Category Archives: Legends

Narratives about belief.

Kidney Urban Legend

Nationality: Greek
Age: 50s
Occupation: Software Designer
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: 4/15/11
Primary Language: English

The informant is a male in his 50s. He was born to two Greek parents in New York. He was brought up in the Greek Orthodox Church. He lived in the Bronx for most of his youth before moving to the suburbs in Connecticut. He has worked as a journalist for most of his life, a job in which he spent a good deal of time in the Middle East as a foreign correspondent. He now lives in Southern California as a software developer. He is divorced with three children.

The informant heard this story while working a journalist. Other journalists he worked with would tell it to him, all claiming that the story was completely true, that it happened to their own cousin or another person just one step removed from the teller. The first time he heard it, he believed that it might be true. It intrigued him because if it was true, it would make a very good story for a newspaper or magazine. Although he first thought there might be some veracity to the story, in the journalism business the informant has learned to always be very skeptical of any story presented as “happening to a guy I know” or any such construct. He considers the story to be apocryphal, similar to UFO stories, in as much as it is impossible to confirm, especially for the standards needed in journalism. The informant has had this story retold to him many times by journalists he encounters, each time with some variation in the details, but very rarely, if ever, tells the story himself to other people. He has also heard it told where the man in the story wakes up in an ice filled bath or on a beach.

Text: A guy on vacation wakes up on a park bench in a different country. He wakes up and is in tremendous pain. When he gets a chance to look in the mirror, he finds that there is a gigantic scar on his back. He has no memory of what that might be. And he goes to a doctor and it turns out that one of his kidneys has been removed. He has been kidnapped and his organ removed and sold.

Analysis: This urban legend was told to the informant by his fellow journalists on multiple occasions. This legend probably appeals to that profession for two reasons. Firstly, as the informant indicates, such a story is plausible and would make a very good story. His initial interest in the story was to see if it would be possible to prove and be generated into a journalistic investigation. The second reason this legend was probably so popular among journalists, especially international correspondents, is that, for people who constantly travel around the world by themselves this story might resonate the underlying fears that accompany constant movement in strange locations. In the legend a man is abducted while on vacation and removed to a different country. At least in this version, the victim and crime are connected to travel. International correspondents would of course be comfortable with travel, but they would also be aware of the dangers of constantly moving about alone.

Campfire Story

Nationality: Greek
Age: 50s
Occupation: Software Designer
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: 4/15/11
Primary Language: English

The informant is a male in his 50s. He was born to two Greek parents in New York. He was brought up in the Greek Orthodox Church. He lived in the Bronx for most of his youth before moving to the suburbs in Connecticut. He has worked as a journalist for most of his life, a job in which he spent a good deal of time in the Middle East as a foreign correspondent. He now lives in Southern California as a software developer. He is divorced with three children.

The informant heard this story when he was young, commonly in a campfire situation. He classifies it himself as a “campfire story”, told among young pre-adolescents in situations where spooky stories are being swapped. He had this story told to him multiple times when he was young when someone was called upon to tell a “ghost” story. He considers it a story relegated to youth.

Text: A person is driving at night and a car behind them constantly honking. And he can’t figure out whats wrong and why its… and he tries to let them pass and slow down and pull over and they just keep honking and honking. And of course its because there’s someone in the back seat, an escaped lunatic, they’ve heard about on the radio. And, um, they can see the person but the driver can’t see them so they’re honking to warn the driver, that’s what the misunderstanding was.

Analysis: This story plays on a universal fear among humans. There is always a fear of what is hiding behind your back. Humans fear what they cannot see and behind the back is a constant blind spot. This fear is used in many horror films, when the monster/killer, etc. is commonly standing right behind their victim. This fear is especially compounded by the dark. The story is suited for campfire situations as it prays on a primal fear. It is also suited to adolescents and youths, as the story becomes less plausible if a person is used to driving cars, as it would be extremely unlikely that a driver would not notice someone sitting in the backseat whenever they looked in their rearview mirror.

