Tag Archives: murder

The Legend of Hooper’s Hollow

Nationality: American
Age: 57
Occupation: Dance Studio Owner
Residence: Downers Grove, IL
Language: English

Legend:

“There’s a beautiful park in between where my neighborhood was and the school that I went to, so, a lot of kids would like to cut through the park. Well, in 1979, there was a boy coming home from hanging out with friends one night, and he was a nice kid, 15 years old, a happy kid, and nobody to this day knows what happened, but he was murdered by being hung from that bridge over the creek [in the park]. So, he wasn’t found for almost a day, and when he was found, he had a huge, angry look on his face, but obviously, he was dead. So, the legend goes that this boy was so happy [in general] and so upset about being murdered that his spirit stayed in the area and haunted any kids that tried to play in that creek or go over that bridge. So, once in awhile we would go there at night to see if we could feel his spirit or see his ghost; we never did, but we wouldn’t actually go over the bridge because we were too frightened.

Just adding on, I did have friends that used to claim that they would hear his voice or see, like, a hologram of him from time to time, especially at night. But, I’m sure they were making it up. ‘Cause anytime we went–which I only went a couple times [because] I was too scared–I never saw any kind of ghost, or spirit, or hologram of his presence. But people used to claim that they would see him or hear his voice yelling or crying from the bridge.”

Context:

My informant told me that the boy was murdered when she was around 12 years old and it had been an anomaly in her town; children being murdered was not common. She told me that that’s the reason why this legend is so popular; the parents only talked about the boy’s murder, but the children talked about his spirit haunting the creek. Many of the children believed it and steered clear of the bridge. When asked if any adults knew about the legend, my informant said that the only reason her mother found out about the legend was through her and her younger brother.

Analysis:

What I find so interesting about ghost stories/legends is what the circumstances are that causes the ghost/spirit to haunt the specific location it is haunting. In the article we read in class about Estonian legends of ghosts, it was believed that ghosts/spirits haunted ancestral homes as a way of keeping the property in the family while the Soviet Union was trying to force Communism onto Estonians. In this legend, it is believed the boy’s spirit/ghost haunts the bridge and the creek where he was murdered as a way to keep children away from the area. It seems that his ghost is keeping the children of the town away from the creek and bridge as a way of preventing another child from meeting his same fate of being murdered. There is also the element that only children/younger people know and share this legend and not the adults. This acts as a way of frightening other children.

The Pig Man

Nationality: American
Age: 20
Occupation: Student
Residence: 530 W. 28th st. Los Angeles
Performance Date: 03/25/23
Primary Language: English

Text: “I actually got told this story while I was in the cabin–this was Cabin 2. The story is before it was Cabin 2, the place was a pig pen. Some guy came to the island and he killed one of the pigs, and he like carved out the pig’s head and made a mask-like thing, and like lived on the island and killed people on the low. It sounds pretty fried, but I lived in the cabin probably when I was like 10 years old, and I was told the story in a very scary way and I was sitting in my little bet like ‘dude, fuck, like this is crazy.’ In the moment this stuff is very scary. When you’re at this camp, you don’t really have your phone, so when the counselors tell this stuff that they’ve told a million times, they tell it very well and there’s no other authority to check the story against.”

Context: My informant, NR, told me this story while we sat together and played NHL while listening to house music and eating frozen yogurt. This was a pretty ideal storytelling setting. He first heard this story as a middle-school-aged camper at a sleepaway summer camp in New Hampshire, and was scared by it at the time. He interpreted the legend as the crux of a practical joke that counselors enjoyed playing on campers. 

Analysis: I believe NR’s legend bears elements of practical joking in that it is leveraged by an ingroup, the counselors, to display the ignorance of the outgroup, the campers. The legend’s employment of elements that could potentially exist add credibility to the horror factor and play upon the ignorance of youth to frighten children. NR also emphasized the credibility of the storytellers, emphasizing that he defaulted to believing their account because he lacked a method to investigate other possibilities without his phone. The Pig Man’s employment of the mask also creates a fear factor, as anyone wearing the head of a dead pig would appear frightening, certainly in American culture where people are far removed from the slaughter of animals and death of animals in general. This legend can tell us about summer camp culture, in which authority is valued as well as respect for the surrounding land, which is often unsupervised and can be dangerous for a wandering child. In that spirit, the legend also plays a cautionary role, encouraging campers to stay vigilant in nature–the closer a camper is to being alone in nature, the more the camper will think of the Pig Man and desire a return to safety. I additionally believe that the death aspect of the legend taps into the childhood interest in death as a taboo topic. 

