I don't know how I have managed to keep this blog as long as I have and not brought up one of the great American spooky stories, but I have, so it is long since time that I brought this up.
The story goes that one night, some time between the late 1920s and the mid-1930s, shortly before midnight, at a crossroads near Dockery Plantation in Mississippi, a good harmonica player but lousy guitar player named Robert Johnson begasn a ritual to summon the Devil. Johnson pulled out his guitar and began to play, quite poorly. Shortly after the stroke of midnight, a large man, his skin and clothing as black as coal, approached, took the guitar from Johnson, tuned it, played a short tune, and handed it back to Johnson.
Johnson got the guitar into position, played, and was shocked to discover that he was now amazing. He looked up towards the coal-black man, only to find that he had vanished. Johnson walked back through the dead of night, and would soon discover that he was now a brilliant guitarist not just on the instrument that he had brought to the crossroads, but on every guitar that he picked up.
Johnson's newfound skill began to bring him success. He had became a popular guitarist and singer at the juke joints of the American south, and also found himself popular with the ladies.
But he knew that there was a cost, and that the Devil would quite literally collect his due. Johnson knew that in exchange for his talent, he had pledged his soul to the Devil, and that he would burn for eternity after his death.
As he shot to local fame, Robert Johnson wrote and performed songs with the usual blues subject matter of hard women and harder working conditions, difficult lives, and the need for relief. But he also wrote and performed other songs. Songs about bad dealings at crossroads. Songs about being pursued by demonic hounds. And songs about the Devil pursuing him. Some hold that he was writing songs based on the folklore of the region, but others claim that he was trying to tell people about what he had done.
One day, in August 1938, Johnson began behaving strangely, and people reported seeing him walking on all fours and howling like a dog. He had been working as a musician at a dance hall in Greenwood Mississippi at the time, and despite his odd behavior, he showed up for work that night and performed as normal. Later on, he fell ill, and suffered from painful convulsions that lasted for three days. Finally, he died. Some say he was poisoned by a jealous husband (again, he was popular with the ladies, not all of whom were single), some say that he simply dropped dead without cause. Most agree, though, that the Devil had made good on his part of the bargain, and now expected Robert Johnson to pay the bill.
Commentary: As I said above, this is one of the great American spooky tales, and I am surprised that I haven't covered it before. However. I am happy to do so now.
For anyone who tells you that overt connections between music and Satan began with heavy metal, let me introduce you to the mother genre of all rock music - the Blues. Stories such as this one surround Robert Johnson, one of the great early figures of the blues, but some would hold that other musicians (including Tommy Johnson - there were a lot of men with the surname Johnson in early blues, just as there were a lot of men with the surname King in mid-20th century blues) made the same deal. And blues music often contained Satanic imagery and subjects, such as Robert Johnson's own The Devil and Me Blues and Hellhound on My Trail Blues. Overtly Christian imagery and subjects were also, of course, part of early blues, which makes sense as blues is closely connected to Gospel music.
Robert Johnson was born in 1911, and died in 1938 at the age of 27 years. He had wandered the south as a musician and manual laborer during the 1920s and 30s, with accounts holding that he had either run away from home or been kicked out by his father as a teenager. However, as is typical for an African American in the early 20th century, his life was not well documented, and it is difficult to sort out what was true and what was rumor.
One thing that does seem to be certain - he hung out at juke joints as a young man, and played harmonica well. However, he wanted to be a guitar player, and was so bad at it that many musicians, including iconic bluesmen such as Son House, recall him "annoying people to death" with his attempts to coax any sort of decent sound out of a guitar. Then he vanished for somewhere between six months and a year, and when he re-appeared, Son House recalls being amazed at how skilled a guitar player Johnson had become.
I set the story in Dockery, Mississippi, but others would place the story in other locations throughout the south. Robert Johnson was a traveling worker and musician, and there is no shortage of crossroads in the south that claim to have been the location of his Faustian bargain.
Although the story of Robert Johnson is the prototype of the bargain between a musician and Hell, it is not the first such story. As documented in one of my earlier entries, the violinist Paganini is said to have either made such a pact himself, or to have bee the product of a pact between his mother and a demon. And, of course, in more recent years, heavy metal musicians play up this Satanic imagery to create their own mythologies.
Of course, the truth probably has less to do with deals made in Hell than with hard work. As noted, Robert Johnson vanished from the juke joints for somewhere between six months and a year. Though the documentation is sparse, he probably traveled to work, possibly with his family, and while doing so, he appears to have found a guitar teacher. The identity of the guitar teacher is unclear (and, really, it might have been more than one) but most sources point towards Ike Zimmerman (or, in some records, Zinnerman) being the teacher. It is said that the two played guitar at night in cemeteries in order to be in a quite place for practice, which may explain another variation of the story, where Johnson is said to have made his deal with the Devil in a cemetery, while playing his guitar on a tombstone.
Sources: Wikipedia, Open Culture, UDiscover Music, NPR, The Guardian
Showing posts with label Demons. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Demons. Show all posts
Sunday, September 30, 2018
Wednesday, June 7, 2017
Devils Gate, Pasadena, Los Angeles County
At Devil's Gate Gorge in Arroyo Seco there sits a large rock outcrop that many believe is shaped like Satan's head, hence the name of the location. Factual information about the location's history is hard to come by, having been buried in tall tales and folklore, and these have, in turn, influenced much of what people say and have written about it in the tight circle of fact and nonsense that is human collective memory.
Holy crap, I read what I just wrote and realize that I have been listening to a lot of Aaron Mehnke's podcast* lately.
Regardless, what become common belief tends to color what people wish to write about and tends to change stories that we hold to be true of older stories. So, keep in mind that, especially when talking about Tongva beliefs below, there is a fair chance that the story is more nonsense than sense. But it's entertaining nonsense, and in the end, isn't that the highest form of truth? The answer is no.
Okay, I promise that I have all of that out of my system now.
As noted above, the rock formation, from one angle, looks like a devil's head. See what you think:
Local stories holds that the sounds of the river moving through the gorge sounds like laughing, which was allegedly thought by members of the local Tongva ethnolinguistic group to be the culture hero Coyote laughing**. Some telling shold that the Tongva felt that the location was supernaturally powerful and to be avoided, and others that it was the gateway to the afterlife and therefore to be shunned by the living. I am skeptical of the claim that the Tongva had these story, especially the variations about avoiding the location - this sort of embellishment is often added to ghost stories to make them seem more authentic, but is almost always false.
In 1920, the gorge was dammed to create a reservoir and control flooding in the Los Angeles river system. However, the Devil's Head remained above water and continues to be visible
As time went on, the place began to collect other stories, the most entertaining of which involve Alastair Crowley, L. Ron Hubbard, and their friend, Jet Propulsion Laboratory c-founder and scientist and all around really weird guy, Jack Parsons. According to the story, Ol' Al , Ron, and Jack were convinced that the Devil's Gate Gorge was a gateway to Hell (one of specifically seven) and full of all manner of supernatural power. Some folks have claimed that the location of the Jet Propulsion laboratory was intended to use power from the Devil's Gate, and is tied in to the various occult movement that have become popular in Los Angeles and Hollywood during the 20th century. While these stories tend to breakdown into incoherency pretty quickly, they are fun to hear and tell.
Among the stories are claims that Hubbard and Parsons too part in rituals at the gorge with the intention of tapping into the Hell gate's energy, possibly to create a Moon Child, a being that would embody a feminine divine force. Parsons and Hubbard did, in fact, engage in rituals for this purpose in 1946, though whether they did anything at Devils Gorge is not reported anywhere.
In the 1950s, a series of children went missing in the area, including 13-year-old Donald Lee Baker and 11-year old Brenda Howell in 1956, and 8 year-old Tommy Bowman in 1957 and 6-year-old Bruce Kremen in 1960. Bruce Kremen is especially baffling, as the boy was attending a YMCA camp, and left the counselors to walk 300 yards back to the camp lodging, only to vanish. The 1956 disappearances were explained years later when serial killer Mack Ray Edwards was caught. The later disappearances are still unsolved, and may have been tied in to Edwards, or may be due to some other cause. Regardless, they have added to the grisly history of the area.
Modern L.A.-area ghost hunters like too claim that these rituals opened the gate, allowing evil entities into our world. And they flock to the location hunting for these entities (I wonder what the OSHA requirements for protective equipment are? A Mojo hand? a gris-gris bag?). Stories for the location include the (disappointedly mundane given the history above) usual orbs in photos and phantom voices. In one case, someone did report hearing singing coming from the metal gate shown in the picture above, and seeing red eyes peering from the back of the tunnel.
The folks at Offbeat L.A. provided a short and enjoyable description of the area, though they refer to mysterious wood structures that, to this individual who deals with utilities, look exactly like transmission line structures, so, you know, grain of salt and all.
*Which, if you haven't been listening to it, I have to ask, what is wrong with you? If you like the sordid tales that I post here, Aaron Mehnke's providing you the stronger stuff, and in excellent, if sometimes very wordy, format.
** I am not a specialist in Tongva mythology, but I am a professional archaeologist and anthropologist that works in California, and this explanation of allegedly local Native American belief sounds to me more like a 20th-century white-person claim than an actual part of the local Native Folklore, but, again, as I am not an expert on the stories of this particular region (my graduate research was performed farther north in the Santa Barbara area, and my professional life has been primarily in the San Joaquin Valley and Sierra Nevadas), I may be wrong and it is possible that this place was forbidden in the Tongva belief system. Incidentally, as I refer to utility companies later in this entry, I am an archaeologist employed currently by a utility company to help them comply with federal and state cultural resources laws - so I help protect archaeological sites, historic buildings, and spots important to Native Americans - yep, it's an actual job with a good career path and decent pay, so if you decide to get a Masters degree in archaeology, yes you can actually have a good job, no matter what all of those condescending assholes will imply.
Commentary: Naturally, the ghost hunters who visit the area are looking for the "norm" of our time - orbs, cold spots, and the like. Which is disappointing given the allegedly deep supernatural meaning of this place. I have to admit that, in reading LA Ghost Portal's write-up, I was a put off by their description of trying to reach out to the spirits of missing and dead children. That just seemed really tasteless to me. On the other hand, I included them in my description here, so perhaps I am guilty of the same tastelessness.
What I like about this story is the way that it weaves numerous different strands present in other ghost stories together. Appeals to Los Angeles supposed hedonism? Check! Reference to a cult? Check, and bonus (both Crowley's temple and Scientology make an appearance!)! Reference to dark rituals? Check! Reference to Native American sacred sites? Check! Turning the mundane (a gate) into something creepy? Check!
The story is, undoubtedly, mostly bullshit, though, wonderfully, the one element that might be true is the most outlandish - while I can't confirm that Parsons and Hubbard ever engaged in rituals at the Devils Gate, it would not have been any weirder than things that these two were confirmed to have gotten up to around that point in time.
Source: Atlas Obscura, LA Ghost Portal, Timeout, Offbeat L.A., Weird U.S.
Holy crap, I read what I just wrote and realize that I have been listening to a lot of Aaron Mehnke's podcast* lately.
Regardless, what become common belief tends to color what people wish to write about and tends to change stories that we hold to be true of older stories. So, keep in mind that, especially when talking about Tongva beliefs below, there is a fair chance that the story is more nonsense than sense. But it's entertaining nonsense, and in the end, isn't that the highest form of truth? The answer is no.
Okay, I promise that I have all of that out of my system now.
As noted above, the rock formation, from one angle, looks like a devil's head. See what you think:
Local stories holds that the sounds of the river moving through the gorge sounds like laughing, which was allegedly thought by members of the local Tongva ethnolinguistic group to be the culture hero Coyote laughing**. Some telling shold that the Tongva felt that the location was supernaturally powerful and to be avoided, and others that it was the gateway to the afterlife and therefore to be shunned by the living. I am skeptical of the claim that the Tongva had these story, especially the variations about avoiding the location - this sort of embellishment is often added to ghost stories to make them seem more authentic, but is almost always false.
In 1920, the gorge was dammed to create a reservoir and control flooding in the Los Angeles river system. However, the Devil's Head remained above water and continues to be visible
As time went on, the place began to collect other stories, the most entertaining of which involve Alastair Crowley, L. Ron Hubbard, and their friend, Jet Propulsion Laboratory c-founder and scientist and all around really weird guy, Jack Parsons. According to the story, Ol' Al , Ron, and Jack were convinced that the Devil's Gate Gorge was a gateway to Hell (one of specifically seven) and full of all manner of supernatural power. Some folks have claimed that the location of the Jet Propulsion laboratory was intended to use power from the Devil's Gate, and is tied in to the various occult movement that have become popular in Los Angeles and Hollywood during the 20th century. While these stories tend to breakdown into incoherency pretty quickly, they are fun to hear and tell.