Ghost story – Hong Kong

Nationality: Chinese
Residence: Hong Kong
Performance Date: 11 April 2011
Primary Language: Chinese
Language: English

This is a story about a haunted school in Hong Kong that Theresa heard from her father when she was growing up. She told me two versions, one that supposedly took place 20-25 years ago and one that takes place when the school was newly built (date unknown). In both cases, the main thrust of the story is the same.

“The school was built when the Hong Kong government were expanding the rural areas to accommodate a large group of low income, low education people to settle away from the city center. The kids were absolute terrors, and the teachers doesn’t care. Generally, most schools in Hong Kong are six or seven stories- concrete buildings, with stairs and hallways running on the outside like balconies. Windows looking into the class rooms run the entire length of the hallway. There were small recesses a couple of square feet in size, that leads into the rooms, offering more protection from the elements. Most schools don’t have a gymnasium, usually they have a courtyard with basketball hoops that also doubles as an assembly area.

“ In one version, twenty, twenty five years ago, the boy was in grade six and by all accounts a little monster. It was after school and he was running down the hall on the third floor when he crashed into the walls outside the staff room. None of the teachers inside noticed when the kid bounced off a wall and fell onto the floor. The kid had a concussion and died on school property, right outside the staff room door. The school swept it under the rug and the parents, being uneducated, poor and most likely influenced by the school, said nothing.

“The second version cast the school in slightly better light. The accident occurred when the school was newly built. The town was still new enough that there were no little to no road signs and most addresses were still using the land’s lot number. The boy was in the courtyard when he fell after climbing something, hitting his head on the ground and lost consciousness. The school called for an ambulance but it being a relatively new school, and a lack of a real address other than a lot number, the ambulance took too long getting there and the boy died before help could arrive.

“The incident should have ended there and given enough time people would have forgotten it, except not long after, the janitors noticed some nights there was a student still around the school when they were closing. They complained to the principle that they seen him around the second floor bathroom and the third floor after school, then runs away when they tried to get him to leave, and would the teachers please do something about it. Not much was done and they were told not to talk about it. The janitors got increasingly frustrated since they can’t close the school with a student still inside.

“They finally caught him one night on the third floor. There was a janitor on each end of the hall stairways to prevent him from escaping. The student started running towards the other end of the hall, then turned into the staff room’s door recess. The janitors thought they had him, only he wasn’t there when they arrived and the staff room door was locked and padlocked on the outside. None of the janitors mentioned the student again, except now it’s the school’s worse kept secret, kinda hard not to know when every once in awhile, someone would see a student run down the third floor hallway and into the staff room after school.”

I think this story is fantastically interesting because it stands in contrast to some of the more prominent ghost stories in Hong Kong. A brief internet search revealed many stories related to grisly murders and horrific accidents, while this story stand apart as more of a cautionary tale. There is no way of knowing whether or not this is true but, to me, this story about a school designed specially for low income students to be accommodated away from the city center and where a general atmosphere of apathy persists, even when a student dies, feels like a subtle critique of bureaucracy and class divisions, and I would not be surprised to find similar stories in other cities, both in China and abroad, where there is a significant income gap.

The Bronze Cat

Nationality: American
Age: 22
Occupation: Student
Performance Date: 14 April 2011
Primary Language: English
Language: Japanese

Although Morgan’s narrative is first person, this story clearly contains intrinsic folkloric value and that is how I will analyze it.

“When I was about thirteen or so, I was in a corner store in Wildwood, New Jersey (where I’ve always spent my summers) when a little metal cat caught my eye. I couldn’t look away from it; I was utterly enchanted. I had to have that cat. I had to buy it no matter what. It wasn’t that it was cute; it wasn’t. It didn’t have pupils. It was misshapen. It was bronze and smelled like money. I couldn’t put it down, though–it was like it was begging me to take it home.

When we got home, though, it felt totally different. I looked into its face, which had looked so sweet in the store, and suddenly it looked malicious. It made chills run up and down my spine to be anywhere near it, and I could hardly stand touching it. I felt nauseous and scared. So I left it upstairs and came down to the TV room–it was waiting for me. I rounded on my sister, demanding to know why she’d brought it down, but she hadn’t touched it. Its pupil-less eyes followed us around the room.

