Tag Archives: ghost stories

“La Llorona”

Nationality: Mexican American
Age: 30's
Occupation: Learning Specialist for SAAS at USC
Residence: Los Angeles area
Performance Date: April 15, 2015
Primary Language: English
Language: Spanish

The informant’s family had been a traditional Mexican family then they moved to America and expanded their culture here. His parents were born and raised in Mexico and learned many cultural forms of folklore with the informant who was born in America. He shared some of the folklore that he was told that stuck with him as he grew older and more wise and mature. 

Informant…

“There was a woman in Mexico named Maria. Maria was gorgeous, more beautiful than anyone else so she believed she was above everyone else. As Maria go older, she got more beautiful and prideful because of it.When she was old snout to have an interest in men she wouldn’t look at the men from her village. She believed they weren’t good enough for her and what she thought she deserved so she would say thing about how when she would be married it would be to the most handsome man in the world. And then one day, a man who fit her standard rode into her village. He was a handsome young ranchero as well as the son of a rich rancher from the south. He only rode wild horses, he thought it wasn’t manly to ride a horse if it wasn’t half wild. He was the most handsome man in the world, but he had various talents as well he sang beautifully and played the guitar. Maria decided that that was the man for her. Maria played mind games with the ranchero, if he would speak to her on the pathway she would ignore him and pretend he wasn’t there, he would go to her how at night to play the guitar and serenade her but Maria wouldn’t go to her window, she wouldn’t accept any gifts from him. This all made the ranchero want her even more and he knew he had to get her to love him. Everything went according to Maria’s plan and they were soon married. Things were great in the beginning of their marriage they had 2 kids. But the man became bored with Maria and wanted to live his crazy wild life again, he showed more affection to the children that he showed to her. As proud as Maria was, she became very angry with the him. She also began to feel anger toward her children. One night she drowned her kids in the river and when the man found out that she drowned her kids he basically rebuked her away. So she was cursed because she drowned her kids for all eternity to wander the earth crying for her kids, hence the name la llorona.”

Analysis…

“La Llorona” translated in english as the woman who cries

When asked about where he heard the story he said his mother and grandmother had told him but he wasn’t sure where the story originated or came from but he knew that it came from Mexico. The informant believes that La Llorona is real. He came into close contact with her when he was young around the ages of two or three. He said that his mother and his aunt were in Mexico cleaning his grandmother’s house when they heard her painful, creepy, whaling cries. He said that she was saying “oh my babies” and when his mother and aunt heard that they took all the children and threw them under the bed in the next room. He said they did this because it is believed that if she finds children she will take them as her own because she had lost hers. He believes that this story is also told to children as a scare tactic method to keep them in the house at night so that La Llorona doesn’t take them. He believes that because his mom used it as a scare tactic on him, his brothers, and his cousins.

Tales like this are told all over the world as a scare tactic to force kids into doing whatever their parents feel like they should be doing. Most Americans have heard of having monsters under their beds (to keep children in their beds at night) or the boogie man (forces kids to bah in fear of the boogie man coming after them. This tale reminds me of those and I initially make the connection between them. The crazy part of this tale is the informant swears that the came into close contact with the la llorona meaning that it is possible that she is real which would lead to ghosts and unwanted spirits being real.

Another version of this legend can be found in movie form and is called The Crying Woman (1993) directed by Ramón Peón.

Fort Monroe – Confederate ghost stories

Nationality: Half Filipino-American, half white
Age: 21
Occupation: Graduate student
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: 3/27/2014
Primary Language: English

ITEM:
(1) The informant’s father’s family had just moved into Fort Monroe — her father was visiting from his undergrad (Purdue) and was almost 20 at the time. The night he came home, everyone in the family heard the sound of heavy chains dragging across the floor of the upstairs attic. The next day, her dad and his dad went to investigate. They saw nothing, and it never happened again, but everybody agreed on the sound.

(2) One time, a bunch of the army wives got together and they were talking about their houses. They ended up comparing ghost stories. One of them was saying that she walked into the kitchen with her husband and there was a cat there — they didn’t have a cat. The cat looked at them, and then turned away and walks through a wall. Eventually, the family looked up the plans for the building in the engineer’s office and originally there’d been a door in the space the ghost cat walked through.

BACKGROUND:
The informant’s ethnicity is half-white, half-Filipino American. Her father, who is white, was in the army, and his father flew helicopters in Korea and Vietnam — their family grew up moving from army base to army base.

Fort Monroe, in Hampton, Virginia, was where they kept the really important POWs from the Civil War, like Jefferson Davis. For those POWs, they would build quarters for their wives. It was widely understood that the town ghost was the ghost of a woman whose face sometimes appears in the widow at Mrs. Davis’s old quarters, waiting for her husband to come back.