Among the stories are claims that Hubbard and Parsons too part in rituals at the gorge with the intention of tapping into the Hell gate's energy, possibly to create a Moon Child, a being that would embody a feminine divine force. Parsons and Hubbard did, in fact, engage in rituals for this purpose in 1946, though whether they did anything at Devils Gorge is not reported anywhere.
In the 1950s, a series of children went missing in the area, including 13-year-old Donald Lee Baker and 11-year old Brenda Howell in 1956, and 8 year-old Tommy Bowman in 1957 and 6-year-old Bruce Kremen in 1960. Bruce Kremen is especially baffling, as the boy was attending a YMCA camp, and left the counselors to walk 300 yards back to the camp lodging, only to vanish. The 1956 disappearances were explained years later when serial killer Mack Ray Edwards was caught. The later disappearances are still unsolved, and may have been tied in to Edwards, or may be due to some other cause. Regardless, they have added to the grisly history of the area.
Modern L.A.-area ghost hunters like too claim that these rituals opened the gate, allowing evil entities into our world. And they flock to the location hunting for these entities (I wonder what the OSHA requirements for protective equipment are? A Mojo hand? a gris-gris bag?). Stories for the location include the (disappointedly mundane given the history above) usual orbs in photos and phantom voices. In one case, someone did report hearing singing coming from the metal gate shown in the picture above, and seeing red eyes peering from the back of the tunnel.
The folks at Offbeat L.A. provided a short and enjoyable description of the area, though they refer to mysterious wood structures that, to this individual who deals with utilities, look exactly like transmission line structures, so, you know, grain of salt and all.
*Which, if you haven't been listening to it, I have to ask, what is wrong with you? If you like the sordid tales that I post here, Aaron Mehnke's providing you the stronger stuff, and in excellent, if sometimes very wordy, format.
** I am not a specialist in Tongva mythology, but I am a professional archaeologist and anthropologist that works in California, and this explanation of allegedly local Native American belief sounds to me more like a 20th-century white-person claim than an actual part of the local Native Folklore, but, again, as I am not an expert on the stories of this particular region (my graduate research was performed farther north in the Santa Barbara area, and my professional life has been primarily in the San Joaquin Valley and Sierra Nevadas), I may be wrong and it is possible that this place was forbidden in the Tongva belief system. Incidentally, as I refer to utility companies later in this entry, I am an archaeologist employed currently by a utility company to help them comply with federal and state cultural resources laws - so I help protect archaeological sites, historic buildings, and spots important to Native Americans - yep, it's an actual job with a good career path and decent pay, so if you decide to get a Masters degree in archaeology, yes you can actually have a good job, no matter what all of those condescending assholes will imply.
Commentary: Naturally, the ghost hunters who visit the area are looking for the "norm" of our time - orbs, cold spots, and the like. Which is disappointing given the allegedly deep supernatural meaning of this place. I have to admit that, in reading LA Ghost Portal's write-up, I was a put off by their description of trying to reach out to the spirits of missing and dead children. That just seemed really tasteless to me. On the other hand, I included them in my description here, so perhaps I am guilty of the same tastelessness.
What I like about this story is the way that it weaves numerous different strands present in other ghost stories together. Appeals to Los Angeles supposed hedonism? Check! Reference to a cult? Check, and bonus (both Crowley's temple and Scientology make an appearance!)! Reference to dark rituals? Check! Reference to Native American sacred sites? Check! Turning the mundane (a gate) into something creepy? Check!
The story is, undoubtedly, mostly bullshit, though, wonderfully, the one element that might be true is the most outlandish - while I can't confirm that Parsons and Hubbard ever engaged in rituals at the Devils Gate, it would not have been any weirder than things that these two were confirmed to have gotten up to around that point in time.
Source: Atlas Obscura, LA Ghost Portal, Timeout, Offbeat L.A., Weird U.S.
Sunday, February 22, 2015
Popobawa - Zanzibar, Africa
Okay, I'm going to give a content warning here: This entry is probably not fit for younger readers, people who are sensitive to discussions of sexual assault, and it is definitely not fit for twelve-year old boys who will just use it as an excuse to crack inappropriate jokes about anal sex*. You have been warned.
Also, I can see some readers getting into a racist "oh, these primitive Africans" rant, and I'll talk about why you shouldn't be so confident in the Commentary section.
There is something haunting Tanzania. Called the Popobawa - a bat-like creature that is said to sexually assault people in the night. In addition to these assaults, it is also said to generally haunt the home of its chosen victims, making noise, moving objects, and trying to frighten them. Once it has gotten it's fill of terror in one home, it moves on to the next one, usually in the same neighborhood.
Although the Popobawa may attack anyone in the household, it is alleged to prefer to anally rape men, and then threaten to return to repeat the action if the men do not tell others about the attack. As a result, men who have been attacked must confess the violation to others, compounding the trauma of the event.
Popobawa, which appears to translate to "bat wing" in Swahili, is a shape-shifter and can appear in many forms, but it's natural form is said to be that of a large bat-like creature with one eye and a gigantic penis, though this "natural form" may be more a creation of western media than an aspect of the Tanzanian folklore regarding the creature. In Tanzanian folklore, it appears that the creature has no true shape, and that the name refers to the shadow that it casts when it appears. The creature's appearance is said to be accompanied by scraping noises on the walls and roof, and a sulfurous smell.
The Popobawa prefers to attack people in their homes when they are alone, and so, during Popobawa panics, many men choose to spend their nights outdoors, sometimes in the streets (often the only open place in some of the crowded towns and cities), which has led to fatalities from automobile traffic.
It is also said that the Popoabawa may be frightened away by gatherings of people, or by recitations of passages from the Koran.
The origins of the Popobawa are unclear. While many people in Europe and the Americas like to think of it as a cryptid (that is, a creature not formally discovered by science but alleged by believers to exist, a'la Bigfoot or the Loch Ness Monster), it's pretty clear that the people of Tanzania consider it to be a spirit or demon of some sort. One story holds that a sheikh (a respected member of the community with informal authority) summoned a djinn (an spirit in Islamic folklore, in many ways comparable to the demons of Christian folklore) in order to attack neighbors with whom he was having difficulties, but that he lost control of the djinn and that it is now loose as the Popobawa.
*I was a twelve-year-old boy once. I know how you work.
Commentary: Okay, let's get the first thing out of the way - I know that there are people reading this and thinking "oh, those primitive/superstitious Africans/Muslims! They have such dumb beliefs!" To which I will point out that panics regarding spectral sexual assault are not in any way unique to Africa or to the Muslim world. Christian and general European folklore is filled with stories of spectral rapists - Succubi, Incubi, "old hag", and many a faerie story - not to mention more recent stories about aliens abducting people and subjecting them to various sexual probes and experiments. And massive panics regarding this sort of thing are not unheard of in the west - consider the amount of claims of "Satanic Ritual Abuse" that appeared during the late 1970s and early 1980s. So, if you are inclined to look at this as a sign of gullibility or foolishness in a poor and underdeveloped part of the world, just be aware that your own culture is perfectly capable of producing very similar things.
Alright, that rant done, it's time to talk about this story. We have a story about a creature that goes about terrorizing households, and sexually assaulting members of the household (though allegedly prefering the male members). Let's assume, as I am inclined to, that this is all folklore. What does it mean?
Well, a number of different hypotheses have been put forward. Including:
- That this story is used to describe or cover up actual sexual assaults.
- That this story simply reflects a local variation on folklore surrounding the phenomenon of sleep paralysis.
- That this story reflects feelings of male inadequacies in a changing and poor region of Africa, with the metaphorical rape being used to metaphorically describe fears of emasculation.The insistence by the creature that mean admit to their violation in order to prevent further violation seems very much in line with this.
- That the story reflects fears of political instability. In fact, Popobabwa panics, during which many people report encounters and men often take to sleeping outdoors, typically accompany elections.
- That the story is a metaphorical discussion of Zanzibar's past as a slave market used by Arab traders. While plausible, the Popobawa first appeared on the island of Pemba in the 1970s, and so it seems unlikely that it would reflect directly the experience of 19th century slaves and slave traders.
Of course, none of these explanations are exclusive of the others, and it may well be that the Popobawa is a folkloric conglomeration of the anxieties, concerns, and very real assaults experienced by people living in Tanzania. It would appear to be a way in which ghostly folklore represents real-world issues, a phenomenon known the world over.
Sources: Podcast, BBC News, Wikipedia, Center for Inquiry, Cryptid Wiki, The Demon-Hunters Compendium,
Thursday, October 24, 2013
Dudleytown
In Cornwall, Connecticut, there is a location within the ominously-named Dark Entry Forest that is said to be among the most haunted locations in the Americas. The location is the ruins of Dudleytown, a once-prosperous town that was founded by a cursed family, and which was doomed as a result. All that remains now are the cellar pits and odd bits of rock wall where once there were buildings and fences. And there are those that say that spirits or demons also remain.
Legend holds that Dudleytown is the earthly receptical of a curse that began in 1510, when Edmund Dudley was beheaded after he was revealed to be conspiring to overthrow the King of England. His son, John Dudley, tried to marry his son to Lady Jane Grey, thus entering the royal family...and all three were executed. Shortly afterwards, John Dudley's other son returned from France, bringing the plague with him and unleashing an outbreak that killed thousands of people. John Dudley's third son decided to get out while the gettin' was good and left for the Americas in 1630. Once there, he had sons, who would later settle in Connecticut...
Or, an alternate version is that Governor Thomas Dudley of the Massachusetts Bay Company was related to Edmund Dudley, and was the uncle of four Dudley Brothers who settled in Connecticut. In this version of the story, Thomas Dudley is a horrible tyrant who executes those who are not Puritans...
But regardless of the exact version, four brothers, Abijah, Barzillai, and Abiel, founded Dudleytown in the late 17th or early 18th century. Depending on which version of the story you are going with, these four brothers carried a curse with them, or one of Thomas Dudley's victims cursed him and all who dwellt near him (including his nephews), damning the land on which he lived, which would become Dudleytown. In the Governor Dudley version of the story, he is murdered - hacked to death and his body left on his land - and the murderer is never found.
The three Dudley borthers lived the rest of their lives in Dudleytown, Abijah and Barzillai dying of natural causes, apparently. But Abiel...oh, Abiel went insane! He lost his mind, and shorlty afterwards lost his fortune and even his home, dying a pauper
While Abiel was still alive, Nathaniel Carter bought Abiel's house (the unfortunate fellow could no longer afford it) in 1759, thus activating the curse*. After displacing poor, mad Abiel, the Carter family moved out of Dudleytown in 1763 and went to reside in Bimghamton, New York...but somehow left their 13 year old son behind. The result, rather unexpectedly, was that the son survived the rest of the family when a Native American raiding party attacked the Carter's New York homestead in 1764, gruesomely killing and scalping Nathaniel Carter, his wife, and even their infant child. In 1774, Nathaniel's borther, Adoniram, and his entire family died of cholera, thus adding more lives to the Dudleytown curse.
And the horror kept on coming. In 1792, Gershon Hollister is said to have been murdered at the home of William Tanner. Afterwards, Tanner reported seeing strange animals in the forest as well as demons, and this eventually drove him insane. In 1804, a General by the name of Swift was at home with his wife, when she walked out to the front porch and was killed after being struck by a bolt of lightning. Mary Cheney was born in Dudleytown in 1811...and the curse followed her after she left, leading to disaster in her hsuband's career and sickness on her part, and she finally committed suicide in the 1830s. An unspecified plague hit the town in 1813, killing all of one family (the Jones family) and killing off many others.
As the 19th century wore on, crops failed, farm animals routinely vanished without explanation, and unexplained deaths continued. Come the end of the 19th century, only the Brophy family (transplants from elsewhere who arrived in 1892) remained. First the Brophy sheep began vanishing, then his sons vanished (though it is worth noting that they were wanted by local law enforcement...so, "on the lam" might be a better description than "vanished"). After a few years, Mrs. Brophy died of unknown causes. He was sometimes seen around Cornwall, muttering about "demons"...and then his house burned to the ground and he vanished, as well.
Dudleytown remained abandoned to whatever demons Mr. Brophy had encountered until 1930, when Dr. William Clark, a pathologist from New York, decided to build a summer home at that location. Things were quiet until 1937, when Dr. Clark left on a business trip, leaving his wife behind. When he returned home, he found her in an upstairs room, cackling to herself, having gone quite mad. She never recovered, eventually dying in an asylum.
