Category Archives: Myths

Sacred narratives

The Salt Witch

Nationality: American
Age: 22
Occupation: UI/UX Designer
Residence: Los Angles, CA
Performance Date: April 30, 2021
Primary Language: English
Language: Japanese, Latin

The informant grew up in Omaha, Nebraska. Here, he tells the story of an old chieftain from the American Indian Omaha Tribe who encounters a witch after his wife’s passing.

N: There’s the Salt Witch. There’s a chief– I don’t know if he’s of the Omaha Tribe or not, cause there are some stories of chiefs of the Omaha Tribe. But, there’s a chieftain who lost his wife and he basically, like, shut down because his wife was dead. I don’t remember how his wife died. She just passed away, or something?

Um, but he retreated into his hut and the other members of the tribe were like “We gotta vote a new chief in. This guy’s doing shit all”. So one day he just came out of his hut, like, full war dress on adn just fucking leaves. And he, like, comes back a week or something later with a shitload of scalps, like heads, and a buncha salt. 

And the story– like the scalps are like, “Okay. He can still kill white people. Still strong” like whatever. But like, the salt part is he told a story about one night he was trying to sleep and he heard a ruckus. So he went out and he saw a young woman, who was being held down by an old crone about to chop her head off. And the chieftain ran and buried his tomahawk into the old crone’s head. Saved the young woman, and the young woman looked up at him and had his wife’s face. But then, when he reached down to grab her, she, like, disappeared, leaving a buncha salt behind. And he sorta scooped it all up.

People Don’t Eat Shrimps in Yemen

Nationality: China
Age: 75
Occupation: Interpreter
Residence: Shenyang, Liaoning, China
Performance Date: 4/20/2021
Primary Language: Chinese



Backgrounds:

CC was born and grew up in Beijing. He earned a bachelor’s degree in Arabic, and then served as an interpreter for China’s medical assisstance team sent to Yemen. He stayed in Yemen for over 10 years, helping with the communication between the patients in Yemen and the medical workers from China. During his time in Yemen, he got to know many local Yemen people and was able to learn a lot about their culture from local people.

The informant shared this piece of folk practice during an interview via phone call.

The Main Piece:

CC asked: “Do you know that Arabic People (I personally think he’s mostly referring to people in Yemen) don’t eat shrimps? They say that shrimps are made of the dead skins and dirt from Alah’s feet, saying they’re dirty. When I was in Yemen, sometimes we go to the beach, we might see the beach full of shrimps, but nobody takes them or eat them. But we’re Chinese and we didn’t care, so we would collect a lot of the shrimps and we would eat them. But people know shrimps are delicious, so nowadays more and more young Muslims started eating shrimps, but the older ones I know, they don’t eat shrimps at all. “

Analysis:

I know there are some restrictions on what a Muslim can or cannot eat, but I didn’t know it would involve such common foods like shrimps. It is interesting that this habbit of not eating shrimps is linked to the creation of things: the people in Yemen give everything an origin in their creation myths, and shrimps, unfortunately, have a less popular one.

The Old Man At The Beginning

Nationality: Caucasian
Age: 19
Occupation: College Student
Residence: Oregon
Performance Date: 4/24/21
Primary Language: English

Intro

The following is a folk myth that my friend told me. We both went to school together in Oregon, from middle school through high school so I’ve known him for a while. My friend is still at home for college so I asked him to tell me a folk story that he had heard in his childhood. This is a direct transcribed script of what was said in the story, with the various “umm’s” and “uhh’s” omitted.

Story

“Okay, this is one of the only good folk stories I actually know. So I’m just a little bit Native American right, a little bit of the Crow tribe from the Wyoming area I think. This is the only story that I think I ever heard about… probably because it’s pretty important, you know, creation stories and all that. It goes like this. In the beginning the world was just covered in water. And then there was this old guy, I think he was just named Old Man in the story for some reason, not important enough to give an actual name I guess. Anyway, he was looking around, I don’t know if he had a boat or something, but he saw some ducks off in the distance. For some reason the ducks had red eyes, don’t ask me why, I just remember it cause like, why do ducks have red eyes. Anyway he goes up to them and is like ‘is there only water in this world?’ 

