Tag Archives: ghost

Afterlife- A Personal Folk Story

Nationality: American
Age: 52
Occupation: Realtor
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: 4/9/21

Main Story:

“I’ve told you this story before and it really means a lot to me, I was super close with my grandfather so it makes it seem like he’s up there watching us when I think about this story. So I was at his house in Palm Desert in the room I usually stay in that has a view of the mountains in the distance. That mountain range would be impossible to hike on, no trails whatsoever and no one has ever hiked it, and none of us had ever seen anyone hike it. But that one morning I was looking out the window and saw a figure in the distance climbing up the mountain. I thought it was weird but didn’t think too much of it. Then maybe five minutes later we get a call that my grandfather had passed away. I truly think it was him making his final journey and hiking the mountains that he loved waking up to every day.”

Context:

My father had told me this story many years ago, and I had always kind of remembered it, but I asked him to retell it to me for the purpose of this project. My father loved his grandfather so much, they were best friends so when he died it was very hard on him and this story helped him get through it and believe that no one ever is fully gone but can live on through other people.

Analysis:

This story is so interesting to me because we really do have no idea if there is or isn’t an afterlife and how one makes the journey after death on earth. Like my father told me I believe him that it helped with the healing process and that it helped instill a belief in him and passed down to me and my siblings that people who die can live on through you. This is an oral story that can easily be passed down to my children in hopes of instilling a bit of faith in knowing that one doesn’t die for good.

The Blue Light

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Nationality: American
Age: 80
Occupation: Retired, Former Museum Curator
Residence: Kelseyville, California
Performance Date: April 26, 2021
Primary Language: English

Background:

My informant for this piece grew up in rural, northern Wisconsin. I know from personal experience that living in an isolated area such as this one can cause serious boredom, especially during adolescence. Because of this, people who grow up away from the city often make their own fun, creating games and exploring the landscape. Occasionally, in the dark of night, strange things tend to occur.

Context:

As a teenager, looking for “the Blue Light” was both an exciting pastime and rite of passage in my informant’s hometown; everyone knew about it. On late nights, those individuals who thought themselves daring enough would go out in an attempt to experience the lore themselves. Luckily–although I may never get to experience it myself–I was able to live this tradition vicariously while he told me about it during an over-the-phone interview for the USC folklore archives.

Main Piece:

“When we were in high school… It was called the blue light. And there was a bridge on a country road, and you would go park on the bridge at night and people would go there all the time. And if you look out off the bridge sometimes people would see a blue light moving through the woods, and I saw it once, and my friends did too. The rumor was that there was an old farmer who hung himself off the bridge and his ghost haunted those woods.”

Analysis:

A few years ago, I remember hearing about some kind of phenomenon similar to the Blue Light that was supposedly proven false. Instead, these strange colors that people were seeing in the woods at night were reasoned to be the release of natural gas from a swamp, which would have a luminescent glow for a few seconds before dissipating. While this seems a more likely explanation, it hasn’t stopped the legend hunters who, apparently, continue to go out in search of the Blue Light even to this day. Though I would like to believe in the story and to pursue the Blue Light for myself, this continued interest in the phenomenon as the embodiment of a ghost is probably due to the human tendency of belief perseverance. In other words, teens in that region may have been given the information to know that the Blue light is probably just swamp gas, but they continue to believe in the story because it’s what they’ve always known.

For a Similar Narrative, See:

Carlisle, John. “Mysterious Light Draws Thrill Seekers to a U.P. Forest.” Detroit Free Press, 9 July 2018, eu.freep.com/story/news/columnists/john-carlisle/2016/09/04/mysterious-paulding-light-upper-peninsula-michigan/89275134.

Main Piece: Mad Bess

Nationality: American
Age: 11
Occupation: Student
Residence: CO
Performance Date: 04/12/2021
Primary Language: English

Background: The informant’s elementary school is said to be haunted by the ghost of a former tenant of land, Mas Bess. The school’s campus is very old and used to house many of the town’s silver mines in the late 19th century. The buildings have been remodeled, but never torn down. The school’s headmaster tells the students that if they are destructive towards the land or the buildings, Mad Bess will not be happy and will curse us all. 

Context: I asked the informant if she had ever seen a ghost before and she told me that she has yet to see her with her own eyes, but knows that Mad Bess is always looming around school. She promised me she was not afraid of Mad Bess, but some of her classmates are. She told me that she would never litter on the campus or disrespect the playground or the classrooms because she is certain Mad Bess would cause a miniature earthquake at her school. 

I also asked the informant if the teachers speak about Mad Bess frequently and she responded very matter-of-factly “Of course they do. Mad Bess is part of our community. The school would be incomplete without her. She has been on campus longer than any of the rest of us and deserved to have her home taken care of.” 

Thoughts: I attended the same school as the informant about a decade ago. While I was at the school, we had a different headmaster, but the legend of Mad Bess was the same. She was spoken about in two contexts. One, she was a legend of entertainment that served as a community point of connection. Two, she gave the teachers a threatening ghost story that they could strategically use to make the children behave. They could scare us into being respectful because the consequences of not doing so were grave. This is a folk legend that has been circulating and bringing together people on the campus since its founding. Ghost stories have so many purposes!    

Durgashtmi – Ghost Festival

Nationality: Indian
Age: 23
Occupation: Marketing
Residence: France
Primary Language: English

There is a festival in India called Durgaashtmi, and what happens is that ghost enter the human body – ghosts like past spirits. They enter the body because maybe they haven’t gone to heaven or something like that. Like they haven’t found piece in their life or death. On the festival day these spirits want to show that they are still around and need peace, so their enter some women’s bodies, and these women become uncontrollable. So people say that they have supernatural powers or force or energy and totally become crazy. That happens in India – you can watch videos and stuff. Sometimes they chain these kind of people up. So all these Indian priests come and try to provide peace to the spirits by saying mantras in Sanskrit. And basically these mantras are supposed to get the ghost out of their body. Many priests believe the ghosts are a ghost of this goddess called Durga. She is considered to be a mother figure that’s super angry that won’t go out off your body. Some people also die from this process because they get so crazy and start to drink blood and stuff. It’s a very weird festival, at the end of the day they try to get the ghosts to quit the bodies of the people and the people aren’t dead yet.

Context: [informant] The main aim of the festival is to provide peace to the spirits and get them out of the world of the living. And this is of course scary also, because if Google Durgaashmi ghost you can find that girls are really.. I don’t know… like there are really ghosts coming in the bodies.

Thoughts: Seemingly possessed people are a phenomenon all over the world, and I think it can be looked at from many different lenses. Psychologists might call it psychosis, and religious people might call it possession. Regardless, it is very interesting that India has created a festival around 

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.