Context: While in a class discussion, the student told me about an eerie experience she had at her old house in Connecticut, previously owned by an electrician.

Text:

“My house is pretty old in Connecticut and it was created by an electrician — and so there’s like seven outlets in my room alone. There’s so many places to charge things, which is actually very useful, but there’s a lot of switches in the house that don’t do anything. Obviously they connect to something, but we’re not sure what they connect to.

There’s two different switches for the fan on my ceiling. One of them doesn’t really do anything, but the other is a sliding switch so you can choose how fast the fan moves. There was one night where the fan kept spinning on its own. And so I turned it on and turned it back on, and I went to my parents’ room and told them the fan was spinning. I said that I feel like there’s something weird. I feel like there’s something in my room.

My parents were like it’s probably a ghost, cause we believe in that stuff a lot. My mom was like ‘go in and tell the ghost that you know that you’re here and you know something’s the matter. I need to go to bed and you have to go. You are not welcome here.’

I go back and jump into bed and I’m under my covers. I’m sitting there look up at the fan and I say all that stuff. And then the fan stops.”

Analysis:

One thing that I found so interesting about this story was the similarity we shared in our interactions with weird phenomena in our spaces. I had shared my own story about telling a possible spirit to “stop,” which was followed by a complete cessation of action. The student and I shared that the scariest part about that situation was when the mysterious force halted. As she told me the interaction, it was alarming to imagine something listening to her fears and realizing that they were finally getting a reaction. I’m curious to see if other people who have had ghost stories where they were scared and decided to face it head-on ended up having similar responses.

As Cowdell notes in the article on scary folk elements, “folk horror is a feeling.” Stories like these are passed through performance and the thrill of imagining oneself in that type of situation.