Tag Archives: ghosts

“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.

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.

Conversations with Spirits during Dreams (Memorate)

Text 

Collector: “Have you ever been contacted by a spirit?” 

Informant: “With loved ones that I have lost, I have had experiences with them partially in the physical world and a lot in the metaphysical slash dream world. When our Nana died, I started having dreams about her and they felt immensely real. I’ll still have some every now and again. I’ve had experiences with my father’s grandfather who passed away. Immediately after he passed away, he came to me in a dream and told me things about myself, gifts that I had, and I felt like he was very at peace with his death. I only experienced him once, same with my great-grandmother. Two days prior to her physical death.” 

Collector: “What made this experience feel different than other dreams, your normal dreams?” 

Informant: “In these dreams, I felt paralyzed like another force was holding on to me. Almost like my soul was in a different place and then needed time to get back to my body. I found myself lying in bed. I heard the sound of static like a television channel. It grew louder. I grew more uneasy. My body felt celestial is the best way to put it.” 

Context

The Informant is a 26-year-old man. He’s had several spiritual interactions through intense dreams and episodes of sleep paralysis. Each interaction was with a deceased family member after or nearly before their time of passing. The Informant expressed he could have full-length conversations with the dead through this medium. 

Analysis

I found it interesting that the Informant’s spiritual interactions took place during vivid dreams. This reminded me of the article, “Ghostly Possession and Real Estate: The Dead in Contemporary Estonian Folklore” when the author Ülo Valk explains that, “visual and auditory experiences with spirits can also occur in dreamlike states.” (Valk 34) In this dream space, both parties could say their peace. These encounters also happened near the Spirit’s time of death. This could be interpreted as the Spirit “finishing business” with loved ones before moving on to the afterlife. Valk also notes that spiritual interactions commonly occur in transition periods where there are feelings of, “disorientation, uncertainty, discontinuity, [and] unrootedness.” (Valk 35) Those emotions are common during grief. For the Informant, these spiritual conversations helped both parties to emotionally move forward and find peace in their respective realms. 

Spirits using Smells to Contact the Living (Memorates)

Text:

Informant 1 (son): “I will have experiences where if I’m at a deep state of indecision I’m or if I’m doing something that may not be right. I can smell [my Nana]. A smell will come to me and it smells like a mix of cigarettes and perfume. And I know that it’s her. Or if like I need to be doing something or calling someone or just doing something I can smell it. And it’s a very distinct smell like nothing I own smells like that.”

Informant 2 (mother): “When my Mom first left, she was a smoker, so I’d be driving, and all of a sudden I could smell smoke in my car. You just kind of know. [My son, Informant 1] snuck out one night and he left and then he called us. He was like: ‘Don’t get mad, I was going to a party but I started smelling smoke in the car, I knew it was Nana so I’m turning around.’”

Collector: “So the spirits can use specific smells? To communicate or make their presence known?”

Informant 2: “Yes. The spirits have to figure out how to get your attention.”

Context:

Both Informants are related. Informant 2 is the mother of Informant 1 (Male, 26 years old). I conducted two separate interviews asking the Informants to share memorates, and both mentioned the ability to smell the deceased. This smell came from the same deceased family member they refer to as Nana (Informant #1’s Grandma and Informant 2’s Mother). 

Analysis:

In both stories, a ghost contacts the living in moments of internal conflict or bad behavior. The Deceased’s unique smell signaled their “spiritual presence” which helped guide the Informants into making the right decisions. Almost like an Angel sent to protect the living from danger. Informant 1’s spiritual encounter while sneaking out reminded me of a quote from Ülo Valk’s article, “Ghostly Possession and Real Estate.” The author writes that perceived interactions with spirits, “are sometimes caused by fears related to the breaking of behavioral norms.” (Valk 34) The son’s conscience knew sneaking out was wrong. When the smell appeared, he perceived the dead as present, the spirit of a family member was watching over his actions. The “fear” of disappointing the dead swayed Informant 1 into “turning around” to obey the “behavioral norms” set forth by his parents.