Tag Archives: family ghosts

Willy’s Story

Age: 22

Text:

Interviewee:
The story is kind of a monster-ghost story from my hometown, Thousand Oaks, California. It’s about Willy, the moster.

There is this forest area behind my neighbor’s house, and they always warn their kids “Don’t go in the forest after dark, because there is a monster in the woods named Willy, and he’s gonna grab you.”  Willy was like a old, mean, adult figure that’s kind of a spirit in a sense, and he came with a cane. Then, this story got circulated around my neighborhood, and all the kids know this story.

Essentially, if kids disobeyed, like went into the forest, they would get taken. It’s kind of like the classic, like, be weary of stranger danger story. So yeah, that basically is the gist of the story itself. All the kids in my neighborhood know this story. We always tease each other, “Be careful of Willy, don’t go in the forest.” It kind of has that local legend feel, which is kind of interesting.

I was never brave enough to go in the forest and check on that, like I didn’t want to be the person to see that Willy’s real, you know, so I trusted everyone’s judgement.


Interviewer: This story kind of reminds me of Little Red Riding Hood, like don’t go off the track.
Interviewee: Yeah, yeah. Otherwise you will get into trouble.


Interviewer: Is there a prototype, or, is there someone who was actually taken, that you know of?
Interviewee: Lucky for my neighborhood—no. No one got taken by the monster. It was more of
just a cautionary tale. There is no specific people who got taken, but my parents would joke around and, like, have items being taken from my backyard, when I was like, “Oh where did my ball go?” They’d be like, “Oh, Willy took it,” and they probably just donated it or something.

Context:

When the interviewee was growing up, around 8 to 9 years old, he was told this story by his parents. All the kids in his neighborhood know this story, and some of the parents even brought this up too——according to the interviewee, “I think that’s actually where it originated, a friend’s parent told them this story.”

Analysis:

“Stranger Danger” Cautionary Tale: Willy’s Story is a local cautionary tale. This tale functions to regulate children’s behavior. Willy is an archetype of the stranger danger—an outsider who is dangerous and must be avoided by the children. On an emotional level, this stranger, who is old and carries a cane, contrasts with the safe domestic environment in which children grow up. Children are told this story because parents would like them to be cautious of the outside world, the strangers, and the forest.

Transmission: According to the informant, a parent in the neighborhood started telling this story to their kids, and then “all the kids (in his neighborhood) know this story,” and sometimes parents know too. This represents a vernacular transmission that is local and informal, and it is also one that goes in various directions. For instance, first it was transmitted in a top-down way, but it was later transmitted peer-to-peer by the children.

Family Haunted House

Text:

“Gee [grandma]’s house is lowkey haunted, it’s messed up. The man who Gee got the deed to their land from, we call him Old Man Hattfield. When my mom and my aunt were growing up they would come home from basketball games really late at night, and one night they came from the back door. They came around the corner and my mom swears that she saw a man at the top of the stairs, and then by the time that my aunt and Gee got over there the man was gone, they didn’t see him. Obviously my mom was freaking out, she was scared to death. So they all went upstairs, there was nobody up there, the windows weren’t open, there was no way anyone could’ve gotten there. They think it was Old Man Hattfield, my friends still refuse to go upstairs at Gee’s house because they think it’s haunted by Old Man Hattfield. . That’s one story. Gee has another story about this dress. So when they bought the land it was from debt, so I think with the deed to the land came other things like this pocket watch and this wedding dress. It’s this white wedding dress, and I don’t know who’s it was, but Gee had this dress up until maybe 10 years ago until she finally got rid of it. She’d wake up in the middle of the night and swear she saw a woman wearing this dress at the foot of her bed. So eventually she was like, “I’m tired of this, I’m gonna burn this dress.” So she sets it out in the burn pile. But then she’s going through their stuff at least five years later, and the dreams had not stopped. So she didn’t know what happened, she thought the dress had been burned. Then she found the dress inside the house in a drawer, and she’s like “what is this? How is this dress here?” And she asked Papa and he said “Yeah I saw you put it in the burn pile but I put it back in the house.” They burned it after that and the dreams stopped. 

Context:

GR is a 19-year-old college student from a small town in Arkansas. His grandma, Gee, has told him this story, and many members of the family believe that Gee’s house is haunted. 

