Tag Archives: mirror

The Haunted Mirror

Age: 18

Text:

Interviewer: “S, tell me your story whenever you’re ready.”

SA: “Okay. So, my uncle had moved into a house a couple years ago, and my grandparents and my aunt had helped him move in. 
And while they were looking at the house, they really liked it. He was able to get everything unpacked. But he and his wife, a couple weeks or months after he had moved in, weird things started happening. 
Like, while he was home alone and his wife was at work, lights shut on and off, or he would hear things around the house, which shouldn’t have been possible because he was home alone. So after a while, with all these strange things happening, um, he decided to call, uh, like, a ghost specialist. Like a, like a priest or something like that. 
And basically the priest went through the house and saged it. Then he got somebody who he wanted to just check deeper into what was happening. But basically this person was asking a bunch of questions. 
They’re like, yeah, there is something definitely off about the house. We just don’t know what it is. And as they kept asking him more and more questions, they finally asked him something that really clicked to him, which was, ‘do you have a mirror in your garage?’ 
And he was like, yes, like, how did you know? They were like, ‘where did you like get this mirror?’ 
And basically he had told them, he said, he had gotten this mirror, which was ike, it was almost like a cultural thing around the mirror. It was like a face on top of this tiny mirror that was in his garage. 
And he told the priest or whoever it was, come in and check the house, that he had got it from a garage sale, and then the person told him you need to get rid of it immediately, because there was a spirit attached to it. And that is what was happening in the house. And basically, they told them, don’t ever bring things back from garage sales, because you never know why the person is even trying to sell it. 
Because it was a really nice mirror. So why were they trying to sell it for not a lot of money in the first place? And as soon as he got rid of the mirror, all of the weird things disappeared.”

Interviewer: “Thank you so much. Um, what do you think of the story? Do you believe it?”

SA: “My uncle… My uncle likes to lie a lot. So what do I think? 
I thought he was lying. But what made me really believe it is that his wife was also saying these things were happening and she isn’t a liar. So it’s probably true.”

Interviewer: 
”What do you think about it?”

SA: “About what?”

Interviewer: “The ghost and whether or not you believe in it or believe in ghosts in general.”

SA: “
I believe that stuff like that can happen. I believe things like that could happen, but I also believe it could be things other than ghosts.”

Interviewer: “Like such as?”

SA: 
“The wind?”

Context:

She was told the story when she was 13, and her uncle was about 39. He grew up in Oregon, and he was unemployed at the time of the story. He told this story to her in the living room of her grandparents house. The actual setting of the story took place in St. John’s, Oregon.

Analysis:

This is a clear example of peer / familial groups and their influence on ghost stories. The informant, knowing her uncle, was fairly certain he was probably not telling the truth. However, because of her aunt’s testament, she believed it. This story also follows typical ghostly motifs (flickering lights, strange noises, etc.)

Irish Proverb

Text

“A friend’s eye is the best mirror”

Context

My informant heard of this particular Irish proverb from an Irish teacher at his elementary school, and went home to his parents that day to inquire about its meaning. My informant interprets this proverb as meaning that only somebody that knows you well can tell you the objective truth about yourself. My informant said he took this proverb to heart and thinks about it often, but doesn’t necessarily use it much in everyday life.

My Analysis

Obviously we all have self-bias, which can cloud our own self-perception and so it’s necessary that we have a close friend or somebody who knows us well that’ll tell us the truth when we need to it. I’d never heard my informant utter this particular proverb before, so it was fascinating to be able to hear from him about the proverb itself as well his interpretation of its meaning. I realize that this particular post may be rather pithy, but this cultural piece of folklore is rather succinct in its meaning.

No Mirror Facing You When You Sleep

Nationality: US
Age: 19
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: Apr 21, 2019
Primary Language: English

Context: The collector interviewed the informant (as XZ) for superstitions. The informant is a USC student from Los Angeles. Her parents are from China. The conversation was in the collector’s dorm room When the informant saw a mirror on the collector’s bookshelf, she came up with the following folk belief.

 

 

Main Piece:

Never put the mirror where you can see your own reflection when you sleep.

