Tag Archives: death

Walt Disney Frozen and Buried at Cal Arts

Nationality: Caucasian
Age: 57
Occupation: USC Professor of Animation
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: May 1, 2013
Primary Language: English

Walt Disney is buried under the unfinished, in, well, Walt Disney is buried in the unfinished sublevel. And frozen. Well it’s just gotten around. When I had the CSSSA students, I told them Walt Disney was frozen in the sublevel. And one night we found them downstairs trying all the doors, because when we took the kids and we took them to Disney studios, they asked the animators there, “Is Walt Disney really frozen and buried in the sublevel at Cal Arts?” And they all said, “Yes, of course he is.” And so that’s passed on through generation after generation. He died in 60, 67. Which is when Cal Arts started building, it was built, 69, 70.

CSSSA animators are high school students enrolled in a summer course at Cal Arts in the hopes of being accepted to the world famous animation school when applying for college. Here my professor told her CSSSA students that Walt Disney was buried in campus because they were uninitiated into the Cal Arts Animation family and couldn’t know any better. The animators the students visited at Disney backed up this story because they, too, were initiated members of the animation industry. The students eventually learned that their mentors were pulling their collective leg, and by learning this started the process of becoming indoctrinated as members of the animation culture, and potentially as future Cal Arts students.

La Llorona

Nationality: American
Age: 22
Occupation: Student (Fine Arts Major)
Residence: Burbank, CA
Performance Date: April 22, 2013
Primary Language: English
Language: Chinese, Japanese, Spanish

“I don’t remember the details, but it’s this mother, in the myth, and her children drowned… or something like that, and then she died somehow. Anyway, this woman ended up dead and her children were drowned, so there was this link between La Llorona and the water… um… so the myth, the myth was that children were warned not to go out at night near pools of water because La Llorona would come to them and drown them and the key was that if you heard this woman crying and you were like, ‘ah, where are my children?’ or something spooky like that… if you heard it really close, that meant she was far away, but if you heard it really far away, that meant she was close, or something…

“My teacher told me the story that her grandfather told her, that one day, he decided to run away from home, or something like that, and it was nighttime, and he was somewhere in which this myth applied, and um… I guess he was… I always imagined he was by one of those pools, those, um… not inflatable pools, but like those gigantic ones that would stand and you would put water in them and they were really popular in, like, the 90s. I always imagined it like that, but it seemed to be some sort of water tower, some public means of storing water, and he was by it because he was thirsty and whatever, and he heard this crying, and he was by water, and he was a child, and he heard this crying, but it sounded far away, and he kind of… I don’t remember if he saw it, but he just, I think he looked into the water and he kind of saw over his—oh I think her eyes bled or something, something spooky, I think her eyes were bleeding—anyway, he looked into the water and he went, like, ‘AHHH! Jesus!’ and then he ran away, and he’s still here obviously because my teacher is still here.”

 

The informant was told this version of La Llorona in her 7th grade, Spanish class, which was dedicated to the study of Mexican culture on Fridays. La Llorona means the crier or the one who cries. After the recounting of the story about her teacher’s grandfather, she was asked by her teacher to illustrate the La Llorona tale.

The informant said the stories that stick with her most are ghost stories, which might be related to how her cousins told her that you can only see ghosts if you believe in them. She believed ghosts seemed like a neat proposal because it would mean that it’s possible to have life after death, but she also worried that it would be the a sort of half-life in which you would be stuck forever (where people would see you, but not come to know or understand you). She liked hearing these types of stories because she liked to draw frightening images as a child even though the stories themselves scared her. She also mentioned she was glad she did not live where the story applied, which is an interesting proposal because it implies that certain folklore only affect certain people from which it (supposedly) originated from.

What is most interesting about this telling of La Llorona is not the story itself (which is even incomplete), but the personal narrative that follows , which functions as a friend-of-a-friend legend. That part, tacked onto the first, more well known, part in a way, validates the original tale. The combination of the popular and the personal brings a big tale back to a human level and keeps it spreading.

 

For another telling of La Llorona, see:

http://www.literacynet.org/lp/hperspectives/llorona.html

Dove Signs

Nationality: German
Age: 23
Occupation: Front Desk Worker/ Grad Student
Residence: The Valley
Performance Date: 4/25/2012
Primary Language: English

Story:

“In my family, we believe that when a person dies, they become a dove.  When my great-aunt and grandfather died, the next day there were two doves in our backyard.  So I believe it.”