Dr. Clark was the last resident, but the Clarks weren't the last people to encounter evil at Dudleytown. Local folklore tells of a satanic biker gang that enters the Dudleytown area to hold rituals. People report being attacked by demonic creatures with cloven hoofs and strange green eyes. People report seeing shadow people, floating balls of light, dark human forms rising out of the cellar pits, having weird images show up on film (or in digital pictures), and that animals seem to be strangely absent from the area. And, as is so often the case, stories persist that a TV news crew arrived to film a story around Halloween, only to have their equipment fail while they were present.
*For the life of me, I can not figure out why the curse is said to begin with one of the Dudley ancestors...when A) they weren't actually related, and B) the alleged displacement of an unfortunate madman seems to be reason enough to cause the curse without the convoluted stuff from the previous centuries.
Commentary: As ghost stories go, this is one of the greats. Dudleytown is creepy, famous, and a real place...all of which make for a good story. The story of the curse, the demonic creatures having been sighted by residents, and the fact that the ruins are still there (though entry is prohibited by the current landowners, and people do get arrested for trespassing, so, really, stay out), it all makes this particular tale all the more delicious as ghost stories go.
Unfortunately, for all of the giddy creepy thrill that the story supplies, it really doesn't stand up to any sort of scrutiny. As at least one source has pointed out, the story of the curse and the early deaths/madness actually doesn't hold up very well, even using just the information provided in the common versions of the story itself - pretty much everyone who is said to have died or been driven insane by the curse was quite elderly at the time...and, well, therefore would be expected to be experiencing dementia or death (for example, Abiel was 90, and the symptoms of his madness are pretty consistent with dementia). Moreover, the number of people who are said to have died in various versions of the stories are, actually, well short of what you would expect for a rural 18th/19th century community, indicating that being in Dudleytown might actually have been good for your health. So, ya'know, not so scary, that.
A short but accurate and useful write-up of Dudleytown's history if provided on it's Wikipedia entry (accessed October 23, 2013):
Then, even the mysterious or horrifying deaths turn out to be more mundane than legend would hold. Records show that Gershon Hollister was not, in fact, murdered, but instead died due to an accident during a barn raising. Mary Cheney did not kill herself, but died of a lung disease, likely tuberculosis, and she had never been to Dudleytown - her death is especially easy to trace, as she married Horace Greeley. Harriet Clarke did commit suicide, but in New York, not Dudleytown. General Swift lived in another location near, but outside of, Dudleytown (also, Swift was, like Abiel, quite elderly when he "went mad" so it was probably just dementia again). Mrs. Clark was not driven insane, and in fact continued to live in the area after her husband's death in 1943. And so on and so forth...
What's more, the verifiable history of Dudleytown is rather different than the legend holds. There's no known relation between the Dudleys of Connecticut and Edmund Dudley. Similarly, if you match up the time the periods during which the Dudleys of Dudleytown lived (the mid-to-late 18th century) with the life of Thomas Dudley...that he was their uncle seems remarkably unlikely...and they didn't settle in the area until after others already had, so their uncle would not have lived there, and in fact he died of natural causes at his home in Roxbury in 1653. Also, the Dudley brothers were actually Gideon, Barzillai, and Abiel, there wasn't an Abijah.
What's more, there is plenty of evidence that the town was deserted not because of weird supernatural goings-on, but because of the difficulty in obtaining freshwater, poor conditions for agriculture (rocky ground and a placement that resulted in shade from the hills and trees pretty much all the damned time), and variations in the local iron industry all provided potential causes for abandonment. Add to this that Dudleytown was never really a town (stories of it having been a more substantial settlement are false), but rather part of Cornwall, and, well, many residents probably just moved to other parts of the town or county when land became available.
One Reverend Dudley, the author of the Legend of Dudleytown page linked to below, traces the origin of the ghost stories to the 1938 publication of the book They Found a Way, though it is conceivable that elements of the story already existed in local folklore, but even that isn't too terribly odd a thought. After all, frequently shadowy location with an abandoned town? If you don't make up a ghost story for that, then you are just being a lazy sod.
Still, even knowing all of this, I still love this story. It still creeps me out, and if I ever find out that I will be visiting Connecticut, I will try to get permission to visit this site.
Sources: Wikipedia, The Legend of Dudleytown, Cornwall Historic Society, Prairie Ghosts, Ghostvillage, Damned Connecticut, ghosttowns.com (wildly inaccurate information, but a fun read), The Illustrious Internet!, The Ghosts Of Ohio (because, of course, a website about Ohio will cover Connecticut), Exciting Earth, paranoid ramblings from the Illustrious Internet
Legend holds that Dudleytown is the earthly receptical of a curse that began in 1510, when Edmund Dudley was beheaded after he was revealed to be conspiring to overthrow the King of England. His son, John Dudley, tried to marry his son to Lady Jane Grey, thus entering the royal family...and all three were executed. Shortly afterwards, John Dudley's other son returned from France, bringing the plague with him and unleashing an outbreak that killed thousands of people. John Dudley's third son decided to get out while the gettin' was good and left for the Americas in 1630. Once there, he had sons, who would later settle in Connecticut...
Or, an alternate version is that Governor Thomas Dudley of the Massachusetts Bay Company was related to Edmund Dudley, and was the uncle of four Dudley Brothers who settled in Connecticut. In this version of the story, Thomas Dudley is a horrible tyrant who executes those who are not Puritans...
But regardless of the exact version, four brothers, Abijah, Barzillai, and Abiel, founded Dudleytown in the late 17th or early 18th century. Depending on which version of the story you are going with, these four brothers carried a curse with them, or one of Thomas Dudley's victims cursed him and all who dwellt near him (including his nephews), damning the land on which he lived, which would become Dudleytown. In the Governor Dudley version of the story, he is murdered - hacked to death and his body left on his land - and the murderer is never found.
The three Dudley borthers lived the rest of their lives in Dudleytown, Abijah and Barzillai dying of natural causes, apparently. But Abiel...oh, Abiel went insane! He lost his mind, and shorlty afterwards lost his fortune and even his home, dying a pauper
While Abiel was still alive, Nathaniel Carter bought Abiel's house (the unfortunate fellow could no longer afford it) in 1759, thus activating the curse*. After displacing poor, mad Abiel, the Carter family moved out of Dudleytown in 1763 and went to reside in Bimghamton, New York...but somehow left their 13 year old son behind. The result, rather unexpectedly, was that the son survived the rest of the family when a Native American raiding party attacked the Carter's New York homestead in 1764, gruesomely killing and scalping Nathaniel Carter, his wife, and even their infant child. In 1774, Nathaniel's borther, Adoniram, and his entire family died of cholera, thus adding more lives to the Dudleytown curse.
And the horror kept on coming. In 1792, Gershon Hollister is said to have been murdered at the home of William Tanner. Afterwards, Tanner reported seeing strange animals in the forest as well as demons, and this eventually drove him insane. In 1804, a General by the name of Swift was at home with his wife, when she walked out to the front porch and was killed after being struck by a bolt of lightning. Mary Cheney was born in Dudleytown in 1811...and the curse followed her after she left, leading to disaster in her hsuband's career and sickness on her part, and she finally committed suicide in the 1830s. An unspecified plague hit the town in 1813, killing all of one family (the Jones family) and killing off many others.
As the 19th century wore on, crops failed, farm animals routinely vanished without explanation, and unexplained deaths continued. Come the end of the 19th century, only the Brophy family (transplants from elsewhere who arrived in 1892) remained. First the Brophy sheep began vanishing, then his sons vanished (though it is worth noting that they were wanted by local law enforcement...so, "on the lam" might be a better description than "vanished"). After a few years, Mrs. Brophy died of unknown causes. He was sometimes seen around Cornwall, muttering about "demons"...and then his house burned to the ground and he vanished, as well.
Dudleytown remained abandoned to whatever demons Mr. Brophy had encountered until 1930, when Dr. William Clark, a pathologist from New York, decided to build a summer home at that location. Things were quiet until 1937, when Dr. Clark left on a business trip, leaving his wife behind. When he returned home, he found her in an upstairs room, cackling to herself, having gone quite mad. She never recovered, eventually dying in an asylum.
Dr. Clark was the last resident, but the Clarks weren't the last people to encounter evil at Dudleytown. Local folklore tells of a satanic biker gang that enters the Dudleytown area to hold rituals. People report being attacked by demonic creatures with cloven hoofs and strange green eyes. People report seeing shadow people, floating balls of light, dark human forms rising out of the cellar pits, having weird images show up on film (or in digital pictures), and that animals seem to be strangely absent from the area. And, as is so often the case, stories persist that a TV news crew arrived to film a story around Halloween, only to have their equipment fail while they were present.
*For the life of me, I can not figure out why the curse is said to begin with one of the Dudley ancestors...when A) they weren't actually related, and B) the alleged displacement of an unfortunate madman seems to be reason enough to cause the curse without the convoluted stuff from the previous centuries.
Commentary: As ghost stories go, this is one of the greats. Dudleytown is creepy, famous, and a real place...all of which make for a good story. The story of the curse, the demonic creatures having been sighted by residents, and the fact that the ruins are still there (though entry is prohibited by the current landowners, and people do get arrested for trespassing, so, really, stay out), it all makes this particular tale all the more delicious as ghost stories go.
Unfortunately, for all of the giddy creepy thrill that the story supplies, it really doesn't stand up to any sort of scrutiny. As at least one source has pointed out, the story of the curse and the early deaths/madness actually doesn't hold up very well, even using just the information provided in the common versions of the story itself - pretty much everyone who is said to have died or been driven insane by the curse was quite elderly at the time...and, well, therefore would be expected to be experiencing dementia or death (for example, Abiel was 90, and the symptoms of his madness are pretty consistent with dementia). Moreover, the number of people who are said to have died in various versions of the stories are, actually, well short of what you would expect for a rural 18th/19th century community, indicating that being in Dudleytown might actually have been good for your health. So, ya'know, not so scary, that.
A short but accurate and useful write-up of Dudleytown's history if provided on it's Wikipedia entry (accessed October 23, 2013):
Dudleytown was never an actual town. The name was given at an unknown date to a portion of Cornwall that included several members of the Dudley family. The area that became known as Dudleytown was settled in the early 1740s by Thomas Griffis, followed by Gideon Dudley and, by 1753, Barzillai Dudley and Abiel Dudley; Martin Dudley joined them a few years later. Other families also settled there.
As with every other part of Cornwall, Dudleytown was converted from forest to farm land. Families tilled the land for generations. Located on top of a high hill, Dudleytown was not ideally suited for farming. When more fertile and spacious land opened up in the mid-West in the late 19th century, and as the local iron industry wound down, Cornwall's population declined.
During the early 20th century, old farms in Cornwall were sold to New Yorkers seeking a better life in the countryside. Much of the Dudleytown area land was acquired by the Dark Entry Forest Association, which planted thousands of trees. During the 1930s, New York's Skidreiverein Club spent their winter weekends skiing on trails they built in Dudleytown; in the summers, they canoed down the Housatonic River.
Then, even the mysterious or horrifying deaths turn out to be more mundane than legend would hold. Records show that Gershon Hollister was not, in fact, murdered, but instead died due to an accident during a barn raising. Mary Cheney did not kill herself, but died of a lung disease, likely tuberculosis, and she had never been to Dudleytown - her death is especially easy to trace, as she married Horace Greeley. Harriet Clarke did commit suicide, but in New York, not Dudleytown. General Swift lived in another location near, but outside of, Dudleytown (also, Swift was, like Abiel, quite elderly when he "went mad" so it was probably just dementia again). Mrs. Clark was not driven insane, and in fact continued to live in the area after her husband's death in 1943. And so on and so forth...
What's more, the verifiable history of Dudleytown is rather different than the legend holds. There's no known relation between the Dudleys of Connecticut and Edmund Dudley. Similarly, if you match up the time the periods during which the Dudleys of Dudleytown lived (the mid-to-late 18th century) with the life of Thomas Dudley...that he was their uncle seems remarkably unlikely...and they didn't settle in the area until after others already had, so their uncle would not have lived there, and in fact he died of natural causes at his home in Roxbury in 1653. Also, the Dudley brothers were actually Gideon, Barzillai, and Abiel, there wasn't an Abijah.
What's more, there is plenty of evidence that the town was deserted not because of weird supernatural goings-on, but because of the difficulty in obtaining freshwater, poor conditions for agriculture (rocky ground and a placement that resulted in shade from the hills and trees pretty much all the damned time), and variations in the local iron industry all provided potential causes for abandonment. Add to this that Dudleytown was never really a town (stories of it having been a more substantial settlement are false), but rather part of Cornwall, and, well, many residents probably just moved to other parts of the town or county when land became available.
