Tag Archives: ghost stories

The Pocono Devil

Nationality: Latino, American, Jewish
Age: 23
Occupation: User Researcher
Residence: Los Angeles, California
Performance Date: May 2nd, 2021
Primary Language: English
Language: Spanish

As a child, the informant attended a summer camp in the Poconos in Pennsylvania. He tells the story of an urban legend that haunts the camp grounds– the Pocono Devil.

M: Pocono Devil? That is a story that I heard a couple of years ago when I went to camp in the Pocono mountains in Pennsylvania. There’s a story that I heard about a monster that lived in the woods. Basically, the story I always heard was that the camp opened in the 40s, and in the 50s, uh, there was a camper who got buried alive by his sister by the lake. 

And the story goes that that kid rose from the grave as the Pocono Devil, who’s a demon who stalks the woods looking for revenge on his sister. So you go into the woods, wearing, at night, wearing a Pine Forest T-shirt–Pine Forest is the name of the camp– the Pocono Devil will come after you thinking you’re his sister.

It might be a story that they told campers to make sure they didn’t go into the woods in the middle of the night, or something that older kids 30 years ago came up with to scare younger kids. 

There’s also this big, gnarled tree thing in the center of camp called the Ten Year Tree. Any person who’s either attended the camp for 10 years, or worked there for ten years, gets their name on a metal stamp bolted to the tree. And if you look for it, uh, right in the middle, there’s one for the Pocono Devil. 

Thoughts:

It’s classic for a summer camp to have haunting stories. Like the informant said, this story was probably either made to keep campers out of the woods at night to keep them safe or was made by older campers to freak out the younger ones. Either way, this story has very obviously become greatly entangled with the identity of the camp as they have a name plate in honor of it.

A story like this also helps increase the popularity of the camp. The name Pine Forest piggy backs on the story of the Pocono Devil, thus increasing the width of the camp’s brands reach as well as tempting kids to join next summer.

Bunshinsaba

Nationality: Chinese
Age: 18
Occupation: Student
Residence: China
Performance Date: October 28, 2020
Primary Language: Chinese
Language: English

Main Piece: Interviewer: In my middle school, the movie Bunshinsaba was quite popular at that time. One day after the final exam, my roommates and I decided to summon Bunshinsaba and ask her how did our exam go. We sat around the table in the dormitory and held a pen together. As soon as we read the incantation silently, the pen started to move on the paper automatically and a number gradually appeared. Everyone was shocked by what we have just seen. Then, according to the tradition, after the rite, we should properly bury the pen so that the Bunshinsaba can be peacefully sent away, but we were too lazy to do that so we just left the pen in our dormitory. Soon, we heard a loud sound from next door: the chandelier in that dorm fell from the roof! More horribly, after checking the chandelier, the maintenance guys affirmed that there was nothing wrong with the chandelier and they could not explain why this situation happened. We were scared by it, and we thought it must be a warning from Bunshinsaba. Therefore, the next day, we bury the pen in the school’s garden, and then everything returned to normal.  

Background: Bunshinsaba was from one of the oldest witchcrafts in ancient China. Bunshinsaba is the ghost of a dead person who can come back to humans’ world and answer people’s doubts through a certain rite. It originated in the worship of a legendary spiritual goddess. Normally, we think it started from Tang Dynasty but some experts believe it is much longer than we thought. Initially, some Taoist priest used it for divination, and then, it became more popular among ordinary people.   

Context: I sent a message to my interviewer, who is one of my best friends, and asked her to tell me some unusual or supernatural things that have happened to her. Then she sent me a long message to illustrate this story and I asked for several details afterward. It was a relaxing and fun chat as she thought it was a memorable and interesting part of her school life. 