We both agreed that it was evil, so we sealed it in a little box with a rubber band and a note that said DO NOT TOUCH, DO NOT OPEN, along with a short story that I made up about its origins. We took it to the attic, where there was a floorboard that, when struck in a certain corner, could be pried open to reveal a hidden compartment. We put the box in there, sealed it, and climbed down the ladder.

It was waiting in our bedroom.

We ran, crying, to our parents, who promptly sealed it in a plastic bag with salt in the fridge while they determined what to do with it. Eventually, they decided that–since no returns were allowed–we would have to donate it. I protested, saying that I couldn’t bear the thought of passing it on to someone else and leaving them stuck with it, and this is what they told me:

“Donating it removes the curse,” they said. “By doing a good deed, you erase it.”

It never came back for us.”

I asked Morgan how her parents knew how to deal with the bronze cat, and she said that among other superstitions she had grown up with, her parents raised her with the idea that salt and cold neutralizes bad luck and curses. “We do this fairly systematically; if we’ve identified an object as being unlucky, it often gets thrown in a baggy with sea salt and put in the fridge. I once did this with the names of the people who were bullying me, and they left me alone until someone threw out the paper.”

Research revealed that this superstition is present in some form in several cultures. In the Jewish tradition, salt- because it was a pure substance- was believed to have a potency to ward off evil spirits. In the Bible, Ezekial 16:4 briefly mentions the practice of rubbing newborn babies with salt.
Among Scottish and English fisherman, touching cold iron was believed to neutralize the evil eye and protect one from demons (possibly because confronting the metal in its safer form neutralized the power that the evil could send into it).

There seems to be a dual lesson to be learned from this story. The first is the age old idea of “Be careful what you wish for.” It cautions both against the desire for material possessions and against engaging with supernatural elements whose purpose one might not know. Although there was not the traditional “wish” in this story, there was the desire for the statue, which ultimately led to the revelation of its malevolent nature. This sentiment can be found in many pieces of classic and popular culture- the Faust legend in both its incarnation as Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus and as Goethe’s Faust in which an intellectual makes a deal with the devil and more recently (and more irreverently) the American film Bedazzled (2000) in which the main character sell his soul for seven wishes, but uses the last one to wish someone else a happy life. His selfless act negates the contract and allows him to keep his soul.

The information about salt in Jewish folk tradition can be found in Jewish Magic and Superstition: A Study in Folk Religion by Joshua Trachtenberg (Forgotten Books, 2008) on page 162.
“Touch cold iron” can be found in Evil Eye the Origins and Practices of Superstition by Frederick Thomas Elworthy (Kessinger Publishing, 2003) on page 222.
Full texts of Dr. Faustus and Faust can be found at Project Gutenberg.

Ghost Legend of Mae Nak- Thailand (Buddhist)

Nationality: Thai
Age: 20
Occupation: Student
Residence: Bangkok, Thailand
Performance Date: April 22, 2011
Primary Language: Thai (laotian)
Language: English

Legend:

About 100 or 150 years ago, there was a married couple in Bangkok. While the husband was gone on military service the wife, Mae Nak (??????), delivered their first-born baby, but because medicine wasn’t as good at that time, she and the baby died during delivery. When the husband came back, nobody in the village told him that Mae Nak and his baby died because they thought that he would be sad since he was expecting to see his wife and baby, who he hadn’t seen in a long time, when he came home. However, he comes to his house and finds Mae Nak and their baby. Everyone in the village saw that the man had gone home and yet was still acting normal, and talking about Mae Nak and his baby as though they were still alive. These people wonder what is going on and talk among themselves but do not say anything directly to him about the death of his wife and child.  Though someone in the village finally comes and tells him that his wife and child are dead, he doesn’t believe them because he sees them still alive.

One day, Mae Nak is cooking a meal in which lime is one of the ingredients, and the lime falls between the cracks in the floor of the house. The husband sees the lime fall and he goes downstairs to pick up the lime. His wife doesn’t know that he is going to get the lime and, because she is a ghost, she extends her arm all the way through the crack of the floor to the ground under the house to pick up the lime. The husband sees this and now he also recognizes that the house appears differently—all of a sudden, he realizes that his house is also very dirty because his wife is dead (he originally thought that it looked very clean). He finally believes what the village people told him about his family being dead. The husband runs away and goes to a village temple, asking a monk to help him.

