The Tradition Surrounding Mary Draper Ingles in Virginia

Nationality: United States of America
Age: 51
Occupation: Owner of Concer Media
Residence: Kansas City, MO
Performance Date: 4/25/20
Primary Language: English

Main piece:

“There’s this story from my hometown of Bradford, Virginia about this woman named Mary Draper Ingles who, during the 1750s, was kidnapped by a group of Native Americans. She might have had a child at the time, but she was kidnapped by these Natives and then eventually escaped and then followed the rivers from Ohio back to Virginia where she lived in Bradford for a while until she died but there’s several parts of the town that remember her including an annual theater production.” 

Background:

The informant for this piece is a man in his early 50s who was raised in a small town called Bradford in southwest Virginia in the New River Valley. This area had broader ties to Appalachian culture as a whole and he lived there throughout his childhood and teens. This story is a local story about a real woman but whose kidnapping and return is sometimes doubted. Regardless, the town uses the story to establish a local identity, especially in the form of an annual theater production.

Context:

This story was shared with me during an encounter with my informant wherein I asked if he had any examples of local Appalachian folk culture. The conversation occurred in his backyard alongside family and friends.

Thoughts:

I find this story fascinating as the figure of the piece is entirely real. Mary Draper Ingles was a real woman who was kidnapped by Native Americas in the 1750s. However, the story of her return has become crucial for the identity of Bradford, Virginia. She is a proud figurehead for the community, which ties the community to their specific place and argues their right to exist. What is even more interesting is how the town still romanticizes the story. As mentioned above, the town hosts an annual theater production about her. While this might veer outside of folklore because it features authored literature, the traditions done around the piece are more folkloric in nature. This places the story in a strange level of liminality. It is both real and fiction, authored and folklore. This binary is interesting and is used by the natives of Bradford to establish identity.

The Spiritualist Camp In Niantic, Connecticut

Nationality: United States of America
Age: 51
Occupation: VP, Renewables Engie Solar
Residence: Kansas City, MO
Performance Date: 4/26/20
Primary Language: English

Main piece:

“The Pine Grove Spiritualist campground is where my dad lives in the summer and my grandma lived during summers when I was a little kid and its located in Niantic, Connecticut which is a small town kinda south-central on the water in Connecticut and the spiritualist campground is a small cluster of homes located on a point, so there’s only one road heading in or out of town, and it’s maybe 100 or 200 houses on this point and when you come in this one road from out of town, it says “Spiritualist Campground” and it looks like its from the 1800s or early 1900s so as soon as you come to this town you think what is this? And it’s a small enough town that a lot of times people just walk around for entertainment and I would walk around with my cousins and kinda tucked away in the corner of the woods is a building. That building is where the spiritualist still have meetings and I didn’t know much about spiritualism and what it meant when I was a kid but apparently it’s a religion and in that cluster of houses, there are maybe a dozen of families who practice spiritualism and they would meet periodically in this temple, which was this building, to have discussions. We didn’t know what they were meeting about so on a few of this walks, generally we would avoid the temple because it was kinda dark and it was creepy, but on some walks we’d go close to it and one night we dared my oldest cousin to look in the window of the temple because they were having a meeting so it was at night and he looked to the window and came running back and he said they were walking on the walls and ceiling sin there, it was crazy. I never went or looked or anything like that- I didn’t want to, but that’s the story of the Spiritualist campground.”

Background:

My informant is a man in his early 50s originally from Hartford, Connecticut. He lived there through his teens and had extended family in the nearby areas. As stated above, his father had a summer home in a former spiritualist camp now known as Pine Grove. Spiritualism is a religion that believes in a spiritual realm where the spirits of those have passed are located. Furthermore, it was practiced heavily in New England in the 1800s, which would make sense for the creation of this neighborhood.

Context:

My informant told me about this story when I was asking a group of family and friends about scary stories or legends from their childhood. He told the story in front of the group and I recorded it during that telling. 