Thoughts: People do not like uncertain and unknown future, and they try to figure it out through summoning Bunshinsaba. I felt very unbelievable and frightened when I first heard this story, so I looked up some relevant information online. Some scientists explained that this is simply because people had some psychological hints during the process that make them inadvertently move their pens. More importantly, I think the story tells us not to do these ghost rituals casually, no matter how curious you are, because you do not know if something terrible will happen if you annoy the ghost.

Woman in White– A Ghost Story

Nationality: Lebanese American
Age: 20
Occupation: Student
Residence: Long Beach
Performance Date: April 27 2020
Primary Language: English

Collector: Please, madam, pray tell us your ghost story.

Informant: Alright. I will tell you now this story of my ghost encounter, encounter with the paranormal. Ok, so, um, it took place in the Netherlands, um, we were going– me and four other girls that were studying abroad in Germany, we were gonna take a trip to Amsterdam, and, um, we took the overnight train, the cheapest option from Germany, which was like, seven different trains and all these transfers throughout the middle of the night, so, we get to, um, the Netherlands, um, to this little town about an hour outside of Amsterdam, where our AirBnb was, it was called [name]. 

So we get there around like, 11 AM, um, we, um, have a snack and we go check into our Airbnb, it’s like 11:30, 12, and what we didn’t know, but we didn’t mind at all, is that you have to walk through about a mile of forest to get to the airBnB, which it doesn’t say on the website.. [Laughs] Y’know, we’re not thinking anything of it. um, the forest is beautiful, there’s a nice path, the trees are nice and tall, so, we walk through this mile of forest, we don’t think anything of it, and we get to the AirBnB, check in, and we go straight to sleep, since we didn’t sleep all night. And we sleep, all of us, for maybe like 6 or 7 hours, um, and we wake up, and we’re all in great spirits and we all wanna go hit the town in Amsterdam and go party, and we’re all getting ready, listening to music, and by the time we’re ready to leave the airbnb and take the train to Amsterdam, um, it’s about 9pm, i think it was exactly 9 pm. So we have to walk back through that mile of forest to get to the train station to get to Amsterdam.

 So, um, this mile is just one straight shot path, through the trees, the eact one we had come on the way there, just one straight shot path. We set off on the path, and we quickly realize that it is pitch black– and i can’t stress enough that its pitch black, its like your eyes are closed because trees are so tall, they’re covering the moon and the stars, um, so the four of us, we’ve all got our little iphone flashlights, which are only so good, and we’re all spooked, but y’know, we’re big girls, its fine. Um, so, y’know, we’re walking through this very creepy, um, pitch black, literally– and i can’t stress enough how it was pitch black, as though your eyes were closed. It is– i never– Before, I had never seen such darkness in my life.

So, um, we get about halfway through, about a half-mile out, and we come to a crossroads. And, at the same time, all of our flashlights come upon the same thing– a woman, about 15 feet ahead of us, standing completely still, completely straight, she’s wearing a wedding dress, and she’s standing completely still, right in the middle of our path. And we all stop– and, it was about two seconds, all together, or less, that we’re standing there, um, and one of us goes “what’s that?” and we realize we’re all seeing the same time, we take off and run for our lives the way we came back to the airbnb, we are running absolutely for our lives, and we all were looking back, and, um, she didn’t chase us or anything, but when we got back to the airbnb, we were all freaking out, all in tears, crying, it was so scary. And, um, we confirmed that all four of us had seen the same thing, a tall woman in a wedding dress, um, like 15 feet ahead of us, standing completely still. 

Collector: Was she looking at you?

Informant: So the thing is, is that none of us could see a face. So, it’s not like– when I remember, i don’t remember, like, noticing a certain faceless-ness that, like jumped out at you, but looking back, none of us can recall seeing a face. But, my three other friends, they recall seeing, like, a sort of blueish greenish tint to her skin, which i don’t personally remember, but all three of them remember it. Um [laughs], so yeah.

Context: The informant is a good friend of mine, and is a Lebanese-American young woman studying music. In 2019, she studied abroad in Germany, and so had the opportunity to travel around Europe. This is her personal experience.