Analysis: 

The figure of a ghost woman in a wedding dress is a pretty common one. She’s seen in La Llorona, a ghost women who walks around in a white dress, and there are many other versions of the “White Lady,” female ghosts in white dresses. The white dress is commonly associated with wedding dresses, and in this story the ghost is in a wedding dress. The wedding is a huge important ritual for a community, and it’s a large moment of shifting identity for women. They go from being part of one family to another, from being in the pre-reproduction phase of their life to being ready for reproduction. From a maiden to a wife, soon to be a mother. Weddings are a moment of liminality, where magic often happens. Ghosts are another figure of liminality, where they’re not quite alive and not quite dead. They’re not in this world, but they’re not in the next. The ghost bride can represent anxieties of when the marriage ritual goes wrong, just like how the ghost comes about from the death rituals going wrong. The wedding ritual is very important to a community, because it brings about new members of the community, but it’s also very anxiety inducing for the bride, because a lot can go wrong in this new identity and in the moment between the two identities. It’s also frightening for people to see these ghost brides because weddings are often supposed to be a large celebration of happiness, and people don’t like to acknowledge when they are not. However, oftentimes throughout different cultures weddings are not a moment of happiness for the bride. They could be just an economic situation, they could’ve been forced into the marriage, they could be a child, the marriage could tie them potentially forever to a bad person. There are a lot of negative things that can be associated with marriages, but people like to turn away from those. That’s why the ghost bride comes out, as a representation of all the anxieties that moment of liminality can bring. Studying a specific ghost bride figure can also tell you a lot about women’s place in that specific culture. 

Grandma’s Visitation

Nationality: Chinese
Age: 19
Occupation: Student
Residence: Jiangsu, China
Performance Date: 10/24/21
Primary Language: Chinese
Language: English

Background: The informant is raised in a family that believes in Buddhism. Since the following paranormal event happened when the informant was only six, her mother helped to provide some of its detailed information, yet the informant claimed that she did hold bits of memory of the whole experience. She claimed that she remembered it so well because, for her, it was an emotional experience. 

CY: My grandma passed away when I was six, around May, the summer holiday before I went to primary school. She died in a car accident. That night, my parents invited some monks to our home to hold a ceremony, known as “Zuo Fa Shi” in Chinese. The first night passed peacefully, but the following evening, which was exactly one night before my grandma’s cremation, I started to run a fever, umm, at around 7 p.m. My mom got super worried, but the monks comforted her, saying that it was my grandma. She came to visit me. My temperature kept rising at midnight and my mom said that I was murmuring the whole time, though she could barely understand one word. The monks then told my mom to read a piece of sutras beside my bed, but she has forgotten about the content… I think it should be something that was meant to be said to my grandma. My mom was so terrified that she pulled up an all-nighter, and according to her, at around 2 a.m., I suddenly straightened my arms, pointing to the ceiling, and made a strange noise that sounded like an old woman screaming. After that, everything got settled down. I was no longer murmuring nor feverish. And that ends my whole story. 

Me: You said that your grandma went to visit you the night before cremation. Is there any significance about that evening? Why that night particularly? 

CY: Well, yeah, there is some sort of sayings about that in the ancient Chinese culture. So if spirits really exist, they are supposed to pass the Nai He Bridge and drink the Meng Po soup after the cremation. So, uh, that night was, was really her last chance to visit her family. And my mom said that my grandma came to visit me because she worried about me the most. 

Me: I see. Then do you know if your grandma went to visit others as well? Like your other relatives-? 

CY: Oh yes! May was pretty harsh on our family during that year, because my grandaunt also passed away in May. Because of oral cancer. I remember her calling all of us to the hospital one day and telling us that she thought that she was going to an end. She said that she had dreamed of my grandma that night, seeing my grandma smiling and waving to her. And about one or two days later, my grandaunt passed away. They said that my grandma was waiting for her in the dream, and they both went to heaven. 

Context: This piece was collected during a phone call. 

Thoughts: The informant’s experience is a detailed example of ghost visitation, which is quite interesting and moving at the same time since people in many cultures tend to believe that family members would come back and visit their beloved before going to the other side of the world. However, it is worth noticing that a lot of the details were narrated by the informant’s mother, so they might be exaggerated or imprecise. Her mother might be experiencing slight hallucinations due to the trauma of losing her own mom, and it is possible that her memory has faded after more than ten years. Yet a lot of the behaviors shown by the informant during her grandma’s visitation indeed can be considered “spooky”, such as the unexpected fever, and it makes me wonder if all these so-called ghost visitations would manifest themselves in terms of certain illnesses on the person being visited. Moreover, how would this visitation be different from the “visitation dream” experienced by the informant’s grandaunt? 

Family Ghost Story After Relative’s Sudden Death

Nationality: American
Age: 20
Occupation: College student
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: 04/20/2019
Primary Language: English

Context: The informant, a 20-year-old female college student, was describing stories and rituals, related to both her family and her passion for theatre, that she believes help define different facets of her identity. The following is an excerpt from our conversation, in which she describes a highly personal family ghost story relating to the sudden death of her uncle in the San Francisco marathon when she was young.

