Tag Archives: ghost story

“Johnny, I want my liver back…”

Genre: Folk Narrative – Ghost Story

Text: 

One day a boy named Johnny is told by his mother to go to the butcher’s to get some liver for dinner. He takes the five dollars she gives him and heads off toward town, taking a shortcut through the local cemetery. When he gets to the butcher’s shop, Johnny is distracted by a stand of comic books, where the newest edition of his favorite series is on sale for only five dollars. Without thinking, he immediately buys the comic book and begins to read it, losing track of time until the sun begins to set.

Jonny realizes he’s made a mistake: he now has no money to buy the liver for dinner, and his mother is going to be furious that he spent it on a comic book! He has no choice but to hurry home, cutting again through the graveyard. But on his way home, just as he passes a freshly-dug grave, Johnny has an idea – a way to get a liver for free.

“What kind of liver is this?” his mother asks when he gets home and gives her the liver. “It looks old… you’re sure you asked for the freshest cut?”

Johnny tells her that he’s sure it’s fresh and it’s what the butcher gave him. Johnny’s mother finally accepts the liver and tells him to wait upstairs while she makes his favorite meal for dinner: spaghetti and liver.

While Johnny is waiting in his room, he begins to feel sick, thinking about the graveyard, the fresh grave, and the liver currently being prepared into spaghetti. When his mother calls him down for dinner, Johnny feels too sick to eat and tries to just go to sleep.

But late that night, once his mother has gone to bed, Johnny hears a low call…

Johnny, I want my liver back…

Johnny sits up straight in bed. The call sounds like it’s coming from the direction of the graveyard. He feels even more sick now and hides under his covers, but then he hears a thudding on the front door…

Johnny, I want my liver back… I’m outside your front door…

Johnny is crying now in fear, desperately wishing he hadn’t spent his five dollars on a comic book and instead had gone to the butcher’s.

He hears the front door creak open and then slow footsteps coming up the stairs, getting closer… and closer… and closer… Then there’s a rattling on his bedroom door.

Johnny, I want my liver back… I’m outside your bedroom…

Johnny runs to his closet and shuts the door, trying to hide but knowing it is too late. There is a sudden pounding on his closet door…

Johnny, I want my liver back… I’m inside your bedroom…

Johnny holds his breath. The closet door creaks open… and then…

AHHH! (the narrator screams)

Context:

“I grew up going to a summer camp near Lassen National Park and the camp led day trips through a bunch of subway tunnels. The tunnels were dark and cold and eventually led to a larger opening, where all the campers would gather in a circle and turn off their flashlights while the counselors told a ghost story. It was tradition to tell this story and the younger campers would always get scared, but it became a part of the camp’s culture. The story didn’t have an exact narrative ending, but it ended with the counselors suddenly turning on their flashlights and jumping at the campers while their screams echoed through the subway caves.”

Analysis:

This story has a pretty clear message to the listeners, who are primarily children: that dishonesty will only get you in more trouble and to follow directions. If Johnny had listened to his mother’s directions and spent his five dollars on the liver, nothing bad would have happened. But because he wanted to cover up his mistake of spending the money on a comic book, he ended up getting an old liver from a fresh body in the local graveyard and his actions came back to haunt him.

I also see this experience as a whole as a “rite of passage” for the participants in the summer camp described by the informant. Young listeners who are hearing the story for the first time will be hanging onto every word and will therefore receive the most shock at the end, when the counselors scare the campers. In contrast, campers who have heard the story before will know what to expect and may even join in on scaring the younger campers. The shared experience of anticipation, fright, and eventual laughter likely creates a sense of bonding/community within the group of listeners.

“The Yellow Ribbon”

Genre: Folk Narrative – Ghost Story

Text:

A man named Johnny was going out for coffee one day when he saw the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. He introduced himself to the woman, whose name was Jane, and the two of them began to fall in love. Everything about Jane was perfect, but there was one thing that confused Johnny: every single day, Jane wore a yellow ribbon around her neck.

“Do you ever take it off?” Johnny finally asked her after a month of dating. Jane told him that she never takes it off, even to sleep, and that he should never untie it. But even though Johnny pushed and pushed, she would never tell him why.

“One day, I’ll tell you,” Jane would always say whenever he asked.

The years went by and Johnny and Jane fell deeper in love and eventually, Johnny proposed to her. Yet every day, Jane still wore the same yellow ribbon around her neck.

