Tag Archives: Narrative

Scary Aerie

Age: 17

Date of Performance: 4/01/2025

Language: English

Nationality: American

Occupation: Student

Primary Language: English

Residence: United States

  1. Text

The informant is a high school student. She referenced a legend from her summer camp as a kid, known as “Scary Aerie.” It was the name of an outdoor ropes course at the camp, with a legend about a girl who fell from the course into the lake below it. Her name was said to be Aerie, and legend has it– she haunted the course so that campers would hear her screams when they zip-lined over the lake.

2. Context

“Yeah Scary Aerie always freaked me out a bit because I was already afraid of the heights on the rope course and the tale they used to tell us honestly made it ten times worse.”

“I got told it my first year as a camper so I was probably seven years old or so. I don’t know, sometimes I felt like I could actually hear her screams but I might’ve just been in my head about it. Some of my friends said they would hear it and some said they didn’t so, yeah, I don’t know.”

3. Analysis

Scary Aerie is a legend, with questionable truth value located in the real world of the summer camp where it originated. It’s again, a social tool and example of folklore that bonds a community. They all share the knowledge of the legend and are impacted by it differently.

It seems a bit of a tactic to incite fear into the new members of the camp, a strategy for younger campers to have to learn their place in the community. It’s a common practice by many organizations– to inflict some hardship on new members before they can feel fully established in their new area. This seems to be the function of Scary Aerie.

13 Curves

Age: 50

Date of Performance: 3/31/2025

Language: English

Nationality: American

Occupation: Financial Advisor

Primary Language: English

Residence: United States

  1. Text

The informant is a financial advisor and father. He referenced a myth called “13 Curves.” The informant told a story of a road just north of his hometown where a tragic car accident occurred over 60 years ago. The road is claimed to be haunted by the souls of those who died in the accident, with the informant saying he was warned of paranormal noises on the road as a kid.

2. Context

“I heard about this when I was a little kid. This terrified me. Sometimes I traveled on that road with my family to go see family friends of ours. I liked riding in the car through the curves during the day but at night I was terrified.”

“Always looking for ghosts in the forest on either side of the road. There was also a story that on Halloween these ghosts would travel over to my neighborhood which was scary to me.”

3. Analysis

“13 Curves” sounds like a myth dealing with natural phenomena, as most myths do. It seems like a coping strategy for a tragic event– a story the town has adopted to better understand a sad, horrific car accident that occurred in their area. Perhaps, there are noises or shadows on that road, and a logical explanation for the community to better understand the dark, eerie ambience of the area.

Given that myths are made to create meaning, and the informant was informed of this myth at a young age, perhaps also, the myth could be aimed to teach the informant a lesson. It could be intended to raise awareness for cautious driving, to learn from the accident. We learned in culture about how “our myths naturalize our culture and impact how we think.” in this scenario, the “13 Curves” myth impacts how the community approaches the road and helps them better understand a sad accident and environment of the road.

Cardiff Giant

Age: 50

Date of Performance: 3/31/2025

Language: English

Nationality: American

Occupation: Financial Advisor

Primary Language: English

Residence: United States

  1. Text

The informant is a financial advisor and father. He referenced a legend about the “Cardiff Giant” near where he grew up. He told a story about how the remains of a 10-foot-tall man were seemingly discovered by two men digging on a farm. It turns out the remains were a hoax by a scam artist, who was inspired by the idea of giants in the bible. He constructed a stone man and buried it in an area of much religious fervor. When the giant was uncovered, it became a legend about stone people that had used to live in the area, inspired by a local native tribes’ understanding of humans.

2. Context

“This one didn’t scare me but I was always interested in it. Each fall, my family would go apple picking in that area and I was always asking my dad about the giant. I found it interesting that someone would go through that length to create a hoax once I found out the giant wasn’t real.”

3. Analysis

This legend is a testament to the power of ‘belief’ in human nature, a concept we talked about in class. Legends go in hand often with what people believe– this legend represents a creator of the legend taking advantage of the human obsession with spectacle, and the desire to be engaged with anything out of the ordinary or seemingly obsurd.

This legend could be classified as a historical legend, a story about the history of a giant and its attachment to native tribes that has not been accepted as true, but is set in the real world. Through the practice of ostension, in this case, the two men digging up the giant, the legend became “true” in a way, and real to the community it involved.

For the informant, it was simply a playful legend, a chance to poke fun at the environment he was in and engage further with his community. This is representative of how legends are very social, and often a part of peer groups. It allowed the informant to socialize with his family and have a deeper understanding of his community.

Chinese New Year – Folk Origin Myth

Nationality: Chinese and American
Age: 20
Occupation: USC Student
Residence: Los Angeles, CA

Context:

My informant is from China. In China they celebrate Chinese New Year, otherwise known as Lunar New Year, which is the most important traditional holiday in their culture. Lunar New Year, marking the start of the lunar calendar year, is said to symbolize a fresh start and the opportunity to leave bad luck behind and welcome what the new year has to offer. The lunar calendar follows the moon’s monthly cycles and is about 354 days, making a leap month necessary to stay in line with the seasons. Lunar New Year is widely celebrated in many other East and Southeast Asian countries. Its significance lies in the blending of ancient traditions with modern day practices.