At the same time, Mae Nak doesn’t know that her husband saw her ghostly arm extend to pick up the lime and so she doesn’t know why her husband left or where he is and goes searching for him. After looking for a long time, she finally finds him at the village temple. When she gets to the temple a group of monks holds a rope together in a circle with the husband in the middle and pray at the same time (a Thai practice believed to protect the person in the middle from spirits) in order to protect him. One of the monks explains to Mae Nak that she is a ghost and that she must go to the ghost world to be reincarnated, but Mae Nak tells the monk that she really loves her husband and wants to stay with him. The head monk then explains that her husband is not hers forever, and that she cannot fight with nature; she must be reincarnated and cannot stay like she is. However, Mae Nak breaks through the circle of monks and the husband runs away from her. She keeps following her husband, and is very sad and angry that her husband doesn’t want to be with her anymore. He explains to her that a man and a ghost cannot live together, but she still doesn’t understand why and they keep arguing.

Finally, a famous head monk (equiv. to a Christian bishop in Christianity, according to the informant), named Somdej Toh (????????) comes to Mae Nak and explains to her the Buddhist concept of non-attachment, teaching her that from birth, nothing is yours—your body, your property, anything—and that being with this man or not being with this man is no different because she is just a part of nature; no matter what happens, everything is the same. Because this monk is such a great teacher Mae Nak understands now and leaves her husband and goes to the ghost world. Still, to this day, when people go to the district in Bangkok, called Prakanong (???????), where Mae Nak and her husband lived, they claim to see Mae Nak’s ghost around the place where her house used to be.

The informant learned this item from his grandmother while he was very young, perhaps 6 years old. The legend is usually told “by parents to young children so that if they misbehave something very bad will happen to them because the ghost of Mae Nak will come and get them.” “If you are concerned about the Buddhist context” then the story is “good and very deep,” according to the informant. However, he does not believe most people care very much about the story’s Buddhist themes, but rather “just as a ghost story.” The informant also states that the story is good because it helped him to “learn about people in an earlier time period and how they lived.”

I agree with the informant that the main purpose and value of the legend, besides its use by elders to scare children into behaving properly, seems to consist in its conveyance of the important Buddhist principle of “non-attachment” as the informant refers to it. However, despite its apparent connection to Buddhist belief and practice, it is interesting to find that one of the main events in the story—the encircling of the husband with a group of praying monks who are  connected to each other with a rope in order to keep Mae Nak away—is actually described by the informant as a practice which is not part of Buddhism but rather is a Thai folk belief. Since this practice ultimately fails with Mae Nak breaking through the sort of “force field” created by the praying circle of monks, while the teachings of the great Buddhist teacher Somdej Toh succeed in convincing Mae Nak to depart her husband and this world, it is quite possible that the legend is in fact asserting the efficacy of Buddhist teaching over mere Thai superstition. Finally, the story need not have a specifically Buddhist message (though this seems very clearly intended) but rather may serve to teach in general that we must know when to let go of something, such as a person or an endeavor, and simply move on instead of foolishly trying to hold on to it.

Upon more closely analyzing the story, I also found that the story’s main dilemma—namely, Mae Nak’s unwillingness to go to enter the spirit world—is resolved only on the third attempt, echoing the importance of the number three which pervades much of American folklore. In the legend, we find that the first attempt to persuade Mae Nak is made by one of the “superstitious” temple monks who is protecting her husband. Next, it is the husband himself who tries to convince his wife that a ghost and a man simply cannot remain together in this world. Finally, the famous Thai Buddhist teacher, Somdej Toh, enters the story for the third and final attempt, so wise and compelling that he is able to successfully demonstrate the foolishness of Mae Nak’s wish to remain with her husband in this world, and persuade her to depart this world for the next.

Annotation:

Nadeau, Kathleen, and Johnathan H.X. Lee. Encyclopedia of Asian-American Folklore and Folklife. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, LLC., 2011.