Analysis: I must admit that I am a little biased when it comes to this story, both because the informant is my friend, and because it is a frankly terrifying story. There were several things that I thought of first after hearing this experience. One was the location, taking place not only in a pitch black forest, but on a crossroads as well, which are considered to be liminal spaces, or places of transition. Traditionally, this is believed to be where many spirits can be found, in areas where ownership is uncertain, and so other entities are free to “cross over”.

Another element of the story is the woman dressed in a white wedding dress. Many cultures have a version of a woman dressed in white, lingering in forests, rivers, or other more rural areas where a scene of disaster supposedly happened. In many stories, these women in white have been scorned, or hurt in some way, and now wander the mortal plane in despair, or for revenge. The story is almost always connected to traditional cultural roles for women; For example, the woman kills herself after losing her husband to another woman, thus “failing” in her duties as a wife, or drowns her children in a river, therefore failing as a mother. I wonder if this story works as a sort of precautionary tale aimed at younger woman– to warn them of the monster they could become if they do not adhere to their roles. Another popular version of this story is La Llorona, an entity in Mexican folklore. For more information of the White Woman, please look at :

La Llorona (2020). Retrieved April 28 2020, 

from  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Llorona.

White Lady (ghost) (2020). Retrieved April 28 2020,

from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Lady_(ghost)


Abandoned Nunnery in Oklahoma

Nationality: Chinese-American
Age: 20
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: 2nd February 2019
Primary Language: English

Text:

KM: “Apparently there’s this like abandoned nunnery out somewhere in Tulsa, and I had a couple of my friends who got there, obviously trespassing to this place. But it was like, I don’t know, but there were rumors that there were like tapes that were still there even though the place was like abandoned that like showed like really bad things I think that happened there. So they go out there at like night, and they say – there were like 6 of them I think, 4 or 6 or them, and they were like okay we’re going to split up and we’re going to search for these tapes. And so, the person who told me this, he and this other guy, they went up like upstairs, and they were like searching for stuff. But um, my other friend, he went in the basement and they actually found the tape. And when they like picked it up, the like lights flickered in the building. And so, they had to like get out of there and apparently the tape is supposed to be like super creepy and stuff and my friend was just like keeping it in his car for the longest time.”

MS: “Did you ever play the tape, to see what was on it?”

KM: “No I don’t think so – it was a VHS tape so I don’t know. I never really followed up. I’m pretty sure the tape is just in my friend’s car still.”

…

KM: “But for the longest time, I felt like I was haunted by the nuns after hearing this story because like weird stuff would happen with like my phone and I was like “the nuns are haunting me” so I was convinced… My Twitter AV, this is like stupid, but my Twitter AV, which is like your profile picture on Twitter, I would upload it and it would always just turn to black, just like a black picture and I could never like change it back, and I was like I’m really being haunted by these nuns for listening to this story. Because I think part of the legend was that once you hear the story, or once you know about the tapes, they would target you too so I just remember feeling distinctly uncomfortable knowing this.”

 

Context:

The informant is a Chinese-American college student from Tulsa, Oklahoma. This conversation was part of a discussion among a group of similarly aged people about their high school experiences growing up in various parts of America. The content has been lightly edited, and the removed content is indicated by ellipses.

 

Interpretation:

Even though this is not a first-person account of visiting this apparently haunted nunnery, it still provides us with information because this is how legends typically spread – the informant believes she was haunted by the nuns even though she never took a part in directing interacting with the legend herself. She may have experienced the same “haunting” things even if she hadn’t heard the legend but having heard it, she automatically used its mysterious nature as a way to justify inexplicable things in her life. Also interesting is how the mysterious nature of the tapes gives them their value and so even though they were taken from the original site, they were never actually played to verify the legend one way or the other. This may be an instance of the fear of the “other”. For the modern generation, VHS tapes are not something familiar and have this spooky quality because of that.