Conversation pulled from audio:
Informant:

“This is like a Chinese New Year’s story, basically. Like why you have to put like you have to have fireworks and like you have to put up like red stuff or wear red on Chinese New Year’s. It’s because like basically there was like a town in the past that was like always like attacked by like I was like tormented, I guess, whatever, like by a monster that lived in the mountains and it would come down once a year to like eat people. And basically like they realized that like by setting bamboo on fire, it causes like a bang, like a really like loud popping and like banging sound. And like the monster would be like scared of the sound. And then they also realized that like the monster was like scared of red because it’s like really it’s like looks like fire, right? And then so, but this is really out of order, but you guys can Polish it.

{ 1:01 }
And so like they did these things and then the monster would like stay away. And like when it did come down, it would like run away. So yeah.

Me: { 1:10 }
The red scared it off?

Informant: { 1:14 }
The red and then the firecrackers because it’s like when you set the bamboo on fire, it like kind of sounds like a firecracker.

Me: { 1:19 }
A ritual. Gotcha. I like that. That’s awesome. Thank you so much.”

Analysis:

Is this story true? Who knows. That’s what makes it a folk myth. Does it even matter if it’s true? I don’t think so. I find it interesting nonetheless. The fact that my informant was told this story as a child as the origin of Chinese New Year is all that matters. That’s what makes it folklore because this story has been pasted down by the folk, true or not.

What I find interesting is it’s explanations for why people wear red and light firecrackers during this holiday. The monster, symbolic or not, is scared away by the color red and the lighting of firecrackers because it’s scared of fire. Is this symbolic? I think so. I think it could represent bad luck, chaos, hardship, or winter and with the new year you celebrate to ward these things off. Often in folklore monsters are used to represent natural or social fears. This monster could also represent the warding off of doubts about the new year and struggles like famine and fear of invasion from the closing year.

Myth: Anansi Story from a Coworker

Context:

Informant S is a 25 year old graduate student in the film production department of USC SCA and is the collector’s coworker. S is from New Jersey, and their family is from the Virgin Islands. S has “heard various Anansi stories within [their] family. This one [they] remember partially reading it for a project [they] were doing in a class but it also was within the realm of the ones [they] heard growing up [they] just couldn’t fully remember it so [they] just found one.” The informant has studied folklore for their own personal interest in it and employed it in their own filmmaking.

Text:

Informant: “Anansi is essentially like an African diaspora. It’s a spider, like a trickster-spider, and it’s everywhere in the Caribbean, it’s in the whole diaspora. And there’s one Anansi story I sort of remember where he’s hungry and he wants dinner. So he keeps getting himself invited to, like, dinner parties and pretending there’s a bunch of people and then he steals the host’s dinner and just, like, leaves. I think he killed one of them at one point. But it’s all these different like creatures of the forest I think, there’s a fox, a wolf, and a crow I believe? And then eventually he keeps coming home, eating all the food he stole, and not bringing any back for his wife and kids. So, I think his wife rats him out and then there’s like a fake dinner party made to get him and he eats so much food he can’t move anymore. And then all the people he stole the food from capture him and basically tie him up and leave him tied against a tree. And then he eats the rope and escapes. That’s not… that’s the gist of it, I can remember.”

Collector: “Like that’s how it ends?”

Informant: “Something like that. They usually have kind of dark endings but the… essentially Anansi is supposed to teach you […] lessons about why not to trick people and be greedy and selfish and a bunch of stuff. […] Anansi itself is like a… almost universal… one of the few universal diasporic concepts. There’s a whole bunch of them, that’s just one I remember.”

Interpretation:

I was lucky enough to find an informant for this collection entry that was familiar with concepts of folklore itself. S mentioned that their interest in the African diaspora is rooted in their own personal background, connecting them to heritage or family as we’ve discussed in class. It seems like this kind of interest in cultural folklore is common among the children and grandchildren of immigrants in America. S’ story reminds me of the concept of “universal archetype” – though that theory has been disproved, I can see why some folklorists have considered it. The concept of a trickster god, while not archetypal, appears in a number of folklores – notably in Indigenous American folklore, according to Lévi-Strauss’ work in structuralism. Anansi, like Lévi-Strauss’ examples, acts on instincts that are pretty reminiscent of human flaws, and is connected with a specific type of animal – a spider. Though S believes the story is to teach people not to mess with trickster gods, I believe it has to do with human flaw such as greed and gluttony as well. What’s more, I think it’s interesting that the informant specifically mentioned what they believe the story is supposed to teach, and has a pretty clear understanding of this story as a myth.