Tag Archives: ghosts

El Paso High Ghost-Moratorium

Nationality: United States/Mexico
Age: 21
Occupation: Research Assitant
Residence: El Paso/Los Angeles
Performance Date: 3/30/17
Primary Language: English
Language: Spanish

Main Piece:

The Participant is marked as BH. I am marked as LJ.

LJ: Can you tell me about El Paso High School.

BH: So El Paso High is known as the oldest high school in El Paso, but beyond that, its also the most haunted high school in the city. It used to be um, the moratorium for world war 11 soldiers who had died in combat, but had no family members reclaim their bodies. So all these bodies were just left there…so as a result, it has been said that there are many ghosts that wander the halls of all of these veterans who have not been able to find peace.

…

LJ: How did you learn about the ghosts?

BH: I would hear them all the time when I was growing up. Um…I think I heard them more around middle school. There were kids who would go out to the school at night. So sometimes they would hear things..

 

Context:

I had visited the participant and her family in El Paso in March. This was recorded after.

Background:

The participant is a fourth year student at the University of Southern California. She is a firm believer in religion and likes “scary stories,” including television shows and hearing about hauntings. She grew up primarily in El Paso, Texas with her mom and two sisters.

Analysis:

This is an example of how ghost stories are passed from one person to the next, immortalizing the event and history of the place. In this case, El Paso High, being the oldest has a lot of history. Not all of the stories may be true, but they are believed by a large amount of the population in El Paso. Being there, I also learned that since El Paso is so close knit, many of the stories and beliefs are shared by the community. Every place I went on my visit had some sort of history to it. There were plaques along the walls and in the pavement, but a lot of what I learned came from listening to native El Paso-ans speak about their city.

 

Ghost Month

Nationality: Taiwanese
Age: 54
Occupation: Consultant
Residence: Taiwan
Performance Date: 4/21/17
Primary Language: Chinese
Language: English

The informant is my father who has always grown up in Taiwan but came to America for grad school. Understanding both cultures, he has a very wide understanding of the traditions in our household and its practices.

Informant: 中元節/鬼節 (Zhong Yuan Jie/Guai Jie) – Ghost month, is when the doors to the underworld open and ghosts come back to our world. This takes place from July to August and we put food outside and burn money for the ghosts and our ancestors. It is believed that the food will feed their hunger and the money is so that they can use in the underworld. It used to be practiced in every household, however, within the past 2 or 3 decades the houses and families have stopped doing it. Nowadays only those who run small businesses keep the tradition alive by putting tables outside their offices and putting out food and drinks while burning money in a large can. I think it has something to do with not upsetting the ghosts and satisfying them to prevent any bad luck.

I think this is interesting since it is still a prevalent tradition, but it has been long stopped being practiced by the households. Only those who run businesses do nott want to upset any of the ghosts and such, thus they try to give them what they want and go on with their businesses, hoping for no bad luck. Although after asking some of my Taiwanese friends, it is still practiced in households, but it is very rarely seen. It is interesting to see how such a prevalent tradition that takes up a whole month during the summer went from households to only businesses to continue performing the rituals.

Ghost of UBC

Nationality: Taiwanese
Age: 23
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: 4/10/17
Primary Language: English
Language: Chinese

Informant is a friend of mine that loves ghost stories.

Informant: There is a long drive into the campus. The road is completely empty except for the trees on the sides. The road is kinda long and the story is that some couple was driving on the road. They got into a fight and the girl stepped out of the car and right after getting out she got hit by another car. To this day it’s said that her spirit still haunts University Boulevard. Numerous reports by male students claim that they picked up a woman who handed them a piece of paper with the library’s address on it. She’ll jump in the rear seat, and then quickly disappear. This has happened on more than one occasion.

Me: So when you drive down the road at night did you ever see or hear the girl?

Informant: Nah, there is never anything on that road. I do use that ghost story to fool around and scare the shit outta people though!

