Tag Archives: ghosts

Camp Ghost Story

Informant: The old owner of the property had a daughter [named] Gertrude who was in a wheelchair and he built it all for her. Apparently, she haunts the manor house basement, like the cellar…She fell down the stairs in her wheelchair is the story. 

Context: The informant learned this song at her sleepaway summer camp located in the Berkshires. She was in middle school when she first heard the story and heard it reinforced as she grew older at this camp. 


Analysis: This story connects Gertrude to a specific location (the manor house basement), which is a key feature of legends; they are told as if they could be true and are grounded in real-world settings. The narrative follows a familiar memorate/legend pattern: a tragic backstory (a girl in a wheelchair who dies by falling down the stairs) explains the presence of a haunting. This kind of scary origin story gives a bigger meaning to the space. It turns a normal basement or cellar into a potentially dangerous location that children shouldn’t want to be around. It also reflects common motifs in ghost lore, including untimely death and a lingering presence.

La Llorona

Context/Q: What do you know about La Llorona?
GV: “I heard about it from like different stories that my grandma used to tell me. It was about a lady who drowned her kids in a river and now she haunts different kinds of rivers.”

Q: How did you hear about the story?

GV: “Yeah again, my grandma from my mom’s side would tell the story to me and my brothers. She also used it to like…scare us I guess. If we were being bad, our grandma would tell us that La Llorona would get us in our sleep.”

Q: Have you heard of the story anywhere else?

GV: “I guess basically every form of media. They’re pretty much all retellings of La Llorona but in their own way so like in the form of a book, movie, tv show, and more probably. I’ve also heard that other countries have their own interpretation of La Llorona.”

Q: Are you familiar with those interpretations?

GV: “No I just saw a TikTok explaining the different ways La Llorona is told in different countries. It might actually just be more Latin countries that have their own version of it.”

Q: Why do you think the story is so memorable?

GV: “I feel like it has to do with the story being really creepy and hearing about it super young. Like I think I might have been 8 or 9 when my grandma told me about La Llorona. I guess it just sticks with you I don’t know.”

Analysis: The story of La Llorona is widely known in Latin countries, telling the story of a woman who drowned her own children and now roams different bodies of water in search of them. It’s become widely recognized for its unsettling nature and being a myth passed down through different generations.

Fallen Rose

Age: 19

I was there when my grandma passed. The room had that still, suspended feeling—like everything was holding its breath. I had brought a single rose and placed it gently beside her on the bed, not really knowing what else to do except be there and give her something soft, something beautiful.

When the doctor finally said the time of death, everything seemed to freeze. And then, right in that exact moment, the rose slipped off the bed and fell to the floor. No one touched it. There wasn’t any movement that I could see that would’ve caused it. It just… fell. It caught me off guard, but it didn’t feel random. It felt like something had shifted the second she was gone.

A year later, on her birthday, I went to visit her. She’s in a mausoleum—completely enclosed, no wind, nothing that could disturb anything placed there. I brought another rose and set it carefully on her tombstone. I stood there for a while, talking to her quietly, like I used to when she was here.

Then I said our phrase, the one we always shared: “I love you more.”

Right after I said it, the rose twitched.

I froze. I remember staring at it, trying to make sense of what I had just seen. There was no breeze, no movement around me—nothing that should’ve made it move. It was small, but it was real.

So I said it again, a little more sure this time. “I love you more.”

And that’s when the rose fell. Completely, unmistakably, off the tombstone.

I didn’t feel scared. If anything, I felt this overwhelming sense of calm, like something familiar had just reached back toward me. In that moment, it didn’t feel like coincidence. It felt like her. Like she heard me, like she answered in the only way she could.

I know I can’t prove it. I know how it sounds. But I also know what I felt standing there—that same quiet certainty, like the moment she passed. To me, that was her way of saying hi, of reminding me that the love we shared didn’t just disappear.

And ever since then, I’ve held onto that. Not as something I need to explain, but as something I experienced—something that felt real in a way that doesn’t need proof.

