- Details
- Collected on 03/23/2024
- Genre: Memorate
- Language: English
- Nationality: Mexican
- Relationship to Informant: Friend’s Father
- Text
- Summary
- When the informant was growing up, he and his brother would help out their older neighbor named Billy. The night that Billy died, his brother felt a strong presence over him that he believes was Billy’s spirit trying to tell him something.
- Direct transcription of folklore:
- “In Rippon, where we grew up, there was a time when our next-door neighbor, Billy, died. That night – we didn’t know he had died – my brother felt a presence come over him and he couldn’t speak. Finally, he started screaming because he felt this presence – which was Billy. Later, we found out that he died at the time [my brother] felt the presence. Billy was older and his wife’s name was Nelly, and we would help them out. My dad would always send us over and ask if they needed anything, so if they had anything heavy they needed us to bring into their home we would help out or one time Billy fell off his horse and we had to go help him. They were great neighbors and we knew them. It wasn’t an evil presence, but it was something that came over him and he couldn’t speak. He wasn’t sure if Billy was trying to tell him something.”
- Summary
- Context
- This story was a personal experience from the informant that has become an oral tradition within his family.
- Analysis
- In this story, the informant’s brother felt the spirit of their neighbor trying to connect with him before they knew that the man had died. They believe that this presence was Billy’s attempt to communicate with them. This story indicates that there is a belief that spirits can attempt to contact the physical world during their passing to the afterlife. This story also expresses the cultural value of helping out neighbors and having a tight-knit community because it connects you to those around you.
Tag Archives: presence
Presence in our House
Ok so when we bought our house – I don’t believe in this stuff – but in the house around the kitchen area, I just had a sense that there was a presence, and it was definitely what I believed to be the wife of the previous owner. She just seemed to be lurking around there. Like I said she…she just…
We would come upstairs from the garage to the kitchen, and I would feel that she was looking at us and peering at us. For several years I felt that this was going on, and that she was looking out from the kitchen window outside to us as we approached the house. It went on for several years. It wasn’t a scary feeling… it was just as if she was checking things out. And then one day, she kind of just disappeared. She wasn’t there anymore. I kind of forgot about it and then when I remembered, I thought about how she didn’t really come out anymore like she used to. It’s been 15 years in the house, and she hasn’t been around for…I don’t know… maybe 8 years.
You never saw her?
It was just a white, vague presence but you felt it. And then it was gone. Haven’t seen her since.
Did you feel a sense of relief when you thought she had gone?
It’s interesting you say that because it didn’t really bother me. It bothered me in the beginning, but I just got used to it. I just don’t know.
Background: This was a narrative my uncle told me about his house where he lives with my aunt and my cousins in Glendale. It was significant to him because it was the only type of supernatural interaction he claims to have ever had, but it wasn’t super bothersome to him, because as stated above he said it wasn’t the most strong presence and that he didn’t really mind it. I conducted this interview live at my uncle’s house, so this story was given to me live. I thought this was an interesting story because first, the presence he felt was not very strong, which is fairly different from the rest of the stories I have collected, which all otherwise state that whatever they felt was very strong and trying to communicate something to them.