Midget Town

Nationality: American
Age: late 30s
Performance Date: April 1, 2017
Primary Language: English

Oh it was always like have you been to midget town? Because it’s like… Yes, it scared the bejeezus out of me. But it was just like this one way street by the river bed and that the houses are smaller so it’s midgets. But it’s a private… it says PRIVATE STREET:NO TRESSPASSING, that if you drive down the street, midgets will come and chase you with pitchforks.  

This Urban legend came to the attention of my informant through her high school friends and peers. She told me this story as a funny thing she and her friends used to do. This was an urban legend around where she grew up in Whittier, California. She was an active practitioner of this urban legend and found that the houses were indeed smaller for little people, but there were no pitchforks. This piece of folklore was interesting to me because this was a real place that was only nicknamed “Midget Town” a name stereotyped for little people.

Brandon’s Satan worship

Nationality: Mexican American
Age: 26
Performance Date: April 1, 2017
Primary Language: English

So he started studying like he started reading books about Satanism, he was just… he was just really interested in it and it was like probably about a month that he was really into it like buying books and like reading into it and I was like “You need to stop this, like this is creepy, I don’t like it.” So I was against it but, so during that month some weird things were happening. So there were umm… a bunch of flies that would just come into his… just his room, only his room and they would I don’t know where they would come in from but they were just like everywhere in his room. And then one night we were asleep and in the middle of the night like dead silent his guitar just like knocks over and it woke us up because it like you know it made the guitar noise, that was creepy. And the whole month we both had really creepy dreams, in our dreams it was always something about the room, like something was getting us. It was really creepy.

My informant lived through these strange events. She told me this story after the topic of Satan and devil worshippers came up. I found this story interesting because my informant was telling this story about Brandon, an ex-boyfriend who cheated on her. Hearing these strange things about him made me wonder if this was part of the reason for their break-up or part of her method of rationalizing the break-up, as folklore often does with things we do not understand.

The Devil in the Wall

Nationality: Mexican American
Age: 26
Performance Date: April 1, 2017
Primary Language: English

Okay I was really upset about something maybe it was something that happened in school or dance, I don’t know but I was like crying in my room, it was when we had the bunk beds and I was on your bed crying, crying, crying umm… for like an hour or something and you know how we used to have that umm.. The wall used to have like some sort of texture to it. What is that called? Oh no that was the ceiling but it was the wall. The wall had a crack and I was crying, crying, crying and I looked to my right and I swear, it was the lighting and there was a crack in the wall and it looked like the devil’s face like for sure and I told dad and he, I mean you saw it too right? And it was creepy because I had never seen it before, I had never noticed it before until that moment and then uhh… so he ended up just knocking a hole in it and then like re-plastering it to get rid of the creepy devil face.

My informant experienced this piece of folklore and traumatized her to this day. She informed me about this story as everyone was talking about weird ghost stories or satanic stories over dinner. This piece of folklore scared me when I heard it because the informant was talking about the room I used to sleep in every night and I had no idea about the crack in the wall.

The Vibrating Bed

Age: 26
Performance Date: April 1, 2017
Primary Language: English

At Lupe’s house, in Roxxanne’s room in the middle of the night in her room and her and Vincent and ALbert have all experienced the same thing in the middle of the night the bed will vibrate like slightly so and then she’ll go around and ask people “Is that an earthquake, did you guys feel it” and nobody ever feels anything. It’s just her bed vibrates in the middle of the night.

My informant did not experience this piece of folklore firsthand and was told this story by her cousin. This story was told to me at a dinner where everyone was telling ghost stories and strange occurrences that happened to them. What I found interesting about this piece of folklore was that, in the setting that I was in, once people started telling ghost stories, everyone else wanted to chime in even if they had not experienced anything paranormal themselves. They just wanted to be part of the group.

Dream Premonitions: Yolanda

Nationality: Mexican
Age: 41
Performance Date: April 16, 2017
Primary Language: English
Language: Spanish

This had to be about like 15 years ago because we were in our late 20’s when she… umm… when this happened and I just remember it was the wednesday night before Thanksgiving. Yeah, Yolanda was a neighbor that we grew up… that I grew up with, that was a year older than me but her and I were in the same grade so we used to play together  as kids and then when we got older we kinda grew apart, we went to different high schools and we had, you know, different sets of friends and stuff and… so anyway the wednesday night before Thanksgiving  we were living in uptown Whittier in that little yellow house duplex that we had and I hadn’t talked to Yolanda, I hadn’t heard from her, I hadn’t seen her in years. As adults, we hadn’t seen each other in a long time. The last time I saw her she had just had a baby and she was walking her baby around in the neighborhood by my mother’s house and I remember going outside saying “Aww let me see your baby, she’s so cute!” and it was like two months… the baby was like two months old. So, I had this umm…I had this umm… dream about her and in my dream I was the same age I was as an adult. I think I was like 27 or 28 at the time and but Yolanda came to me as a little girl and how I remember her when she was little. When she got older, I mean the last… like I said the last time I saw her she had just had a baby but she had gained a lot of weight and I just assumed it was from the baby, but when we were little she was like the scrawny, boney little kid… little blond girl.And so, in my dream I was an adult but she was little girl and I don’t remember anything specific about the dream other than I dreamt about her and I just remember waking up in the morning on Thanksgiving morning thinking “God that was so weird, like why would I dream about her, I haven’t talked to her in a long time,” I haven’t like nothing in my mind had kind of provoked thinking about her other than to think, “Oh well maybe I’m gonna see her, because I’m gonna go to my mom’s house and if she goes to her mom’s house for Thanksgiving so … I… I figured well maybe I’ll see her today because I’m going to my mom’s house and maybe she’ll be at her mom’s for Thanksgiving.” So I remember going to grandma’s house and we were you know chopping food and getting things ready for Thanksgiving and I just remember asking grandma like, “Hey you know who I dreamt about last night, I dreamt about Yoli like have you talked to her, have you seen her?” And she’s like “No, I haven’t seen her in a long time.” You know and I said “Oh maybe she’s going to Emma’s today.” No big deal but we had the conversation Thanksgiving morning. I told her about my dream and that was that. The next day after Thanksgiving, friday morning, grandma called me and she’s like, “You’re not gonna believe what happened” she’s like “Yolanda died.” And Yolanda died wednesday night the night I had a dream about her and she had… she had what the newspaper reported as an accidental overdose. She was 28 years old and she mixed um… alcohol with prescription drugs and overdosed. And it just was like the weirdest thing to me that I dreamt about her on the night that she died when I hadn’t seen her or talked to her in years.

My informant told me this story in its entirety over dinner, though I had heard bits and pieces of it from her before. My informant experienced this strange phenomenon first-hand and after telling me her story, I found that other members including her mother had experienced the same thing. They all had dreams of friends or relatives on the night of or before they died. This story was very personal to my informant as she was close with the woman in the story, Yolanda.