One Reverend Dudley, the author of the Legend of Dudleytown page linked to below, traces the origin of the ghost stories to the 1938 publication of the book They Found a Way, though it is conceivable that elements of the story already existed in local folklore, but even that isn't too terribly odd a thought. After all, frequently shadowy location with an abandoned town? If you don't make up a ghost story for that, then you are just being a lazy sod.
Still, even knowing all of this, I still love this story. It still creeps me out, and if I ever find out that I will be visiting Connecticut, I will try to get permission to visit this site.
Sources: Wikipedia, The Legend of Dudleytown, Cornwall Historic Society, Prairie Ghosts, Ghostvillage, Damned Connecticut, ghosttowns.com (wildly inaccurate information, but a fun read), The Illustrious Internet!, The Ghosts Of Ohio (because, of course, a website about Ohio will cover Connecticut), Exciting Earth, paranoid ramblings from the Illustrious Internet
Friday, August 12, 2011
Highway 246, Santa Ynez Valley
The stretch of Highway 246 that runs between the towns of Buellton and Santa Ynez in the Santa Ynez Valley in Santa Barabara County is said to be haunted by a few odd apparitions.
The first is a ghostly horse-drawn carriage, often said to be a hearse, that traverses the road late at night. Some versions of the story update this to an automobile. The hearse continues down the road, headed to the west, unimpeded by any physical object that blocks its way, some say carrying the souls of the recently dead to the afterlife. Some locals have interpreted the hearse as being part of the Santa Ynez Chumash belief that the spirits of the dead must travel westward in order to reach Point Conception, the gateway to the afterlife. A more sinister version of the tale holds that the hearse is bearing the souls of the damned to Hell.
The second story concerns a black, spectral dog that people have reported running along the road at night. Though nobody claims to have been attacked by it, it is said to be a terrifying sight to behold. It is often claimed to not be a ghost, but rather a demon, wandering the road looking to do harm.
Interestingly, the third story concerns the ghost of a young boy that is said to appear on the side of the road. He seems to be lost and frightened, but will accept a ride from any motorist kind enough to stop for him. When the driver reaches the place that the boy asks to be dropped off, he has simply vanished. It is said that this spirit is the ghost of a young boy who was killed in a car accident while his mother was driving. The mother survived, but the boy was dead at the scene, and now wanders the highway trying to get home.
Commentary: The ghost stories of Highway 246 are interesting for a few reasons. The first, related to the story of the ghostly hearse, is the desire to connect the ghost story to the beliefs of the native peoples of the area. The popular view of Chumash folklore holds that Point Conception was thought to be the gateway to the afterlife, but when I have spoken with people knowledgeable about the ethnographic record of the area, it comes out that the Chumash view of how one reaches the afterlife may not be so clear-cut. There was no centralized church that kept the religious canon in order, and so it is entirely possible that some people did think there was a physical gateway, while others did not, and the precise location may have varied by person telling the ethnographers of it.
In fact, the story of the ghostly hearse is a relatively common motif in European ghost stories, and so this is likely an old campfire story that has been adapted to a California setting, and later had a veneer of faux-antiquity added by the reference ot Chumash religion.
Similarly, the ghostly dog is common in European folklore (and served as the inspiration for the Sherlock Holmes novel The Hound of the Baskervilles), and is likely also a transplant. Demonic black dogs show up in Medieval and Renaissance stories, and remain a popular aspect of many European haunted outdoor spots to this day. The connection between these dogs and demonic forces may be tied to earlier pre-Christian folklore, though that is of little direct importance as the story of this dog likely was brought by Christian Europeans.
The vanishing hitchhiker story is interesting because it has all of the common elements - strange, frightened person who will accept a ride, vanishes when you get them to their destination, etc. etc. - but changes the age and gender of the hitchhiker. These stories are normally about young women - between the age of 16 and 25 - and not pre-adolescent children. This has an interesting effect: While one might feel sorry for the young women who are doomed to hitchhike for the rest of time, the stories nonetheless remain creepy. The young boy, though, is simply a sad and lonely character, with very little creep factor to him. It changes the story from creepy but sad to just plain depressing.
Sources: Published Book, Internet, Local Folklore
The first is a ghostly horse-drawn carriage, often said to be a hearse, that traverses the road late at night. Some versions of the story update this to an automobile. The hearse continues down the road, headed to the west, unimpeded by any physical object that blocks its way, some say carrying the souls of the recently dead to the afterlife. Some locals have interpreted the hearse as being part of the Santa Ynez Chumash belief that the spirits of the dead must travel westward in order to reach Point Conception, the gateway to the afterlife. A more sinister version of the tale holds that the hearse is bearing the souls of the damned to Hell.
The second story concerns a black, spectral dog that people have reported running along the road at night. Though nobody claims to have been attacked by it, it is said to be a terrifying sight to behold. It is often claimed to not be a ghost, but rather a demon, wandering the road looking to do harm.
Interestingly, the third story concerns the ghost of a young boy that is said to appear on the side of the road. He seems to be lost and frightened, but will accept a ride from any motorist kind enough to stop for him. When the driver reaches the place that the boy asks to be dropped off, he has simply vanished. It is said that this spirit is the ghost of a young boy who was killed in a car accident while his mother was driving. The mother survived, but the boy was dead at the scene, and now wanders the highway trying to get home.
Commentary: The ghost stories of Highway 246 are interesting for a few reasons. The first, related to the story of the ghostly hearse, is the desire to connect the ghost story to the beliefs of the native peoples of the area. The popular view of Chumash folklore holds that Point Conception was thought to be the gateway to the afterlife, but when I have spoken with people knowledgeable about the ethnographic record of the area, it comes out that the Chumash view of how one reaches the afterlife may not be so clear-cut. There was no centralized church that kept the religious canon in order, and so it is entirely possible that some people did think there was a physical gateway, while others did not, and the precise location may have varied by person telling the ethnographers of it.
In fact, the story of the ghostly hearse is a relatively common motif in European ghost stories, and so this is likely an old campfire story that has been adapted to a California setting, and later had a veneer of faux-antiquity added by the reference ot Chumash religion.
Similarly, the ghostly dog is common in European folklore (and served as the inspiration for the Sherlock Holmes novel The Hound of the Baskervilles), and is likely also a transplant. Demonic black dogs show up in Medieval and Renaissance stories, and remain a popular aspect of many European haunted outdoor spots to this day. The connection between these dogs and demonic forces may be tied to earlier pre-Christian folklore, though that is of little direct importance as the story of this dog likely was brought by Christian Europeans.
The vanishing hitchhiker story is interesting because it has all of the common elements - strange, frightened person who will accept a ride, vanishes when you get them to their destination, etc. etc. - but changes the age and gender of the hitchhiker. These stories are normally about young women - between the age of 16 and 25 - and not pre-adolescent children. This has an interesting effect: While one might feel sorry for the young women who are doomed to hitchhike for the rest of time, the stories nonetheless remain creepy. The young boy, though, is simply a sad and lonely character, with very little creep factor to him. It changes the story from creepy but sad to just plain depressing.
Sources: Published Book, Internet, Local Folklore
Wednesday, August 18, 2010
Shadow People
We all know the feeling - you are minding your own business, perhaps you are doing some housecleaning, perhaps you are out for a walk, perhaps you're driving home after a long day, and you see something out of the corner of your eye. Something black, moving, and seemingly intelligent. It's just there for a split second, a shadowy form, human in shape, but with no distinguishable features other than it's dark hue. You turn to get a better look, and it is gone. Perhaps you have a feeling of fear or dread on seeing it. Regardless, you know that, whatever it is, it isn't good.
Some people claim to have seen more than just the split-second image in their peripheral vision. Stories abound of people seeing figures that look like living, 3-dimensional shadows. Sometimes these figures appear to be following or attempting to interact with the witness, at other times they appear to simply be passive observers. On occasion, they even appear to be trying to do harm. Although typically they are solid black with no distinguishable features, there are some that appear to have red, glowing eyes.
Although sometimes seen during the day, these strange creatures are typically spotted at night. Often, the witness feels a sense of fear or dread upon seeing them, and often there is a strong sense that these creatures are here to do damage to us or our world.
Commentary: This one is a bit of a departure from the stories that I normally post in that it's more a phenomenon than a specific story. I had tried to find a specific story that could be tied to a particular time and/or place, but always found Shadow People were either shoe-horned into existing stories about haunted places, or were simply mentioned as "a weird thing happened to me" stories without the location being relevant and often not even mentioned.
Still, even if it breaks the mold a bit, I wanted to find a way to include Shadow People on this site because they are rapidly becoming an important piece of our ghost story folklore, and I find the stories really damn creepy. Really, I find few things more shiver-inducing than walking down a dark road while listening to someone talk about their encounters with Shadow People.
That being said, I don't actually believe in Shadow People. Not in the least. So, what do I think is going on? Well, this quote from About.com's entry on Shadow People provides some useful information:
As does this one from the Shadow People Archives:
So, for quite some time, reports seem to have been of vague shadowy images viewed out of the corner of the eye, sometimes accompanied by a feeling of dread. Over time, however, people have begun describing seeing more intense encounters. The descriptions of these entities are extremely varied, but are beginning to become standardized into a few typological categories.
Let's take this one apart, shall we. And let's start with the nature of vision and memory.
Our eyes have large blind spots, and we are constantly unconsciously scanning in order to make out what is in the world surrounding us. Since we can't look at everything at once, our brain has to fill in the gaps between scans of an area by supplementing the image with information that has either already been gathered, or else tries to fill-in-the-blanks with semi-related information. Most of the time, this works so seamlessly that we don't notice it, but sometimes it doesn't, and we will see things - just for a split second - that shouldn't be there. It's a common phenomenon, and it happens to all of us. This pretty easily accounts for the majority of "black shapes that were there until I turned to look at them" whether people label them "Shadow People" or not*.
The accompanying feelings of fear and dread can also be explained naturally. It's startling when we see something moving where we thought that there was nothing, thus fear is generated. There are also more than a few different things that can mis-fire in the brain of a perfectly normal, sane person that can result in hallucinations and/or feelings of dread, see this article in Science Now for an example.
Many encounters with Shadow People, much like many ghostly encounters in general, occur while a person is in bed, either about to fall asleep or waking up from sleep. Again, knowing a bit about how our brains work (and how our bodies prepare for and revive from sleep) explains most of these cases. As described in this journal paper, it is perfectly normal for people to experience hallucinations - with vision, sound, and even emotion - in the period surrounding sleep. It's common for someone to insist "I know that I was awake" when this is pointed out - but the truth is that we often can't consciously tell when we are completely awake (and therefore not prone to sleep-related hallucinations) and when we are not completely awake. Add to this the fact that it is very common for people to dream that they have woken up and experienced something, and it can be difficult to figure out what actually occurred and what did not (I have had such experiences myself). So, again, a common line of evidence doesn't actually stand up to scrutiny.
Now, let's look at memory. Most people think of memory as functioning more-or-less like a computer's hard drive: data is coded, and then retrieved more-or-less intact when we need it. Turns out, that this isn't even vaguely how memory works (see here, and here). Memory is a much more active process, and we are, in essence, re-creating a memory each time that we call it up and usually end up either adding things to it or taking things away from it, the end result being that memories that we don't think about too often are more accurate than memories that we think about frequently.
It gets worse, though. In addition to our brains monkeying around with our memories every time we recall them, experiments have demonstrated that we are prone to having false memories implanted by simple suggestion. Some of these false memories can even become extremely vivid - to the point that the person with the false memories will remain convinced that the event actually occurred even after the method by which the memory was created has been explained.
And remember, these problems with memory apply to perfectly healthy, normal, honest, and sane people. This is not pathological, it's just the way that our brains work.
When you add our weird way of handling vision to the way in which our brains handle memories, it begins to seem pretty likely that many, probably most, cases of Shadow People in which the witness truly believes what they saw can be cracked up to oddities of human vision combined with the cludginess of human memory. Add to this the fact that, with the Internet, people can easily come across other people's stories, and you can see how a memory of one thing can begin, over time, to conform to a "group consensus" memory. This common social phenomenon would pretty easily explain why the variation in Shadow People stories seems to be shrinking, people are remembering more intense encounters, and a few specific "types" of shadow people are becoming the norm.
What about the other examples of people seeing Shadow People? Can I explain all of them?
Well, it's really not necessary. There are many, many different ways that the stories can come about - from honest misperception to people intentionally making stories up, and when you throw in a small number of people who actually are suffering from some mental pathology the mix gets pretty thoroughly screwy - and so you simply have to accept that there are probably many different origins for many different stories. You can find the root cause of individual stories, and probably find patterns that allow you to explain a wide variety of stories (such as what is described above), but there's always going to be at least one or two stories that don't fit that explanation, and so you'll have to figure out what happened in those cases. Hell, some people may even have seen something truly strange, but it's hard to separate the signal from the noise.
