Ghosts of Interstate 295

Content: 

D:  I didn’t really hear about it growing up because 295 wasn’t built until I was in high school. 

And the sightings of the ghosts and stuff really started happening after, you know, I moved away, but then, you know, I started hearing about ’em when I was going home and you know, then they started showing up in newspaper articles and stuff like that. But you can, you can research that, you know, online. 

Me: Where did you hear about the ghosts?

D: I think family. Yeah. I mean, people that lived in the area. This would be more like they might know somebody that saw a sighting or, you know, or saw it in the paper or, um, you know, saw the police down there and stuff like that. I think my dad, you know, knew about sometimes when the police were called to the area and stuff. Um, because they would see these Indians on horseback and, you know, people would, would call and report just like, “Hey, some kids are out here, you know, playing around on horses, you know, by this highway and they don’t need to be down here, you know?” And then, um, but other sightings of ’em, they were clearly Indians, but 295 was built over an Indian burial ground and they discovered it when they were building the highway and they managed to get the approval to just keep going anyway and finished it out. And so it disturbed a lot of graves and a lot of activity was kicked after that, but they claim that people can hear the chanting and stuff like that too. 

Me: Chanting in the same area?

D: Oh yeah. I mean the same, the same apparitions. They hear the chanting and they follow the chanting and then they see apparitions of these, you know, Indians on horseback and stuff. 

And there’s, and there’s multiple sightings. It’s not just one or two people that have seen it or one incident that happened. I mean, it’s happened over and over and over. 

Background: D was born in Richmond, Virginia in 1963. She moved to Atlanta, Georgia in 1981. Virginia’s Interstate 295 was completed in 1987. 

Context: This story was told to me over a phone call. 

Analysis: In my conversations, I found that stories of ghosts traveling along highways and interstates is relatively common in the United States, particularly in the southern states. However, most of that lore revolves around one major story that someone experienced, and the following stories of others. This one, however, doesn’t seem to have a central or first experience. Like D said, everyone knew someone that had seen the ghosts of Interstate 295, but no one knew who saw them first. 

See also: D directed me to the following link, which she felt accurately illustrated her memory of the lore: Posted by blogger in RVA Ghosts. (2021, November 8). The Haunting of the Pocahontas Parkway. The Haunting of the Pocahontas Parkway – RVA Ghosts. Retrieved April 22, 2022, from https://rvaghosts.com/the-haunting-of-the-pocahontas-parkway/

Reindeer Food

Content: On Christmas Eve, when her kids were young, D mixed up glitter and oats and called it “reindeer food.” Her children would sprinkle the mixture on the front yard, and repeat the following: “Sprinkle on the lawn at night. The moon’s light will make it sparkle bright. As Santa’s sleigh flies and roams, this will guide the reindeer to your home.” 

Background: D was born in Richmond, Virginia in 1963. She moved to Atlanta, Georgia in 1981. She raised three daughters in Atlanta in the 1990s and 2000s. 

Context: This story was told to me over a phone call. I found the variations online. 

Analysis: After I spoke to D, I found several different variations of the saying that goes with reindeer food. Below are a few examples.

  1. Make a wish and close your eyes tight. Then sprinkle it on your lawn tonight. As Santa’s reindeer fly and roam, this food will guide them to your home.
  2. Come December 24th as Santa flies here from the North, here’s what you do, it isn’t hard ~ just sprinkle this stuff in your yard…the sparkles draw old Santa near and oats attract his reindeer…then you just wait ~ they’re on their way.
  3. Sprinkle this reindeer food outside tonight. The moonlight will make it sparkle bright. As the reindeer fly and roam, this will guide them to your home.

I found it interesting that all the different poems that go along with the reindeer food use some of the same words: sprinkle, sparkle, flies. Additionally, I found that some websites called it “reindeer dust” instead of “reindeer food.” The recipe seemed to be about the same, although some substituted sprinkles for glitter.

The Chinaman’s Hat

T is 70 years old. He is a retired teacher. He was born in Southern California and raised in Hawaii. He was 7 years old when his family moved there in 1959. He is very animated and speaks very quickly. As he explains in the piece, he likes it because his father worked for a tour company on Oahu and it is one of the stories he remembers the tour guides telling tourists. He told it to me in conversation.

