Category Archives: Legends

Narratives about belief.

The Crushed Lady

Nationality: Chinese-American
Age: 19
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles, CA
Performance Date: March 26, 2023
Primary Language: English
Language: Chinese

Text: “So, my mom told me this story. Back when she was younger, she worked on this project in China, and they had to knock down a mountain to do it. But the mountain is a village and people dug out holes in the mountain to live there. So, the people had to flatten the mountain, but one of the construction workers accidentally flattened a woman. And legend has it, people say, the man suddenly switched up and started talking in the woman’s voice. He said, in a woman’s voice, “Who just flattened me?” and then he would switch back to his own voice and the two voices began to have a conversation. They eventually started talking about how they would get together: the woman said that because he flattened her no one would date her, but the man told her that he would. This was terrifying to everyone who saw it, so they took him to a hospital, but no one could help him there. Then they took him to a shaman who couldn’t do anything either. Finally, they went to a butcher who took out two really big knives and hit them against the ground, telling the spirit of the woman to get out, after which the woman finally left and stopped talking. Afterwards, the man snapped out of it and had no idea what happened.”   

Context: The informant is a 19-year old Chinese-American student who heard this story from her mother a few months ago, who was present at the time and place in which it took place. She would not disclose the location where the story took place out of fear that the story was cursed and something bad might happen to her if she revealed any more details. 

Analysis: This supposed firsthand account expresses some very interesting attitudes towards ghosts. In spite of the perceived curse surrounding this story, and how terrified the informant recalls her mother being when she told it to her, I cannot help but wonder if the story would have been even more terrifying and difficult to digest had the woman just been crushed, an innocent life, accidentally and irreversibly taken. Ülo Valk describes that ghosts can be a way for people to process difficult, confusing, and upsetting realities. Perhaps, this ghost story was actually an attempt to assuage the horror of sudden death that the story describes by having the woman live on in the consciousness of the man that killed her. It is also fascinating to consider how the woman’s spirit was removed from the body of the man. Both a hospital and a shaman–traditional sources of healing in most societies–were useless in helping him. It was, as a matter of fact, a butcher, a known facilitator of death, quite the opposite of healing, that was able to successfully exorcize the woman’s spirit. Perhaps, the butcher is symbolic of the very reality that the story refuses to acknowledge: the acceptance of death. I believe the subliminal message in this legend is that death is a harsh, blunt reality, and despite our attempts to lessen its blow by conjuring up spirits or magical awakenings, that reality will never change, and we can only fully heal once we have accepted it in its purest form. This belief may also be rooted in Chinese Buddhist practices where the belief in samsara (traditionally a Sanskrit term), continuous death and rebirth, is widely accepted. According to samsara, no one truly dies, your spirit merely transfers from one form to another, and this story may represent a malfunction in that process, hence why it is viewed as cursed. 

What Comes Around Goes Around

Nationality: American
Age: 63
Occupation: Entrepreneur
Residence: Aubrey, TX
Performance Date: March 26, 2023
Primary Language: English

Text: “So to start, there was a medium-sized town–a long time ago–and there were a few wealthy patrons and some poor people on the outskirts. Some of the wealthier people thought of themselves as above all the poor people who they thought were lazy and didn’t deserve anything. So, there was this guy and his wife riding a horse drawn carriage back home after church, and there was this old lady standing in the road that had her hand out begging for food. The guy who was driving the carriage wasn’t watching and almost hit her, causing her to fall into a ditch. Instead of getting out and helping her up, he just tossed a six-pence at her and then just drove off, thinking “She deserved her lot in life.” However, the old lady was a type of witch, and she put a curse on him. As time went by, the guy noticed that all of his business dealings started crashing, and eventually his business went so bad that he went bankrupt and lost his house, and his wife divorced him. He lost everything, and as he got older and more and more feeble, he had to turn to begging. One day, he was begging on the same road that he first encountered the witch, and this motor vehicle came by and almost hit him and knocked him into the mud. And as he’s laying there in the mud, starving and half drowning, he’s thrown a six-pence by the passing car–the same one he gave the old lady.”  

