The devil as a suitor in Colombian memorate

Age: 21

Text: “They were living like, in the countryside, you know, whatever, they have this house. And they had, they had like a few maids and one of the maids and one of these maids was like, ‘I like you know, I, there’s this boy that I’ve been talking to, that we’re going on a date.’ And so, you know, my, my great, great grandmother was like, oh, yeah, right, like, ‘Go girl’ or whatever. So. So then, this guy, he comes on a carriage. They hear this carriage like approaching the house. And then and then they hear a whistle. It’s like, really sharp whistle, like, and the girl goes running out running out of the house. She’s like, in the middle of some duty that she’s like cleaning or something. She drops it and she runs out of the house. And they’re like, ‘Well wait, you can’t leave what’s going on? Let me meet him’ like that. ‘About what?’ And she runs out and they take off and then they don’t even see the carriage by the time that they leave, they get out of the house and like ‘oh shit, like, where did you go?’ So whatever. The kind of person she knows he’s kind of like, what? Like, she just left in the middle of like cleaning this thing. Like, what the hell? She comes back later that night? Or no, and then they’re like, oh, it’s taking her forever to get back to like, what the hell? She comes back later that night and she smells. She smells like, like, they don’t know what she’s been doing like grease and like, like, some like burns. Like maybe it’s like some barbecue but just like a weird smell. And she’s kind of dirty like she’s she’s a little she’s not, you know, put together and then like, what the like what has happened, but she was like, ‘I know it was amazing. I had the person whom I love. Oh, I love him. I love him. And they’re like, oh, like you just met. So whatever.’ They’re kind of like ‘okay, that’s weird.’ The next day they they hear the carriage and then and then she goes running up they’re like ‘whoa, okay, we have to meet him but the same thing happened, that she was running suddenly. They’re like ‘okay, she’ll come back tonight. I guess whatever. This is annoying. We got to talk to her about that and she doesn’t come back that night

So they’re kind of concerned. She gets back two days later, in the middle of the day, like, they’re like she like kidnapped like, I don’t know. So she comes back. And she’s, dirty, like, she’s actually like got dirt on her face. She’s got dirt in her like, fingers like, she smells like shit. Like, even worse than before. She didn’t she hasn’t showered you know, she hasn’t bathed or anything. She just gets back their like, ‘what the fuck?’ So they go bathe her. And they’re trying to get answers, like ‘what’s, what happened? How did you get like this? Like, what happened?; She’s like, ;No, no, oh my God, it was amazing. Oh, you don’t even like it was amazing.’ Um, but she’s not telling them anything. ‘Because like, I’m in love with him. You know?’ And so then, at this point, they’re like, ‘okay, you need to rest, like, rest off, we’re gonna take care of you. Like, you can’t, like you have to. She has like cuts like scrapes. A few days go by, and they hear that carriage. And then they hear whatever, but she’s in but she’s still resting in her chambers. She immediately, she gets up and she starts to try to run out. So they were already kind of anticipated it, so they have one of the guards come in. And he’s like, ‘no, no, you can’t leave’ and they’re trying to stop her. And she’s this, like, little small little main woman. She breaks through his grip. She like, you know, she gets through it. She runs out. And so they finally see, they see the carriage kind of going in the distance. And they’re like, ‘oh, shoot, we have to follow her.’ But then they try and follow, and they lost it already. They lost it. They can’t follow her. She’s gone for a week. Another week. They’re like, ‘okay, she’s dead this time. Like she, I don’t think he must be, I don’t know. He must be like torturing her and she escaped every time. She’s I don’t know,’ they don’t know what’s going on. Finally, a month later, she comes back. And she is really fucked up. She’s got bruises, she’s got cuts. She’s, she’s so dirty her like she’s getting like infected wounds. And like, she smells like rotten flesh. Like she smells like, you know. And so they so at this time, they put her in the bath. hey shut her in a room and they have a guard outside waiting by her room. They have everyone taking care of her, like she’s not getting away. And then a few days go by nothing happens. Nothing happens. And then, you know, my great grandma, like a great grandmother. She was like, ‘I can’t deal with this girl anymore. Like she’s running off like, we’re sending her to our cousin’s place.’ So they get her in a carriage. They get the guardsmen, like we’re sending her off. And then they hear back, the guys come back that were in the carriage and they said, ‘;she left in the middle of the night. You know, we’re driving, we’re going through the countryside, and we hear a whistle and we hear another carriage and she took off. She jumped out of the carriage she took off. And we lost her’ and she was like, ‘well, that’s it. She’s never coming back.’ And so yeah, so they were like, Okay, that’s it. A few months go by, and she’s back and she’s back at their front door. She’s, she’s ruined. She’s like, half dead at this point. She’s, you know, and she, she really she stinks. It’s like rotten, burning flesh, like disgusting. So like, they don’t know what to do anymore. They’re like, ‘okay, this is what we’re gonna do. We’re gonna have, we’re gonna have guards, and we’re going to keep watch. And the second that we see that guy come with his carriage, we’re going to follow him.’ So they have guards like sitting in a carriage ready to go whenever he comes. A few nights passed by and she’s getting a little better. Whistle, carriage, they’re ‘like okay, we’re after her.’ So they let her run off, and they follow her immediately. And so this carriage is just, it’s going so fast. But they’re, you know, they’re keeping up, keeping up. And then it’s it they’re going like, who knows where they’re going through the mountains. They’re going all over. And finally it takes like, my grandmother, she was at home. Well this happened. So she heard the story after but, so this whole time the guards are, you know, they’re the people in the carriage. They’re following and following. And they come back without the girl. And my grandmother was just like ‘what happened?’ And the guards were like, ‘we followed for a day, we followed for like 24 hours. It was nighttime. We could barely see them but we saw, we reach this peak on a mountain, and they finally stopped, the carriage stopped and they got off. And so they we were like, ‘what what’s what’s here’ so we get off. We go try and look. But it looks like they have like, disappeared into like this, like mountain. They don’t know what it’s like they go further, they go further, and we see this huge gaping hole in the mountain. And there’s fire coming out of the hole. And, and we peek inside. And there’s a pile of burning bodies and demons’ and they said it was, it was like, you don’t know what it is. It’s like, they were red. Their skin was red. And they were all dancing around the fire. And then we saw the maid. And she was with this man. This man is huge man. Like, dark, like dark. Like you couldn’t see his skin. So it was so dark. And they were dancing. They were dancing around this fire of burning bodies. And they came back and they said ‘we saw hell. We saw hell’. And they’re like, ‘Okay, fuck that girl.’ She never came back