And the ducks are like, ‘that’s all we’ve seen but you could try checking underneath.’ 

Then the Old Man tells the youngest duck to dive down and look for land. The youngest duck is down there for a while so the Old Man says, ‘he must have drowned.’

But then the younger duck comes back up and has a ball of mud in his bill. The old guy takes the mud and blows on it three times. They say that the mud grew and filled the earth and that’s how the land got there. I think they believe the Old Man made the land for them.”

Analysis

Of the three folklore pieces that I got from my friend, this was the only one that I didn’t have prior knowledge of going into it. And when I say I don’t have a clue what he was talking about, I mean I thought he was just telling me some made up story. He didn’t know the name of the story, so I had to do some digging into what it might be called. After a while of searching, I found that the Crow people had a deity they would call Old Man Coyote, and that was the man in this story. 

To the Crow people, this was a story that described how the land came to be. To us nowadays, we would see this as a piece of folklore categorized as myth. The Crow people took this story as something that probably actually happened, though my friend obviously does not believe it to be true. Because of this importance in their religion, the Old Man At The Beginning can be considered a sacred narrative of the people. In all my searching for this story, I could only find about three other sources of the story. Despite its rarity, my friend actually told a decent retelling of the story, only missing a few things from the other sources. For another reference, see https://www.firstpeople.us/FP-Html-Legends/OldManattheBeginning-Crow.html.

The Leprechaun

Nationality: Irish, Chinese
Age: 19
Residence: Oregon
Performance Date: 4/29/21
Primary Language: English

Intro

The following is a description and story about Leprechauns in Ireland. My friend first heard the story from his parents, specifically his dad who is Irish. I have known this friend since elementary school. I knew that he had heard many stories about where his parents are from so I asked him to tell me about a few of them. I recorded this over the phone as he was very busy and couldn’t find a time to meet up (also COVID). This is a direct transcribed script of what was said in the story, with the various “umm’s” and “uhh’s” omitted.

Story

“Leprechauns are, they’re like, think of them as like fairies. And you know, a lot of them are like Central European and Northern European, not considering the UK or Norway or Sweden. They have fairies and that’s kinda where you get your traditional Lord of the Rings, type fairies, like D&D and that kind of stuff. But basically Leprechauns are Irish fairies. Traditionally they’re shoemakers or distillers, so they make shoes or they make drinks. And the Leprechaun, at least from my knowledge, it started, at least the folklore and myths of them used to come up more and more during the Irish famine. The reason for that is because during that time the middle class and Ireland was really heavily affected because that was their whole thing. They were just potato farmers. And the great Irish famine happened with the potatoes so they had this idealistic thing that represents in my way of seeing it, the famine. And it’s kind of because, I don’t know what you know about Leprechauns, but it’s basically how they’re inherently evil creatures. They try to trick you and it’s kinda like a Rumplestiltskin type thing. So basically what happens is… the whole tradition of finding the pot at the end of the rainbow, that type meme, that’s where Leprechauns keep all their gold, keep all their wealth. They come out during nighttime, and typically they are like, more known with kids. And kids were told this story because during this time it was really really hard in Ireland. And they wanted to give their children, parents wanted to give their children hope for this. So they’re like ‘hey, the only way to get what you want in life is to outsmart people.’ And that’s kinda where this traditional Leprechaun story came from. It’s like, there’s gonna be really bad people in life, that happens and they’re gonna try and trick you, so you have to be smarter. And that’s kinda where the heart of the Leprechaun story comes from. 

I’m just gonna go ahead and do a brief thing of what the story was like when I was younger. Basically it’s, when you’re a kid, you can get visited by this Leprechaun, or you can get visited by many Leprechauns. They’ll come to you in the middle of the night when you’re sleeping and you’ll wake up and you’ll see it, and then it would go off into the garden or into the forest. And typically the kid would chase it. So they chase it and find this little hut. In the hut they would be either making shoes or brewing, brewing beer or whatever. Since this is some sort of magical creature the kid would be like ‘what kind of magical powers do you have. Or what can you offer me. So the Leprechaun tells the kid about the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. But then there’s like favors involved. They’re like, ‘oh I need leather so I can make more shoes or I need wheat and barley so I can brew more beer.’ So it’s an exchange of sort, but the exchange goes back to hard working mentality, like everything comes with a price. But it also comes to outsmarting the person you’re working with, in this case the Leprechaun. It is really a story about the real world. And it is flavored in this fun-loving and semi-dark fairy tale. In the end sometimes the Leprechaun will die, or he will get murdered by the kid or something. But that’s the story of the Leprechaun.”