“It was one of the small islands, Oahu, where we lived… but um… one thing dad was, was he worked for Trade Wind Tours and because… we didn’t have a lot of money but we did go on a lot of tours, so we went on bus tours… like Pearl Harbor tours… there was one called Circle Island Tours… it was boring but they had free food, so… The tour guides would tell stories and one was the legend of the Chinaman’s hat. There’s a Hawaiian name for the island but I don’t remember… but people call it Chinaman’s hat. What the legend is, is that there was an evil Chinese giant that ruled over the menehunes… they were like elves or leprechauns, and he ruled over them and was mean and the menehunes got together with Pele who was the goddess of the volcanoes… she was not a happy woman… anyway she got together with them and the Chinaman liked to eat turtles, so there’s an island across the way and they tricked him into going out into the ocean and it was further away and deeper than the Chinaman could swim, so he sank and drowned. Anyway his hat is still there sticking out of the water.”

There is an island off Oahu that is known as the Chinaman’s hat. The island’s name in Hawaiian is Mokoli’i. According to www.haaiian-culture-stories.com/chinamans-hat.html, “Pele’s sister, Hi’iaka, slew a giant lizard and threw its tail into the ocean… the island of Mokoli’i remains a remnant of the lizard’s back, poking through the water.” The same site references a 1983 painting by artist Dean Howell showing a cross section of the island and the Chinese giant below the ocean. A google search revealed Dean Howell was born in Salt Lake City, Utah and studied art at Brigham Young University in Hawaii. He also have published a book called The Story of the Chinaman’s Hat in 1990. A 2007 article published in Pacific Business News https://www.bizjournals.com/pacific/stories/2007/05/07/story9.html cites a failed resolution to discourage the use of “Chinaman’s Hat” to refer to Mokoli’i which means “little lizard” in Hawaiian according to https://www.to-hawaii.com/oahu/attractions/chinamanshat.php.

Menehune are a mythological race of diminutive people who live in the forest and stay hidden, coming out at night to build temples, roads, houses, etc. According to Wikipedia, Folklorist Katharine Luomala posits that “the Menehune are a post-European contact mythology created by adaptation of the term manahune (which by the time of the colonization of the Hawaiian Islands by Europeans had acquired a meaning of “lowly people” or “low social status” and not diminutive in stature) to European legends of brownies.” Brownies being household spirits of Scottish folklore. So it’s interesting that T recalled the Menehune as elves or leprechauns.

The story T remembers hearing tour guides tell illustrates the history of colonialism, Asian labor migration, and touristic exploitation in Hawaii. Efforts to discourage the use of “Chinaman’s Hat” in favor of the Hawaiian name Moloki’i, show the role and power of folklore in terms of national identity and culture. The elements that make up the story show the complexity of folklore as a living tradition that can resist easy definition as well as how fakelore (assuming the tour guides simply made up the story for tourists) can become disseminated and accepted.

Wooly Worm Weather Prediction

Nationality: American
Age: 50
Occupation: Retired
Residence: Calfornia
Performance Date: 4/30/22
Primary Language: English

Background: My informant is a 50 year old woman from Tennessee. She first heard about the folklore from her father, but has heard it many times anecdotally since.

J: Wooly worms are funny little caterpillars, I’m sure you’ve seen them before. They’re everywhere in the south. 

Me: I saw tons of them in Maine when I went to summer camp! So, tell me more about them. 

J: Well, I’m no bug expert. I know they’re orange and black, and they’ve got fur! *laughter* I always thought they were funny-looking. They’re usually in the foliage, but some of them come out to uh, say hello at picnics and such. But people think the ones you find in fall can predict the severity of the winter. If the orange band is big, the winter will be mild. A bigger black band means a nasty winter. It’s a common belief. 

Me: I think I’ve heard that before. Do you think it’s true?

J: I had some cousins who really thought so. When we were younger we’d go out and look for them and they’d try to make predictions. I was probably only 6 or 7. I didn’t care so much, I just wanted to hold them, and uh, I suppose I didn’t have a good frame of reference back then. I didn’t really know what was a big band or a small band, they usually all looked the same to me. I think I can tell better now. But I’m not sure myself if it’s real. I remember bad winters, but I don’t remember if I saw big black bands on the caterpillars before them.

My thoughts: This superstition is very common, especially east of the American continental divide, so much so that after our conversation I looked it up and saw that a scientist in the 50’s tried to scientifically prove its accuracy. He didn’t ultimately do that great because his sample sizes were too small. Very similar to this practice is Groundhog day, where Punxsutawney Phil looks for his shadow, and if he sees it, it means six more weeks of winter. The difference is that the wooly worm predictions are more localized and personalized, as anyone who finds a caterpillar can make their own predictions. Groundhog day is mostly endemic to Pennsylvania, though even in California some people take it as a prediction for our own winter, which is quite silly. I think the wooly worm predictions have a better chance of being legitimate than the groundhog prediction, though both are ultimately just longstanding and fun folk superstitions. 

