Tag Archives: animal

Tailypo Horror Story

Nationality: American
Age: 22
Occupation: Barista
Residence: Boise, ID
Performance Date: March 12th, 2019
Primary Language: English
Language: N/A

Informant:

J, a 22-year-old, Caucasian male who grew up in San Francisco, California until he turned 16. He now lives in Boise, Idaho. He spent his summers at summer camp with his friends.

Background info:

During summer camps, counselors and children would sit around a firepit at night and tell stories. While some of these were positive, most of them would be told with the aim of scaring people. This is one of the stories told to J during one of these sessions.

Context:

This was told amongst a group of friends sitting in a circle around a firepit late at night, slightly intoxicated, telling each other their favorite scary stories they heard as children.

Main piece:

“Okay… so there’s this guy who lives in the mountains all alone. His life is simple and quiet… This guy… he keeps three dogs with him for hunting and tracking, but… one winter… there is a huge shortage of game… As his storages begin running out, he spends all day looking for food with his dogs and his rifle. One day, as he’s looking for dinner, he shoots a rabbit and shares it with his dogs. Obviously, he’s still hungry. He’s like six foot – one eighty… He continues his hunt until he finds some strange tracks he’s never seen before, three long claws… This dude’s starving, so he follows them late into the night. Eventually, the tracks go cold… The guy looks around…, frantically looking for new tracks, knowing he won’t see another animal for a while… As he’s looking around, he sees something stalking on the branches of a nearby tree… BAM!… He shoots it… He begins looking around for the animal but cannot find it. He eventually gives up, as it is getting late, and decides to head back empty-handed. As he begins to lay down, he notices that one of his dogs brought something back with them – the tail of the animal! He boils it into a stew and enjoys the reward of a long day before falling into a deep slumber… *Chittering, clawing, and scratching noises*… The guy slowly awakens to the noises to see the creature at the foot of his bed. In an otherworldly voice, the man hears it demand its ‘tailypo’. The dogs begin to growl and chase the creature back into the woods and the man passes out… He wakes again in the morning, thinking it was nothing more than a dream… One of the dogs is missing. He spends the day searching for it, but as night falls again, he gives up and tries to catch up on sleep from the night before… *Chittering, clawing, and scratching noises*… The man JUMPS awake to find the creature at the side of his bed now, demanding more aggressively that the man return its ‘tailypo’. His dogs again chase after the creature and the man, terrified, eventually falls asleep. When he wakens, he realizes that this was no dream… Two of his dogs are now missing, and he knows the creature will return this night. He begins fortifying his cabin and sits up all day and night with his gun and his last dog at his side… *Chittering, clawing, and scratching noises*… The dog jumps to its feet and runs after the noise, barking… *Barking, cut short*… *Chittering, clawing, and scratching noises*… The man shakingly aims his gun at the door… The window near his bed shatters. BAM! The man fires his weapon accidentally. As he frantically tries to reload his rifle, the creature leaps upon him. Eye to eye, the beast once again demands the return of his ‘tailypo’… As the sun rises, the man is flayed beyond recognition. To this day, on the darkest of nights, the creature can still be heard whispering for its ‘tailypo’… *Chittering, clawing, and scratching noises*…”

Thoughts:

As I read back through this transcript, I wish it could better capture the feeling of this piece. As far as ‘scary’ stories go, this piece was among one of the best I’ve ever heard. It was exhilarating, and the ambiance of the environment in which it was told played into it with the cold, quiet, dark night with the flames casting shadows around us. I think the story was interesting coming from J, as he was raised in San Francisco, nowhere near the woody area described in the story. However, because it was told during summer camps, I believe it made it even more terrifying at the time (due to being told to children unfamiliar with their environment). There are many stories in which events happen in sets of three. The number of dogs, the number of times the creature visits the man, and the number of claws the creature had are all sets of three. The sound effects that J used during the story really made it come alive, which is why I believe most recounts of live stories like this do not capture the actual experience of the story.

El Chupacabra in the Fog

Nationality: USA
Age: 22
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles, CA
Performance Date: 04/02/16
Primary Language: English

Folklore Piece

“So my story… Um… It’s the myth of The Chupacabra by MK. When I was… When I was, let’s say 10 years old, my eldest cousin, one of my elder cousins, um came in one christmas and shared that he had witnessed something in the fog in my grandparents house. Imagine an old red house in the middle of the farm. Outside of their house, which was a quintessential farmhouse out in the country in Corcoran california, which, side note is best known for the Cochran Prison that houses Charles Manson. Charlie Manson? Charles Manson. Anyways, so Cochran. And he went outside and came back in and claimed that he saw lying on the side of the road, a Chupacabra. Now, if anyone is familiar with El Chupacabra knows that it’s basically a mythical creature, um, and he claims in his heart that it wasn’t a wolf, it wasn’t a coyote, it wasn’t a possum. It was all those things put together as one. And he came in and he scared us. We actually went outside to try and find it. And it was miraculously gone. OK? This animal that wasn’t supposed to be there in the first place. He claims he saw. And it was scary for us because we knew it wasn’t true, but at the same time the myth of The Chupacabra lived on. Because every year, or every time we would be out there, and it was just a little bit foggy and there was a full moon, we would hear this animal that was said not to exist, which was said not to exist, but we knew in our hearts that it did. And I do honestly think it’s true. I think he saw something that wasn’t, it wasn’t, like I said it wasn’t a wolf or a mountain lion, it wasn’t any of those things. In my heart I believe that it was true, because when we went out to go find it, it was gone. This animal that he had seen. So there it is, the myth of The Chupacabra, and we still talk about it to this day.”

