Tag Archives: Superstition

Albanian Broom Superstition

Nationality: American
Age: 18
Occupation: Student
Residence: Bronx, New York
Performance Date: March 17, 2017
Primary Language: English

Informant: The informant is Mrika. She has lived in the Bronx, New York for her whole life. She is eighteen years old and is a freshman at Fordham University in the Bronx, New York. She is of Albanian descent.

Context:We sat across from each other at a table at a diner in Yonkers, New York during our spring breaks from college.

Original Script:

Informant: So, if someone accidentally hit you with a broom while they were sweeping, it would be bad luck. If they hit your feet, people would say that you wouldn’t get married. It seemed like an allusion to slavery. Brooms deal with the ground and the dirt. You had to get rid of the bad luck. To do that, you have to spit on the broom.

Interviewer: Why is this piece of folklore important to you?

Informant: I learned about this while I was on vacation in Albania, so it reminds me of that culture. I must have been eight years old. This is the one superstition that makes me remember the month I spent in Albania when I was growing up.

Personal Thoughts: I find it interesting that not only did Mrika explain the piece of folklore, but she also had developed a sense of the potential meaning behind its reason. Usually, people do not really know where the folklore they follow comes from or its meaning, yet Mrika, as she got older, was able to infer why getting hit with a broom is considered bad luck.

Don’t Bring a Feather into the House

Nationality: Scottish
Age: 27
Occupation: Professor
Residence: Boston, MA
Performance Date: 4/26/17
Primary Language: English

Informant: Dr. Çulik-Baird is a 27-year-old professor. She was born and raised in Scotland, and moved to Los Angeles at 21. She recently moved to Boston for a job.

Main Piece:
Hannah: “When I was little, my mother would always warn me not to bring a bird’s feather into the house. My dad didn’t believe it, but my mother would always warn me against it.”

 

Interviewer: What would happen if you did?

Hannah: “Just bad luck, really. She never told me much more about it.”

Background Information about the Performance: The informant lives away from her family now but still practices this superstition that her mother told her. She said that doing so reminds her of home.

Context of Performance: This piece was told in the household of the informant when she was younger.

Thoughts: I have never heard of this superstition before, and the informant noted that it might have just been her mother’s belief. Nevertheless, I enjoyed learning that the piece kept the informant connected in some way to her family, despite living so far away.

 

Chew on a Piece of Thread

Nationality: American
Age: 20
Occupation: Actor
Residence: San Diego, CA
Performance Date: 3/18/17
Primary Language: English

Informant: B is a 20-year old born and raised in Southern California. He and his family are Jewish, and are all involved in theater.

Main Piece:

Informant: “Something my mom always told me is: if you’re wearing a garment of clothing that is actively being sewn or mended or stuff of that nature, you need to chew on a piece of thread.”

Interviewer: What happens if you don’t?

Informant: “Well, bad luck. There are all sorts of associations to death shrouds and dying, so it’s pretty bad to do.”

Background Information about the Performance: The informant’s mother told him this superstition when he was younger. The family frequently sews clothes due to their involvement with the theater.

Context of Performance: The piece is told as a warning against bad luck, mostly during situations in which people are mending clothes.

Thoughts: The informant noted that although he is not very superstitious, he very much believes this superstition. I was not aware of this superstition, but was aware of other sewing-related superstitions, such as knotted threads signifying an argument in the future, or not leaving something unsewn through New Years.

Going to Hell in High School

Nationality: Chinese-American
Age: 20
Occupation: Student
Residence: La Crescenta, CA
Performance Date: 3/12/17
Primary Language: English

Context: I collected this from a high school friend when we were on a camping trip together over Spring Break.

Background: My friend and I were part of our high school’s marching band.

Dialogue: (Note: C denotes myself, J denotes my friend)

J: When I first went to CV [high school] they— We did the tour thing with the band, and they were like “This is the stairs to Hell! There’s a bomb shelter down there.” Which… fuck knows.

C: There’s a bomb shelter?

J: Yeah, apparently there’s a bomb shelter in CV. It was built in the 60s, it makes sense, y’know. I’ve never looked at the blueprints.

C: I was never told there was a bomb shelter.

J: Um, but I don’t know where that is. I’ve always assumed it was down in Hell, um, but… A couple years after that, uh, I was told by… someone, that a hobo used to live down in Hell and just kind of… slept there, cuz y’know, shelter I guess, and that one day administration found that hobo dead in Hell. So that sucks— Well it’s not really in Hell, cuz Hell you get to from the inside of the auditorium, you gotta go down the stairs from the Jazz Cave, but this was like— you know the stairs behind the auditorium, that go down and are like, sketchy and dark?

C: The spiral ones?

J: N0, the spirals are in the Jazz Cave. The ones that are, like, if you’re going from the Band Room up to the quad, and instead of going up the stairs you go around the stairs, and then there’s stairs down. If you go down those stairs.

C: Okay.

J: That’s where I was told that the hobo died.

C: Oh! Yeah, yeah.

J: And it’s like dark there and shit, so… it would make sense that no one found him there for a while.

Analysis: This is almost my own piece of folklore too, since I went to high school in the same place and knew about the same locations. In this instance, however, comparing my own knowledge about “Hell” (a basement area underneath our school’s auditorium) to what my friend knew showed some variation: I had never heard of the bomb shelter existing before, nor did I know that the specific staircase my friend had spoken about was supposed to be an “entrance to Hell,” as we would have put it back in the day.

The Rice Witch

Nationality: Vietnamese-American
Age: 20
Occupation: Student
Residence: Palo Alto, CA
Performance Date: 4/17/17
Primary Language: English

Context: One of my roommates, when he heard me explaining to a friend about how stressful it was to try and find folklore from different sources, offered some of the stories he knew from his childhood.

Background: My roommate’s family was extremely superstitious when they lived in Vietnam before he was born.

Dialogue: One day my uncle got enough, like, money on a shopping errand to buy some bags of rice, and, you know, apparently, as far as we know, he did get the rice. He was heading back with two bags of rice, um, and… he came back with nothing! What he told the family was that, in the middle of the way he encountered an old lady who asked him to give him the rice, and… he just could not… control anything except the fact that he handed the rice over to her and watched her walk off with it, and then came back with, uh, nothing, and actually… everyone believed him. So I guess there’s that.

Analysis: This feels extremely of its culture, largely because my roommate specified that his family’s superstition were directly connected to the country they come from, Vietnam. This fact also leads me to believe that this witch is a kind  of witch specific to the Vietnamese and/or Southern Asian area, rather than just a witch that everyone in Western civilization is familiar with.