This, of course, hasn't stopped a large number of crackpots from developing a large number of psuedo-scientific explanations. If you type "Shadow People" into Google, you will be inundated with talk of "extra-dimensional beings", time travellers, and so on. All of the people talk of these things as if they are completely reasonable, without ever stopping to consider what terms such as "extra-dimensional" even mean**. Essentially, people interested in Shadow People have begun spinning explanations of this phenomenon without A) stopping to figure out if there is even a phenomenon needing explanation, and B) stopping to figure out if their explanations even make sense or are even vaguely plausible using the concepts to which they themselves are appealing. And so, we get some rather long treatises on the nature of something that may not actually exist using explanations that are cobbled together from pop-culture misunderstandings of physics and mathematics.
...and people wonder why I just stick to the stories and don't get into the research.
*I have had a recent experience with this myself. Not long back, I was driving home from southern California. It was late at night, and I was tired and had been driving for five hours straight. Off to my left, I saw a massive shape, a large 4-legged creature that was completely black, come chargin towards me. I swerved (thankfully there was nobody else on the road near me) to escape, and a split second later realized that my eyes and brain, in their fatigued state, had translated the movement of the trees and the black nightime sky into an image of a pure-black beast rushing towards me.
**Hint - it's a term that comes from mathematics and is applied to physics via that route. The way that Shadow People enthusiasts use the term doesn't actually make a lick of sense and owes far more to comic books than to physics.
Sources: Science Now, Podcast, Shadow People Archives, About.com, Journal Article (on hallucinations in normal, sane people), Wikipedia, Radio Show (warning, this one is pretty damn crazy)
Some people claim to have seen more than just the split-second image in their peripheral vision. Stories abound of people seeing figures that look like living, 3-dimensional shadows. Sometimes these figures appear to be following or attempting to interact with the witness, at other times they appear to simply be passive observers. On occasion, they even appear to be trying to do harm. Although typically they are solid black with no distinguishable features, there are some that appear to have red, glowing eyes.
Although sometimes seen during the day, these strange creatures are typically spotted at night. Often, the witness feels a sense of fear or dread upon seeing them, and often there is a strong sense that these creatures are here to do damage to us or our world.
Commentary: This one is a bit of a departure from the stories that I normally post in that it's more a phenomenon than a specific story. I had tried to find a specific story that could be tied to a particular time and/or place, but always found Shadow People were either shoe-horned into existing stories about haunted places, or were simply mentioned as "a weird thing happened to me" stories without the location being relevant and often not even mentioned.
Still, even if it breaks the mold a bit, I wanted to find a way to include Shadow People on this site because they are rapidly becoming an important piece of our ghost story folklore, and I find the stories really damn creepy. Really, I find few things more shiver-inducing than walking down a dark road while listening to someone talk about their encounters with Shadow People.
That being said, I don't actually believe in Shadow People. Not in the least. So, what do I think is going on? Well, this quote from About.com's entry on Shadow People provides some useful information:
Those who are experiencing and studying the shadow people phenomenon say that these entities almost always used to be seen out of the corner of the eye and very briefly. But more and more, people are beginning to see them straight on and for longer periods of time. Some experiencers testify that they have even seen eyes, usually red, on these shadow beings.
As does this one from the Shadow People Archives:
Sometimes it appears as the mere silhouette of a person, usually male, but generally lacking any other characteristics of gender. However, in no way does the description end there. There are “hatted” shadow beings, hooded shadows, cloaked ones, and solid or wispy, smoky types. Some are seen only from the waist up. Others clearly have legs that are seen fleeing from their observers. They dart into corners, through walls, into closets, or behind television sets, bushes, and buildings. Sometimes they simply fade into the dark recesses of the night. Lacking in the description is one common denominator unifying the many different types of shadow people that enter our world…except that they are “intensely dark.” But even then, there are exceptions.
So, for quite some time, reports seem to have been of vague shadowy images viewed out of the corner of the eye, sometimes accompanied by a feeling of dread. Over time, however, people have begun describing seeing more intense encounters. The descriptions of these entities are extremely varied, but are beginning to become standardized into a few typological categories.
Let's take this one apart, shall we. And let's start with the nature of vision and memory.
Our eyes have large blind spots, and we are constantly unconsciously scanning in order to make out what is in the world surrounding us. Since we can't look at everything at once, our brain has to fill in the gaps between scans of an area by supplementing the image with information that has either already been gathered, or else tries to fill-in-the-blanks with semi-related information. Most of the time, this works so seamlessly that we don't notice it, but sometimes it doesn't, and we will see things - just for a split second - that shouldn't be there. It's a common phenomenon, and it happens to all of us. This pretty easily accounts for the majority of "black shapes that were there until I turned to look at them" whether people label them "Shadow People" or not*.
The accompanying feelings of fear and dread can also be explained naturally. It's startling when we see something moving where we thought that there was nothing, thus fear is generated. There are also more than a few different things that can mis-fire in the brain of a perfectly normal, sane person that can result in hallucinations and/or feelings of dread, see this article in Science Now for an example.
Many encounters with Shadow People, much like many ghostly encounters in general, occur while a person is in bed, either about to fall asleep or waking up from sleep. Again, knowing a bit about how our brains work (and how our bodies prepare for and revive from sleep) explains most of these cases. As described in this journal paper, it is perfectly normal for people to experience hallucinations - with vision, sound, and even emotion - in the period surrounding sleep. It's common for someone to insist "I know that I was awake" when this is pointed out - but the truth is that we often can't consciously tell when we are completely awake (and therefore not prone to sleep-related hallucinations) and when we are not completely awake. Add to this the fact that it is very common for people to dream that they have woken up and experienced something, and it can be difficult to figure out what actually occurred and what did not (I have had such experiences myself). So, again, a common line of evidence doesn't actually stand up to scrutiny.
Now, let's look at memory. Most people think of memory as functioning more-or-less like a computer's hard drive: data is coded, and then retrieved more-or-less intact when we need it. Turns out, that this isn't even vaguely how memory works (see here, and here). Memory is a much more active process, and we are, in essence, re-creating a memory each time that we call it up and usually end up either adding things to it or taking things away from it, the end result being that memories that we don't think about too often are more accurate than memories that we think about frequently.
It gets worse, though. In addition to our brains monkeying around with our memories every time we recall them, experiments have demonstrated that we are prone to having false memories implanted by simple suggestion. Some of these false memories can even become extremely vivid - to the point that the person with the false memories will remain convinced that the event actually occurred even after the method by which the memory was created has been explained.
And remember, these problems with memory apply to perfectly healthy, normal, honest, and sane people. This is not pathological, it's just the way that our brains work.
When you add our weird way of handling vision to the way in which our brains handle memories, it begins to seem pretty likely that many, probably most, cases of Shadow People in which the witness truly believes what they saw can be cracked up to oddities of human vision combined with the cludginess of human memory. Add to this the fact that, with the Internet, people can easily come across other people's stories, and you can see how a memory of one thing can begin, over time, to conform to a "group consensus" memory. This common social phenomenon would pretty easily explain why the variation in Shadow People stories seems to be shrinking, people are remembering more intense encounters, and a few specific "types" of shadow people are becoming the norm.
What about the other examples of people seeing Shadow People? Can I explain all of them?
Well, it's really not necessary. There are many, many different ways that the stories can come about - from honest misperception to people intentionally making stories up, and when you throw in a small number of people who actually are suffering from some mental pathology the mix gets pretty thoroughly screwy - and so you simply have to accept that there are probably many different origins for many different stories. You can find the root cause of individual stories, and probably find patterns that allow you to explain a wide variety of stories (such as what is described above), but there's always going to be at least one or two stories that don't fit that explanation, and so you'll have to figure out what happened in those cases. Hell, some people may even have seen something truly strange, but it's hard to separate the signal from the noise.
This, of course, hasn't stopped a large number of crackpots from developing a large number of psuedo-scientific explanations. If you type "Shadow People" into Google, you will be inundated with talk of "extra-dimensional beings", time travellers, and so on. All of the people talk of these things as if they are completely reasonable, without ever stopping to consider what terms such as "extra-dimensional" even mean**. Essentially, people interested in Shadow People have begun spinning explanations of this phenomenon without A) stopping to figure out if there is even a phenomenon needing explanation, and B) stopping to figure out if their explanations even make sense or are even vaguely plausible using the concepts to which they themselves are appealing. And so, we get some rather long treatises on the nature of something that may not actually exist using explanations that are cobbled together from pop-culture misunderstandings of physics and mathematics.
...and people wonder why I just stick to the stories and don't get into the research.
*I have had a recent experience with this myself. Not long back, I was driving home from southern California. It was late at night, and I was tired and had been driving for five hours straight. Off to my left, I saw a massive shape, a large 4-legged creature that was completely black, come chargin towards me. I swerved (thankfully there was nobody else on the road near me) to escape, and a split second later realized that my eyes and brain, in their fatigued state, had translated the movement of the trees and the black nightime sky into an image of a pure-black beast rushing towards me.
**Hint - it's a term that comes from mathematics and is applied to physics via that route. The way that Shadow People enthusiasts use the term doesn't actually make a lick of sense and owes far more to comic books than to physics.
Sources: Science Now, Podcast, Shadow People Archives, About.com, Journal Article (on hallucinations in normal, sane people), Wikipedia, Radio Show (warning, this one is pretty damn crazy)
Wednesday, May 26, 2010
The Demonic Mirror
In October, 2007, the Modesto Bee (the newspaper of Modesto, CA and the surrounding area) asked its readers to share their ghost stories for the usual Halloween scare-fest that most media attempt to put out.
Included in this story was one from a fellow Named Gary Metzger, who worked in an Italian Restaurant run by an older Sicilian man near Sacramento during the 1970s. The following is taken directly from the article:
Commentary: I'm not really sure how to classify this particular story, but it is a good one. On the surface, it appears to be a variation on folktales concerning evil spirits trapped in objects. The fact that it's a mirror fits, as these objects often have rather sinister natures in folklore as well as folk magic, and breaking this mirror would certainly bring bad luck.
Going with the folktale angle, the idea of a successful businessman purchasing a cursed item that will ultimately be his undoing is an old one. Though, in this case, the purchase is not claimed to have done him any good at all. I have to wonder why the Sicilian man doesn't claim that the mirror brings him business success due to the demon being trapped inside.
Another folktale angle is that of the apprentice dabbling into things that he isn't yet meant to know. He was told to clean the mirrors, but not one in particular. He forgets this admonition, and pays a fearful price for his lapse in memory. It's played out on a small scale, but the basic story arc is a familiar one.
On the other hand, depending on the religious leanings of Mr. Metzger, this story of the demon in the mirror might have another meaning. I have written in the past about how members of certain types of religious backgrounds use stories of demonic encounters as a way of proving their own worthiness, and it is possible that this is just such a story. However, without information concerning the religious background of Mr. Metzger, it's impossible to say if this is the case here.
Of course, one has to ask whether or not Mr. Metzger experienced something or not, and if so, what he experienced. It is, of course, entirely possible that this was simply a good, and very creepy story that he had come up with, and the newspaper's request for stories was an excellent opportunity to share it. If so, my hat's off to him.
It's also possible that he perceived something weird. In that case, one has to wonder what he perceived. Given the rather odd nature of both human memory and human perception, it is possible for someone who is both perfectly sane and perfectly honest to experience or remember experiencing something vividly that never happened. So, that's a possibility. The flipside is that something truly weird really did happen. However, without providing us with the name of the restaurant, or even which Sacramento-area town it was in, we can't check up on the story. So, we are at a dead end.
Sources: Newspaper
Included in this story was one from a fellow Named Gary Metzger, who worked in an Italian Restaurant run by an older Sicilian man near Sacramento during the 1970s. The following is taken directly from the article:
“My boss told me to clean all of these gilded mirrors along one wall of the restaurant. He told me to leave alone one really old, dusty one at the end. Well, by the time I got to it, I forgot his orders. I dusted it off, squirted it with water and wiped it down.
“There was one smudge in the lower bottom corner that wouldn’t rub off. I looked at it real close, and it was like I was looking through it at this tiny pinpoint of light. And then the pinpoint got larger and this demonic face was jumping at me. It stayed in the mirror, but I yelped and my boss heard me. He came and took me to a table. He asked what I saw.
“He told me he had bought it in the old country and the salesman warned him there was a demon trapped in the mirror. He said the salesman also told him not to break the mirror or the demon would go free.”