Context: The informant is a 63 year-old man who was told this story by his grandmother as a child to learn about how treating others poorly might come back to bite you. His maternal grandmother had an ancestral connection to the Salem Witch Trials, which was when this story took place. 

Analysis: This is another example of how a legend can perform an intended social function or reinforce important messages. This story was told to the informant as a child and was meant to instill in him the importance of treating others with dignity and respect. It encapsulates a number of universal messages that every child learns, such as “treat others the way you want to be treated” and, more importantly, “what comes around goes around” (which the informant not surprisingly used as a title). The story is particularly effective at communicating these messages to children especially through its use of polarities and narrative symmetry. The use of polarities and clearly-defined extremes can resonate more effectively with a child who tends to process and understand the world in terms of binaries and in less of a nuanced way. The wealthy man who rapidly descends the socioeconomic ladder to the status of a beggar represents a very clear contrast in order to communicate to a younger audience the consequences of acting insensitively and allows no confusion in terms of portraying his actions as having a starkly negative outcome (the man is “starving and half-drowning” at the end). The story’s moral is likewise reinforced through its narrative symmetry. The legend has an organic ending that perfectly mirrors the way it began, coming full circle as the positions of the old lady and the man are reversed. The old lady, now, is the one throwing change in an identical act to the man in the beginning. The message “What comes around goes around” is thus inherent on an intuitive structural level in the story, where, quite literally, a coin being thrown inevitably gets tossed back. On this level, the message “What comes around goes around” can potentially be translated as “What gets thrown gets tossed back.” This legend is definitely useful for children as it anchors the message in a clear, concrete action that serves as the tangible thematic framework for the entire story. The tactile element of the coin and use of simple binaries throughout the story would naturally appeal to children, so it is no surprise that the informant’s grandmother chose a story like this in order to convey an important life lesson to her young grandchildren. If this story was indeed passed down from the Salem Witch Trials, it may have also been very effective at frightening children (and even adults) who were indoctrinated by the Church into believing in malevolent witches and compelling them to abide by Christian teachings, such as philanthropy and loving your neighbor as yourself. 

The Legend of the Hook

Nationality: American
Age: 63
Occupation: Entrepreneur
Residence: Aubrey, TX
Performance Date: March 26, 2023
Primary Language: English

Text:

Informant: “The story happens in a small town, and there’s a small darkened road that teenagers would go down and park along to kiss and make out. So, the story follows these two teenagers who are parked alongside the road and start to get a little amorous…”

Collector: “Do we know anything about the identities of the two teenagers?”

Informant: “They were just two young kids from the local high school that haven’t been dating for long; they’re very innocent and new to the dating scene, so the whole situation is exciting for them. Anyhow, they’re out, things are starting to get hot and heavy, but they hear some noises out in the woods. The guy rolls down the window and asks, “Hey, is anybody out there? Do you need help?” There’s no response, so they just go back to making out. A few minutes go by, and they hear the same noises again, and the kid rolls down the window and again asks if anyone’s out there. The girl tells him, “Why don’t you go out and take a look?” and so he goes out and looks around the car and sees nothing. He gets back in and rolls up the window, but they hear yet another noise, and this time it sounds even closer, so they start to get concerned. They realize how late it is and decide to head home, and on the way home, they turn on the radio. On the radio they hear that a mass murderer had just escaped from a nearby mental institution and was on the loose. The broadcast described the man as having one defining feature: a hook for one of his hands. And so they’re like, “Oh, well, at least we’re out of that area.” So they drive home, and when they stop in front of the house, the guy gets out to open the door for her, and there on her door handle is a hook.”

Context: The informant is a 63 year-old man who was told this story by his grandmother as a teenager when she was cautioning him against staying out late at night. The informant said that the legend accurately referenced a mental hospital that was close to where he lived as a boy in upstate New York. He explained that the moral is that you can be much closer to danger than you think, and that you should trust your instincts whenever you feel like something isn’t right.