The night before their wedding, Johnny finally had enough. He decided he absolutely needed to see what was under that ribbon, that he couldn’t wait a single day longer.

That night, Johnny waited for Jane to fall asleep. When he was certain she was sound asleep, he reached over to her neck and gently tugged on the end of the ribbon to untie it…

But when Johnny pulled the ribbon undone, he realized why exactly Jane had worn it every single day: because without the ribbon to hold it in place, her head rolled right off her neck and onto the floor, where Jane’s eyes slowly opened.

“Oh Johnny,” she said, even though her severed head was now a few feet away from her body. “I told you not to untie the ribbon.”

Context:

“I first heard this story from my older brother when I was growing up, but I heard it a few times throughout my childhood at places like childcare centers and in elementary school. I think it’s a pretty common ghost story among kids. I always thought it was creepy to think about a woman’s head being held onto her body by only a ribbon, and for a while, I was scared of anyone I saw wearing a ribbon or a thick choker around their neck.”

Analysis:

The theme of this story seems to be trust within a relationship: Jane withheld a secret from Johnny – the only apparent “fault” about her. But Johnny could not trust her enough to live without knowing what the secret was, and it was his scheming/distrustful nature that led to him trying to discover the answer on his own and accidentally revealing that Jane’s neck was severed. The implication of this happening the night before their wedding suggests that a lack of trust within a couple is potentially ruinous to a marriage. However, another possible interpretation is to take the opposite stance: that it is withholding secrets from one’s partner that destroys a marriage, and that the skeletons of one’s past will always end up being revealed.

“The Water Fountain Ghost”

Genre: Folk Narrative – Ghost Story

Text:

“At the summer camp I went to as a child, we were told a ghost story about a woman who roamed the grounds at night. The director of the camp sat down all the campers on the evening of the first day and told us that long ago, back in the earliest days of the camp, there was a camper who decided to leave their cabin in the middle of the night to explore. They decided to go to the water fountain by the pool, but because it was so dark outside, the camper couldn’t see where they were going and they tripped and fell into the water and drowned. The ghost of this camper, now a grown woman, is seen haunting the camp grounds at night, particularly in the area near the old water fountain. If she sees any campers wandering around outside where they are not allowed after dark, she will drag them into the pool so they can join her as a ghost.”

Context:

“I first heard this story when I was six or seven years old, and I was terrified! I totally believed it, and every night, I would look out my cabin window and look for the ghost lady. It took a few years for me to stop believing it, and it was really only when I had to go to the nurse’s office during the night and I was too scared to go because of the ghost, and the counselor told me that it wasn’t a true story and just something they told to scare the campers into staying inside the cabins. Later on, when the directors of the camp changed, they stopped telling the story which made me kind of sad, because I felt like it was part of the camp lore and kind of another rite of passage in growing up there as a camper.”

Analysis:

I agree with the informant’s realization that the story was something made up in order to scare the campers into staying inside their cabins during the night. In such a rural location, it would be likely that campers leaving their cabins during the night would get them hurt, either by their own actions or by a wild animal. It also discourages campers from engaging in misbehavior that wouldn’t be appropriate in a children’s camp setting, like meeting up with other campers during the night. I think, as the informant experienced, that this is probably a fairly successful method for the younger campers who believe the story, as scaring them into obedience probably has a higher success rate than telling them a seemingly arbitrary rule.

This ghost story reminded me of the story of La Llorona, who is a character from Mexican folklore who also takes the form of a wandering woman. La Llorona is found near bodies of water (just as this ghost is found near the water fountain/pool area) and is said to drown unfaithful men (while this ghost drowns disobedient children).

Grandmother’s Goodbye

Genre: Folk Narrative – Ghost Story

Text:

“My dad once told me a story about an experience he had with a ghost. My dad was really close with his grandparents; he spent a lot of time over at their house when he was younger and as a child, he had these really weird dreams where his grandmother would appear to him. In the dreams, she was just sitting on a stool beside his bed and talking to him.

“When I was around ten years old, my great-grandmother, his grandmother, passed away. But my dad told me he had one of those dreams the night she died: in his dream, he was a child again as he was looking at her, and just as she always did in the dreams, she was sitting on a stool and talking to him. But he had a feeling that this dream was different. Although he doesn’t remember the details of the conversation he had in the dream, when he woke up, he felt a visceral change and later discovered that that was the night she passed away.”