Analysis

Hearing what Leprechauns actually were to the Irish people was really fascinating for many reasons. For one, I never thought of Leprechauns as anything more than Saint Patrick’s Day, rainbows, and Lucky Charms (though I did know they had significance to the Irish, I’m not that ignorant). Learning how Leprechauns were actually the Irish version of fairies and the handful of lessons that they taught to kids was really interesting. I think a creature like this and the non-specific of the story would classify it as a myth. I also thought it was funny how my friend threw in the part about the kids killing the Leprechauns so casually. Stories like this are probably important to him because they were probably stories he heard a lot growing up.

La Mano Peluda

Nationality: Hispanic
Age: 30
Occupation: Lead Associate of Operations
Residence: Laguna Niguel
Performance Date: April 19th, 2020
Primary Language: English
Language: Spanish

–Informant Info–
Nationality: United States of America
Age: 30
Occupation: Lead Associate of Operations, Chase Bank
Residence: Laguna Niguel, CA
Date of Performance/Collection: 4/19/2021
Primary Language: English
Other Language(s): Spanish

Main Piece:

The following conversation is transcribed from a conversation between me (HS) and my co-worker/informant (MR).

MR: So La Mano Peluda translates to “hairy hand.” It’s basically an old legend that my parents used to scare me with when I did something that I wasn’t supposed to do, like not taking out the trash or doing chores. So I would literally crawl into a ball at night and make sure that my legs weren’t hanging out of the covers because I genuinely thought that this terrifying hand would come out from under my bed and drag me by my ankles out of my room to who knows where.

HR: Hahahaha. So how old were you when you heard this story?

MR: It went back to when I was probably like 5 or 6. Because I was in school already, and if I didn’t do my homework my mom would be like, “If you don’t do your homework La Mano Peluda is gonna come and get you!”

HR: And do you know where this legend came from?

MR: Well my mom got the tradition from her family in Mexico, but after you asked me about it I did a little googling. Apparently, it was a man’s hand that had survived from the Spanish Inquisition. He wanted to seek revenge on the people who had pillaged his home or something like that. But when I was little, I didn’t really care about the origin and just got freaked out when I thought about an old hand hiding under my bed.

Background:

My informant is my co-worker from my job. She is essentially my supervisor and she enjoys helping me to practice my Spanish and telling me a lot about her culture and heritage. She was raised in a Spanish-speaking household by two parents who both immigrated to the United States from Mexico. She used to be intimidated by the legend of La Mano Peluda as a young child but grew to see it as a funny way that her parents made her do her chores. 

Context: 

The legend of La Mano Peluda was brought up while having a general discussion with my co-worker about her culture and traditions. She had told me about the legend before but I asked her to go more in-depth for the sake of the collection project. We were sitting next to each other on the teller line at work and we would chat in-between customers. 

Thoughts:

The story of La Mano Peluda is a classic legend that is prominent across a wide range of Latin-American cultures. I would equate it to classic American campfire stories where the goal is to scare and entertain the audience. I have heard multiple recollections of this folk tale and they all seem to stem from having a fear of something hiding under one’s bed. For particularly young children, the legend of La Mano Peluda is used as a sort of scare tactic to get them to do their chores, while in older adolecents it is seen as an entertaining folk tale. What is interesting is that there is a pattern of “hairy hand” stories across the globe.

For another “hairy hand” story, see:

Mary Curtis Special to The Star. “Dartmoor Nights and Scary Tales Stir Imagination: SA2 Edition.” Toronto Star, Torstar Syndication Services, a Division of Toronto Star Newspapers Limited, 1990.