This was so spooky when I first heard it. I had always planned on visiting my friend at UBC, but upon hearing this spooky ghost story I didn’t feel like I wanted to go visit him anymore! Even if it seems like a made up story, I personally do not like getting scared out of my wits.

From what I have found, it is an old tale that has been passed down for many years, upon hearing it I did some research and it is very similar to the generic “vanishing hitchhiker”

 

Sleep Paralysis Ghost

Nationality: Bangladeshis
Age: 18
Occupation: Student
Residence: Bangladesh / Boston, Massachusetts
Performance Date: March 13, 2017
Primary Language: English

Informant: The informant is Nabila. She is eighteen years old and is a freshman at Northeastern University. She grew up in Bangladesh.

Context of the Performance: We sat on the living room floor of a mutual friend’s house in Yonkers, New York over our spring breaks form college.

Original Script:

Informant: So basically, do you know about sleep paralysis?

Interviewer: Yes.

Informant: Basically, it’s a condition which doesn’t allow you to move or talk when you’re waking up or first falling asleep. In Asian culture, when that happens, people believe that it is a form of nightmare or that it is a ghost sitting on you. When you have sleep paralysis, since you can’t move, and you might be screaming out loud but can’t actually make any noise, people think that he’s sitting on you. Because he can’t speak, since he’s a ghost, you can’t speak either. I actually don’t believe it though. My mom told me this when I was about thirteen, but now I know that it’s actually sleep paralysis.

Interviewer: Why is this piece of folklore important to you?

Informant: It’s important to me in the sense that when it happened to me, it really scared me. I had a bunk bed, and it happened to me the first time I slept on the top bunk. So, I never slept on the top bunk again because I thought that the nightmare would happen again.

Personal Thoughts: I find this piece interesting because I have known about sleep paralysis for years now and have never heard of this type of fear of it. In fact, I, along with many of my friends, have tried to achieve sleep paralysis because you need to do so in order to lucid dream. Lucid dreaming is something so many people try to do, so it is compelling to me that Nabila and her family are so afraid of sleep paralysis.

Haunted House in the Philippines

Nationality: Filipino
Age: 21
Occupation: Civil Engineer
Residence: Hawaii/Los Angeles
Performance Date: April 26, 2017
Primary Language: English
Language: Tagalog

The 21-year-old informant was born in the Philippines, but moved to the U.S. (Hawaii) at the age of 9. As ghosts and other mythical creatures play a large role in Filipino culture, the informant recounts personal stories and myths that she encountered during her time in the Philippines.

Informant: “When I was little, I was with my brother and we were at my grandma’s house, and we had a babysitter with us, so it was just the 3 of us. I was like, 3 or 4 years old maybe? I think it was a 5-story house– it was a pretty big house, which people were saying it was so big that it wasn’t as inhabited as it should be, so then like, ghosts started coming in and like, taking over the space or whatever.

But um, we’re just playing and then we heard like, chains on the stairs, just like (*makes a few thumping noises with her hand*). It kept stepping on the stairs and we heard chains just clanking on the floor, and as a child I was just like, ‘Fuck is that?’ And there’s a foot on the stairs, and it was all bloody. It was literally just a foot, and it had chains around it– all bloody. And it just kept stepping, not really going anywhere.

And then, I talked to my brother, and up ’til this day, he’s like, ‘No, I swear I saw it,’ and he was 7 years old then? Maybe I was 4… I was 3 or 4.”

Collector: “Was it like, a solid foot?”

Informant: “Ya, it was just one foot. I forgot what that house used to be… like, what used to be there before the house was built… but I know there was some mystery there.

And there was another one… like, the house was pretty haunted. I heard stories that–well, when we weren’t there–my other cousins lived right across that house, and her grandma would say that she would see like, a white lady just walking across the rooftop, and no one was there ’cause everyone was like, in Hawaii or like, the mainland or whatever… So that was another one of the stories.”