The Outpost

Nationality: American
Age: 20
Occupation: Student
Residence: 720 W. 27th St. Los Angeles
Performance Date: 03/25/23
Primary Language: English

Text: “Alright so basically it was like, so my sleepaway camp was on an island in Lake Winnipesaukee, New Hampshire and it’s like an all-boys camp whatever but basically the camp is all centered around this island and it’s all kinda in this one area and there’s this path you can take through the middle, and at the end of the path is this place called ‘the outpost,’ which is basically a little hut with a bathroom, it’s got a fire pit for camping and stuff–you could spend the night there if you didn’t want to sleep in the cabin, like people did cabin nights there. And so basically only older kids really spent the night at the Outpost, but there were these things called cabin nights where you go with your cabin and basically like post up at like a little beach along the island or play hoops for a while or you could like do random shit honestly-go swimming maybe. You’d camp out with marshmallows and do all that stuff. Basically older kids who could go to the outpost started the story, and essentially it says there’s a murderer in the outpost bathroom. All these kids are out camping, and this kid asks to go to the bathroom and basically gets like stabbed and like blicked. Nobody knows where he is after a while, but the counselor lets another kid use the bathroom–other kid pulls up, gets stabbed, whatever, blicked. At this point the counselor is like ‘yo what the fuck is going on.’ So two kids blicked, blood everywhere. Someone else gets blicked, then they run back to camp super far. One of the guys who works in the office, his dad owned the camp, and he grabbed a gun and killed the guy. It’s really scary when it’s told to you as a kid around a campfire at the outpost.”

Context: My informant, NR, told me this story while we sat together and played NHL (hockey video game) while listening to house music and eating frozen yogurt. This was a pretty ideal storytelling setting. He first heard this story as a middle-school-aged camper at a sleepaway summer camp in New Hampshire, and was scared by it at the time. He emphasized the combination of his youth, the campfire setting, and the storyteller’s authority as elements that enhanced the fear factor of the legend. As explained in the text, the camp was all-boys and the legend revolved around a remote location on the property known as the outpost, at which cabins (groups of campers) would sometimes spend the night outdoors. The legend is traditional at the camp. In hindsight, NR interprets the story as a classic scare-legend, told to encourage adherence to the ‘buddy system’ and to scare younger children. 

Analysis: In my interpretation, the legend of the Outpost offers insights into summer camp and childrens’ culture, particularly through the classic campfire-horror trope. A few dynamics at play make the legend material to the young NR. For one, his youth relative to the storytellers enhances their credibility and thus the plausibility of the legend. In the days of early adolescence, age plays a major role in credibility–this legend is most popular/effective with young children, reflecting this truth. Also, NR’s unfamiliarity with the area adds to the legend’s effect. While he was a regular camper, the Outpost region was still not completely familiar to NR, which can create gaps in understanding that are prone to being filled in with horror legends such as this. In this case, his fear of the unknown, already exacerbated by the campfire setting, became manifested by the legend of a murderer who lived in the Outpost, reflecting a classic youth’s outlook on reality. On the flip side, I view this legend as a practical joke played by counselors on campers and as a cautionary tale leveraged to ensure safety. However, contrasting with many uses of practical jokes, I do not view this necessarily as a rite of passage or an initiation ritual–I believe it is more just a tradition that the camp can collectively identify with. Due to the temporary nature of the camp experience, there is no investment in seeing the children on the other side of understanding the reality of the story. 

The Ghost of Mrs. Kissle

Background information :

The informant is a friend who is from Connecticut and has a second home in Vermont. 

Main Content: 

ME: So could you tell me about your murder-ghost story? 

LA: So there’s this family called the Kissels that used to own my ski-house in Vermont. They had a similar setup that we do, they had the grandparents, the kids, and all of their kids came as well. But there’s now a movie about this story called The Two Mr. Kissels with John Stamos. And um, they didn’t do any of this in our house, but there’s this crazy story from 2008. So they went crazy because they worked in finance, and one guy got killed by his wife in Hong Kong, because she gave a kid a poisoned smoothie to give to the dad, and he died. She rolled him up on a carpet and put him in a storage unit, and then the other dad killed him in his basement in Greenwich, because he wanted to be killed, not kill himself, for insurance purposes. And the Grandma died in my house, and she was fine, she never did anything bad, but my mom would always tell me that Mrs. Kistle was gonna get me when I would go to sleep. My mom and my aunt would terrorize me about it and always tell me that there would be a ghost in the house. 