CONTEXT:
The informant, who is one of my housemates, told me the stories, which originated from her father, in conversation. Her father actually recently visited her (4/30/14), and later corroborated details of her stories with him, the primary source.

ANALYSIS:
Whenever people live in older areas, or areas with a lot of history, it seems much more common to encounter ghost legends, and for people to be more comfortable with the idea of ghosts. This is of course helped along by my informant’s father’s religious upbringing. His family was Catholic — it was totally normal to talk about ghosts, and nobody talked about them as if they’re inherently scary.

Additionally, Fort Monroe is an area so closely tied to the Civil War, the bloodiest and one of the most traumatic events in American history. The distance in time between then and the modern day isn’t as far as people might think, and one way to tie these two eras together is by passing on legends about local history.

For more information about Fort Monroe’s ghost sightings, click here.

“El Mano Peluda”

Nationality: Columbian/American
Age: 18-22
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: April 19th, 2014
Primary Language: English
Language: Spanish

Information about the Informant

My informant is an undergraduate student majoring in Philosophy at the University of Southern California. He is half-Columbian and was raised in the Jehovah’s Witnesses Christian denomination.

Transcript

“It’s called, um, ‘El Mano Peluda [sic?],’ and that’s supposed to mean ‘The Hairy Hand.’ And, um, I think that was so I wouldn’t get up at night, or, like, move around or make too much noise. But basically, um, when you’re sleeping, this hairy hand would come in through the windows or through the vents or something.”

Collector: “Just a hand?”

“It’s just a hairy hand. That’s it. Um, and I actually Googled it. Apparently, it’s some guy had his hand cut off during the Inquisition and he revenged–he said he would get revenge on the people who were the culture that killed him. So, um, the hand would come out of its grave and it would grab children or it would grab their legs from either under the bed or it would crawl up their blanket. It was just really scary. Um, and yeah, occasionally my mom would  use it as kind of like a, um, you know when you rile up little kids, you say something like ‘The hand’s coming, the hand’s coming,’ and she’d grab my leg and I’d go like, ‘Oh my god!'”

Analysis

This, unlike the other stories this informant told me, does not seem to be a case where the parent scares the child in order to get them to behave, but is more of a ghost story with purpose of entertaining/scaring rather than coercing. This story does give the figure in it a backstory, according to my informant’s research, which also supports its position as more of a ghost story than a story to get children to behave with. The strange part of this is the commonality of the concept of a “hairy hand,” with disembodied hand stories all over the world constantly needing the hand to also be hairy. This is possibly a remnant of the historical theory that criminals were closer to our purported ape ancestors and thus displayed features that are more akin to those of primates, including excessive body hair.

For another “hairy hand” story, see:

Gilbert, Jane . “Letterboxing on Dartmoor: An Addictive Pastime… for the Brave!”. Time Travel-Britain. Web. 01 May. 2014. <http://www.timetravel-britain.com/articles/country/dartmoor.shtml>.

Demon sighting

Nationality: Mexican-American
Age: 20
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles, CA
Performance Date: 4/28/12
Primary Language: English
Language: Spanish

This is a story about my informant’s Uncle Carlos.

“This one time, when he was a kid, uh, he was home alone. And in his room it was pitch black and he wakes up to the sound of someone whispering in his ear, like, ‘Carlos, look, look!’ At first he thought he was just, like, he was dreaming until he came to and he was, like, ‘Wait, what the hell is that?’ From his perspective, he turns around and from his doorway he sees, like, these two, these two diamond shaped eyes. And it’s, like, perched, like, you could see, like, there’s something perched, like, at the top of the corner, like, right there and he’s just kinda trying to wake up just kinda like, ‘What the hell?’ And the more he’s looking at it, the more he starts to feel like something’s literally looking right at him and there’s just, like, this eerie feeling, like, ‘What the hell is that?’ And, at this point, he’s just completely paralyzed, he has no— just out of pure fear. He doesn’t know what to do. And he manages to break out of the fear and turn on the light. Like, he gets up and turns on the light. For a solid three seconds, he saw this thing… The way he described it, it looked like a bat, a bat with—a brown bat with a lot of fur and this, just huge, just wing. You could see it flapping, like that, and it just it flapped and it went through, like, the hallway and it went back into the dark.” Laughs.

