Tag Archives: ghost story

“Bloody Mary” Test of Courage

Nationality: Vietnamese-American
Age: 10
Occupation: Elementary School Student
Residence: Iowa
Performance Date: 5/1/2021
Primary Language: English

Main Piece:

B: So when I was in kindergarten or first grade, during recess my friends and I would play four-square. So, I was- there’s a line and I was waiting in the line to play. And I heard two boys talking about Bloody Mary. They said you have to say “bloody mary” three times into a mirror, and then she comes out or something.

Me: Could you do this in any mirror or did you have to go in a specific room?

B: You had to do it in the bathroom. But I tried it and nothing happened (laughs the kind of laugh you do when you try something silly).

Me: Why do you think kids tell each other this story?

B: I think part of the reason is because they want to scare each other. And I feel like part of it is also that, they got told it and they got scared, and they want other people to know because they want them to be aware or something.

Me: What thoughts did you have when you tried this?

B: I didn’t have any thoughts, I was like, I’m gonna do this, and I went in the bathroom and turned off the lights and shut the door, and then I started saying it? And then I was like, “this is fake,” and went back out.

Background: 

My informant is my cousin’s 10-year-old son, who is in the fourth grade. He lives in a suburban neighborhood near Des Moines, which is the capital of Iowa. He goes to a public elementary school in his district, where he heard this story. He then tested the theory in the bathroom at his own house. He insinuates that he was never fearful of this story nor did he believe it, and carries this tone throughout his telling of it. 

Context:

This is a transcript of our conversation over the phone. Lately, he has been telling me stories about what goes on during school, though this conversation was prompted specifically for this collection project. I was curious about whether his generation still knew about bloody mary.

Thoughts: 

I was pretty surprised that “Bloody Mary” is still an ongoing tradition/ritual for kids in my informant’s generation. In class, we learned about Dundes’ theory on Bloody Mary’s connection to fears about menstruation in young girls, which explained why so many of my female classmates also knew about this ritual, and how they learned of it when they were in elementary or middle school. Thus, I was slightly surprised that my cousin’s son also knew about Bloody Mary, and that he learned about it from other boys. In this instance, the story of Bloody Mary doesn’t seem to attest to girls’ fears about menstruation, which is a potentially scary and traumatic first experience if not well-prepared for it, but rather, a sort of test of courage for boys. My informant’s commentary on the reason the story is told, which is that the relayer was scared themselves, suggests that some fear may be alleviated when the story is passed onto another person. The act of trying it, then, tests your courage to face this alleged horrifying sight of a bloody woman, which fully alleviates your fear when nothing happens.

For Dundes’ work on Bloody Mary, see:

Dundes, Alan. Bloody Mary in the Mirror: Essays in Psychoanalytic Folkloristics. University Press of Mississippi, 2002. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt2tvfn2. Accessed 1 May 2021. 

The Black Stallion and Creature With Three Red Eyes: Don’t Walk Alone at Midnight in Guatemala

Nationality: Guatamalan-American (American citizenship)
Age: 20
Occupation: Student studying medicine at USC, Hospital Tech
Residence: 2715 Portland St Los Angeles CA 90007
Performance Date: 2/12/21
Primary Language: English
Language: Spanish

I heard this legend while many of my housemates were gathered around a table and drinking. The first time the speaker shared this story, he mentioned that his grandfather never drank after he saw a red-eyed figure in Guatemala. When I asked him to retell his story for collection, he gave much more detail about the two creatures his grandfather feared.

*

The speaker’s grandfather used to tell this story when he would get drunk: he saw two creatures. One was a being with red eyes, the other was a black horse. In 1960 in San Rafael, Guatemala at exactly 12 am, neighbors in a village of only 15 or 20 houses could hear a black stallion. And if stragglers outside a home were caught alone, they would hear a horse running after them. They wouldn’t see the horse. If they managed to slip inside their house and close the door, they would hear the horse pounding at the threshold until 12:01. Then they would not hear it anymore.

If the horse caught stragglers, they would die of an underlying disease like cardiac arrest or drug overdose, something “easy to explain.” In those days, a lot of children went missing in the wilderness because the area was “unexplored.”

One night, the speaker’s grandfather and his friend left a larger group of friends playing soccer to walk home around midnight. They were both drunk. Suddenly, the speaker’s grandfather felt dread. Every step they took felt “like mud” and the speaker’s grandfather felt like he was being watched. Both friends turned around to see a seven-foot-tall humanoid figure with three red eyes watching “like a little kid goes onto a tree and just sticks his head sideways and stays staring at you.”

The speaker did not know how his grandfather got home that night, but the friend went missing for over a week. “They did find the guy, his friend, my grandpa’s friend. And so he just told me that this dude was torn. Like torn apart. “

When asked what this creature was, the speaker said that “It’s from the time before even that place was colonized by Spain… around the Mayan time… the Mayans just disappeared one day. They were so advanced for their time.” He went on to say that his grandfather believed that the Mayans, who the speaker mentioned were polytheistic built massive pyramids, disappeared because they were killed by these strange creatures. “These things that they [victims] see now are from times that we can’t even comprehend because he’s like, yeah, they’re from the future. And I was like, What the hell do you mean the future?” The speaker trailed off.

