Tag Archives: high school

Red (a Ghost Story)

Nationality: Chinese
Age: 16
Occupation: High School Student
Residence: Arcadia, CA
Performance Date: 4/28/2013
Primary Language: English
Language: Chinese

“So there’s this ghost story that I heard at Mock Trial state, and… it goes something like… There’s a man who checks into this hotel, and… he’s there alone.  So every night he’s there he goes down to the bar, and while he’s sitting in the bar, having a drink… he observes… up at the counter… he sees the back of this beautiful young woman.  And… he keeps trying to muster up the courage to go talk to her, but as soon as he’s close… uh… she just… goes away.  So he’s keep trying every night and every single night he sees the same beautiful woman and he keeps… trying to bring up the courage to go talk to her.  But she leaves every single time… he’s supposed to go talk to her.
So at night when he retires to his room… he… hears a scratching… at the door.  He wakes up… and he asks, “who’s there?”  But nobody responds.  So… he goes up to the door and looks through the eye hole… and all he can see is red…  There’s nothing there but the color red.  He finds this… kinda odd so he just goes back to sleep.
Uh, when he goes back to the bar he sees the woman again, same chain of events occur… he’s back at his room that night… hears the scratching again.  He looks at the eyehole, asks “who’s there?” No one’s there… it’s JUST the color red.  So the next day… he goes back to the bar… and he sees that the girl is gone.  So he goes up to the bartender and says… “Where’s that girl who sat here every night,  I really wanted to talk to her.  And… the bartender is like… “Oh… um… you mean that young woman?  Well… she left… but there was something really really odd about her.”  And the man asks, “what was that?”  And the bartender says… “Her eyes were colored red.”

My sister heard this story from a friend on a car ride back from a mock trial competition.  She and her friends were sharing scary stories when it was around evening.

My sister was particularly disturbed by this story and claims to think about/dream about it for the remainder of the day and night she hears or re-tells it.  She says that the thing that scares her the most is the connection between the girl’s eye color and the red that the man sees through the eye hole.  The catch is that every night she was here, the girl was peering through the eye hole, watching the man.  She says the thought of being watched in places of supposed privacy frightens her.

When I first heard the story, my first thought aabout the color red was that this either represented a trait of the man or the girl.  I thought that the color would imply something sexual about the story, so I was surprised that the association was quite literal – that the girl’s eyes are red and so when she went to watch the man it covered the eye hole’s view with red.  The story was not as disturbing for me, probably because I was expecting some form of bizarre twist when I had the conversation with the informant, and it was outdoors and fairly light.  The place in which this piece is performed is important. My sister heard this story during the evening in a car – the cramped and dark environment probably contributed to how the story impacted her.  However, I do agree with her on the frightening prospect of being watched without knowing.  I think the element of having the man “watch” the girl without knowing the girl was watching him all along helps emphasize that twist and underlying fear in the audience.

I also noticed that my sister learned this from a high school classmate and was performed in a group of high school students.   I think that the story is scary for high school students because privacy is something adolescents value a lot.  Although adolescents use things such as social networking and are pretty immersed in an environment of disclosure, they also want a certain extent of privacy for their own thoughts.  I feel like high school students like the informant worry about surveillance because they understand how the world they’re growing up in is becoming more and more transparent (partially because of their own practices).

In my opinion, this story shares similarities with other scary stories involving being watched.  The main recurring elements in the story (the girl and the red behind the eye hole) are kept mysterious throughout the entire story – at the end, another character/informant makes the terrifying connection for both the main character and the audience.  But the girl doesn’t really come across as a ghost to me.  She has an unusual characteristic and doesn’t actually speak to the man, but the story itself doesn’t explicitly call her a ghost.  So I find it interesting that my sister calls this a ghost story.

Mafia (a game)

Nationality: Chinese
Age: 16
Occupation: High school student
Residence: Arcadia, CA
Performance Date: 4/28/2013
Primary Language: English
Language: Chinese

My sister learned a card game called “Mafia” from her speech and debate teammates.  The game requires a playing deck and is often played in groups of six or more.  It’s particularly popular with high school and some college students (who often learned of the game in high school).

A player acts as the narrator and gives each player a card.  A king, queen, and jack must be distributed.  A player with the king card plays as the mafia.  A player with the queen card plays as the nurse.  A player with the jack card plays as a detective.  A player with any other card is a regular citizen.  Players do not reveal their cards to each other.

The narrator asks all players to put their heads down, and then asks the mafia to put their head(s) up and designated a player to “kill.”  The mafia raises their head and points to another player.  The narrator notes the decision and asks the mafia to put their head(s) back down again.  The narrator then asks the nurse(s) to put their head(s) up.  They are asked who they want to save.  They can point to any player, including thesmelves.  The narrator asks the nurse(s) to put their head(s) back down again.  The narrator asks the detective to put his/her head up.  The detective can point to a player and gesture to the narrator that they suspect this player is the mafia.  The narrator will nod or shake their head to affirm/deny their hunch.

The narrator asks all players to put their heads up.  The narrator is then tasked to create a story in which the targetted player dies, or a targetted player is in danger of dying but is saved by the nurse (depending on if the nurse makes the right decision to save the right player).  If the player dies, they have to re-enact the death the narrator devises, even if it’s incredibly ridiculous.  The story may reveal the identity of the nurse if the nurse saves the targetted player.

