Tag Archives: ghost

The Suicide House

Nationality: Chinese - American
Age: 19
Occupation: Student
Residence: Fullerton, California
Performance Date: April 2012
Primary Language: English
Language: Mandarin, Cantonese, Spanish

My informant’s grandparents emigrated to the United States from China. The following story is from her maternal grandfather’s village in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong, near the city of Toisan. She heard this story from her mother, who heard it from others in the village while visiting.

 

“This story is from my grandpa’s village, but is from before his time, back when arranged marriages were customary. In the village there was a cranky but wealthy man, who had made money in the United States and then came home to the village. One day, he decided to get married. This old, disgusting freak ended up marrying a young woman. The day of the wedding, she hung herself in his house. A short while later, the old man’s son also decided to get married. I’m not sure if it was his son or another male relative, a nephew maybe, but he was an idiot too. The woman he was marrying was smart and capable, but she had no way out of the marriage, so she hung herself too, in the same house. The house is now haunted by the ghosts of both of these women, and is avoided by those in the village.”

 

This ghost story reflects a traditional Chinese village’s societal views about the custom of arranged marriages. This negative view of arranged marriage, as well as the suicides of the young women, are topics which probably would have been taboo to talk about in day to day life. However, this ghost story provided an outlet for the villagers to do so. This story being remembered close to 100 years after it supposedly occurred shows that it is still very much a part of their culture, and that they still identify with the story.

Goatman’s Bridge

Nationality: African-American
Age: 19
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles, CA
Performance Date: April 25, 2012
Primary Language: English

Additional informant data: My informant was born and raised in Northern Texas, about thirty minutes from Denton.

Contextual data: My informant told me this story when I asked about ghost stories from her hometown. She says she learned it from friends, when she was around 16 years old. She says she would tell this story if she was “telling someone where to go for fun,” and one time she and her friends actually made a trip to the place (though one friend got really scared so they didn’t get out of the car). The following is a description of the legend in her own words:

There’s a bridge in Denton, Texas called Goatman’s Bridge. If you park outside the bridge at night and honk your horn three times a goatman will appear. He’s half-goat half-man. I want to say that he screams, but I don’t remember. There’s the bridge, and then there’s this sort of cul-de-sac area around it, and if you park in that area then he appears in the entrance of the bridge. On an unrelated note, a lot of people have died there–I don’t think in the recent past, but a long time ago–and I don’t know how, but I know it happened. It’s in a really sketchy area.

This type of story is a common one, involving a haunted place and a summoning ritual (often including a 3x repetition of an action). My informant wasn’t sure about the historical background, and neither was I, but a little research showed that legend has it that there was a successful black goat herder who lived near the bridge and was hanged off the side by angry Klansmen. According to my informant, taking a trip to Goatman’s Bridge late at night is a fun and scary adventure, and it’s often a bonding experience, as everyone gets scared together.

Annotation: Seen in YouTube user SilkOlive’s documentary video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WIrnzzTmP0s.

The Virgin Ghost

Nationality: Korean
Age: 49
Occupation: Travel Agent
Residence: Fullerton, CA
Performance Date: April 2012
Primary Language: Korean
Language: English

Whenever an unmarried woman dies, her spirit is cursed to become a “virgin ghost.” She is forced to roam around, instead of having passage to heaven or having a peaceful afterlife. This ghost is cursed, as no one loves her in the after-life and her appearance also frightens the living.

This story was told to my informant by her friend. They both believed as teenagers that they needed to get married, as they did not want to be cursed as a ghost. She now believes that this was told to encourage young women to get married.  Korean culture wants their offspring to get married as soon as possible. This is due to the fact that in the olden days Koreans considered unmarried bachelors to still be children. My informant also stated that this myth is quite prevalent in Korean television shows that deal with horror aspects.

This is quite interesting as the Korean culture values so much that they are willing to frighten young women in to getting married. What this folklore basically states to Korean women is that, if you didn’t get married you were not wanted, thus in the afterlife you are cursed to frighten people and roam around. Interestingly females ghosts are also prevalent in Asian folklore as menacing creatures, my informant could not give me a reason why to this. It does make sense to me that a “Virgin Ghost” would be lonely in the afterlife as her appearance is frightening. However my informant stated that if the “Virgin Ghost” meets a “ghost spouse,” the spirit will be free to have a peaceful afterlife.