“Oh, I also forgot to say that in the in the first story when she comes back, she was like well I live in another, like the maid, but then they’re like what happened and she said she said ‘I’ve not been harmed this is just from the hurt of life,’ like her scars.”

it’s just the hurt energy every time she come back. I wasn’t harmed. It’s just the hurt of life. It’s just the hurt of life. Yeah. Yeah. Oh no. Oh, we and I also forgot to say so the men come back and they’re like, oh, like we saw hell. So then they’re like, so then they got all the military men. They’re like, like, Let’s go investigate. And they go back to this mountain. It was gone. The hole in the ground was the pit of hell. It wasn’t there anymore.”

Context:

This memorate was told to the informant by his Colombian grandfather. Colombian folklore frequently uses the devil. 

Analysis:

This tale illustrates a “slippery slope” image of a supernatural evil which seduces and possesses. The repeated refrain “Just the hurt of life” suggests some sort of psychological entrapment used to justify her increasingly damaged condition upon return home. The rural setting that frames isolation as a catalyst for the supernatural with Catholic undertones. The repeated motif of the uncatchable carriage, the guard’s futile attempts to restrain her, and the final vanishing of the hell-mouth mountain evoke themes of loss, the limits of rational control, and the inescapability of spiritual forces once they take root. Like most oral folk horror tales, the story functions both as entertainment and as a cultural warning. 

Jose the Ripper

Age: 21

Text: “So they’re telling me that down the road, there’s a mental asylum, where a man named Jose the Ripper sneaks out every night, and as punishment for his crimes, which I don’t remember, he had his arms and legs chopped off. So he sort of scuttles around on the ground, using just his torso and then carries a knife between his teeth. And so when little children are outside at night, and they’re very quiet, they can see his glowing eyes through the bushes and the blade of the dagger being illuminated by them. And when they hear whispering and rattling wind on the windows at night, and they draw the blinds they can see the glowing eyes of Jose the Ripper as he’s about to smash through the window and murder them. 

Context:

“Okay, so I was seven years old and we were staying with some family friends in Spain. I was about seven years old and I was sitting on Julio, our family friend’s lap after having dinner. My siblings were trying to scare me about being outside in the dark at night.”

“And so then, believe it or not, that scared the shit out of me when I was seven. And so I was like crying in Leo’s lap for the rest of the night.”

Analysis:

This contemporary legend imparts a moral lesson, as the informant said, to get children to not be outside during night for their own safety. It does so by tying horror tropes to localized details, the mental asylum where this mutilated killer escaped being “down the road.” The name “Jose the Ripper” is likely a reference to the 19th century British serial killer Jack the Ripper, recast across cultures. 