Commentary: I'm not really sure how to classify this particular story, but it is a good one. On the surface, it appears to be a variation on folktales concerning evil spirits trapped in objects. The fact that it's a mirror fits, as these objects often have rather sinister natures in folklore as well as folk magic, and breaking this mirror would certainly bring bad luck.
Going with the folktale angle, the idea of a successful businessman purchasing a cursed item that will ultimately be his undoing is an old one. Though, in this case, the purchase is not claimed to have done him any good at all. I have to wonder why the Sicilian man doesn't claim that the mirror brings him business success due to the demon being trapped inside.
Another folktale angle is that of the apprentice dabbling into things that he isn't yet meant to know. He was told to clean the mirrors, but not one in particular. He forgets this admonition, and pays a fearful price for his lapse in memory. It's played out on a small scale, but the basic story arc is a familiar one.
On the other hand, depending on the religious leanings of Mr. Metzger, this story of the demon in the mirror might have another meaning. I have written in the past about how members of certain types of religious backgrounds use stories of demonic encounters as a way of proving their own worthiness, and it is possible that this is just such a story. However, without information concerning the religious background of Mr. Metzger, it's impossible to say if this is the case here.
Of course, one has to ask whether or not Mr. Metzger experienced something or not, and if so, what he experienced. It is, of course, entirely possible that this was simply a good, and very creepy story that he had come up with, and the newspaper's request for stories was an excellent opportunity to share it. If so, my hat's off to him.
It's also possible that he perceived something weird. In that case, one has to wonder what he perceived. Given the rather odd nature of both human memory and human perception, it is possible for someone who is both perfectly sane and perfectly honest to experience or remember experiencing something vividly that never happened. So, that's a possibility. The flipside is that something truly weird really did happen. However, without providing us with the name of the restaurant, or even which Sacramento-area town it was in, we can't check up on the story. So, we are at a dead end.
Sources: Newspaper
Friday, January 22, 2010
Demonic White Noise, Georgia, USA
I usually don't include stories sent in to podcasts, but this one was too creepy to ignore.
A fellow named Archer, who lives in Georgia, sent an MP3 containing this story into the Anything Ghost podcast...
Archer had bought a white noise machine to help him sleep. You've probably seen these machines before, they produce various different sounds - rain, a flowing creek, etc. - to act as background noise, and cancel out other noises that may interfere with a person's sleep. Archer liked the creek setting, and would turn it on as he went to bed.
One night, a friend of Archer's was visiting from out of town. The next morning, he asked Archer about the talking machine that had been on all night. Archer explained that it was not a "talking machine" but a white noise machine, and that it had been playing the sound of a flowing creek. His friend insisted that he heard it speaking, though he couldn't understand the words, but Archer heard no such thing and figured that his friend was joking.
Later, another friend came to visit, and reported the same thing. After this visit, Archer decided to try turning the machine on and visiting different bedrooms in his home to see if there was something about the acoustics of the place that would cause the machine's noises to sound like speech. He found nothing, and just thought it was odd, without giving it much more thought.
A short time later, Archer went on a trip to another city. He brought the white noise machine with him, and turned it on when he was ready to go to sleep. This time, though, he didn't just hear the flowing creek, but rather the strange voice, and it was screaming in a deep, angry tone. While the screaming occurred, a hot wind began to blow through the hotel room. Archer hit the power button numerous times, but to no avail. He finally unplugged the unit from the wall, causing the sound to stop and the wind to stop blowing in the room.
He threw away the machine and has stated that he hasn't bought a replacement.
Commentary: So, this is the second "haunted object" that I have written about here. This is also an interesting one in that, given that it apparently hosted an angry spirit, it could also fall into the "demons" category, and might be thought of as a possessed object.
Unlike some of the other stories on this blog, my interest in this story comes not from an intellectual interest in the structure or elements of the story, but simply from the fact that it is a damn effective scary story. I have told the story to, or played the podcast for, several people, and all of them have been suitably creeped out by it.
I discovered the hard way that telling this story to your girlfriend late at night is a good way to get her both unnerved and angry with you. Thankfully, I have also discovered that this can be neutralized to a degree by suggesting that she imagine that, rather than a deep demonic voice emanating from the machine, the voice of Bill Cosby telling a rambling anecdote that goes nowhere is coming from the machine. Really, it's hard to be frightened when you imagine that the eternal damned babble incoherently about Jello pudding through a set of cheap speakers.
It's worth noting that devices that produce white noise, including white noise generators, but also including items such as electric fans or televisions and radios set to static, as well as devices that simply produce other types of random noise, can be thought to produce speech because of a phenomenon known as pareidolia - the tendency for the brain to perceive distinct patterns even when there is only randomness, in this case to hear voices or language where none actually is. This is likely the phenomenon behind most electronic voice phenomenon and the claimed backward messages on rock albums* as well as the tendency for people to see things such as religious figures in burn marks or alien spaceships in cloud formations.
But, of course, that wouldn't explain a machine screaming at the owner. Whether this is a case of something strange actually happening to Archer, or a case of someone simply wanting to tell a scary story to an audience via a podcast, I haven't a clue. But it makes for a damn good ghost story.
For more on how paradolia can cause us to hear things that aren't there, check out these two podcasts: this one and this one
Sources: Podcast (the story starts at the 30:14 mark)
A fellow named Archer, who lives in Georgia, sent an MP3 containing this story into the Anything Ghost podcast...
Archer had bought a white noise machine to help him sleep. You've probably seen these machines before, they produce various different sounds - rain, a flowing creek, etc. - to act as background noise, and cancel out other noises that may interfere with a person's sleep. Archer liked the creek setting, and would turn it on as he went to bed.
One night, a friend of Archer's was visiting from out of town. The next morning, he asked Archer about the talking machine that had been on all night. Archer explained that it was not a "talking machine" but a white noise machine, and that it had been playing the sound of a flowing creek. His friend insisted that he heard it speaking, though he couldn't understand the words, but Archer heard no such thing and figured that his friend was joking.
Later, another friend came to visit, and reported the same thing. After this visit, Archer decided to try turning the machine on and visiting different bedrooms in his home to see if there was something about the acoustics of the place that would cause the machine's noises to sound like speech. He found nothing, and just thought it was odd, without giving it much more thought.
A short time later, Archer went on a trip to another city. He brought the white noise machine with him, and turned it on when he was ready to go to sleep. This time, though, he didn't just hear the flowing creek, but rather the strange voice, and it was screaming in a deep, angry tone. While the screaming occurred, a hot wind began to blow through the hotel room. Archer hit the power button numerous times, but to no avail. He finally unplugged the unit from the wall, causing the sound to stop and the wind to stop blowing in the room.
He threw away the machine and has stated that he hasn't bought a replacement.
Commentary: So, this is the second "haunted object" that I have written about here. This is also an interesting one in that, given that it apparently hosted an angry spirit, it could also fall into the "demons" category, and might be thought of as a possessed object.
Unlike some of the other stories on this blog, my interest in this story comes not from an intellectual interest in the structure or elements of the story, but simply from the fact that it is a damn effective scary story. I have told the story to, or played the podcast for, several people, and all of them have been suitably creeped out by it.
I discovered the hard way that telling this story to your girlfriend late at night is a good way to get her both unnerved and angry with you. Thankfully, I have also discovered that this can be neutralized to a degree by suggesting that she imagine that, rather than a deep demonic voice emanating from the machine, the voice of Bill Cosby telling a rambling anecdote that goes nowhere is coming from the machine. Really, it's hard to be frightened when you imagine that the eternal damned babble incoherently about Jello pudding through a set of cheap speakers.
It's worth noting that devices that produce white noise, including white noise generators, but also including items such as electric fans or televisions and radios set to static, as well as devices that simply produce other types of random noise, can be thought to produce speech because of a phenomenon known as pareidolia - the tendency for the brain to perceive distinct patterns even when there is only randomness, in this case to hear voices or language where none actually is. This is likely the phenomenon behind most electronic voice phenomenon and the claimed backward messages on rock albums* as well as the tendency for people to see things such as religious figures in burn marks or alien spaceships in cloud formations.
But, of course, that wouldn't explain a machine screaming at the owner. Whether this is a case of something strange actually happening to Archer, or a case of someone simply wanting to tell a scary story to an audience via a podcast, I haven't a clue. But it makes for a damn good ghost story.
For more on how paradolia can cause us to hear things that aren't there, check out these two podcasts: this one and this one
Sources: Podcast (the story starts at the 30:14 mark)
Wednesday, December 23, 2009
Gateway to Hell
On behalf of the people of Stull, Kansas, I wish to say that none of this story is true, in any way shape or form. Okay, let's begin...
In the small town of Stull, Kansas, there is an old cemetery that contains one of the seven gateways to Hell* known to be on Earth. It is one of two spots - the other being an isolated spot in India, where Satan himself appears at midnight on Halloween to gather those who died violent deaths to have a final cavort across the surface of Earth. Some say that Satan again appears in Stull on the first day of Spring to visit a witch buried in the cemetery.
People have visited the burial ground for decades, waiting to see the Devil appear. Although nobody has reported a visit by the Father of Lies, many people have reported strange happenings, including a malevolent force that manifests as a strong wind that can knock a grown man down and keep him on the ground, as well as unattended vehicles moving from where their drivers parked them. Other reported incidents include mysterious voices, and invisible hands clutching at trespassers.
Rumor holds that Satanists routinely meet in the cemetery, especially near the ruins of an old church - which is said to be the precise location of the gateway to Hell - in order to carry out their rituals. And sometimes demons, even Satan himself, will come to these gatherings of the evil faithful to sanctify (or diabolize) their rites.
Commentary: The town of Stull, Kansas is a small settlement in an unincorporated part of Douglas County. The town was, like so many rural towns throughout the U.S., a pleasant place for the residents, but uninteresting to most people passing through (that is not an insult, merely an observation, and I say this as someone who came from just such a rural, unincorporated town). That changed in 1974, when the student newspaper at the University of Kansas in Lawrence published an article describing weird cult activity at the cemetery. After that, legend trippers began to visit the cemetery, looking for an encounter with the supernatural. These visitors have engaged in a good deal of vandalism, and as a result the local residents and law enforcement are keen to keep visitors away.
The local antipathy towards tourists creates a weird sort of dynamic. People who have visited and been chased away have described that they feel as if the locals have something to hide. The locals, on the other hand, have nothing to hide but simply are tired of outsiders coming in and doing damage. As a result, the story has probably gotten more inadvertent fals confirmation than it should, and the locals have to deal with idiots and vandals.
The question that I would like to have answered is what is the deal with this being one of the seven gateways to Hell? Despite a good deal of searching on the internet and in libraries, I have never been able to figure out where the other six gateways are. Apparently one is in some isolated location in India, never specifically named by anyone who mentions it. But there are no answers as to where the other ones are. I wonder if the "seven gateways" got attached to this story so that it seemed somehow more ominous.
Videos: Sometimes it seems like Hometown Tales has a video for every occasion...
Sources: Wikipedia, Prairie Ghosts, Internet, Hometown Tales (see video embedded above), Internet
In the small town of Stull, Kansas, there is an old cemetery that contains one of the seven gateways to Hell* known to be on Earth. It is one of two spots - the other being an isolated spot in India, where Satan himself appears at midnight on Halloween to gather those who died violent deaths to have a final cavort across the surface of Earth. Some say that Satan again appears in Stull on the first day of Spring to visit a witch buried in the cemetery.
People have visited the burial ground for decades, waiting to see the Devil appear. Although nobody has reported a visit by the Father of Lies, many people have reported strange happenings, including a malevolent force that manifests as a strong wind that can knock a grown man down and keep him on the ground, as well as unattended vehicles moving from where their drivers parked them. Other reported incidents include mysterious voices, and invisible hands clutching at trespassers.
Rumor holds that Satanists routinely meet in the cemetery, especially near the ruins of an old church - which is said to be the precise location of the gateway to Hell - in order to carry out their rituals. And sometimes demons, even Satan himself, will come to these gatherings of the evil faithful to sanctify (or diabolize) their rites.
Commentary: The town of Stull, Kansas is a small settlement in an unincorporated part of Douglas County. The town was, like so many rural towns throughout the U.S., a pleasant place for the residents, but uninteresting to most people passing through (that is not an insult, merely an observation, and I say this as someone who came from just such a rural, unincorporated town). That changed in 1974, when the student newspaper at the University of Kansas in Lawrence published an article describing weird cult activity at the cemetery. After that, legend trippers began to visit the cemetery, looking for an encounter with the supernatural. These visitors have engaged in a good deal of vandalism, and as a result the local residents and law enforcement are keen to keep visitors away.