After the events unfold, the narrator allows for the players to vote for one person to be executed.  Players must decide amongst themselves and can accuse anyone (they don’t know anyone’s roles).  When they’ve come to a decision, the narrator describes the accused person’s execution.  After that, the narrator will reveal whether or not the mafia are still on the loose.  The game ends when either the mafia manage to kill everybody else, or if the other players successfully figure out the mafia and execute them.

My sister really likes playing this game because it has a lot of room for creative and persuasive tactics.  There are no rules to the narration (other than ‘make it entertaining’), and there are no rules as to what kinds of evidence players can present to accuse one another.  The game also doesn’t allow you to trust anyone, which makes the action suspenseful.

I think the game’s fostering of mistrust among players is particularly appealing to high school and college students because there is still a degree of uncertainty as to the full stories/personalities of your friends.  The game can reveal certain personality traits of  a player depending on if the players play with a personality true to themselves.  And in competitive environments like high school and college, this game allows for a sanctioned and cathartic experience of being unashamedly competitive against your own friends, if it means survival/success in the game.

My sister mentions that some narrators do not need the targetted player to re-enact their death.  This particular version that my sister describes (with re-enactments) is probably also appealing to her group of speech and debate competitiors, because speech and debate requires either persuasive or performative skills.

Duct taping prank

Nationality: Chinese
Age: 18
Occupation: College student
Residence: Arcadia, CA
Performance Date: 4/27/2013
Primary Language: English
Language: Chinese

My friend is a student at Cal Poly Pomona.  But when he was in high school he was in the marching band.  His high school’s marching band had a particularly strict sense of hierarchy, and so freshmen who were just joining the band were expected to “stay in their place.”  This is an account my friend told me, of a freshman who was particularly unruly and how upperclassmen retaliated during band camp, a week in which the band members train and get to know each other:

“There was this one kid, who, um… who was a freshman, and he was pretty much just a general asshole.  Um, he didn’t show up to practice, he’d cut in line past seniors to get to food and stuff like that, and… he was even worse to people who were, like, of his year.  And… yeah, so basically he’d go around stealing people’s stuff.  And so, one of the seniors were like… “So um,yeah, this is too far so we need to get back at him.”  So we took duct tape and we duct taped his sleeping bag… until there was more duct tape than actual sleeping bag.  And… yeah, basically it was like… justice.  But kind of like, vigilante justice or something like that.”

[“Do you feel that pranks like this kind of enforce the hierarchy you guys have? Like, if people fall out of line…”]

“Yeah, for sure, ‘cause generally if you are being really… arrogant, and, you know, just a general douchebag… we try to put you back in your place.”

My friend definitely thinks that this disproportionate retribution was effective in perpetuating the cultural hierarchy of his high school band.  The duct taping tradition in that particular community far predates my friend’s account.  He remembers it as one of the more common gestures used in disciplining freshmen.

There’s a certain discontinuity betweem the nature of the prank and the values it’s supposed to reinforce.  Band requires a lot of self-disicipline and respect of bandmates/directors, yet this prank is demeaning to the target.  I think this irony can be explained by the way band’s hierarchy works.  As my friend said, the targets of these pranks are usually unruly or arrogant freshmen.  So, as a form of reciporcity, the upperclassmen return acts of disrespect with more disrespect.  On the other hand, it seems likely that duct taping is something that amuses high schoolers because it demeans the target.  There’s a constant struggle of being “better,” and strict hierarchies like band help to reinforce that way of thinking.

Urban Legend: High School

Nationality: America- Caucasian
Age: 21
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: April 22, 2013
Primary Language: English
Language: Ancient Greek

The Nipple Nerve Story

The informant heard this story from a friend about something one of his friends did. The informant’s story is there was a gut who decides he wants to pierce his nipples. Instead of doing the smart thing about getting it down professionally he does it himself.  After week he decides that he doesn’t want them anymore. He takes out one ring and nothing happens. He takes out the other one and a white string comes out. He takes a pair of scissors and cuts the string. He passes out because the pain. When he wakes up, he’s dazed and notices a bad smell. What had happened was that when he pierced his nipple he pierced the nerve. So when he removed it he cut the nerve, passed out, and shit himself.

The informant says he believes that this actually happened because he believed his friends friend’s were stupid enough to try that. He loves telling this story because it gets a great reaction out of people.

This story was one of the only friend of a friend tales I found. Its one of those urban legends that its hard to tell whether it really happened because it sounds kind of plausible. Whether it real or not is not really important but the plausibility makes the story really effective. An effective story just makes it more fun to repeatedly tell people.

Joke: Theather humor

Nationality: American-White
Age: 25
Occupation: Lab Administrator/ researcher
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: April 18 2013
Primary Language: English
Language: Intermediate French

Joke

“What has two legs, a tail, and bleeds profusely?”

“Half a cat.”

My informant got this joke in high school. It was everyone’s favorite joke in her Theater class. Sometimes they would just text each other “Half a cat”. The informant says that she thought it was funny in an unexpected and twisted way.  It was mostly funny because it was an inside joke within the theater group. She said it in-jokes were in common in her theater class, they wouldn’t make sense to people outside the class.

This is kind of a joke riddle. The humor comes from the fact that the person thinks the answer is going to something they don’t know but then the answer is actually really simple. It actually reminds me of a joke from one of my favorite books How NOT to write a Novel “Giving a reader a sex scene that is only half right is like giving her half of a kitten. It is not half as cute as a whole kitten; it is a bloody, godawful mess ” (Mittelmark and Newman) Apparently in American society dead cats are a source of humor.