“And he got up and he looked at it and from the door, from the other um, doorway, he saw it perched there again. And from there, he, literally, just, he’s screaming, just turning on all the lights, every single light in the house and my grandparents finally get back and he’s probably thirteen, fourteen, and my grandparents, are like—having all the lights on in the house, in the middle of the night are you fucking crazy? So he comes—The way that my grandma told me, like, he—my grandma saw my uncle Carlos in the living room like this…”

(pulls knees to chest and wraps arms around shins )

“Just waiting for them to get back. And he was just, he felt it like, it was, like, in the house, just like staring at him. He had no idea what it was, but he said, like, ‘[informant’s name], it was this thing this, like a demon.’ And he didn’t know exactly what it was… you know, but, like, for him, there’s no bullshit. This, for him, it happened. It was there. You know, he still remembers it. And it was just really traumatizing.”

 

My informant seems to trust the word of his uncle Carlos and believes that this demon animal actually exists. My informant can’t explain how this could have happened, but his family is very open to the supernatural and he loves hearing about and sharing these stories.

This is a very specific example of an appearance of a demon. This is another common motif in legends about the devil.

Red (a Ghost Story)

Nationality: Chinese
Age: 16
Occupation: High School Student
Residence: Arcadia, CA
Performance Date: 4/28/2013
Primary Language: English
Language: Chinese

“So there’s this ghost story that I heard at Mock Trial state, and… it goes something like… There’s a man who checks into this hotel, and… he’s there alone.  So every night he’s there he goes down to the bar, and while he’s sitting in the bar, having a drink… he observes… up at the counter… he sees the back of this beautiful young woman.  And… he keeps trying to muster up the courage to go talk to her, but as soon as he’s close… uh… she just… goes away.  So he’s keep trying every night and every single night he sees the same beautiful woman and he keeps… trying to bring up the courage to go talk to her.  But she leaves every single time… he’s supposed to go talk to her.
So at night when he retires to his room… he… hears a scratching… at the door.  He wakes up… and he asks, “who’s there?”  But nobody responds.  So… he goes up to the door and looks through the eye hole… and all he can see is red…  There’s nothing there but the color red.  He finds this… kinda odd so he just goes back to sleep.
Uh, when he goes back to the bar he sees the woman again, same chain of events occur… he’s back at his room that night… hears the scratching again.  He looks at the eyehole, asks “who’s there?” No one’s there… it’s JUST the color red.  So the next day… he goes back to the bar… and he sees that the girl is gone.  So he goes up to the bartender and says… “Where’s that girl who sat here every night,  I really wanted to talk to her.  And… the bartender is like… “Oh… um… you mean that young woman?  Well… she left… but there was something really really odd about her.”  And the man asks, “what was that?”  And the bartender says… “Her eyes were colored red.”

My sister heard this story from a friend on a car ride back from a mock trial competition.  She and her friends were sharing scary stories when it was around evening.

My sister was particularly disturbed by this story and claims to think about/dream about it for the remainder of the day and night she hears or re-tells it.  She says that the thing that scares her the most is the connection between the girl’s eye color and the red that the man sees through the eye hole.  The catch is that every night she was here, the girl was peering through the eye hole, watching the man.  She says the thought of being watched in places of supposed privacy frightens her.

When I first heard the story, my first thought aabout the color red was that this either represented a trait of the man or the girl.  I thought that the color would imply something sexual about the story, so I was surprised that the association was quite literal – that the girl’s eyes are red and so when she went to watch the man it covered the eye hole’s view with red.  The story was not as disturbing for me, probably because I was expecting some form of bizarre twist when I had the conversation with the informant, and it was outdoors and fairly light.  The place in which this piece is performed is important. My sister heard this story during the evening in a car – the cramped and dark environment probably contributed to how the story impacted her.  However, I do agree with her on the frightening prospect of being watched without knowing.  I think the element of having the man “watch” the girl without knowing the girl was watching him all along helps emphasize that twist and underlying fear in the audience.

I also noticed that my sister learned this from a high school classmate and was performed in a group of high school students.   I think that the story is scary for high school students because privacy is something adolescents value a lot.  Although adolescents use things such as social networking and are pretty immersed in an environment of disclosure, they also want a certain extent of privacy for their own thoughts.  I feel like high school students like the informant worry about surveillance because they understand how the world they’re growing up in is becoming more and more transparent (partially because of their own practices).

In my opinion, this story shares similarities with other scary stories involving being watched.  The main recurring elements in the story (the girl and the red behind the eye hole) are kept mysterious throughout the entire story – at the end, another character/informant makes the terrifying connection for both the main character and the audience.  But the girl doesn’t really come across as a ghost to me.  She has an unusual characteristic and doesn’t actually speak to the man, but the story itself doesn’t explicitly call her a ghost.  So I find it interesting that my sister calls this a ghost story.