“I’m not sure if it’s real or not, I’m going to believe because the way he will talk to me, he would stare me down in the eyes,” the speaker continued. “And my grandma would also support that, because even she would hear the black horse because that another story my grandma told me when my grandpa was asleep, was, he couldn’t sleep at night, most of the time in Guatemala, because he said that that’s the human figure would haunt him because of his friend.”

The speaker noted that black stallions were also a status symbol in Guatemala reserved for members of the military.

When asked why he first told the story, the speaker noted that ” Usually when I’m under the influence, then the story comes out But usually, when you’re impaired or under the influence, you see, I wouldn’t say another dimension, but you see something else? Like you see? We see different.”

The speaker’s grandfather worried that these two creatures would come for him after he moved to the U.S. He later died of a heart attack.

*

This speaker is a good friend but he embellishes stories a lot. He later told me that he believed that he’d seen the red-eyed creature in the U.S. even though he called both of these creatures “just legends” in the recording. I also happen to know that in telling these stories, he was trying to get me to trust him again after a breakup. After, he often offered to tell similar stories. But I think he was being genuine when he told me what he knew and what he had seen.

This speaker also struggles with drinking alcoholic beverages. Telling this story may be a way for him to express the fear he feels drinking to suppress emotions or escape responsibility.

He later asked me not to tease him about ghosts because to him, these stories are very real. I might not believe these stories in the daylight, but I will never walk alone at midnight in Guatemala.

Haunted House in Indiana- The Funny Man and the Woman with the Red Eyes: Sleep Paralysis and Two Traveling Ghosts, Cured by a Witchdoctor

Nationality: African-American
Age: 20
Occupation: Student at FIDM studying fashion design
Residence: 2715 Portland St Los Angeles CA 90007
Performance Date: 2/8/21
Primary Language: English

I first heard this story when I asked the speaker if she had ever seen a ghost, but when she began telling her story I remembered that I had heard parts of this tale before. The speaker told her story in a very matter-of-fact tone and spoke first about her experiences with friendly and unfriendly ghosts. For another example of a ghost legend by this same speaker, search “Haunted Theaters and Ghost Lights” in the USC folklore archive.

*

When the speaker and her twin brother were three years old, they shared a room in Gary, Indiana in a house completely made of brick. “My mom came in [to the children’s bedroom], she had just put us to bed. And then she heard me and my brother laughing. And so she like came back into the room and she’s like, What’s going on here? She’s like, what’s happening? And we’re like, ‘The man, the man. He’s making a funny face.’ And there was nobody there.”

“Was I scared? No, because he was one of the friendly ones of the house,” the speaker said. “He was kind of just there for jokes and like to make children laugh, because apparently, um, his grandchildren died in the house. And he like, died out of grief. And he loved kids. So he would just play with my brother and I [sic] occasionally.”

The speaker said that there were also unfriendly ghosts, and that she had recently gotten rid of one of these malicious specters. ” “They moved with us to Florida. And at first, I didn’t notice because they didn’t approach me. At first, they would just stay in the corner. And I didn’t realize it would always be a really scary woman with two red eyes. And I didn’t know what she was. I thought she was just like, a spirit… But no, she turned out to be worse than I thought.”

The speaker said that she began to experience sleep paralysis and that “I would be screaming, and she’d be attacking me. And I couldn’t move. And I’d wake up with bruises on my arms and my legs because she was sitting on top of me.” She slept with her mother at age 17 because of these nightly attacks. When she returned to her bedroom, she said, ” “I was screaming to save my mom and my brother. But they couldn’t hear me. And then just the woman was just taking my family away from me. And I didn’t like I couldn’t do anything. I was just sitting there. And then again, my mom woke me up screaming, crying in real life. “

The speaker’s Puerto Rican grandfather, Julio, was a witch doctor. “We had to pin a square piece of black cloth underneath my pillow. I don’t know what it was to catch her something like that.” Soon after that she moved to Southern California to attend school, and she hasn’t seen either ghost since.

*

This story was told at night in the kitchen, and three college-age females were present. The speaker said that she was relieved to be rid of the ghosts, and that after her parents’ divorce, she rarely visited the Gary House. She also said that the house was torn apart after the divorce, and that her father would start projects that he wouldn’t complete (for example, fixing the bathroom tub). I think these ghosts may have something to do with the divorce, but I believe that this experience was very frightening for the speaker.

This speaker later scoffed at my mentioning that a friend received therapy when recovering from his parent’s divorce. Her response suggested that children do not need therapy for this life change.

For another example of ghosts stories indicating changes in property ownership or status quo, see the scholarly article “Ghostly Possession of Real Estate: The Dead in Contemporary Estonian Folklore” by Ulo Valk (2006).

The concept of traveling ghosts is certainly frightening, and this story was welcome after a long day’s work.