Context: This story was told to me during a topic of religion. It was me, my roommate, her, and her friend. She stated that she does not believe explicitly in god, but instead believes in spirits. She then elaborated, telling this story.

Analysis: She thinks that it was her grandma. I think it was just a coincidence. It resembles the flame motif and ancestral ghosts. One attribute that could represent why she believed more was that she was younger, and she was very close to her grandma. Her emotional state could have been less stable, making her easier to persuade. I also believe that in her family, ghost stories were accepted more, making her easier to sway.

The Sound of Anklet

Age: 64

Context:

This story was told to me by my grandmother, whom I’ll refer to as PS. My grandma is quite a religious woman, and so she believes in restless souls trapped as ghosts, but not in malevolent forces. She is a witness to this story, as she was brought in to confirm the presence of ghosts. The story takes place in 1978 in Kolkata, India, but she told me this story for the first time when I called her last weekend, inquiring about ghost stories for this class.

The Story:

Some years ago, PS’s brothers were looking to buy a house in Kolkata, and they found one quickly, a large, well-located, and strangely, almost suspiciously cheap one. When they pressed the previous owners for an explanation, the answer was given hesitantly: two maids had been murdered in that house. The owners were selling because they were frightened, and they had not been able to stay. PS’s brothers were not believers in ghosts. They were practical men, and a large house at a low price was still just that so they bought it.

They moved in, and for a while, said nothing to anyone. But at night, the house was not quiet. What they heard repeatedly, consistently, always after dark was the jingling of anklets. The sound of a woman’s feet moving through the house, the small bells at her ankles marking every step. The sound would drift through the hallways, unhurried, as though whoever was making it had nowhere in particular to be and all the time in the world to get there. They set up cameras in the hallways to catch the intruder but found nothing, in fact even the sound of anklets weren’t captured. So her brothers were unsettled enough that they decided to call PS, but they told her nothing about the sounds. They invited her to stay, and they waited to see whether she heard those strange noises too. 

The next morning, PS came to them with a question she couldn’t quite frame. She had heard something in the night, a strange sound she couldn’t explain. Moving through the house was the jingling of anklets.

Her brothers looked at each other as that was as all the confirmation they needed. They called in a tantric, a practitioner well versed in the rituals for restless spirits. PS says the tantric came in the way a tradesman comes to fix something that is broken. He performed the necessary rituals to release the spirits of the two murdered maids, to acknowledge what had happened to them, and to give them somewhere else to go.

After that, the house was silent. The sound of anklets was never heard again.

Informant’s Thoughts (PS):

My grandmother says that murdered people, in Bengali tradition, often become spirits not out of evil intent but out of incompletion, that because their deaths were violent, sudden and unacknowledged, they didn’t know how to leave. She said, the tantric didn’t destroy the spirit of the ghosts, merely released them so they could move onto the next life. 

My Thoughts:

What strikes me most about this story is the way my grandma’s brothers didn’t tell her what they heard. They brought her in blind, waited, and let her come to them. I think it was almost evil of her brothers to withhold the fact that there might have been ghosts. But I still can’t reconcile how 3 separate sets of ears heard the same thing while the camera captured nothing. My theory is that someone else was coming into the house at night, and maybe they were going through a part of the house uncovered by the camera. Their noise wasn’t captured as the cameras of that time were probably not that developed. This to me makes more sense, than believing it as a ghost story.

The Ghost in the Mirror

Age: 19

I interviewed my informant, KD, on a story she heard from friend at a sleepover. In the interview below, she shared the story and her personal thoughts on the matter. Q refers to me, the interviewer, and A refers to KD, our interviewee/informant. The Q&A is a direct transcript, which is why some of the sentence structure is very casual. Below is my personal reflection on the ghost story.

Q: Could you first start by clarifying the source of your ghost story? Like where you got it from?

A: I got this story from my friend in middle school.

Q: Was it told just one on one, or a group setting, or, do you remember the context?

A: I remember we were at her house sleeping over, and she wanted to freak us out, so she told us the story. It was like me, her and a group of maybe four other girls.