Analysis: Legends can function as a powerful social tool, and this story is a prime example of the kinds of effects that they can have. Legends typically intersect with both reality and some supernatural or extraordinary element(s), which can blend together to become powerful persuasive devices. In this case, this story was used to scare teenagers into behaving responsibly, and I will attempt to analyze how it does so, taking into account the distinctive western context that it is situated in. Teenagers often have a reputation for being fearless and reckless in their behavior, and many American teens, especially, are heavily influenced by the American education system, which arguably prioritizes rational thought and critical inquiry and de-emphasizes superstition and blind adherence to belief. As a result, it is reinforced in many American teens and adolescents with traditional schooling to be skeptical of fantastical monsters and stories. Thus, in an attempt to use storytelling as a method of persuasion for teens, it helps to incorporate some tangible aspect of reality for credence, which legends as a narrative form tend to have. Therefore, in teens, the legend would seem to be particularly effective over myths and tales, which are understood by most at their age as not factually true. The manipulation of reality in “The Hook” is particularly effective here, referencing a real location–a mental asylum–where criminals were really known to be held, in order to give the story a greater rhetorical weight and degree of plausibility. The supernatural element, a deranged man from the asylum, blends so seamlessly with the factual details of the story that I see how it would be highly useful in persuading a skeptical, rebellious teenager (as my informant once was) into avoiding staying out late at night.

Hotel Cecil and Elisa Lam

Nationality: USA and Mexico
Age: 20
Occupation: Student
Residence: San Diego
Performance Date: 4/5
Primary Language: English
Language: Spanish

Context:
The informant is a 20 year old female college student at USC. The performance took place in her dorm room.

Text:
Informant: About 10 years ago, there was a girl who died in a hotel right around here in downtown LA. The footage of her acting weirdly in the elevator was all over the Internet. Some people said that she was possessed by demon and other said that she’s crazy. Her body was later found in the water tank at the hotel couple months later. I don’t really know if they’ve figured out what happened to her, but people said that the hotel has been haunted ever since.

Analysis:
The death of Elisa Lam is one of the famous unsolved mystery that happened in Los Angeles. The legend of haunted places often occurred after peculiar death or suicide. Because of the Internet, the legend has spread worldwide. The building has been renovated into affordable housing complex to help the local unhoused population, though most of the rooms remain empty (https://www.latimes.com/california/cecil-hotel-housing-vouchers-latt-123). The history of the hotel is extremely bothering, see link https://thecrimewire.com/multifarious/Los-Angeles-Cecil-Hotel. The video mentioned by informant, see link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3TjVBpyTeZM (trigger warning: unsettling scene)

The legend of Green Mist in Chino Hills

Nationality: USA
Age: 53
Occupation: Soccer Coach
Residence: Lafayette, CA
Performance Date: 4/4
Primary Language: English

Context:
The performer is a 53 year old male who grew up in Chino Hills. At a family dinner, he told the story about the place he grew up to his three kids, his wife, and a guest.

Text:
A green eerie mist that would cover the ground in chino hills. Chino hills “Hill of Hope” cult compound. This was a real place located deep in the hills and very hard to get to. We had to off road and hike in. It was a fenced compound with guards. There were also rumors of military experiment. I heard about that since I was a kid and I read about an article couple years ago confirming the rumor. But when I was little, no one knows what was happening there and all the young people like to drive up there to do like a dare or something. It’s almost like all the kids have to do it… before they graduate from high school or something. It was really creepy, like straight out of a horror movie. It’s not like that anymore…… They stop experimenting there for couple decades now.

Analysis:
Legends often happen around military-related locations because the secrecy involved could provoke wild imagination. It is also possible that the military base fueled the rumors in order to keep people away from the area. The rumor of a cult in the midst of green eerie mist on top of unknown military experiments also makes the place even more strange and mysterious. This legend was used to keep people out of certain places, but it made people want to challenge the legend more. The legend also developed a legend quest that associates with it and it usually takes place on the verge of transitioning from childhood and adulthood.