Thoughts:

I think the inspiration for this story comes from the lack of in-depth understanding of the outside present in childhood. As mentioned in the piece, the informant got the information for this story from his cousins, and never explicitly saw any of the supposed supernatural. This shows that the story surrounding the spiritualist temple shows who is in the community created by these children and who is not. Another major factor for this story is the development of folklore to explain an unknown. As mentioned by the informant, as a child he did not comprehend what spiritualism was. Except, he saw the sign and the temple, both of which can be perceived as ominous. As such, the rationale for explaining something as complex as the religion of spiritualism, the informant invented this story of their strange ceremony using what knowledge he  did have about them to help himself better understand. I also think this piece is particularly interesting as it reflects the history of spiritualism in that area, and how it developed over time.

The Moodus Noises of Moodus, Connecticut

Nationality: United States of America
Age: 51
Occupation: VP, Renewables Engie Solar
Residence: Kansas City, MO
Performance Date: 4/16/20
Primary Language: English

Main Piece:

“So this is a story about- nearby where I grew up in Connecticut there’s a little teeny town in the southern part of Connecticut called Moodus and its where my first cousins lived and we used to go visit around the holidays, Christmas in particular I remember visiting for Christmas Eve because we would trade on and off every year, one year we’d come visit them, one year they’d come visit us and they’d host a big dinner. And they had this big farmhouse and it backed up on this lake and this farmhouse had a hill, a grassy hill, sloping down to the lake and it was extremely old it had extremely dark wooden floors that were rough because it was a farmhouse. Anyways, so I remember the Moodus noises, I don’t really know if its true or a myth, but it’s basically in this town you can hear these noises coming out of the ground and, doesn’t always happen but it can happen and scientists have looked into this and the most likely explanation is that there are micro-earthquakes that are shallow in the ground and that’s the cause of the noise. That’s something everyone talks about in the town, the mascot for the high-school sports team is the Moodus noises and so I remember being with my cousins in this creepy farmhouse and them telling us the story about the noises and then trying to startle us with noises the entire night.”

Background:

My informant is a man in his early 50s originally from Hartford, Connecticut. He lived there through his teens and had extended family in the nearby areas. The cousins described here were present for a lot his childhood and they often shared scary stories. The Moodus Noises are well documented phenomena that remain ambiguous and have little physical ties but it serves to unite the town with a common legend. While my informant did not live there, his interaction with his cousins put him in conversation with this legend.

Context:

My informant told me about this story when I was asking a group of family and friends about scary stories or legends from their childhood. He told the story in front of the group and I recorded it during that telling. 

Thoughts:

What I find fascinating about the Moodus noises is the complete lack of any form of the topic from the folkloric perspective. This natural phenomenon serves the primary function of folklore, it unites the town with a common experience. However, there is no supernatural explanation of the noises. They are not tied to spirits or cryptids, they are just ambiguously there. This is fascinating to me, as more often than not, folklore takes some physical form but the Moodus noises are just noises. In my opinion, this is the result of the fact that the noises have a very clear explanation. Compared to other strange phenomena such as Will o’ Wisps, the Moodus noises have a clear explanation of why they occur. As such, they occupy a liminal space between science and folklore, wherein they have an explanation but they still count as community legend.

The Spook Lights in Joplin, Missouri

Nationality: United States of America
Age: 49
Occupation: N/A
Residence: Kansas City, MO
Performance Date: 4/25/20
Primary Language: English

Main piece:

“The spook light which is sometimes known as the Joplin spook light because that’s the biggest town closest to it but it’s actually in the town of Hornet, Missouri which is, as far as I know, has no population. So it’s just a little ways outside of Joplin Missouri and for decades- probably going back to the turn of the century, this legend has been around this area that on certain nights if go out on this specific roads that’s very dark and abandoned and park your car and are quiet, that you will see a light floating at the end of the road. There’s all sorts of legends about what it is, the most famous one is that it is tied to American Indians somehow, that either during the Trail of Tears or something terrible upheaval, a Native American couple was separated and this is one of the lovers out with a lantern in the nighttime looking for their lost love, but there’s other legends too. In reality there have been scientific studies of it, and some people say it’s some sort of swamp gas, some have said it’s the way this road is positioned relative to a highway a few miles away creates some optical illusion with headlights from the road but it has not been definitely said what this thing is.”