My informant thinks this is because the dove is often associated with souls that fly up to heaven.

The Mourning Dove is often symbolic of optimism and is spiritual with a message of life, hope, renewal and peace.  This is very helpful for a family that is coping with the death of a beloved member.  There are other tales of loved ones becoming butterflies or ladybugs. It is typically an animal that can fly and is very beautiful, which is similar to the idea that the soul of a loved one is beautiful and flies up to heaven.

Haunted Hollydale Mental Hospital

Nationality: self-declared "cholo"
Age: 22
Occupation: unknown
Residence: Compton, CA
Performance Date: February 26
Language: spanish

My friends and I were hunting for haunted houses and after googling haunted places in los angeles, we decided to go check out the abandoned Hollydale Mental Hospital in Downey, CA.

We drove around the hospital campus for a bit, and then decided we should probably leave considering all of the buildings were fenced in and we really didn’t know what we were doing. Then we pulled in to a nearby parking lot and saw a group of people get out of their car who looked about our age, in their early twenties. We asked them if they were there to check out the hospital and they said yes, so we asked if we could join. They were very welcoming (the four guys were drunk, and the one girl was clearly  their sober driver) and explained that they were there to “initiate” Cherry because it was his first time visiting this haunted place. According to them, it was tradition to run up to the main house, “where they kept the craziest of the crazies”, and touch the front door for your first time visiting Hollydale. We decided this was exciting and tagged along. The girl, Cindy, began to explain how they were from the area and that they heard stories about Hollydale all the time from other kids in school. She also told us the story she knows of why it was abandoned:

Back in the 70’s, there was an outbreak of Tuberculosis at the hospital, and their way of dealing with it was to get all of those who had not yet been infected out and then left the rest of the people there to die. That is why the whole compound looks as if everyone just up and left, because they did. They just closed up shop like it was the end of another business day.

Cindy told us that they had been inside one of the buildings before and they took a whole box of papers from beside a desk and it had a lot of old, interesting papers and files inside.

She also said that about a year ago, the town planned  on tearing the place down because it was costing them money to have policemen constantly patrolling and whatnot, but a group of animal rights activists wouldn’t allow them too because the site has become a breeding ground for stray cats.

 

the longest riddle in the world

Nationality: American
Age: 21
Occupation: student
Residence: llinois
Performance Date: January 9, 2012
Primary Language: English

I was told by the informant of this riddle that it was the longest riddle in world (and therefore the most difficult to guess the answer to).  The informant learned it from her father and she enjoys repeating it because it’s amusing to have people challenge the idea that it’s the “world’s longest riddle”.

So Frank (a very famous celebrity) was out to dinner with his friend Bob (not famous) and they were outside this very famous restaurant waiting to put their name in when the hostess spots Frank and motions for he and Bob to come up to the front. Within minutes, the two are seated and a waiter comes by to take their drink orders. Frank orders a coke and Bob a Black and Tan. The waiter returns a little later with their drinks and then takes their food orders: Frank orders the house special of the night, roasted peacock; and Bob orders a deluxe burger. In another twenty minutes, the food arrives. After taking one bite of his roasted peacock, Frank runs outside and shoots himself. Why?

The answer?

Four weeks prior to this evening out, Frank, Bob, Frank’s brother, and lots of Franks fans were on a small cruise ship together. The ship sank in the midst of a storm and the only survivors to make it to a nearby island were Frank, Bob, Frank’s brother, and Frank’s number one fan. As the hours flew by, everyone’s hunger grew, and as a gesture towards his idol, Frank’s number one fan said he’d take Bob and Frank’s brother with him to go find food for them all. The three boys are gone for hours and hours when finally just Frank’s number one fan and Bob emerge from the trees. They say the bad news is that they lost Frank’s brother ans spent forever looking for him, but the good thing is that they found food, and they presented Frank with peacock which they hunted and killed.

Frank so enjoyed the peacock that he decided to order it four weeks later at this great restaurant, but at the restaurant it tasted so different from what he had had before that it made him realize it wasn’t peacock that he had eaten on the island, but rather it was his brother.

 

This informant said that most people react to this riddle with “that’s not a riddle, it’s an impossible-to-guess story!” But hey, it’s all relative, right?