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Heather Thomas April 23, 2013 Folklore Collection

Thomas Carter, Story His Mother Told Him of an Experience she had Around the Age of 20:

My mother, now, said that before she was married, she was getting ready to marry some guy who had asked her to marry him, and she was considering it. One night she woke up—she said she woke up— at night, and sat up in her bed, and her mother’s ghost was standing at the foot of the bed. She said, “don’t marry him, you’ll be sorry”. So, she didn’t. Two years later, the guy she had been asked to marry, he died of tuberculosis.

My grandfather, Thomas Carter is 77. He is a quiet yet clever person who enjoys humor, history, and trains. He lives in an area known locally as Hunton—a small portion of Henrico County, Virginia that sits on the border to Hanover along the Chickahominy River. He was born in a house located about five miles away from where he lives now and can even point out the exact location of that house. When my grandfather was two years old, his elder brother drowned in the Chickahominy, leaving his mother rather protective of him. Grandpa heard this story from his mother sometime during his childhood. Although unsure of exactly when his mother recounted the tale, he does “remember hearing about it” when he was young. My grandfather feels that his most significant life experience is his marriage to my grandmother, a marriage that reaches its 57th year in the fall. My Thomas 2 grandmother shares this sentiment and explains, “We married young, had children. People told us our marriage wasn’t going to work out—because we weren’t going to work. Our religions were different and that was an issue then—he was a Catholic and I was a Baptist.” This story is prominent in his memory because he believes in ghosts and enjoys reading about them; it is a story not too unlike those in his books. He is the person I receive many of my historical and ghost story collections from. The story also stands out to him because he believes in ghosts: There’re too many unanswered questions as far as ghosts are concerned for me to say, they’re not ghosts. There’s too many things that go on that can’t be explained away. All the stories I’ve read, things happen, rocking chairs rock back and forth and there’ s no apparent reason for it. There is a great deal of skepticism surrounding ghosts stories—around anything paranormal in the slightest. Many people cannot reconcile the existence of ghosts with the world logically; others use logic to affirm the existence of said entities. The spirit world receives attention as a place of knowledge, especially snippets of the future. The most common explanation for this is that since they are not part of this world, spirits can “see” beyond the limits of the present. They are entities with information that is trustworthy and valid. This story is important to my grandfather because of his interest in ghosts and ghost stories. Knowing someone intimately who saw a ghost likely reassures his belief. Neither of my grandparents knows much about their families or family tradition; their parents were not willing or open to sharing information or family stories. This story acts as a pathway connecting my grandfather to his great grandmother—who he met. Thomas 3

Additionally, it connects him to an intimate moment of decision in his mother’s life. The story allows him to feel close to The story connects marriage and tragedy, and alludes to a kind of assurance. Should there be some impending crisis related to his future, it is reassuring to know there was someone who would warn the family. Unconsciously, the lack of a warning prior to and throughout the marriage suggests that my grandparents’ relationship is proper and meant to be, despite doubt from the people around them. This validates their relationship and its ability to endure.

The story itself is quite the coincidence if it is true—be the warning a ghost, dream, or my great grandmother’s active opposition to a marriage to this man. The story addresses the fear of Tuberculosis in the 1950s and ‘60s; Tuberculosis was a considerable threat to the health and happiness of everyone. Tuberculosis, the White Plague “ was one of the leading causes of death in the United States in the early twentieth century” (Sucre). The fear that accompanies a disease with the reputation and potential to cause so much damage does not sink to the background quickly; rather it lingers in the public unconscious. Although far from eliminated today—the disease currently rising due to decreased immune health in those with HIV infections—there are medicines and vaccines that can treat the disease (Ioachimescu and Tomford).

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Lauren Colie: Timothy the Leprechaun

On St. Patrick's Day, before I hit puberty, my mom told me about a leprechaun that haunts our family. His name is Timothy, and he killed my great-aunt. Our Irish heritage is pretty direct; our Irish last name is Foley, and comes complete with a shield and a bunch of ill- tempered relatives. We are currently estranged from this side of the family, but my mom had heard this story growing up.

Supposedly, my great aunt (whose name I always forget) was climbing the stone steps to her cathedral (she was one of those hyper- religious Catholics). On the way up, she saw a leprechaun. Whether he just scared her into falling down the steps, or he pushed her, depends on how drunk the storyteller is. Either way, she died. Anytime something peculiar happens at home - especially before my sister got kittens - my mom tells us to "watch out for Timothy”, because he's coming to get us.

