Tag Archives: ghost

Ghost story in Chinese village in Sheng yang

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Nationality: China
Age: 21
Occupation: student

Text:

“The entrance of the village had a big millstone that the entire community shared. Every night, there would be a small, white thingy that people thought was a small white ghost, running around the millstone over and over again. And you can’t get close to it. I mean, if you get close to it, it would jump on you and start to tickle you. It would tickle you until you laughed to an extent that you couldn’t breathe anymore and died. My grandma said she saw it once, but she was not tickled by it. And after the Cultural Revolution, this little thing was gone forever.”

Context:

This legend was passed down from the informant’s grandma. The legend took place long before the Cultural Revolution in China. Our informant thinks it was the “Elimination of the Old Four” movement by the Chinese government at the time that had eliminated the ghost. The “Old Four” include old ideology, old culture, old tradition, and old customs. It was a time when many historical treasures were destroyed. The informant thinks that the villagers believed that the ghost belonged to the Old Four, so it was gone after the movement.

interpretation:

This is a great example of explaining personal experience or rationalizing it with existing legends. It’s a kind of belief enhanced by the informant’s grandma’s own sightings. Similar experiences around the village might have occurred, and added up to the formation of the ghost legend. Obviously, it’s an unwanted ghost. My interpretation of the tickling is that the ghost is small, probably a childlike figure. It’s not rational for a child to kill grown people, and laughing is often associated with children.

The “elimination of the old four” movement, or “除四旧” (pinyin: chú sì jiù), was a movement in China during the cultural revolution that caused a lot of historical antiques and culture to be destroyed. The “old four” refers to old ideas, old culture, old customs, and old habits. The movement firmly grasped the idea that old and superstitious ideas, or anything counter-scientific, went against the principle of communism. This movement’s dogma provided the villagers of Shenyang with a spiritual tool to wash away what they feared in their collective past. The small ghost by the millstone might have been a troublesome existence in the lives of the villagers. In the context of the elimination of the old four, it was eliminated and washed away like all the other things deemed bad and counter to the Communist Party.


					

		
		
	


	

				

			
						

				Mula Sin Cabeza, Brazilian Headless Horse
			

								

			

				
		

				

			

Text:





M: umm , oh another one is the, ah, mula sin cabeza. This is actual like folklore that umm basically is the…  mula sin cabeza its a type of horse without their head, that’s the name





Me: ok





m :  umm





Me: is it mula sin cabeza?





M: yeah, aaand what happened is it’s a creature that is created or born or whatever, when a woman sleeps with a priest. Which your no supposed to cause like a priest is like 





 Cannot have sex and bla bla bla. But, if you do, the woman becomes that horse 





O: what!?





M: yes..





O: that is so anti-woman.





I laugh





M: well, whatever, it’s, it is what it is





Me: maybe society is anti-woman





M: yeah





O: oh m goodness society





M laughs





M: and then so she would 





[I laugh because o realizes that I’m recording and leaves]





M: she would like walk around at night, cause you know the mystic anything will transform at night





[O leaves closing door]





M: and so, and the way she is, imagine like a horse without a head, and on the place the head was supposed to be its just flames





Me: yo, thats metal





M: right, it’s literally that! It like a horse without its head and in its place fire. What else we have…





Me: wait wait, what does the horse do?





M: just haunt the city





Me: the whole city.





M: yeah cause, like it would like walk around us when it was.. And don’t have a head. And it was like a punishment for like sleeping with the priest. Cause you’re not supposed to sleep with the priest





Me: that’s your take on it? You’re not supposed to sleep with a priest





M: yeah basically. In conclusion, do not sleep with priests





I laugh





M: so fleabag would not have survived Brazilian culture





ME: you’re right





Context:





The informant, M, is a 19-year-old USC international student from Brazil. She delivered this piece in the workroom of a campus center before class alongside other pieces in order to share some personal and Brazilian folklore. She learned about this legend growing up in Brazil.





O is a mutual friend of the informant and me, they briefly walked into the workroom and commented on the legend, before realizing I was recording and leaving.





Analysis:





As M said “You’re not supposed to sleep with the priest.” this legend clearly indicates the cultural value of not sleeping with priests. 





To me (as partially stated in the text) transforming the woman who slept with the priest rather than the priest indicates blame on women for the sex rather than priests/men. This would indicate a larger cultural understanding that having sex with a priest is wrong, not a priest having sex. This could relate to western christian notions of purity culture that blame women for the loss of virginity and other sexual acts.





The specifics of M’s speech also indicate that mystic transformations are thought to more commonly happen at night, 

					

		
		
	


	

				

			
						

				Loira do Banheiro, The Brazilian Bloody Mary
			

								

			

				
		

				

			

Text:





Me: ok, we’re recording





M: Oh okay great. Let’s start with the Brazilian version of Bloody Mary. So we call her the blonde woman. It’s a legend, like of course, as every child would when I was in school and I was like elementary school, of course, the children were like ‘oh yeah! Its a legend, but it actually happened here in this school. Umm it’s basically a story that she was a girl she was blond she’s in school bullied. And she went to the bathroom to cry, and then she slipped, hit her head, and died





Me: oh my god





M: and there’s a specific stall that it happened in. In my school it was the bigger one for accessibility. after that I never went to that bathroom again by the way. Cause I was, I was like ‘i don’t believe in it’ but still like ‘Yeah I’m gonna use the other one.’ umm, and to summon her you had to like throw like a one piece of hair. And then..





Me: your hair?





M: yes





Me: Okay





M: on the toilet and then like flush three times, go to the mirror and say like. Uhh loira do banheiro, loira do banheiro, loira do banheiro. Which, loira do banheiro is blond from the bathroom. And then she would appear and kill you.