Maya, the Dancing Ghost

Nationality: Indian
Age: 13
Occupation: Student
Residence: Gurgaon, India
Performance Date: 26/04/21
Primary Language: English
Language: Hindi

The Interviewer will be referred to as ‘I’, and the informant as ‘V’. Translations for Hindi words, if any, will be italicised and in parentheses. The Informant is a 13-year-old Punjabi girl, born and raised in North India, attending a boarding school in North India.

I: So, you mentioned you played some pranks on your friends based on a ghost story they tell at your school. Could you tell me about it?

V: Yeah, sure, so basically, I’m in this old boarding school and this is a really old story that basically every student who ever came here knows. Maya was a dancer for the Nawabs (this refers to the royal families that would rule South Asian states, primarily during the period of Islamic rule), so she used to dance for the king and queen. She was beautiful and she used to dance really well, and slowly the king fell in love with her. And when the queen found out, she sent her guards to kill Maya, and they killed her on the thirteenth, and cut her into thirteen pieces, and she’s buried all around the school, because this is the same place where they were then. So, what we are always told is that on the thirteenth, if Maya can get all her body-pieces back in the same place at 12:00AM, like, at that exact time, then she can come back, and she will haunt our whole school. It’s kind of scary and fun because, basically, we prank all our classmates because of this, like, we scare people on purpose on the thirteenth, in the dorms, especially on any Friday the Thirteenth because everybody thinks that’s scary now. 

Analysis:

This is a particularly interesting iteration of a ghost story, because it visibly and obviously has both older, and newer elements. The idea of her being a royal dancer seems older, like a part of the story that has been preserved over the generations it has been told, especially since the location of this school in North India tracks. However, the idea of ‘thirteen’, the thirteen pieces and the thirteenth, points to a newer iteration, because thirteen, historically, is not a particularly unlucky number for Indians the way it is in other cultures. With the increasing prominence of globalisation and digital media, including social media, the homogenisation of information across cultures, and even multimedia such as horror movies and franchises, the idea of “Friday the Thirteenth”, and thirteen in general as a number that inspires bad luck and fear, has been propagated even to India. Therefore, I would hypothesize that the ‘thirteen’ portion of the story is newer, a modification, especially considering my informant here is very young and part of an especially globalised generation. There is a certain plausibility to this story, since it is rooted in a real time and place in India, even though it concerns ghosts and is largely believed by the student body of the school (or, alternatively, used as an excuse to play pranks), making it essentially a legend amongst this particular community, however niche it may be.

Instances in a Haunted House

Nationality: American
Age: 19
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: 2015
Primary Language: English

Background 

The interviewer and informant, EM, met in college. EM’s mother’s best friend is sure she lives in a haunted house. 

Context

EM tells the interviewer about two ghostly experiences that the lady has told her. Both instances happened in the supposedly haunted house.   

Transcript 

“Basically, she has had so many instances of a ghost in her house. I remember two specific times where very scary things occurred to her. She told me this five years ago, like 2015. In her bathroom, there is a small circular stained glass window that is tinted red and yellow. There is no image in the stained glass, only patterns made with the colors. At night, she woke up to go to the restroom. As she was sitting on the toilet, her attention was drawn to the little window. The outline of a head and neck- like a headshot- the figure of something, or someone, was outlined in the window. She looked away and immediately looked back to find that it was still there. She got off the toilet and looked again. It was gone for two seconds, then reappeared. Of course, I questioned whether or not she was just kinda loopy from being half asleep. She said she went to check the window and the morning and it was normal- no figure. 

The next instance was a little more scary. I am afraid of her house because of this. She woke up in the middle of the night to a strong presence pushing against her. She is convinced she saw the figure of a man above her. She could not get out of bed due to the weight of this body pressing her shoulders to the mattress. She says she ticked and screamed- tried to escape- but was unable to breath. She said the only way for it to stop was for her to give into it. When she stopped resisting this presence, the terror eventually ended. She did not go to sleep in that room after that.”

Thoughts

According to EM, this woman is a very “animated and dramatic lady”. EM explains that she remembers these stories because the way the lady told them was incredibly captivating and spooky. EM has been scared to go into her house since then, because of the ghost the lady is convinced lives with her. EM definitely believes in her, however, because this lady is “so dramatic and loves telling stories”, it makes it hard to believe everything she says”, EM explains. “Everything has happened whenever she has been kind of asleep. With that being said, because she is so passionate about the supernatural and considering she has not been entirely awake, you may question whether or not she has been dreaming.” 

I agree with EM’s interpretation of this lady’s experience. I am sure something must have happened in that house to make these presences felt. Whether or not that it is related to the supernatural and ghosts, can only be interpreted by the people living there. EM also explained that all three people living in that house have felt similar things relating to their house being haunted. However, because this lady in particular is so passionate about these things, I believe she has a tendency to generalize any presence to that of a ghost. Moreover, just like EM said, these instances have happened when the lady was somewhat asleep which may have had an impact on her perception of her surroundings. On the other hand, being half asleep is a very liminal state and I do believe that contributed significantly to the appearance of these ghosts.