Protective snake legend/memorate

Age: 21

Text:

We had a land and Romans and Greek people, you know, used to live there. And

my grandpa was saying, like, in our garden, we have,  gold in our garden. They hide the gold before, like, when they’re, escaping from something, you know, like Turkish, when they’re escaping from Turks, like, they hide the gold. there in our garden. Actually, that’s what he says. And also, like, there’s another story that in that land, he says there is a very, very big snake. We call that snake like a mustache snake, that he protects the treasure. He was telling me that he saw that snake. My grandpa was a farmer, and he was doing some farming stuff, and he was in a tractor. And he told me that he saw this snake. He was kind of overreacting, probably, but he told me when they were driving the tractor, one snake jump off the top of the tractor. That’s what he told me, and what he said was, he got a mustache, that snake. And he’s very big. He’s like five, six meters. That’s what he says. Like five meters. And we call, as I said, we call, like a mustache snake. That snake has a mustache, and he protect the treasure. 

Context:

This is a legend told to the informant by his grandfather when he was 12 or 13. It is rooted in the geographical history of Cesme and Alacati, where he is from; the ancient Greeks and Romans did live in the area. In Turkish mythology there is a protective snake deity named Yilan Tanrı, and past peoples having buried treasure is a trope in Turkish legends.  

Analysis:

This legend/memorate has a few functions. It is educational, teaching the informant about the history of the region, and perhaps embeds some Turkish Nationalism; the garden, and by extension the land is valuable because there is gold buried there. The informant’s disbelief in the memorate, saying “that’s what he said, actually” and that his grandpa was probably exaggerating, highlights the partial belief or belief with doubt that lay at the heart of legends. There isn’t a good reference for a snake with a moustache, but the moustache may be a tool the grandfather used to make the story more entertaining for the informant, or a way to make the story his own given the buried treasure and snake are common themes in Turkish legend. 

Turkish Circumcision

Age: 21

Text:

“When I was getting circumcision, all the people was watching me, actually. If I remember, I was in my parents room and a doctor came, and he started, doing a circumcision, to me – actually, that day, my grandpa. called me like my grandpa was over there. They give me a shot to my balls, like local anaesthesia, and I was six, and I remember I didn’t feel anything there, you know. And I was like, freaking out. And I escaped from the house. I started running, and my grandpa catch me, and he told me that, ‘hey, you’re not gonna do it right now. They’re gonna do it in the army. They’re gonna do it in the military, and they do it with the axe, when you’re 20.’ I was like, what? I’m like, I was so scared, you know, I’m like, ‘Okay, I should go back, I guess.’ Because I was so scared. In Turkey, military is mandatory, you don’t have a choice. I was like, forcing, and I went back, and I just made them do it. And as I said, I was like, six, – I have a video too. When I was getting a circumcision, and my aunts were coming in the room, my uncles were coming in the room, you know, they were just watching me. I’m like, and I didn’t know that much, you know, what’s going on. I remember, we do have food and stuff. People is coming more like our inner circle people, like Inner Inner Circle family. They come in and they eat some stuff, you know, and be celebrating that in the hall, in the home, too.”

Context:

“I didn’t know if it’s, like, very important thing, you know, and I didn’t know that much, but I knew that for my grandpa, for example, it was very important”

Analysis: 

This account of the Turkish sünnet (circumcision) ritual, emphasizes both its emotional weight and its communal significance. The informant’s memory blends fear, confusion, and performance, as the procedure becomes not only a medical event but a public spectacle within the family home. The presence of relatives, the filming of the moment, and the celebratory food all reflect the integration of private bodily transformation with familial observation and tradition. His grandfather’s comment—framing circumcision as a necessary precursor to avoid a harsher military version—reflects how elders use symbolic threats and traditional authority to uphold cultural rites. While the child at the center doesn’t fully understand the ritual’s meaning, he perceives its importance through the seriousness with which his elders treat it. 

Turkish Blood apotropaic – protection for car

Age: 21

Text:

“So what we do is, when we buy a car, usually, or when you buy a new thing, something new, it’s kind of brutal, but what they do usually it’s either chicken or like, sheep or something. They cut it and they put the blood in the front of the car, in the hood. They think it’s protected, like, the car, you know. It’s not religious. It’s just like a turkey. It’s just a Turkish thing.”

Context:

This custom seems to stem from animal sacrifice, though the informant insisted the practice today is just a “Turkish thing” and isn’t religious. According to him, this superstition/practice isn’t very popular with young people. 

Analysis:

The blood in this custom functions as an apotropaic, meant to protect a new object. Cars in this example carry special weight because they are very expensive in Turkey, around 2-3 times that in America, so it is a big life shift to purchase one. Though people are distancing themselves from the practice or original belief (first from Islamic tradition, then young people from older superstition) they still perform it.