This piece folklore was gathered at the San Fransisco trauma recovery center. I met with a group of social workers and over the course of one hour we all got came together in a meeting room and in one big group we decided to go around the table and each discuss folklore from their lives. At the beginning of the discussion I gave a brief description about what folklore could be. After that everyone shared pieces of folklore from their lives.

“I don’t know what to call it but there was this incident in the first house I had ever rented right after I had moved away to college and everything. Me and my older cousin rented this house and when we arrived it just seemed fishy. The door was unlocked when it shouldn’t have been and we got really scared and started to think, “Oh god is somebody in the house.” The logical thing was that there was some kind of squatter living in the house thinking it was empty or some other logical reason but we felt horrible about it and while we were there my aunt was like, “It smells really bad.” I was like “its smells like what” and she said, “it smaller like something dead. It just smells horrible in here.” Both doors were opened, the front and the back and my mother just kept going on about what it smelled like and before we finished checking the house my cousins was like “I don’t feel really good” and my aunt asked him if he felt nauseated and he was like “yeah a little.” so after it saw all said and done she was like “see there is something in this house.It opened the door and it wants you to get out. theres some kind of spirit an it wants you to leave.” So my mother just had this huge belief that there was a spirit telling us to get out. Me and my cousin still rented thee house and we sill lived there for like a year and there were a couple of times where the doors did open suddenly and scared the crap out of us and my mother came with like sage and laurels and like holy water and she did a ceremony where she blessed the house and everything. She went to each side of the house and did a different ritual in each place. Since she did that we never had an incident.”

Final thoughts: One interesting thing is that the only folklore I collected where people seemed to believe that what happened might be real is ghost related folk lore. For some reason people seem extremely ready to believe in the existing of ghost over other supernatural concepts.