The local antipathy towards tourists creates a weird sort of dynamic. People who have visited and been chased away have described that they feel as if the locals have something to hide. The locals, on the other hand, have nothing to hide but simply are tired of outsiders coming in and doing damage. As a result, the story has probably gotten more inadvertent fals confirmation than it should, and the locals have to deal with idiots and vandals.
The question that I would like to have answered is what is the deal with this being one of the seven gateways to Hell? Despite a good deal of searching on the internet and in libraries, I have never been able to figure out where the other six gateways are. Apparently one is in some isolated location in India, never specifically named by anyone who mentions it. But there are no answers as to where the other ones are. I wonder if the "seven gateways" got attached to this story so that it seemed somehow more ominous.
Videos: Sometimes it seems like Hometown Tales has a video for every occasion...
Sources: Wikipedia, Prairie Ghosts, Internet, Hometown Tales (see video embedded above), Internet
Wednesday, April 8, 2009
The Amityville Haunting
Most of us are familiar with the outlines of the story, after all, it has been part of our collective pop culture since the 1970s. On the morning of November 13, 1974, Ronald “Butch” DeFeo Jr. murder his entire family while they slept. He then attempted to hide the evidence but was eventually caught and convicted. He remains in prison to this day.
In 1975, George and Kathy Lutz bought and moved into the house with their children, but they stayed less than a month. After they left, they had a litany of eerie to terrifying encounters to recount. It started small, with objects moving, and sounds without sources, but eventually moved on to much larger and more menacing manifestations. George Lutz heard a phantom brass band marching through the house, the walls began to “bleed” a viscous slime, and the family began to see apparitions of ghostly people.
After a time, the manifestations went from ghostly to demonic. The family reported seeing a devil-like figure with glowing red eyes peering into the windows of their house. The youngest daughter had an imaginary friend named “Jodie” who she reported as looking like a cross between a devil and a pig. One day, after seeing the demonic figure peeking into the windows, George and Kathy found cloven hoofmarks in the snow outside of the house. George began to become violently angry, out of character for him. And clouds of flies would appear out of nowhere even on the coldest of days. A priest came to the house to perform and exorcism, and was told by a disembodied voice to “get out!” The priest was then followed back to the church by a menacing specter, and suffered from a number of different physical ailments.
The final straw came when a mysterious and unseen force began to rip doors and windows out of the walls, and the Lutz family fled in terror.
After they had left, the George and Kathy contacted Ed and Lorraine Warren, as well as the local television station, and asked them to investigate. The Warrens were considered by many to be the pre-eminent paranormal investigators of the day (but see commentary below), Lorraine was a psychic and Ed was a demonologist. The entered the house, took photos, looked about, and made careful notes of what they saw and, in the case of Lorraine, her impressions as a psychic. They concluded that evidence indicated that the family had left suddenly (for example, the fridge was stocked with food, not what you would expect if the family had planned on leaving), and that the house was definitely possessed by a demonic entity.
Further research showed that the ground on which the house was built was thought to be the home of evil spirits by the local Native American tribe, and prior to the colonization of the area by whites, this location was used as a dumping ground for the insane and diseased of the tribe.
And from there, the rest is history. Jay Anson wrote a book, chronicling the experiences of the Lutz family, and the book was made into a hit movie, which spawned numerous sequels that weren’t even claimed to be based on actual events (my favorite for sheer silliness has to be Amityville Dollhouse).
And with that, the true story of a real haunted house became known to the public, and the skeptics predictably refused to believe what was obvious right in front of them.
Commentary: What is written above is the story that most of the public knows, whether from Jay Anson’s book, from the movies, or from the fact that this story has been a big part of our pop culture for the last 30 years. And the story has many firm believers. In preparing for this entry, I came across numerous websites, essays, and articles in which supporters of the Lutz’s version of events rant about the “faithless” closed-minded skeptics who refuse to see what is in front of their face if it doesn’t jive with their pre-conceived ideas of how the world works.
But when you look into the story more, the truth is rather different than the commonly believed version of events.
For starters, William Weber, the defense attorney for Ronald DeFeo Jr., had contact with the George and Kathy Lutz, and even sued them for non-compliance on a book agreement that he had with them. Over time, a story came out that the Lutzes and Weber developed the haunted house story over a few bottles of wine in order to provide Weber with something to use to persuade a jury in a hoped-for new trial for DeFeo (remember, he doesn’t have to scientifically prove that ghosts or demons exist, just persuade a jury), and to allow the Lutzes something that they might be able to use (or sell in the form of books) in order to get out from under a crippling mortgage.
In addition, many of the details just didn’t work out. There are conflicting reports of how long the Lutzes stayed in the home, there are reports from neighbors that the night after they left “for good” they were back to hold a yard sale, there was no snow on the ground on the days when the cloven-hoof prints were said to be in the snow, and all of the original hardware was present and intact on the doors and windows that had allegedly been torn apart. Also, the police were never actually called, contrary to claims made by the Lutzes. Oh, and the priest who had attempted the exorcism? He says it never happened. And many of the elements that made it into Anson’s book seem to have been lifted from the film The Exorcist, which was quite the sensation at the time.
None of the subsequent owners or tenants of the house have had any supernatural experiences (though many have reported trouble with tourists coming to see the house (the house address has even been changed and the windows remodeled to hide from would-be curiosity seekers), a rather strange lack of behavior for a home supposedly ruled by diabolical forces.
What of the Warrens? While they were certainly a popular resource for those wishing to investigate the paranormal, and had a level of celebrity themselves, their methods were generally riddled with problems, and not reliable. In general, tracking down gaps in their logic and holes in their work has not proven difficult even for firm believers in the paranormal, and has proven very easy for those who question the existence of the paranormal.
In fact, the Warrens weren’t even the first investigators contacted by George and Kathy. That would be Stephen Kaplan of the Parapsychology Institute of America, who told the Lutzes that he’d be happy to look into the matter, but that if the story was a hoax, he would report it as such. He never heard back from George or Kathy.
And what of the claim that the house was built on a place of evil that had been used to house the sick and insane? Well, this seems to be an interesting riff on the “built on an Indian burial ground” chestnut that gets kicked around a lot. This part especially interests me because I am, by both training and occupation, an anthropological archaeologist and I work in North America – in other words, this is my turf. There certainly are areas that were considered “evil” or at least unwelcoming by the native peoples of the Americas, but there is no evidence that this location was one of them. And while it is not uncommon in many cultures to isolate the sick, there is little indication that this happened here. Moreover, what of the insane? The separation of the insane into separate “asylum” areas is not uncommon across the world, but neither is it necessarily the norm, and those asylum areas usually have things to keep the insane in – what I like to call “walls” – and there is no evidence of such a thing at this location. In other words, this part of the story appears to be complete fiction that takes advantage of the fact that most people have such a poor understanding of how the Native Americans lived that such a story sounds plausible to everyone except for actual Native Americans and anthropologists – who all regard the story as nonsense.
So, at the very best, being as charitable as possible to George and Kathy Lutz, a fair-minded person would have to conclude that whatever actually happened at the house, the story became heavily embellished afterwards, and the media circus that ensued pushed people to become more entrenched in positions that they took publicly.
On the other hand, many elements of the story contradict facts that can be verified, and those that don’t contradict verifiable facts are of the sort that they cannot be tested at all. There is a clear motive for a hoax, and evidence of an intentional push on the part of Weber and the Lutzes to do just that. I can no more prove that the story is a complete hoax than I can prove that there is not a teapot in independent orbit around the sun. However, if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, well…
In fact, even among those who firmly believe in hauntings and who investigate these matters, there seems to be a growing consensus that this story is a hoax. For most of these folks, the most interesting thing about the story is that something as flimsy as this has gotten the attention of the nation in the way that it has.
While it is sometimes true that those who are skeptical of something unusual are simply refusing to accept it because it doesn’t fit their world view, the facts of this case are pretty clear, and those who continue to espouse the “true haunting” account after sifting through the information that is widely available can be fairly said to be the closed-minded ones here.
To my mind, the most interesting thing about this story is not the alleged haunting, but the way in which stories spread through the media took on a life of their own and became "established fact" in the minds of many people regardless of what the true facts of the case were. In a purely logical/rhetorical sense, this is no different from how a particular political party's views become "obvious facts" for the party faithful despite evidence to the contrary, or how other news events become twisted in the public mind. The main difference is that this sotry is generally treated as nothing more than a "scary story", and as such belief in it is pretty harmless. However, it's good to keep in mind that the same things that got many people to believe in this rather obvious hoax also get people to believe things that can have a much bigger effect on their lives.
Personal Account: No, I don’t have personal experience with the house, and I have never been to Amityville. However, as a kid, my older sister loved horror movies, and I hated them. To be more specific, I was terrified of the movies.
On day, she and I were at home alone. Our parents had rented some movies for us – I don’t remember what I had, but she had Amityville 3 (AKA Amytiville 3-D , part of the early-80’s 3-D fad). She put the movie on, and seemed to enjoy it. I, on the other hand, cowered in my room, waiting for the movie to be over, occasionally slipping out to see what horrors were unfolding onscreen (these movies terrified me, but also kinda’ fascinated me), and what I saw when I ventured out left me feeling very frightened and disturbed.
Fast forward two decades, and I am now in my late 20’s, and have made my dark pact with Jabootu, demon prince of crappy movies. Amityville 3 is on the Sci-Fi channel, so of course I have to sit down and watch it. And, wow, it was bad. I mean, really terrible, not scary or creepy in the least, and nearly unwatchable due to poor performances and even worse writing.
All I could think as I turned off the television towards the middle was “THAT scared me? The only thing scary about this piece of cinematic offal is that someone was stupid enough to think that it would be a good idea to waste money making it!”
SOURCES: Internet , Magazine, Internet , Published Book , Internet , Internet , Snopes
In 1975, George and Kathy Lutz bought and moved into the house with their children, but they stayed less than a month. After they left, they had a litany of eerie to terrifying encounters to recount. It started small, with objects moving, and sounds without sources, but eventually moved on to much larger and more menacing manifestations. George Lutz heard a phantom brass band marching through the house, the walls began to “bleed” a viscous slime, and the family began to see apparitions of ghostly people.
After a time, the manifestations went from ghostly to demonic. The family reported seeing a devil-like figure with glowing red eyes peering into the windows of their house. The youngest daughter had an imaginary friend named “Jodie” who she reported as looking like a cross between a devil and a pig. One day, after seeing the demonic figure peeking into the windows, George and Kathy found cloven hoofmarks in the snow outside of the house. George began to become violently angry, out of character for him. And clouds of flies would appear out of nowhere even on the coldest of days. A priest came to the house to perform and exorcism, and was told by a disembodied voice to “get out!” The priest was then followed back to the church by a menacing specter, and suffered from a number of different physical ailments.
The final straw came when a mysterious and unseen force began to rip doors and windows out of the walls, and the Lutz family fled in terror.
After they had left, the George and Kathy contacted Ed and Lorraine Warren, as well as the local television station, and asked them to investigate. The Warrens were considered by many to be the pre-eminent paranormal investigators of the day (but see commentary below), Lorraine was a psychic and Ed was a demonologist. The entered the house, took photos, looked about, and made careful notes of what they saw and, in the case of Lorraine, her impressions as a psychic. They concluded that evidence indicated that the family had left suddenly (for example, the fridge was stocked with food, not what you would expect if the family had planned on leaving), and that the house was definitely possessed by a demonic entity.
Further research showed that the ground on which the house was built was thought to be the home of evil spirits by the local Native American tribe, and prior to the colonization of the area by whites, this location was used as a dumping ground for the insane and diseased of the tribe.
And from there, the rest is history. Jay Anson wrote a book, chronicling the experiences of the Lutz family, and the book was made into a hit movie, which spawned numerous sequels that weren’t even claimed to be based on actual events (my favorite for sheer silliness has to be Amityville Dollhouse).
And with that, the true story of a real haunted house became known to the public, and the skeptics predictably refused to believe what was obvious right in front of them.
Commentary: What is written above is the story that most of the public knows, whether from Jay Anson’s book, from the movies, or from the fact that this story has been a big part of our pop culture for the last 30 years. And the story has many firm believers. In preparing for this entry, I came across numerous websites, essays, and articles in which supporters of the Lutz’s version of events rant about the “faithless” closed-minded skeptics who refuse to see what is in front of their face if it doesn’t jive with their pre-conceived ideas of how the world works.
But when you look into the story more, the truth is rather different than the commonly believed version of events.
