunny Man, it could be an attempt to stop teenagers from going to the bridge at night or partying on Halloween Night. In my research about this story, there was actually one girl who stayed away from the bridge at midnight while her other friends stayed to see if the Bunny Man legend was actually real. Supposedly, at midnight, she heard the screams of her friends and by the time she got to the bridge, all her friends were hung. In fact, she was later accused of their murders and ended up being put in an insane asylum for shock. Like other sinister figures, such as Bloody Mary, it seems like each folklore has a myth component as well as a legend behind it and they get more complex in variation as the stories get spread around.

Annotation/Additional Comments: This legend and myth can be found at this source: http://www.castleofspirits.com/clifton.html and http://www.fairfaxcounty.gov/library/branches/vr/bunny/

Supposedly, the Bunny Man had been reported in a few other towns in 1973 and the Fox Family Channel series “Scariest Places on Earth” did a segment called “Terror on Bunnyman Bridge’ in 2001.

 

Annotated Piece 1 – William Wallace in the Movie Braveheart

Nationality: American
Age: Released in 1995
Primary Language: English

The following post is a brief analysis of folklore’s presence in the film Braveheart. It contains several key quotes and examples that indicate how this film showcases the oral tradition of Medieval Scotland.

 

The movie Braveheart, directed by and starring Mel Gibson, could not have been created without the aid of folkloric descriptions of William Wallace. The movie even contains clear examples of how our understanding of the great hero has been shaped by oral tradition.

Gibson chose to insert several examples of this in action in the heart of the movie. While rallying his troops prior to the movie’s depiction of the Battle of Stirling, a peasant soldier challenges Wallace, accusing him of being a fraud, for, “William Wallace is 7 feet tall.” In response, Wallace replies, “Yes, I’ve heard, he kills men by the hundreds. If he were here, he’d consume the English with fireballs from his eyes, and bolts of lightening from his arse” (Gibson, Braveheart).

Later in the film, the audience sees several instances of these exaggerations connected into one montage. The first scene shows an old man speaking to an assembled group around a fire.

He says to them, “William Wallace killed fifty men, fifty, as if it was one”.  The movie then cuts to another scene where a man is speaking earnestly to another across a tavern’s table.

He says, “Wallace killed 100 men, cut through them like Moses through the Red Sea”

These subtle dialogues may not bear significance beyond its humor to the casual viewer, but to an analyst of Folklore, it demonstrates clearly what was occurring all across the Scottish countryside at that time. Wallace was moving from man to myth. This myth is what we see portrayed in Braveheart, and it is what has been canonized into an essential component of Scottish culture.

Childhood Ghost Story: Golfer Al

Nationality: American
Age: 54
Occupation: Camp Director
Residence: Greenwich, Connecticut
Performance Date: 4/2/12
Primary Language: English

The story of Golfer Al is one that I remember from my early childhood. Every summer, I would attend a day camp at a country club a few towns over in Connecticut. While we typically would only engage in day activities, the first weekend of August brought with it the annual “camp-out”. For one night, all of the campers and counselors would pitch tents on the golf course, and enjoy the next best thing to true camping. Although it was 10 years ago, I remember very clearly the camp director bringing all of us together in front of a fire, poised to tell his classic scary story. While I heard the same story again and again, each time it made me quiver just as hard as the previous year.

Unfortunately, I was not able to simply regurgitate what I knew from memory for this assignment. Instead, I made a hopeful call to Round Hill Club to see if Jeff was still the summer camp director. My request was met with disappointment. I was told that several years ago Jeff retired, but now Chris Mason ran the camp. It was a long shot, but I had to at least ask him he had heard of Golfer Al. Immediately Chris cracked up and shouted, “You remember that s@#t? Aren’t you in college?” I told him that yes, I remembered the story and that I would appreciate him telling it from his perspective. I copied what he told below, and to my elation it almost exactly matched what I remember as an 11 year-old kid.

“Many years ago, on a cold, rainy day, a man decided to play a round of golf. This man was Golfer Al. Golfer Al was a brave man, not afraid of the rain or cold, and always up for a challenge. So, out went Golfer Al for his last, final round.

He said goodbye to his wife who was enjoying lunch at the snack bar. She was not suspecting of anything bad to happen. Al had played in bad conditions hundreds of times, what could go wrong?

So with that Golfer Al was off, headed to the first tee. He placed his shiny white ball on a perfectly aligned tee. After taking a step back to gauge the fairway’s length and width, he positioned himself next to his ball. With a slow backswing, Golfer Al eyed the ball like a dog eyes your steak. He accelerated through the ball, striking it perfectly. It flew for as far as Al could make out in the rain. He then set off after it.

This was the last that was seen of Golfer Al. When he did not return after 3 hours his wife assumed he was just having a bad round. After 5 hours she began to worry. When 8 hours passed she decided to call for help.

The course patrol set out in carts with a megaphone shouting “Al! Al!” But it was to no avail. The police arrived first thing in the morning, and searched for the next three days, but found no one. Golfer Al had vanished. Several years passed. With time, everyone forgot about Al, and moved on with their lives.

But then things changed. Members of the club began noticing missing golf clubs from their bags. As dusk approached, gold carts began to stall and even stop working. Something about the club just hasn’t right, but no one can put their finger on it.

Some say that Golfer Al is still out there. They say he is waiting for someone to wander out on the course alone at night, because when they do, they’re not coming back.”

 

Chris concluded his version of the story there, pretty much just where I remembered it ending. After some reflection, it has occurred to me that there may have been more to this story’s purpose than simply temporarily scaring a big group of children. Perhaps it was in fact originally intended to serve as a right of passage in the club’s culture. Chris had been indoctrinated in the story’s main points as a junior counselor. Now, as the director of the camp, he is responsible for continuing the story of Golfer Al with the Round Hill Club community for years to come.