Background:

My informant is originally from Joplin, Missouri and currently resides in Kansas City, Missouri. She’s lived all across the United States but lives here currently with her husband and three kids. Her mother lived in the Ozarks in southern Missouri for most of her life and so the entire family has ties to that specific area. Historically, Joplin is not a big town and is known for very little outside of Missouri.

Context:

This piece was brought to my attention through research into legends from Missouri which I used to approach my informant. She has told me about this phenomenon several times but this specific conversation occurred in the living room of her house in Kansas City when I asked her about using the spook light for the folklore archive.

Thoughts:

At face value, the spook lights are seemingly very similar to similar pieces of folklore like the will o’ wisps or other light-based phenomenon. What I feel differentiates the spook lights from other similar folklore though is their use in unifying the town of Joplin and the influence of Native American superstition. The town of Joplin is in the south of Missouri, near the start of the Ozark Mountain range. This area is rife with folklore that comes out of isolated communities who are restricted through natural landscapes like lakes or mountains. Joplin is on the fringe of this culture, which makes it so it mixes Ozark culture with the broader culture of Missouri. By having a local legend, the town is unified in a collective legend. Furthermore, the spook lights are restricted to a single specific road and at certain times, making seeing them even more of a marker of your place in the community. This can also be seen in how the spook light is popular amongst teens who, according to my informant, visit the spook light as a right of passage. The other component to the spook light is how it reflects concerns about the treatment of Native Americans. The legend is that the light is the ghost of a Native couple who have been separated by not only death but also circumstances. By making their local legend a reflection of the poor treatment of Natives, the town recognizes the injustice and seeks to remember it.

For an in-depth look into the history of the legend, see: https://www.joplinmo.org/575/The-Spook-Light

Slenderman

Nationality: United States of America
Age: 16
Occupation: Student
Residence: Kansas City, MO
Performance Date: 4/23/20
Primary Language: English
Language: Spanish

“The idea is that there is a man that lives in the woods, he is very tall and lanky, he wears a suit and has tentacles on his back but the biggest thing is that he doesn’t have a face, when you look at him it’s just a white head, a flat nothing. I honestly don’t remember how I first heard about- it was probably just through talking to other kids because it became such a big deal because Slenderman started as a creepy pasta where someone wrote a story and it just spread through the Internet. There’s a whole bunch of scary photos with a child next to him and the whole idea is that he would lure kids into the woods and kill them. One of the things that was scary about him was that the more you research the Slenderman, the more likely he is to get you. So like as you look stuff up, he’s like gonna put you on his list like this person looking too much into it. I don’t fully know how that started and it made it scarier because we can’t find anything about him.”

Background:

My informant is a 16-year old from Kansas City, Missouri. She is active on the Internet and has been on YouTube since early 2010. In the early days of the Internet, people invented short stories that would be spread throughout the Internet via copy and pasting, earning the name copy pastas. Eventually, this act of sharing stories transformed to fit the horror genre and this subculture was known as creepy pastas. These stories are shared in Internet circles as short and creepy stories and are subject to reinterpretation with each telling. My informant, being invested with the Internet, learned of several of these throughout the years and remembered this one in particular. 

Context:

My informant brought up this story during a walk around her neighborhood when I asked her about scary stories from her childhood. 

Thoughts:

This story is interesting as it represents several fears for a generation that is heavily present on the Internet. Firstly, the Slenderman takes from similar urban legends of the past featuring a man in the woods who seeks to hurt others. It should be noted though, that this specific story states he only seeks to hurt children, which is done to emphasize his cruelty and evil nature. Furthermore, it is tailored to fit those who would stumble upon the story, most of which would be younger children using the Internet. Being entirely on the Internet also changes how people could discuss the story, which features prominently in this telling of the story. The informant told me that she heard you could not look anything up about the creature, as it would make you his target. This is fascinating, as it plays into the fears of a generation with seemingly unlimited access to technology, which is a restriction of said content. If nothing else, the Slenderman also represents an entire shift in the methods by which stories are told. Whereas other classic horror stories are primarily told orally, the Slenderman’s origins are entirely on the Internet. This pushed the content of the piece to better fit this audience, and it adapted to address fears of this generation of kids on the Internet.

For an in-depth look at the history of this legend, see: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/15/movies/slender-man-timeline.html