For starters, William Weber, the defense attorney for Ronald DeFeo Jr., had contact with the George and Kathy Lutz, and even sued them for non-compliance on a book agreement that he had with them. Over time, a story came out that the Lutzes and Weber developed the haunted house story over a few bottles of wine in order to provide Weber with something to use to persuade a jury in a hoped-for new trial for DeFeo (remember, he doesn’t have to scientifically prove that ghosts or demons exist, just persuade a jury), and to allow the Lutzes something that they might be able to use (or sell in the form of books) in order to get out from under a crippling mortgage.
In addition, many of the details just didn’t work out. There are conflicting reports of how long the Lutzes stayed in the home, there are reports from neighbors that the night after they left “for good” they were back to hold a yard sale, there was no snow on the ground on the days when the cloven-hoof prints were said to be in the snow, and all of the original hardware was present and intact on the doors and windows that had allegedly been torn apart. Also, the police were never actually called, contrary to claims made by the Lutzes. Oh, and the priest who had attempted the exorcism? He says it never happened. And many of the elements that made it into Anson’s book seem to have been lifted from the film The Exorcist, which was quite the sensation at the time.
None of the subsequent owners or tenants of the house have had any supernatural experiences (though many have reported trouble with tourists coming to see the house (the house address has even been changed and the windows remodeled to hide from would-be curiosity seekers), a rather strange lack of behavior for a home supposedly ruled by diabolical forces.
What of the Warrens? While they were certainly a popular resource for those wishing to investigate the paranormal, and had a level of celebrity themselves, their methods were generally riddled with problems, and not reliable. In general, tracking down gaps in their logic and holes in their work has not proven difficult even for firm believers in the paranormal, and has proven very easy for those who question the existence of the paranormal.
In fact, the Warrens weren’t even the first investigators contacted by George and Kathy. That would be Stephen Kaplan of the Parapsychology Institute of America, who told the Lutzes that he’d be happy to look into the matter, but that if the story was a hoax, he would report it as such. He never heard back from George or Kathy.
And what of the claim that the house was built on a place of evil that had been used to house the sick and insane? Well, this seems to be an interesting riff on the “built on an Indian burial ground” chestnut that gets kicked around a lot. This part especially interests me because I am, by both training and occupation, an anthropological archaeologist and I work in North America – in other words, this is my turf. There certainly are areas that were considered “evil” or at least unwelcoming by the native peoples of the Americas, but there is no evidence that this location was one of them. And while it is not uncommon in many cultures to isolate the sick, there is little indication that this happened here. Moreover, what of the insane? The separation of the insane into separate “asylum” areas is not uncommon across the world, but neither is it necessarily the norm, and those asylum areas usually have things to keep the insane in – what I like to call “walls” – and there is no evidence of such a thing at this location. In other words, this part of the story appears to be complete fiction that takes advantage of the fact that most people have such a poor understanding of how the Native Americans lived that such a story sounds plausible to everyone except for actual Native Americans and anthropologists – who all regard the story as nonsense.
So, at the very best, being as charitable as possible to George and Kathy Lutz, a fair-minded person would have to conclude that whatever actually happened at the house, the story became heavily embellished afterwards, and the media circus that ensued pushed people to become more entrenched in positions that they took publicly.
On the other hand, many elements of the story contradict facts that can be verified, and those that don’t contradict verifiable facts are of the sort that they cannot be tested at all. There is a clear motive for a hoax, and evidence of an intentional push on the part of Weber and the Lutzes to do just that. I can no more prove that the story is a complete hoax than I can prove that there is not a teapot in independent orbit around the sun. However, if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, well…
In fact, even among those who firmly believe in hauntings and who investigate these matters, there seems to be a growing consensus that this story is a hoax. For most of these folks, the most interesting thing about the story is that something as flimsy as this has gotten the attention of the nation in the way that it has.
While it is sometimes true that those who are skeptical of something unusual are simply refusing to accept it because it doesn’t fit their world view, the facts of this case are pretty clear, and those who continue to espouse the “true haunting” account after sifting through the information that is widely available can be fairly said to be the closed-minded ones here.
To my mind, the most interesting thing about this story is not the alleged haunting, but the way in which stories spread through the media took on a life of their own and became "established fact" in the minds of many people regardless of what the true facts of the case were. In a purely logical/rhetorical sense, this is no different from how a particular political party's views become "obvious facts" for the party faithful despite evidence to the contrary, or how other news events become twisted in the public mind. The main difference is that this sotry is generally treated as nothing more than a "scary story", and as such belief in it is pretty harmless. However, it's good to keep in mind that the same things that got many people to believe in this rather obvious hoax also get people to believe things that can have a much bigger effect on their lives.
Personal Account: No, I don’t have personal experience with the house, and I have never been to Amityville. However, as a kid, my older sister loved horror movies, and I hated them. To be more specific, I was terrified of the movies.
On day, she and I were at home alone. Our parents had rented some movies for us – I don’t remember what I had, but she had Amityville 3 (AKA Amytiville 3-D , part of the early-80’s 3-D fad). She put the movie on, and seemed to enjoy it. I, on the other hand, cowered in my room, waiting for the movie to be over, occasionally slipping out to see what horrors were unfolding onscreen (these movies terrified me, but also kinda’ fascinated me), and what I saw when I ventured out left me feeling very frightened and disturbed.
Fast forward two decades, and I am now in my late 20’s, and have made my dark pact with Jabootu, demon prince of crappy movies. Amityville 3 is on the Sci-Fi channel, so of course I have to sit down and watch it. And, wow, it was bad. I mean, really terrible, not scary or creepy in the least, and nearly unwatchable due to poor performances and even worse writing.
All I could think as I turned off the television towards the middle was “THAT scared me? The only thing scary about this piece of cinematic offal is that someone was stupid enough to think that it would be a good idea to waste money making it!”
SOURCES: Internet , Magazine, Internet , Published Book , Internet , Internet , Snopes
Sunday, April 5, 2009
Ouija Boards
When I was a teenager, some friends of mine who went to my church started playing with a Ouija board. The girls began to get something, the pointer was moving on its own. They asked if it was good or evil, and it spelled out E-V-I-L, and they got scared. One of them asked what it’s name was, and a red ‘S’-shaped rash appeared on each of her wrists, the ‘S’ standing for ‘Satan’ you know. They called the pastor over right away, and he performed an exorcism on the house.
Commentary: This version of the story, with the red “S” shaped rash, was told to me by a neighbor when I was a kid. The story was told multiple times, sometimes with more embellishment than others (sometimes the board spelled out S-A-T-A-N, sometimes it simply went to “S”, and sometimes with the rash on the wrists. I always asked if she was present for the event, and she always said no. When I entered high school, I began to realize that similar stories were a dime a dozen, and that the stories were primarily told either by kids trying to freak each other out, or by a particular type of Protestant trying to warn others of either the existence of Satan or their perceived need for others to convert to their brand of Christianity. In other versions of this story, those told by non-Christians or Christians simply telling a scary story and not trying to use it as a conversion tool, the evil force might be the spirit of a dead killer, an unknown but malevolent spirit, or any number of other things, not necessarilly Satan.
In other words, I began to realize that this story was an urban legend – complete with the classic “this happened to a friend” line at the beginning (the only times I have heard it told as a first-hand account have been on anonymous internet sites). The story seems to have two sources – the first being the distrust of “the occult” by many religious groups of the Judeo-Christian traditions, where anything “magical” that isn’t seen as being strictly of the “godly” mold must be satanic (I have even seen this pushed farther, where anything that doesn’t directly support Christianity, whether supernatural or mundane, is seen as satanic). Unlike other supernatural stories popular among this particular group, the Ouija Board stories are, in my experience, often independent of the teller as victim or hero in “spiritual warfare”, and seem to be told in equal parts as a lesson and just to tell a good creepy story.
The other source of the story seems to be the campfire story tradition – the desire to tell stories that are allegedly true not to teach a lesson or keep someone in line, but simply to have fun with a scary story. In this sense, these stories often fuel a type of legend tripping in that they inspire young people to play at contacting dangerous forces through an item that is really just a rather odd toy and remnant of a very weird period in history . Some enterprising (and pranksterish) individuals that I have met have even figured out ways to conceal magnets in order to fool other people into thinking that they have contacted an entity more malevolent than a teenager with a mischievous streak.
Regardless, the Ouija Board makes for one of the most enduring elements of many a creepy ghost story, and as such is absolutely worthy of mention.
A few more, similar stories can be found here, here, and here.
SOURCES: Personal Account, Urban Legend
Pursuing Demon
“You don’t believe in demons? You’re being a fool! I know that demons are real. I was out at Robert’s house one day. I knew it was time to go, so I got on my bike and started to ride home. After a little while, I felt something that was just wrong. I felt this really intense cold behind me, and I looked around and saw a ball of…just blackness coming after me. I knew it was evil, I could feel it, and I knew I had to get away. I rode as fast as I could, all the way home, knowing that this thing was chasing me. I finally got home, and when I looked, it was gone. THAT is how I know that demons are real!”
Commentary: This is probably one of the first “personal account” stories that I collected, back when I was in high school. I listened as one of the other students in my electronics class told this story to another student who had begun to be open about his skepticism of supernatural claims. At the time, I dismissed the story as nonsense, but I see it somewhat differently now.
Was this kid making the story up, or did he have an experience that he couldn’t understand or explain (whether or not someone else might be able to understand or explain it)? I don’t know, but that’s not what interests me about this story. What interests me is how this story was used as a social tool.
In order to understand what interests me about this story, I have to give you a bit of background information. This kid, we’ll call him Joseph, was a member of an Evangelical Christian church that firmly believed in the reality of “spiritual warfare” – the idea that heavenly and diabolic forces were locked in combat and that humans were playing a rule in a real and bloody war through their choices and politics.
I heard Joseph tell this story under two circumstances – when he was trying to sway someone over to Christianity, or when he was talking to other members of his church. In the first case, the use of the tool was clear- it was intended to persuade someone that they were in danger and only Joseph’s group could save them from that danger. Joseph’s target on that day didn’t buy it, but nonetheless, it was pretty clear what Joseph was trying to do.
The other time that I heard this and similar stories was when Joseph and other members of his church had gathered together. They would trade “spiritual warfare” stories – most of which were much milder, those sorts of things that could easily be chalked up to an overactive imagination (“I was in my room reading a book that I knew I wasn’t supposed to be reading, when I felt a cold presence, and it frightened me, so I prayed….”). Joseph’s, however, was not alone in its more explicit nature – actually seeing the demon, having to escape, etc. These stories seemed to serve both for social bonding, they were stories that everyone told to frighten or excite each other and bring the group closer together. These stories were also as a sort of one-upsmanship, this particular group (and similar ones that I have encountered since then) viewed encounters with demons as a badge of honor – something that demonstrates how the teller encountered and defeated a demon, a religious variation on “big fish” stories.
SOURCES: Personal Account
Commentary: This is probably one of the first “personal account” stories that I collected, back when I was in high school. I listened as one of the other students in my electronics class told this story to another student who had begun to be open about his skepticism of supernatural claims. At the time, I dismissed the story as nonsense, but I see it somewhat differently now.
Was this kid making the story up, or did he have an experience that he couldn’t understand or explain (whether or not someone else might be able to understand or explain it)? I don’t know, but that’s not what interests me about this story. What interests me is how this story was used as a social tool.
In order to understand what interests me about this story, I have to give you a bit of background information. This kid, we’ll call him Joseph, was a member of an Evangelical Christian church that firmly believed in the reality of “spiritual warfare” – the idea that heavenly and diabolic forces were locked in combat and that humans were playing a rule in a real and bloody war through their choices and politics.
I heard Joseph tell this story under two circumstances – when he was trying to sway someone over to Christianity, or when he was talking to other members of his church. In the first case, the use of the tool was clear- it was intended to persuade someone that they were in danger and only Joseph’s group could save them from that danger. Joseph’s target on that day didn’t buy it, but nonetheless, it was pretty clear what Joseph was trying to do.
The other time that I heard this and similar stories was when Joseph and other members of his church had gathered together. They would trade “spiritual warfare” stories – most of which were much milder, those sorts of things that could easily be chalked up to an overactive imagination (“I was in my room reading a book that I knew I wasn’t supposed to be reading, when I felt a cold presence, and it frightened me, so I prayed….”). Joseph’s, however, was not alone in its more explicit nature – actually seeing the demon, having to escape, etc. These stories seemed to serve both for social bonding, they were stories that everyone told to frighten or excite each other and bring the group closer together. These stories were also as a sort of one-upsmanship, this particular group (and similar ones that I have encountered since then) viewed encounters with demons as a badge of honor – something that demonstrates how the teller encountered and defeated a demon, a religious variation on “big fish” stories.
SOURCES: Personal Account
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