 

XZ: My parents told me never put the mirror where you can see your own reflection when you sleep. Because when you are sleeping, your soul, this is so funny, I don’t really believe it, is above your body and moves around. So if you have a mirror facing you when you are sleeping, your soul will look into the mirror and get confused. So it will, like, not go back to your body.

XZ: My parents just told me the story. They think it’s funny. But some people really believe in this. They never put mirrors where mirrors reflect their bed.

 

The informant doesn’t think it is an Asian folk belief but rather an American one. She said that she didn’t believe the saying, but when asked about whether she would put a mirror against her bed, she answered no.

 

 

Collector’s thoughts:

Reflection of the real world in the mirror is a common topic of folk belief. There seem to be an underlying fear of the other self in the reflection, which threatens the exclusivity of self in the real world.

This folk belief also involves the topic of body and soul separation, and the process of sleeping. In this folklore, the connection between the soul and the body is unstable. The soul can get lost easily.

An apartment is found haunted by reflection on the window

Nationality: Chinese
Occupation: student
Performance Date: Apr. 24, 2019
Primary Language: Chinese

Context
The informant grew up in Beijing. We were discussing ghost stories when she brought out this story.

Content
A man bought a new apartment. It was on the first floor. Outside the window is the garden, a small grassland in a residential district. He said that when the apartment was being furnished, he often saw an old man staring at him strangely from the window. When he walked outdoors to find the old man, the old man disappeared. When he moved into the house, a friend of his came to visit him. He told his friend that he often saw an old man. He asked his friend to go out and take a look, while he stood indoors to see whether the old man disappeared from the window. The friend went out, and then ran in hurriedly, brought him out and said, “You could not live in the apartment. The old man is a reflection on the window.”

Analysis
Because the old man is a reflection on the window, he is a ghost in the house. The main motif of the story is that mirrors or mirror-like object (window in this story) can show the reflection of ghosts, even though ghosts cannot be seen directly. Notice that the ghost is an old man. The old man must have some unfulfilled wishes that connect with the apartment – he probably lives in the apartment. To me, the story reflects the anxiety of the working force who fail to pay enough attention to their aging parents.

Wealth Mirror: Folk Belief

Nationality: American
Age: 20
Occupation: Student
Residence: Garden Grove, CA
Performance Date: 4/21/18
Primary Language: English
Language: Vietnamese

So in a lot of Asian cultures we believe in Feng Shui -um- which has a lot to do with balancing and good fortune or things that can cause uhh bad luck or harm you and, my family particularly, we have a mirror hanging above our front door from- on the inside side and the point of the mirror is that it reflects all the good wealth or good fortune that could be trying to leave the house and keeps it inside.

 Something really similar to that is we believe that -um- houses that are shaped triangularly, that are built right in front of a window or a room is bad luck so, for example, the house across from me from my bedroom has a triangular roof and my mom put a mirror in my window in the corner to ward off evil spirits. So mirrors can be used both ways, but its more meant to keep out the bad spirits and good spirits in.

The Informant is Vietnamese. She was born in the US and grew up in Garden Grove, a city in Orange County. She is an Economics and Mathematics student at UCLA. The Informant, my girlfriend, taught me about a use for mirrors aside from vanity in many Asian cultures as I distracted her from her own schoolwork on 4/22 at around 2:30am. Her entire house is set up to maximize energy flow. Although she doesn’t believe in the full power of Feng Shui (Qi as the lifeforce), she believes in the power of Qi.

Feng Shui dictates the placement of various items to correctly direct vital energies (Qi) to maximize happiness, health, wealth, etc. There are many directives with Feng Shui and most involve the use of mirrors to either amplify good energies or reject bad energies.

The cardinal sin of mirror placement is to position a mirror facing a door. This reflects Qi that enters right back out the door. The Bagua mirror, an octagon with wooden backing and an individual symbol on all eight sides. The concavity or convexity means the world; a concave mirror will absorb bad energy while a concave mirror will reflect it away. If a Bagua is placed inside the house, it must be concave.

I grew up with light influence of Feng Shui. My mom was always moving furniture around and reorganizing photos on tables to “improve the Feng Shui,” but I always thought it was an aesthetic thing. I’d be hard pressed to believe that a mirror can increase my wealth and good fortune, but if I run a cost-benefit analysis, there’s nothing to lose.