Tag Archives: ghosts

Bloody Mary

Nationality: Irish American
Age: 20
Occupation: Student
Residence: Anaheim, California
Performance Date: April 27, 2017
Primary Language: English

Tell me who Bloody Mary is.

“Bloody Mary is a story that was really really popular among my schoolmates back when I was in elementary school. Basically uhh…, she was like a ghost or phantom or something that was the Virgin Mary with bloody eyes. And you could conjure her in a mirror through a ritual, and she would kill you. I don’t know why it was so popular looking back on it, cause it was basically asking for a death sentence if you did the ritual. But yeah, we used to tell it to each other and dare each other to do it, especially if there was someone who said they didn’t believe in ghosts. It’s especially fun to do at sleepovers, which is what my friends and I used to do.”

How is the ritual performed?

“You go into a room alone with all the lights off, and there has to be a mirror inside obviously. You stand in front of the mirror and you chant ‘Bloody Mary’ three times. After the third time, Bloody Mary is supposed to appear in the mirror, where she will slit your throat and you will die. I actually have tried it before, but nothing really happened which is good cause I really didn’t want to die. It was super scary though, and sometimes you even feel like something might happen, especially when you’re in the dark standing in front of the mirror and have said it twice already.”

 

Collector’s Comments:

This is perhaps one of the most famous ghost stories out there, and one that I have heard multiple times before. One very interesting thing that I noticed is that the informant describes the ghost as a bloodied Virgin Mary. In the versions that I have heard, Bloody Mary is another woman entirely, with no relation to the Catholic Mary, so this makes me wonder if the fact that the informant heard this story at Catholic school had affected the telling. Another point that is interesting is that the informant had actually performed the ritual, and while nothing happened, the fear that he felt was very real, making the context and the setting a large factor in his belief.

 

For another version of this story, see the horror film Paranormal Activity III (2011), which has a scene where the characters recreate the Bloody Mary ritual.

The Ghost of Frankie Silver

Nationality: American
Age: 24
Occupation: Computer Services Assistant
Residence: Los Angeles, California
Performance Date: April 2, 2017
Primary Language: English
Language: German

“The town that I am from in North Carolina, it’s called Morganton and it’s in Burke County, and one of the famous citizens of Burke County is named Frankie Silver and she was the first woman to be hanged… I thought it was in North Carolina, but it might just be in Burke County… I am not entirely sure, but she was accused of murdering her husband and chopping him up with an ax and then burning him in a stove, like the stove in their house…
And so she was found guilty and hanged. I think she wasn’t hanged in Morganton. I think she was hanged at the state courthouse, but I think the trial was in Morganton in the old county courthouse, which is still standing. They don’t use it as a courthouse anymore, but it has like a museum inside of it. It’s pretty cool. But supposedly, her ghost, you know, still kinda haunts where her house was. I think it’s not quite in Morganton. It was more out in the woods kind of up the mountain, but my mom told me that supposedly where she was buried, which I guess has since kinda been lost… no one really knows where it is anymore… is kinda out towards my childhood home. There was a road off of the main road that was kind of…I think it was just a gravel road called Buckhorn Tavern or something real rustic like that… and that supposedly is where her grave is according to my mom.”

The informant grew up in North Carolina and lived there his entire life there until moving to Los Angeles around three years ago, where he currently resides.
In regards to Frankie Silver, there is speculation to if she was innocent or not, or even if it was just self-defense. This happened at the turn of the century though, so a lot of the speculation comes from women not having as many rights as they do now, meaning that even if it was self-defense, she could have been “doomed at the onset once she was accused” (according to the informant).
While the informant claims to not believe it now, he admits that he probably did as a child, being that he was into ghost stories then. However, he also admits that he didn’t really understand who she was until he was much older. He learned who Frankie Silver was as the children in Morganton/Burke County are required to read a book called “The Ballad of Frankie Silver” by Sharyn McCrumb in middle school.
The informant also cannot distinctly remember what would happen to you if you saw the ghost, but he figures it has something to do with her being unjustly hung.

The informant relayed this to me while in the passenger seat of his girlfriend’s car as she drove us all back up to Los Angeles. I have known the informant since he moved to Los Angeles.

I find it interesting that the informant knew about legend of Frankie Silver, but did not fully understand it until reading a book based off of it. In this case, the legend was enhanced/more distributed because of the authored literature based upon it. While the informant was able to distinguish what he knew as the legend and what he knew as the book, I am sure that the two often get confused or even fall under the same heading of “By Sharyn McCrumb.”
That being said, there is no way of telling how much of the book influenced the informant’s version of the legend or how much it has changed since the book was published.

Haunted Victorian House

Nationality: American
Age: 19
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: 4/20
Primary Language: English

This story was told when the informant was explaining the local legends of growing up in Eastern Tennessee.