For more info on wooly worms, see https://www.almanac.com/woolly-bear-caterpillars-and-weather-prediction

Whistling witches in the trees

Nationality: Mexican
Age: 55
Occupation: Waitress
Residence: Texas
Performance Date: 2021
Primary Language: Spanish

A. is a 55-year-old mother of two in San Antonio, Texas. She grew up in San Luis Potosi, Mexico, a small town nearing the center of the country. She immigrated in her mid-twenties to join her husband in Chicago. She claims in this story that she saw a witch and describes the personal experience in detail every year near Halloween or Dia de los Muertos.

This performance was over the dining table. I was bringing her family conchas and other traditional Dia de los Muertos’ breads like pan de muerto.

Intv: Ok entonces, puedes reiterar ese cuento que siempre me contaste? / Ok then, can you reiterate that story you always told me

A: Claro, claro. Primeramente, el cuento tomo lugar en San Luis Potosi, mi hogar. Allí, viviamos en este casa de dos niveles y dentro del centro habia un patio real lleno de arboles de fruta. En el segundo nivel habia un pasillo que siempre recuerdo nuestro perro, Willie, corria por para saludar visitantes, tambien se podia ver los arboles de nuez que crecieron alrededor de la casa y tambien la entrada de la casa. Claro que esos arboles crecieron un poco mas alto, y por ese pasillo dormia Willie anoche. Acuerdo este noche donde cual Willie no tranquilizaba. Le invite dentro mi cuatro que mi mama, la abuela de Mili, prohibia pero sabia que ella pusiera de peor humor si le deje ladrando. Willie no quizo, y finalmente sali a media noche en mis pantuflas para ver que se notaba Willie. Al abrir de mi puerta escuche un silvando. Acerce al frente del pasillo y vi una figura donde escuchaba el silvando. De repente acorde de un cuento de mi ninez del vecindario. En las noches acerando la noche de todos los santos salian sombras en los arboles que silvaron. El cuento seguia que esos fueron brujas o gente embrujada invitando ninos para sequestrar.

//

Of course, of course. First, the story took place in San Luis Potosi, my home. There, we lived in this two-level house and inside the center there was a courtyard full of fruit trees. On the second level there was a hallway that I always remember our dog, Willie, ran through to greet visitors; you could also see the walnut trees that grew around the house and the entrance of the house. Of course, those trees grew a little taller, and willie slept down that hallway at night. But one night Willie wouldn’t calm down. I invited Willie into my room, something that my mother, Mili’s grandmother, forbids but I knew she would be in a worse mood if I left him barking. Willie didn’t want to, and finally I went out in the middle of the night in my slippers to see what Willie saw. As I opened my door, I heard a whistling. I approached the front of the corridor and saw a figure where I heard the whistling. Suddenly I remembered a story of my childhood. In the nights approaching the night of all the saints, shadows came out in the trees that whistled. The tale followed that these were witches or haunted people luring children to kidnap them.

This myth seems closely linked to the myth of La Lechuza, the bewitched owl women. As aforementioned in the annotation for La isla de las munecas, cultural syncretism plays a large part in La Lechuza’s etymology as well. Owls interestingly are a shared omen amongst many cultures, often developed worlds away from their parallel symbols. This bird of prey with empty black eyes and a scientifically proven silent flight brought chills to dozens of indigenous cultures, being cited as an omen of death repeatedly. La Lechuza moved into Tejano folklore easily with the frequent migration between Mexico and Tejas. As a tejano, I’ve encountered many barn owls near the Gulf of Mexico that glide atop the coastal winds and seem distinctly out of place with their white feathers and habit of flying at eye-level of humans. La Lechuza’s mythology capitalizes off the owls’ nocturnal habits and follows the myth of a persecuted witch that shapeshifts in the night hours and perches in trees as a 7ft tall woman with an owl face luring children. Rumors also dictate the unlikeliness of surviving an encounter with La Lechuza, once again solidifying it as a death omen. Some of her rumored powers are controlling the weather, causing supernatural accidents and deaths and amidst many other claims, gripping a child with their talons and flying off.

To read more about La Lechuza, see “Owl-Bewitchment in the Lower Rio Grande Valley.” Humberto Garza in the Celebrating 100 Years of the Texas Folklore Society 1909-2009 Page 38. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc271470/m2/1/high_res_d/9781574413601.pdf 03+