 

Context: When I asked the participant if she had any stories to tell, she told me immediately. “Oh, yeah, but I’m sure you already know about The Chupacabra.” I pressured her a bit more to tell me her version of it, and it ended up being the story above; not on the origin of El Chupacabra, or particularly any action by El Chupacabra, but just a possible sighting. She likes this piece of folklore because she says she “doesn’t generally consider [herself] to believe in this sort of thing, but I do.” And that, if anything it’s a “fun story that shows how crazy my family and I are.”

 

Personal Analysis: Legend sightings are prevalent throughout the world. Be it alien sightings, ghosts, demons, Bigfoot, Loch Ness, or Leprechauns. What’s interesting about these stories is that the person experiencing the sighting doesn’t often actually interact with the entity; they’re other-worldly both in that they do not take a typical earthly form but also that they can not be interacted with along the same plane as the informant.

Take this story, as an example. The participants cousin saw this animal-like thing through the fog, and it laid motionless on the side of the road. Despite not having interacted with it, he is certain it was El Chupacabra. His certainty also impacted the participant and her family; they believed the story despite never having seen it, simply because her cousin saw it through the fog for a split second.


I believe this is because these legends are constantly reinforced to the point that they create confirmation biases. Everyone in California has heard of El Chupacabra, similar to how everyone in Scotland has heard of the Loch Ness. If one might not have, they probably would not see the objects they see as anything but what they actually are: perhaps roadkill, a rock and a stick, a funny looking shadow. Instead, they take their previously conceived notions about these legends and projected them onto their sightings to confirm them as the creature.

A Dog Walks into a Forest…

Nationality: Israeli / USA
Age: 22
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles, CA
Performance Date: 4/2/16
Primary Language: English
Language: Hebrew, Spanish

Folk Piece:

Who far could a dog walk into a forest?

Halfway because after that he’s walking out.

Background information

“Well, this is the first riddle my dad ever gave me. Uh, you know, I enjoy word play and I think it’s just a light switch that makes people’s heads really turn a bit. Riddles are just a fun way to get a conversation started sometimes, and yeah, I don’t know, it’s just fun seeing people try and figure it out”

Context

“Well, uh, like I said it’s the first riddle my dad ever gave me. We’d often toss riddles at each other back and forth – well, like, once I was older. And uh, yeah, I’m not sure where this one came from before my Dad, but I know my Grandfather also enjoyed word play, so if I had to guess it would be from him. Now I have a bunch of them I ask people if they ever come up. ” Sure enough, this riddle came up when exactly that was happening. I’d asked a group of friends if they had any good riddles or jokes, and two of my friends went back and forth with them. This was the first one that was mentioned.

Analysis

When I first heard the informant tell this riddle in the group, I had no idea it was an actually important riddle to him. At the time, I was just jotting the riddles down as they were told back and forth between this participant and another. I guess it would make sense, though, that his favorite riddle would come first.

This would be an example of a true riddle as are most of the riddles the informant would be talking about. Those that have a traditional question and answer, that can be guess based on clues hidden in the riddle itself. I believe this participant does it, however, to test an acquaintances intelligence. Not that he expects the other person to guess it correctly, but I think he expects them to enjoy it because of how clever it is. This participant definitely values his intellect and the intellect of his friends, so that would make sense.

 

“Heard it from the horse’s mouth”

Nationality: American
Age: 21
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles, Ukiah
Performance Date: 4/23/15
Primary Language: English

I was talking with my friend and I said that I needed to hear a fact straight from the person who said it, and then she said something like, “yeah, you have to hear it from the horse’s mouth.” I inquired what she meant by this, where she had heard it from, etc. This is what she told me.

Informant: “My mom says, ‘I heard it straight from the horse’s mouth’ and that means that you heard it from the person who said it, so it’s authentic.”

Collector: “Do you know why it’s specifically a horse?”

Informant: “I don’t know, but she did grow up around a lot of horses. She grew up on a cattle ranch. And they all rode horses around.”

Collector: “So do you think this is specific to farmer culture or rancher people, rather than city folk?”

Informant: “I think so because you tend to… your language is dependent on your surroundings. You use analogies based on where you live, or on the things that you know”

The informant didn’t know much more about the origins of the proverb, but after some basic online search, I found that thefreedictionary.com offers the following explanation: “this expression alludes to examining a horse’s teeth todetermine its age and hence its worth. [1920s]” As my informant mentioned, this expression probably originated from a culture that was accustomed to being around horses, so its relevance in the future might be questionable. 

The New Jersey Devil

Nationality: American/Jewish
Age: 20
Occupation: Student
Residence: New Jersey/Los Angeles/Australia
Performance Date: 4/14/14
Primary Language: English
Language: Spanish

When I asked my roommate if she had any folklore from New Jersey she replied “Yes, New Jersey has a devil.”  This is an urban legend that tells of a woman who gave birth to a devil like creature that disappeared into the swamps immediately after being born.  The creature has the head of a goat, the body of a kangaroo like creature and bat-like wings.

My roommate did not have any personal stories about the New Jersey devil but noted that it was where the state basketball team gets its name.  She also compared the creature to other mythical animal creatures like the Sasquatch.

This story is interesting because it is very similar to myths like the Chupacabra and Big Foot, but unlike those myths it is specific to New Jersey, which builds a sense of pride in the people who are active and passive bearers of this piece of folklore since they are bonded together by identity.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jersey_Devil