A Ghost Story

Nationality: American
Age: 21
Occupation: Student
Residence: California
Performance Date: April 2007
Primary Language: English

When my informant was about 10 or 11 years old, she was told a story by one of her mother’s friends because she was bored and there no cable in the house. She remembers the story well to this day because of how good a story-teller her mother’s friend, Dave Morton, was.

 

The following is a paraphrase of my informant’s ghost story:

 

“There is a big Victorian house is in Morgan Hill in Northern California. A young businesswoman moves in and discovers an ugly lime green master bedroom in the house. She starts to paint the room bright white because she hates the color and then goes to bed in another one of the rooms. She walks into this room the next day and one of the walls is a BRIGHT green again. But the others are still white. So she paints the wall again, but still the next day it appears bright green. Finally she gives up and decides to sleep in the master bedroom that night. But in the middle of the night she sits up quickly because she has this weird feeling….and there is a lady at the end of the bed staring at her, a tall, young, pretty, brunette, in Victorian clothing. The businesswoman puts her head under the bed to pretend it’s not real, she peaks under from the covers and there is no one there.

 

So the next day she has her dog sleep with her to make her feel easier. Once again she sits up in the middle of the night and she looks over and the dog is missing and the ghostly woman is there again staring.

 

She gives the bedroom one more night, she falls asleep, but she sleeps ‘on the surface’

It’s not a deep sleep. Then all of a sudden she starts to feel something in the room. She looks at the end of the bed and there’s the girl standing there again. The businesswoman thinks maybe something has to happen. She yells at the girl standing and yells ‘what do you want?’ The ghost lifts her arm and points at her.

 

So the next day she wakes up and the one green wall is a little lighter green. The business woman thinks that the wall is lighter because she talked to the ghost the night before.

 

The next night the ghost appears once again and the woman asks what she can do to help the ghost, but the ghost disappears.

 

When the businesswoman wakes up the next morning, there is a locket sitting on the edge of her bed. She sits there and she looks at the initials engraved on the locket. Then she notices that the green wall is even lighter, and realizes that the ghost wants her to figure out the ghost’s story.

 

She starts asking around if they know anything about the house and this woman. She finally finds a woman who knew stories about what took place in this house: that there is a young girl brutally murdered the night before her wedding in the master bedroom against the green wall. The girl’s fiancée found her the next day, and also discovered that the only thing missing from the room was the girl’s locket. The killer was also never found.

 

No one was in that room long enough to find the locket or for the ghost to give the locket to someone still living. So the ghost had found the locket and gave it to the businesswoman, the current resident, and because of that she was free, and the wall was no longer green and the ghost never came back.”

 

Now my informant said she wasn’t even interested in the killer or the fact that he was never found. What stuck with her was how her mother’s friend described the murder as a “splatter job,” and how there was a second person, who confirmed that the story was true.  My informant feels that there is no moral to this story. It was for pure entertainment purposes, as there is not much reason to stay away from the house because the ghost is now supposedly gone.

Duwende at Home in the Philippines

Nationality: Filipino-Chinese
Age: 53
Occupation: Housewife
Residence: Philippines
Performance Date: 01 November 2011
Primary Language: English

I have lived in the same house in the Philippines since I was a baby. The house was built by my grandfather in the 1960s. It is a fairly large house, especially compared to the average size of a Filipino home. It has two floors, and a large garden at the back. There are a lot of empty rooms now—rooms that used to belong to my uncles and aunts when they all lived in that house (my grandfather had 7 children). I asked my mother, Letty, to tell me of a ghost story of the house that she had experienced, or have heard from other people living in the house.

 

Letty: “Ghost stories? Um… I don’t really know if you’ll consider this as a ghost story, but do you remember your old ‘yaya’ Weng? (‘Yaya’ is the Filipino word for babysitters. They usually work full-time, living with the families they work for. Mayet was my new ‘yaya’ after Weng) You might remember her… She took care of you when you were a baby, until about 2 years old, before Mayet came.

 

There was one time, very long ago, before you were even born, that Weng got sick. She got a… I think… Um… 42 degrees Celsius fever. I gave her medicine but even after a few days, she still wouldn’t get better. I was so scared for her and everyone else in the house… what if it was contagious?! So when a week passed we called in your Uncle William who was a doctor to check on her. The odd thing was that… he said she was completely fine! She was just really hot and all she needed was rest.

