Tag Archives: urban legend

Legend of Hicks Road — Albino Colony

Nationality: American
Age: 20
Occupation: Student
Residence: San Jose, CA
Performance Date: 3/18/19
Primary Language: English

Text

The following piece was collected from a nineteen-year-old female during a road trip from Los Angeles to San Jose, CA. As we were driving, she yelled out and pointed at an exit sign to “Hicks Road” leading off the freeway. Girl hereafter referred to as “Informant” and I will be referred to as “Collector”.

Informant: “Look, look! There’s an old ghost story about that road! Have you guys ever heard of Hicks Road?”

(Chorus of negative responses)

Informant: “So, the myth is that at the end of Hicks Road there’s an albino colony. The albinos all live up there in really creepy trailers. They say that the albinos really hate outsiders, or, like people that aren’t albino. So its supposed to be that if you ever are routed somewhere and you’re supposed to go through Hicks Road, you should reroute because if you go through there, the albinos will get you.”

Collector: “Do they just live on the road? What will they do to you?”

Informant: “No, they live in the dead end, basically a cul-de-sac of albino people. There are some parts of Hicks Road that are okay, but if you turn right at the dead end part, it will take you right to the albinos. Nobody knows what they’ll do to you, all you know is that they don’t take well to strangers.”

Context

It was obvious that my informant found this story to be highly entertaining. While the Informant made it very clear that she did not truly believe that there was an albino colony living at the end of Hicks Road, she was still very adamant that we did not venture near it when I suggested we make a quick detour. The informant lives in San Jose and claims to have known the story for a very long time; she believes she heard it at school. When I asked her when she learned of it, or from whom, she couldn’t recall but remembers it as always being present. She remembers it because it is one of the signs she always sees on the drive from her home in San Jose to USC. She heard a theory that the story originated from a couple of people who were out at Hicks Road one night when they stumbled across a man. The kids ran away because they were scared of being caught trespassing, and apparently during an account of what they had seen, one of the kids claimed that one guy had been “very white”. Thus, the myth of the albino colony.

Interpretation

I was very interested in hearing this story. I similarly do not believe that there is truly a colony of albino people living on Hicks Road in San Jose, CA. Like my informant, I am inclined to believe that the myth began when the story passed from friend to family member after one of the originators claimed to have seen a “very white” man up at Hicks Road. I love the idea that whole myths begin by one person’s account of an event, that childhood horror stories can be created by a simple phrase.

West Virginia Blue People

Nationality: American
Age: 20
Occupation: Student
Residence: San Jose, CA
Performance Date: 3-18-19
Primary Language: English

Text

The following piece was collected at a dinner table with a group of girls out celebrating a friend’s birthday. One of the girls, the “Informant”, was discussing an upcoming trip to visit her brother at West Virginia University. Laughing, the Informant launched into a story of the “West Virginia Blue People”, a story about a genetic condition the resulted from intermarriage.

Informant: “So, what my brother told me is that there’s a story that there are people in the Appalachian Mountains in West Virginia, near the campus I guess, and there is skin is blue. It’s blue, and their people have always had blue skin because of all the intermarrying and incest. So you can tell if someone is a product of incest if their skin is blue! Sometimes, it can be really faint though, so you have to look closely at their lips or fingernails. Apparently, it shows more easily when they’re cold!”

Context:

            The Informant learned this information from her brother, when he returned home after his first semester at school. From California herself, the informant was very curious to hear about what the people of West Virginia were like. She remembers the story very easily, most often humorously, because she remembers the manner in which her brother told her. He recounted how, after hearing the story for the first time, he and his roommates would make a show of continuously checking to see if their other friends’ lips or skin ever looked blue. Finding it ridiculous herself, the Informant told me that she still enjoys being a part of the joke.

Interpretation

            My first reaction to this story was wondering whether there was a scientific reason, or condition perhaps, that acted as a precursor to this belief of a skin condition that was a result of incest. Upon further research, I saw that the original story was based on a specific family that was said to be suffering from blue-tinted skin. Researchers believe this to truly be the case, a result of the family suffering from a genetic condition called methemoglobinemia, which is an excess of methemoglobin in the red blood cells of the body. This condition does, in fact, cause blue-tinted. Hearing this story and conducting some research of my own led me to believe that people love to come up with their explanation for things they cannot explain, no matter how perplex.

Coffee Grinds – Predict the Future?

Nationality: Greek
Age: 78
Occupation: Retired
Residence: Carmel
Performance Date: 4/21/19
Primary Language: English

The informant was telling me how Greeks used the dregs from coffee grinds to read the future:

Informant: In some cultures they read tea leaves, but in some cultures they read coffee grinds.

Me: huh

Support: dregs from the coffee

Informant: They took the dregs turned over a little cup and turned it three times, and then they read the inside of the cup – what dripped out – and read what they would see “oh your gonna take a trip, oh you’re gonna get married, oh this or that”

Support: they always said I was going to get married, but here I am!

 

Context: 

The Informant is a Greek woman who was born in the United States. She currently lives in Carmel-By-The-Sea, CA. Though she was not born in Greece, her parents immigrated to the US and she was born into a very Greek community in Phoenix, AZ. The performance was held during an Easter party, in front of her younger sister, who provided supporting information, as well as me.