ME: Was there anything specific about Mrs. Kissel, or were you just scared that she was going to “get you”

LA: They were just like, I don’t know, not something a mom would normally do, they honestly just wanted to freak me out before I went to bed. Then I would stare at the ceiling all night thinking about a bad ghost that was gonna come get me, but my grandma would always tell me that Mrs. Kissel was a good woman, and her kids were the ones who were fucked up. 

ME: Did you ever see a ghost in the house? 

LA: No, I think I almost was trying to convince myself that I would see ghosts there sometimes because of how much she was on my mind. My brother and I would sleep on bunk beds and I would always stare at the ceiling and look for her, but I never saw her. 

ME: Do you tell a lot of people about this experience? 

LA: I never talk about it in the house or in the state of Vermont because it scares me too much. I can only talk about it in other states. 

Context: 

We had this conversation in-person while eating lunch.

Thoughts: 
I think this is a really interesting legend because the legend stems from a real horrific murder, which I think holds a tight grip on the informant. Even though the informant, nor any of her family, have ever seen the ghost, it seems to be a large topic of conversation, and the informant is still scared to speak about it to this day. The fact that there was a real murder story gives the ghost story much more credibility and certainly adds to the fear factor. To learn more about the murders, read here: Fishman, Steve. “Kissels of Death .” New York Magazine, New York Magazine, 28 Apr. 2006, https://nymag.com/news/features/16861/.

Muscle White.

L is a 78-year-old Caucasian male originally from Meridian, Mississippi. L is a retired drill sergeant and veteran of the American war in Vietnam.

While visiting Phoenix, Arizona I met with L to discuss folklore, as he had previously helped me collect war stories for an oral history project. I met L at his Phoenix office where he provided me with two scary stories he remembered from his past. The following is the first of these two stories, which he first heard as a teenager in the 60s.

L: Ok so this is the story of Muscle White… and Muscle White.. was a really bad man, he was always in trouble and been to prison two or three times, and uh been in a bunch of fights and stuff and he got in a fight where he was hurt really bad one time.. and he lost his right arm. And uh, they fixed him up a hook in prison, so he had this hook on his, on his right arm… Well he was in prison, in Parchman Prison in Mississippi… and he broke out, he escaped. And there was this state wide manhunt for Muscle White because he, he was a bad man. They, everybody was looking for him because uh.. he’d been in fights he’d killed some people I mean, he, he robbed some banks this was a bad guy. So everybody was out looking for him.. So, around Meridian where I lived, there were several places where, uh, teenagers liked to go and uh, park and pad, and.. you know and, and uh.. So, one of ‘em was a place that we called Lover’s Lane. And it was a place out in the country. And so uh, this boy and, and girl went out there, they were I think sixteen years old or so, and they went out there and they’re talking. And.. and uh.. um. The girl said that uh, she thought she heard something. And, the boy said “no it’s just your imagination there’s nothing out here there’s nobody out here” and they look, there’s no other cars out here, so there’s nobody here. And she says “no I really thought I heard something, you know or somebody or something” and he goes “no no it’s ok there’s nothing, there’s nothing out here.” And uh, she says “well, see I’m scared.” She says “I really wanna go.” He says “well no, see it’s ok really no no no” she says she really really wants to go and she’s really scared. He says well ok. Uh.. I, I guess we’ll go. And, and then he heard some—a bump on the car. Just as he was cranking up, and that kinda spooked him, and he threw it in drive and he took off real quick. And went down the road, and he said well “the night is ruined so I might as well take you home.” So he took this girl over to her house.. he got out and walked around to the side of his car to open the door for her, and there was a right arm hanging on the door with a hook on the door handle. Muscle White had been there.

Reflection: I have heard the Hook Man urban legend enough times over the course of my life to assume it offered me no more surprises. Yet, L managed to offer a version of the story that was both compelling in its execution and completely unfamiliar to me. I found it fascinating how fleshed out the Hook Man was in L’s telling of the narrative, as most versions of the story I know reduce the Hook Man to a faceless, nameless escaped convict. I believe the local geographical details that L imbues Muscle White’s backstory with provide excellent insight into Mississippi’s cultural history. Specifically, I believe L’s linkage of Muscle White to Parchman prison (a real prison in Mississippi) speaks to the prison’s historical notoriety in Mississippi. As Parchman prison is linked to a storied past of forced labor and terrible conditions for its inmates, it’s not hard to imagine how the story of the Hook Man and the prison eventually melded together through a shared association with evil in the Mississippian collective conscience.

 “For another version, see Brunvand, Jan Harold. 2014, Too Good to Be True: The Colossal Book of Urban Legends, Page #1659