 

I decided to take matters into my own hands… Haha, I think I was paranoid! I turned to Chinese temple blessings from that time on… First, I asked Weng what she was doing that day she started feeling ill. She said she was just handling the laundry that day, hanging out the clothes to dry in the garden. So I went down to check out the place where our maids usually hang clothes, and there it was… a duwende mound!”

 

Me: “What is a duwende mound?”

 

Letty: “Well, a duwende is this… I don’t know how to put this… but it’s a creature, very small, typically the size of a waterjug… Haha! They resemble people, but you can tell that they are not… for one, because of their size… and two, um… their face is also different, almost demonic… Anyway, they usually don’t interact with people, but they get very angry when you destroy their homes, which are the mounds that sprout up from the ground. I think Weng might have hit it accidentally when she was hanging clothes, and this fever was her punishment! Anyway… I got so scared so I got the Chinese blessing papers from the temple and burned some around the garden to try and appease the spirits… did a bit of prayers to the spirits… then asked the houseboy to flatten the mound… gently of course! At least that way no one will step on it again and get hurt. And guess what! A day after, Weng’s temperature went back down to 36 degrees Celsius and she felt fine!”

 

Me: “Didn’t my sister say she saw one too?”

 

Letty: “Yes, according to Chris, she says she saw a duwende when was about… ten years old I think. I remember that day too. I asked her to get something for me from the storage room downstairs, which was adjacent to the area of the garden where I saw the dwende mound… she ran back to me crying, saying that she saw this tiny man sitting on top of one of the boxes, just smiling at her.”

 

Me: “What time was this?”

 

Letty: “It was really late at night, around 11pm. I asked Papa to come down with me because I was terrified. I don’t like ghosts… never want to see them… I know they’re there, but I just don’t want to see them… Anyway, so Papa and I went down to check on the storage room, but nothing was there. We moved around the boxes and didn’t find anything. Whatever your sister saw was gone. I’m not saying I don’t believe her, because I do. I’m just thankful the duwende didn’t do anything to her.”

 

On a personal level, I, myself, had an experience with an entity which I believe to be the duwende as well. When I was ten years old, I was sleeping in the room which my sister Chris sleeps in now. It is important to note that I did not hear any of the stories that happened to the other people in the household at this time. Back then, the house was under renovation, and so the curtains were gone, and I could see the outside clearly. One night, I woke up at around midnight. I didn’t realize until around 5 minutes later that my eyes were following a distinct shadow figure on the eave’s underside visible from my bed. I stood up and walked towards the window and stopped at about a meter away. I realized the shadow figure was walking left and right, and that it was humanoid in shape. I walked closer, only for the figure to stop its walking, and turn towards me. I was so scared that I ran back under my sheets, and eventually fell asleep.

 

The duwende is a quite popular folklore demon in the Philippines. Because knowledge of it is so widespread, it is not surprising that people in my household, most of whom had grown up in the Philippines, would find it easier to associate inexplicable situations to a duwende’s work. The appearance of the dirt mound could just have been coincidence with regards to Weng’s sickness; Chris’ and my experiences could just have easily been results from pairs of tired eyes, and at a time when spooky things are supposed to happen. Had the witnesses not known about the existence of duwendes at the time of the events, they would not have thought the events to be as strange. However, because of their prior knowledge to the demon, coincidences could be interpreted as proof for the existence of the entity.

 

There are a number of websites, listed below, though non-academic, that have information on duwendes. Other terms used to described duwendes in English are goblin, hobgoblins, elves, and dwarves, but most common are dwarves. They live in mounds in the ground, or trees. They say that some of them are good, and some are evil, but most punish you for disrespect if you do not acknowledge and respect their presence, and will only relieve you of pain when they are given sufficient offerings.

 

Cunningham, RT. “Filipino Folklore: Duwende, Mumu and Tabi Tabi Po.” Untwisted Vortex | An American Living in the Philippines. Web. 1 Nov. 2011. <http://www.untwistedvortex.com/2009/06/15/filipino-folklore-duwende-mumu-tabi-tabi-po/>.

 

Stormygirlpdx. “Duwende.” Your Ghost Stories: Publish Your Paranormal Experience! 21 Feb. 2007. Web. 1 Nov. 2011. <http://www.yourghoststories.com/real-ghost-story.php?story=305>.