Analysis:
This was completely new to me, as I had never heard of this ritual and only faintly heard of the tea leave predictions. I think it is really interesting how different cultures share so many similar traditions and patterns, and while they are similar they are also very different. It also raises questions about why cultures come up with these practices, seeing that they are not always accurate, but fascinating nonetheless.

Underwater Body at Oakwood Beach

Nationality: American
Age: 18
Occupation: Student
Residence: Ohio
Performance Date: April 12th, 2019
Primary Language: English

The following urban legend was performed in the USC Village on April 12th, 2019. The informant grew up in Rocky River, Ohio, which is nearby Oakwood beach. At the end of the pier lays a large, sunken metal tube.  The legend was that earlier generations “used to swim through the tube and the someone got stuck and died inside. Kids would try and see but nobody wanted to swim through [the tube] because you wouldn’t make it without getting attacked by the dead person inside.”

The informant first heard of the tube-lore in fifth grade. “Everyone comes back to Rocky River so there was this 5th grade teacher who went to Rocky River High School. The teacher Mrs. Quigley told us “yeah there’s this tube and when we were younger people used to swim through all the time”. Somewhere in the middle of Mrs. Quigley growing up and the informant reaching 5th grade, someone supposedly died inside.

“The pier was very dangerous because there had been many piers that were built and then sunk. People would jump off but there was sunken cement surrounding the area”

The legend of the dead body underwater was probably a mix of scare tactics from adults to prevent their kids from jumping into the area full of sunken cement and the willingness of young kids to share scary stories.

Little Mikey, Killed by Pop Rocks

Nationality: American
Age: 49
Occupation: Professor
Residence: Pasadena, California
Performance Date: 04/20/2019
Primary Language: English

JC: “Alright, so one of the most common and commonly repeated commercials on television when I was a child, in the 1970s, was a commercial for Life Cereal, in which three boys are depicted, basically at table height. And the first two boys are clearly friends, and a little older. And one of them asks the other, ‘what’s this stuff.’ And the other kid says, ‘dumb cereal, is supposed to be good for you’ (dismissively). And the one kid says, ‘well, you try it.’ And the other kid says, ‘nah, I’m not gonna try it, you try it.’ And then one kid says, ‘yeah, let’s get Mikey. He won’t eat it, he hates everything,’ his little brother. They slide the bowl of cereal  over to his little brother, and he just starts chomping it down, just like shoveling spoonfuls of it into his mouth. And then the kid who’s basically trying to punish his brother and get out of eating the cereal says, ‘He likes it! Hey Mikey!’ So Mikey, even though it wasn’t a common name, became a thing we said like all the time.

“And then we heard, maybe ten years later, that Mikey died from, um, eating Pop Rocks and drinking soda. Yeah, it was a shame. And it was one of those stories that, like, came both with people who would say, like, “I know somebody who knows somebody” or whatever attestations, and it also came, like, pre-marked as fake. But then there’d be like weird spin-offs, like ‘it wasn’t really Mikey but it was this other kid’ or, like, the actual urban legend-ness of it didn’t die, it was a real weird vibe. There was a fear underlying it, that this would happen to you. And I think at some point Pop Rocks stopped being sold for a while, and so we attributed it to the death of various children. Like some marketing decision a candy manufacturer makes turns out to be, ‘they’re killing children with Pop-Rocks and Soda!’ The Pop Rocks and soda challenge wiped out a whole generation of Midwestern boys. Yeah we all tried it. Dude, when Pop Rocks were around we put them in everything, of people’s unsuspectingly. Put them in their cereal, you’d put them on your tongue and have to like go to class with it and not open your mouth and have to let the stuff come out your nose and that was really awful. Um, yeah, Pop Rocks… the candy of death.”

So, did you have any other traditions you did involving Pop Rocks?

JC: “I mean, not really? I mean we poured them in people’s food at lunch and stuff. So we definitely messed with people with them. And we tried various things. We all, like, threw a handful of Pop Rocks in and then, like, took a swig of Mountain Dee or whatever… Mello Yello, just to see what would happen.”

Was the messing with people, was it limited to high school or middle school, or did it continue through college?

JC: “Ohh, it totally continued through college. You have to remember, our college coincided– our college years coincided with the great sort of peak in American prank phone calling culture. Like, the Prank Yankers show was on television with puppets reenacting prank phone calls. And, like, people thought this was the peak of humor. So we messed with a lot of people.”

Background:

JC grew up in Ohio. He remembers the commercial because he watched a lot of television as a child. The urban legend about Mikey and the other shenanigans involving Pop Rocks, from JC’s description, were just part of the middle American zeitgeist during the 1980s and early 1990s. The legend has no particular significance to him, other than as a memory.

Context:

The story of Mikey (or some other kid) dying from eating Pop Rocks and drinking soda is an urban legend which would be told in many situations.

Interpretation:

The story of Mikey dying has variations involving other kids, but generally involves the same story: a kid eats Pop Rocks and drinks soda, and the combination causes his stomach to inflate, somehow killing him. Among JC’s circle, the story was entirely recognized as fake, to the point where they fearlessly tried the combination which allegedly killed Mikey. It may have been the type of story to scare older, more gullible people while younger people either knew better or did not care.