Context:

“My great-grandparents on my dad’s side, around when I was ten years old or so, were dying of Alzheimer’s and they needed a caretaker. It was a really big burden on my family, and I remember my dad talking about them a lot during that time because he had a really deep connection with his grandparents. He spent a lot of time with them growing up, and he even ended up remodeling their house and turning it into his parents’ house, which is where my grandparents live now. I think my dad’s dreaming of them was a representation of the deep emotional connection they shared. I think he really felt a change in that connection the night his grandmother died, and I like to think of that dream as her way of saying goodbye.”

Analysis:

Although I am skeptical about the idea of a truly prophetic dream, I think this is an example of how dreams can sometimes help someone process an ongoing trauma or complicated emotions. The informant explained that his great-grandparents were dying of Alzheimer’s, which is a slow end. It is possible that the informant’s father dreamed about conversations with his grandmother as a way of processing this difficult mental condition, and only after hearing news of his grandmother’s death did he feel that, at the time of the dream, he felt that he knew she had died at the time. Memories are notoriously faulty and dreams even more so, which is why I personally believe that this was not a ghost the informant’s father envisioned the night his grandmother died, but merely a way of his brain processing the difficulty of losing a loved one.

Another idea to consider is the fact that the informant’s paternal family is Mexican. Ghosts are prevalent in Mexican culture, particularly the ghosts of loved ones (as seen in holidays such as Día de los Muertos). It is possible that this cultural background influenced the informant’s father to be more inclined to believe in a supernatural explanation for his dream/ghost rather than a scientific one.

Peddocks Island Ghost Story

Main Piece

Informant CH told many ghost stories from the Boston Harbor, on islands near her hometown. She recalls that of the islands, Peddocks Island was the “scariest place she’s ever been” and that she was taken there on a camping trip in both 7th and 8th grade.

An island tour guide who frequents Peddocks told her and her classmates of ghost stories that took place there–there are abandoned wartime barracks on the island and an abandoned ship watchtower, and the grounds are said to be haunted. One such story involves “hearing someone playing a piano, but there’s nobody there.”

While on a walk with another 7th grade peer at night by the barracks, CH and her friend saw a wandering man in a “war helmet with a visor,” wearing black, green, and white. He was “limping and had a gun slung over his shoulder.” They both screamed and the figure didn’t react at all. He was “walking on a path that didn’t exist” and, upon later recollection, CH added that she didn’t remember his walking making any sound. When they returned to camp and told of the occurrence, other teachers and peers didn’t believe them and asked why they all didn’t see it if something was there.

The next day, CH and her peers were taken to a history museum, where she saw photos of soldiers with the “same color grade and hats with visors and everything.” She learned that soldiers used to be trained on this island, and there used to be homes and hospitals set up on the grounds where she was camping.

The next year, CH returned as an 8th grader and, while staying in tents by the old watchtower, she saw a “girl…sketching the exact same guy because she said that she also saw him.”

Interpretation

Informant Interpretation: CH believes this story to be one example of many haunted stories told about Boston Harbor, and traces this back to the fact that “this is the portion that still retains its history.” No one builds or tears things down on the island. “The life as it was is still how it is,” CH mentioned, which makes it a “magnet” for stories like this. CH noted that she honestly believes she and her friend saw a ghost that day, and that this occurrence made her think ghosts dwelled in a parallel world (as he didn’t acknowledge her or her friend) rather than haunting this one.

Personal Interpretation: I found this story to be emblematic of a regional perspective on haunting, as permitted by the history of Boston Harbor–as a city much older than many others in America, it feels more in touch with its history. This plays out in CH’s legend by virtue of haunting coming about in old, untouched places–ghosts become representative of the collective public memory, remaining relevant because so much physical history and buildings remain too. I think it’s also an apt example of human perception informing folk narrative–observation of physical land features, attitudes of locals, and sheer emotional intuition all lend themselves towards forming regional beliefs and legends.

Background

My informant is a current student of Theatre at the University of Southern California, originally from Hull, Massachusetts (located on a peninsula on Boston Harbor). She grew up there, and notes that her family has strong ties to the area. Both of her parents believe in ghosts, though she believes there to be a general local apprehension about their existence around the Harbor.

CH is white and of European (primarily Irish) descent, and female-presenting.