Text:

Informant: Okay, so… my uncle passed away in the San Francisco marathon. It was very sudden because he died while he was running, and he was extremely physically fit and no one could have ever predicted that this would happen. But, on that day, we were up in Tilden Park, as a family. And I was hiding in the bushes with a stick and poking the stick around. And I’m like young. I’m like six or seven. So, I’m poking around with a stick and my mom is like, “Where’s L—?” And then she looks around, and she sees what I’m doing, and she’s like, “What’s going on? What are you up to in the bush?” And I tell her that I hear a voice… and I have no recollection of doing this! My mom actually told me about this when I was doing an interview with her for a project, so it was really an emotional thing to find out. But basically I was with the stick, hearing a voice that was saying, “Long live my sisters.” And so it was really really shocking to hear when she told me this. It was almost like my whole body froze. I didn’t know that my uncle had passed away, but I told her I heard a voice that sounded like my uncle, saying, “Long live my sisters.” And so that was really wild and it had a huge effect on my mom because she knew that he had passed away. It was super weird that I was having this voice in my head, but she said that I told her that is was my uncle’s voice, coming from San Francisco — it sounded far away. I said it was in San Francisco, but that I could hear that it was leaving. So, it was like a goodbye from him. My mom talked a lot about it with the adults in my family. Especially since I was so young, it’s just a really strange thing to have a feeling about. She didn’t tell me until I was much older, but she talked about it with her sister a lot. And I think it was crazy and I think it was something that really helped throughout his passing because my mom is a very spiritual person. We don’t really believe in God or anything, but we believe in spirits. And we found a lot of comfort in the fact that one of us received a message that our uncle was okay, and that he was leaving with a message about bringing power to his sisters. That’s kind of how my mom took it.

Informant’s relationship to this item: The informant was visibly touched and emotional as she recalled the events of her uncle’s passing, as well as the interaction her mother claims that she had with him from beyond the grave. The story clearly holds significant weight for the informant, who only learned of it in very recent years. The story was also very impactful for the informant’s mother and aunt, as they firmly believe that their brother’s ghost was sending them a comforting message with the goal of easing their grieving processes and helping them progress after his death.

Interpretation: I completely understand how this occurrence would be both surreal and comforting to the informant and her family after the sudden loss of her uncle. The informant’s young age, the specific details she used when describing her uncle’s voice, in addition to the fact that she was unaware of her uncle’s passing at the time all make the interaction particularly inexplicable. The story definitely falls under the category of friendly ghost stories, which typically feature deceased family members communicating with their relatives with the supposed goal reassuring and comforting them after tragic losses. Additionally, the nature of the informant’s uncle’s voice, which she described as sounding “far away” and slowly drifting further, emphasizes the widespread belief that ghosts exist in liminal spaces, in which they are not fully alive or dead.

Ghost in Grandmother’s House

Nationality: United States/Mexico
Age: 19
Occupation: Student worker
Residence: Los Angeles, CA
Performance Date: 3/24/2017
Primary Language: English
Language: Spanish

Main Piece:

Particpant/interviewee marked as AM below. Interviewer (me) marked with LJ.

AM: So, it was, like a story of…there was a story about a little girl in my grandma’s house. So all of them…so my Tia Brenda, she went to school with a girl that passed away, like the girl was weird, she didn’t talk to anybody. And she didn’t have friends, they bullied her a lot. For some reason, my aunt talked to her. Um so like when she died, by aunt was we my grandma telling her “she’s here. Like she wants to talk to me.” My grandma was like “you’re crazy, what are you talking about?” And then, um, one of my aunts saw the girl. One of my other aunts. She told my grandma “oh no Ma, Brenda’s not lying, I saw the little girl too. She wants to tell Brenda something, but she doesn’t listen.”

They eventually moved out of that house, when my aunt turned 15. They moved to San Bernandino. And then the girl would talk to her again, but like trying to tell her something about my grandma. But my grandma still didn’t believe it. And then they moved again, to like Tahoe. And one day my grandma was home alone at night–the whole night. She said that something woke her up, like something tapped her. Haha.  When she woke up, like nobody was there. And then she finally saw the little girl. And then, so, she believed the little girl was there, but they didn’t know why she was there. They didn’t know why she kept coming.

A couple of years ago, my little cousin, Alondra went to go visit them and the same girl woke her up. Haha. And then like she said “you need to tell your Tia Brenda to stop doing bad things. Like she needs to be a good mom. She’s a bad daughter.” She told my little cousin this. Once they told my mom, they believed her. They told my Tia and she finally believed it, but she didn’t change. I haven’t heard anything about her since then.

 

Context:

Asked if anyone knew any ghost stories. I recorded this then.

Background:

The participant is a first year student at the University of Southern California. She was raised in South Central, Los Angeles around the university in a Mexican household. She believes in the existence of ghosts and has heard this story from her family, but nothing has happened to her personally.

Analysis:

The participant called this entity a ghost throughout the entire story. However, ghosts, are typically associated with one location. As Professor Tok Thompson said during a lecture “ghosts help us remember horrific acts.” Perhaps it was not a ghost that was following the family or why would the little girl become attached to Tia Brenda and her family?

It is interesting that the little girl’s message told Tia Brenda to be a better person. It might have been the little cousin creating a story, inadvertently, having grown up hearing stories about her aunts and grandmother seeing the ghost of a little girl. It might commemorate the story of this little girl who was ignored and bullied because she was different and then died (cause of death unknown). The story may have evolved to reflect how the family felt about Tia Brenda.

Typically, it was children seeing this girl. When the grandma saw her, she had been sleeping. It could all be a story, or it could be real, but no proof exists.