“So there’s other little town called Jefferson city, it’s pretty small, pretty rural, all farms and shit, it’s kinda like midway between Bullsgap and Morristown which is my hometown, it’s kind of off the map places in east tenessee, but Jefferson City is particularly interesting because there’s this very, very big beautiful victorian house that’s like white and has a sprawling landscape and whatever, and nobody lives it, ever, it’s never ever been bought and I don’t think it’s even for sale anymore but that’s because there was a lady who lived in the house, and she had like fifty pets I think? Like, very many cats and dogs, so she died one day, because she was old, and then no one really, and she didn’t have family or anything, so she just, like, stayed there, dead, and eventually her pets, once they ran out of things to eat they started dying too. So by the time anybody came, they came because they could smell like the rot, overwhelming, so they come, and see this absolute horror scene of rotting bodies and stuff and they clean it out eventually and try to put the house back on the market. And every time it goes on the market and someone moves in, they say they cannot sleep because they hear the dogs and the cats all night rattling and moving around the house all night, and you can smell the rot and the decay still. Which is crazy! But there it is.”

 

Analysis:

The story is interesting because the house is empty now, and the local legends have become so engrained in the culture that it would be strange to occupy the house because you of the suggestion of the cats and dogs running around, you’d probably hear them!

Haunted House

Nationality: American
Age: 19
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: 4/21
Primary Language: English

The informant told me of his haunted house in Eastern Oregon.

“So, my house is haunted, um, I guess I’ll describe a specific spooky encounter that happened one night, probably like two years ago, first of all this is just a side note, I talk and scream in my sleep a lot and I think it’s because I’m possessed, and my sisters are always scared whenever we’re all in the house because I scream, but anyways this one time one night I was sleeping and then it’s like 3 o’clock in the morning and my door opens and it’s my dad in his underwear and holding a shotgun and he’s like “Are you okay?” and I was like “yeah what’s going on?” and he’s like “nothing, just making sure you’re safe.” And then the next morning he tells me what was going on, which was he and my mom were in their upstairs room and they heard this knocking on our front door, and they were curious about that, and they heard footsteps right below them, so my dad got a shotgun and he started combing the house looking for something and they heard voices and this supernatural shit, um, and then the next morning, when I woke up, my mom was also there, making sure i was safe and then she pointed out to me this guest room that we have which is down the hall from me, and the doors were wide open, like this door chair was overturned and there were these pillows out with an impression of body like laying there, um, yeah. So that’s what happened. Yeah.”

Do you know why the house is haunted?

“There were some renovations once so maybe that disturbed some spirits. I don’t know.”

Analysis:

The real life experience that the informant and his parents had confirm his belief in the supernatural and especially ghosts. What was interesting was that the haunting of the house was accepted as a way of life, and something that the family has not done anything to change.

‘Animas’ Ghosts in Rural Mexico

Nationality: Mexican-American
Age: Middle-Aged
Occupation: Retired
Residence: Los Angeles, CA, USA
Performance Date: April 23, 2017
Primary Language: English
Language: Spanish

“People talk so much about ‘animas,’ like means ‘spirits,’ about the point when they die, they come back.

 

So… My grandma always was telling us, ‘Oh, I feel like, umm… A ghost, an anima, that comes with me every night. I feel it here, walking. I saw her walking.’ My grandma said it was a… a… woman.

 

So, sometimes, at home, when we were at home, we hear womans, old womans, walking to us, too. Because we believe what my grandma says, and we were thinking ‘Oh, it’s true what my grandma said. There’s someone walking at night near to us!’

 

And also when we were not sleep before 11:00 p.m., we were, umm… we were in our bed, six girls in the same room, and suddenly outside we started hearing a horse. Ehh… We can hear the, it looks like a humongous horse, it comes from outside the window, and we hear the noises, and we hear that the… chew… horse, very strong about the horse. And so many people in our village talk about that. And we said, ‘oh my god, that is a scary!’ So we don’t open doors and we went to sleep very fast, because we were afraid to this man on the horse.

 

And then also, about the, umm… The money. We hear that where is there flame on the floor, there is some money, too. So some people starts… scraping the dirt in this place, so some people, what they found was, uhh… bones from some skeleton or from some other people, so… they said if you see this, this flame, it can be a dead man or a, or a… golden pot.

 

So it was, uhh… it was kind of… strange? But it, it was like that.”

 

Analysis: Much like her husband’s ghost story, the informant’s ghost story is notable for its apparently-widespread belief in an otherwise deeply religious culture that would normally reject the existence of such spirits. And yet, the presence of ghosts is considered a normal enough occurrence that they may enter and live inside of houses without too much hubbub. Also worth noting is the expansion on the flaming ground concept from the informant’s husband’s story. Evidently, flaming ground that signifies good or bad luck is a common belief. Additionally, the chance to discover a long-lost skeleton may be related to the ghosts of people that the informant claimed to have run into first-hand, as it would appear that being buried far away from anything in particular may trigger a spirit’s restlessness from improper burial, a taboo in Judeo-Christian culture.