Me: obvi





M: yes. And then I remember I had a friend who like, my friends would go to the bathroom to try it, but that’s like– it would only work in the girls’ bathroom and there were two boys. So I don’t know how they were doing it!? Cause I never went with them cause I was like I’m not doing that. But yeah. Dunno what they were doin’, but yeah whatever we were kids so it’s umm





Me: what’s your take on what that means? Like what’s the meaning, what’s the story?





M: ummm I don’t know. I think it’s, probably for either just– it’s just a scary story the children told each other or maybe to make them behave when like between going to the bathroom and going back to class. But yeah, I think that it’s just a scary story that kids created.





Me: alright





Context:





The informant, M, is a 19-year-old USC international student from Brazil. She delivered this piece in the workroom of a campus center before class alongside other pieces in order to share some personal and Brazilian folklore. She learned about this legend growing up in Brazil.





The informant suggests that the legend is either “just a scary story the children told each other” or something adults said to make kids behave in bathrooms.





Analysis:





M says that this is a Brazilian version of Bloody Mary. Indeed the two figures share much: They each appear in girls’ bathrooms. they both are summoned by some action and three repetitions of their name. both kill their summoner. And both fall into that space of legend where people will say they don’t believe, but then avoid the thing/action/place anyway.





Because of this association with Bloody Mary, this legend may also be related to the fear of menstruation (as other scholars have drawn the connection with Bloody Mary).  This seems believable because both stories are set in bathrooms and are most popular among young girls, but I hesitate because of the Loira do Banheiro lack of blood references. Instead, there is the focus on hair: you put a piece of hair in the toilet to summon her, and her name-worthy trait is her blond hair. 





There is also the moral included that you should not bully someone because they might die and haunt a bathroom killing children.

					

		
		
	


	

				

			
						

				Legend: Haunted Classroom
			

								

			

				
		

				

			

When I asked my informant M about any stories they might have had about surrounding legends, they thought of the time when their high school English and Creative Writing teacher was sure that her old classroom was haunted. M said that she would always stay late after school was over to finish work, and suddenly one day, people started asking her if she was at school when she wasn’t there because they saw someone in the window of her classroom. The description of the figure was always the same, a woman dressed in white. She told them that it wasn’t her that they saw and that they must have mistaken her for someone else, but it kept on happening and people would joke that a ghost was haunting her classroom. She was staying late one night, as usual, when she suddenly encountered the womanly figure that everyone was talking about. M said that nobody knew exactly what had happened, but apparently, things started to fall over in her classroom. The experience spooked their teacher enough that she made the administration give her a different classroom the next year and now she always leaves the school as soon as the bell rings. 





I found this story funny, but I also felt bad for their poor teacher. I’m not going to deny that her classroom was haunted, but she might have also been especially tired after a long day of work that day and her brain conjured the figure up. I also don’t think people telling her that a woman-like figure dressed in white is always inside her classroom when she is not there helped her imagination. It sort of reminds me of Sydow’s term, memorate, where she is relating a personal experience to a spoken narrative. I never thought a classroom of mine was haunted, but a lot of people, including myself, in elementary school thought that our language teacher wasn’t human. She was not a nice person and she had a way of smiling and staring through to your soul that frightened many of us and we thought that she was a creepy alien in disguise as a human.

					

		
		
	


	

				

			
						

				The Family of Ghosts
			

								

			

			
Nationality: American
Age: 22
Occupation: Student
Residence: USC
Performance Date: 3/30/23
Primary Language: English
	
		

				

			

Text: “When I was fourteen, I was at a sleepover with some of my friends. In the middle of the night, I woke up to strange noises coming from the bathroom. When I walked into the bathroom, the light switch wasn’t working. I started getting freaked out because the power was not out. So anyways, I left the light switch on, used the restroom, and when I was looking in the mirror, the lights turned on, and my nose was bleeding. I was in tears and when I tried to wake up my friends, they kind of brushed it off and told me to just use a tissue to plug my nose. I tried to go back to sleep, but I couldn’t. There were still noises coming from the bathroom, almost as if someone was in there, but nobody was. When I tried to use a different bathroom later on, I ran into my friend’s older brother’s room, and he claimed that he had a very similar experience with the light switch, just no bloody nose. And he went on to explain how his father used to tell him and his sister a story of the family who previously lived in the house. It was something about how the dad went psycho and killed his wife and kids in this very house. He then said that his dad would freak them out by saying that the ghosts of the mother and children still live in the house, haunting it, decades later. The father would flicker the light switch in the kids’ bathroom while they were in there to scare them, hence why the light switch is messed up. Not sure if that’s true or not, but it was definitely the last time I had a sleepover at that house.” – Informant 





Context: The informant was about 14 years old, sleeping at a friend’s house when she experienced this situation. She heard the story of the dead family from her friend’s older brother, who had heard from his dad, who he wasn’t sure made it up or not. 





Analysis: This story contains elements of folklore, particularly in its use of legends and ghost stories. The legend about the previous family who lived in the house and the father who went insane and killed his family is a classic example of a ghost story passed down through generations. It serves as a warning to those who dare to stay in the house and suggests that the spirits of the deceased family still haunt the place, decades later.





The strange noises, malfunctioning light switch, and nosebleed experienced by the informant add to the eerie atmosphere of the story and heighten the sense of supernatural presence. The fact that the informant’s friend’s older brother also experienced a similar incident with the light switch lends credibility to the story and reinforces the idea that something unexplainable is happening in the house. This story showcases how folklore and legends can be used to explain unexplainable occurrences and to warn people of potential dangers.