Q: Okay, cool. That’s interesting because HP had a similar, sleepover situation, since hers was at summer camp. All right, you could just start by telling the story then, please.

A: Okay, so she’s telling us that she goes to this cabin in the mountains every year, and she went with one of her friends, and she went up. Her parents brought her up, but her parents weren’t there when this was happening. They were out at dinner and drinks or something, and they left her and her friend at the house. So they [the girl and her friend] were taking pictures with a flash camera, and when they were looking back through the pictures, there was a mirror behind them, and in this mirror there was a face of a man, [but] there was no man in the house, or allegedly, no man in the house. It was just these two girls, their parents were gone, so they were looking at these pictures, and there was a face in the mirror. So then they started taking pictures somewhere else. And every time they took a picture somewhere with a mirror there was, like, a face. And they checked the mirrors. They checked everything after and they couldn’t see anything. And then later, when I asked her, because I was curious, I was like, “Wait, do you still have these pictures?” She goes, “No. A week later, the SD card was wiped,” and she doesn’t know how

Q: Okay, so obviously, this is something you said happened to your friend, right? So this isn’t like, tied to any folklore or anything like that, but it was told through a peer group. Did you believe it when your friend told you the story? Like, did you get chills? Did you/do you believe in what she was saying, or did she believe in it being a ghost?

A: She acted like she really did believe in it, but I don’t really believe in it, just because I’m not that kind of person. I think she is just making the story to freak us out. But knowing her, she wasn’t really someone who, like, just made stuff up like that, right? And she’s not like a pathological liar. 

Q: Like, do you think there was anything in that story that I guess is a motif that would guide you to believe it’s a ghost, or that kind of thing?

A: Probably just like the face. Like, that’s like, kind of something you see in movies a lot, you see something in the mirror you can’t really in real life.

Q: And do you believe in ghosts ever, in general, is your disbelief applied to every situation? Or is it just like this situation with your friend? 

A: I feel like everything that happens there has to be a logical explanation for it. I don’t really believe in ghosts, but there are some things that I’ve heard of, like stories like, you know, “The Conjuring” or whatever. Like those stories, those real stories that have been made into movies. I find it hard to find the logical reasoning behind it. But personally, in my daily life, or like in this story too, I just find it hard to believe.

Q: If it had happened to you, do you think you would believe?

A: If it had happened to me, and the whole wiping of the SD card thing just would also be confusing. So maybe if something like that did happen to me, I’d believe it right. 

Q: Do you think there’s any chance she just imagined the face there, or, dreamed it all, or something. Do you think there’s, do you think there’s any chance she imagined the face there, or something?

A: There’s a chance, like, we were 12 years old, so, like, maybe just some sort of reflection on the mirror, or some weird camera setting.

Q: In ghost stories we talk a lot about children and ghosts and ghosts appearing to children, because it’s the whole idea of, your life being cut short before, you’ve reached your prime, or before important things happen to you. Do you think there’s any tie between the child seeing it and the parents not being there, versus how she would have reacted if she were older. 

A: Yeah, I feel like, well, like that whole trope of like, ghosts appearing to children was, kind of logical, because children are not mature yet, so they kind of, they won’t really look for like, the logical reasoning behind it. They might just believe it, or like, also, children might be taken advantage of, because if they talk about it, people will be like, oh, like, they’re used to managing it, because children tend to make up their stories. So I feel like that’s why, like, in a lot of literary texts with ghosts and stuff, they never really target the adults, because the adults just wouldn’t believe it. They find a logical explanation. So I feel like it could be possible to get ghost stories by targeting children, mainly because no one will take them seriously.

Personal Reflection: Much like our interviewee, KD, I just find it hard to believe in ghost stories in general, and thinking back to the days when I was little, this sort of feels like one of those small things that I would find and hyperbolize into a huge spooky story for fun. However, I do find this story more easy to believe than the police chief camp story because it aligns a lot more with classic ghost stories. The whole apparition in the mirror and the fact that it was a ghost appearing only to a child really aligns with a lot of traditional ghost stories, so this one is a bit less surprising to me.