Lauren is 20 years old and studies journalism at VCU. She was born in Richmond “because they had a good program for high-risk pregnancies” and lives in Stafford County, “near the border with Fauquier county, a rural farming community”. She recalls hearing the tale of Timothy the Leprechaun when she was 11 at a gathering on St. Patrick’s Day. “I heard this story on St. Patrick's day, sitting at the bar in our living room, listening to adults converse around me while I sipped Sprite and picked the tomato chunks out of tomato, basil and feta salad.”

Lauren enjoys gardens, editing, and her Irish heritage. Lauren’s family consists of people who prescribe to a variety of religions, so she often Thomas 5 feels uncomfortable around extremely religious places/functions. She states that:

Churches make me uncomfortable, and have made me cry more than once. I respect old cathedrals, but chose not to go take a tour of one while on vacation in Germany. I sat outside in the garden while my grandma and great-aunt toured the inside.

This story stands out to her because it speaks to her discomfort with religion and the impression it left is thoroughly part of her life to this day:

I mean, it's creepy. I'm not Christian, I don't believe in fairies and I think that side of the family is full of lunatics. But my mom says it often enough that I keep my closet door CLOSED at all times. I can hear the difference in air pressure of when it is and isn't open, and I can't sleep with it open. Not that I believe Timothy actually is coming to get me.

Lauren believes that the story is cautionary on a subliminal level. It is not a deterrent outright but lingers on in one’s memory to dissuade certain behaviors:

I think stories are powerful, especially when used as my mom does. She didn't really use it as a teaching tool; I think she tells us for entertainment, and to leave the option open that maybe, just maybe, it's not absurd to believe my great-aunt didn't die just because she was clumsy. Thomas 6

The tale is intriguing for several reasons. First, use of the leprechaun as a harbinger of death—which Lauren brings up on occasion, as a figure that follows her family, with the Great Aunt’s death as the best-known instance of his antics—seems odd. One of the earliest works mentioning the leprechaun portrays them as trickster figures connected to the water (Matthews and Matthews 292). This tradition of the creature eventually flows into a derivation that is more docile. The generic leprechaun that serves as the traditional Irish cliché is not a cause for concern; leprechauns are shoemakers (Illes 628). The truly evil persona for the creature may stem from the Leprechaun movies of the 1990s. Interestingly, in the film, the leprechaun kills the woman by shoving her down a set of stairs (http://www.imdb.com). The leprechaun’s name, Timothy, is ironic considering the religious sentiments of the Great Aunt and the family in general. Timothy comes from timotheos, meaning “honoring god”, so, theoretically the leprechaun murdered the Christian of the family on behalf of God (http://www.etymonline.com). The smiting of the believer around a temple of her faith sends a message, associating religion with danger. This validates the lack of Christian belief in later generations; it is in fact, dangerous to be around churches at all.

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Sarah Morley: The Legend of of Fairfax

In the 1970s, there were a number of reports of a man in a white bunny suit terrorizing children and causing property damage—with an axe. One of the most famous instances of a Bunny Man encounter was a couple sitting in their car. Bunny Man jumped onto the hood and started harassing them, swinging his axe and damaging the car (the hood). He lived under, or was seen under, a bridge that is now known as a “Bunny Man Bridge”, where supposedly one can see him amongst the corpses of rabbits hanging on Halloween.

Sarah is 18 and an Art Foundation Student from Stafford, Virginia. Her “nuclear family” consists of her, her parents and her brother. She has an interest in urban legends and occasionally researches them. In high school, she encountered this tale online and found the proximity of the incident enticing: I’m really interested in scary stories and urban legends. While researching one, I stumbled upon one that I was surprised to find took place not far from where I lived. I asked other people if they had heard about Bunny Man—that’s how I learned that it was a legend, a local legend, that many people already knew. The story serving as the basis for the horror film Donnie Darko set in “Middlesex, Virginia” further reinforces her continued interest. “Donnie Darko’s my favorite movie. That its basis was so close to home—I thought it was interesting”. Sarah holds the tale in a lighthearted regard, feeling it is more a story than anything with historical precedence. As to the story’s purpose or origin, Sarah feels that it is just a kind of fun rumor: “It was Thomas 8 probably some drunken Halloween escapade that got passed around like a game of broken telephone.” Sarah’s version of the Bunny Man involves a rather docile Bunny Man; the ones heard by Jessica Kusuma from her peers were more violent, with the Bunny man harming or killing locals, and his bridge was a threatening place from which people do not return. The Bunny Man is a tale told in much of Northern Virginia, however the Bunny Man Bridge is in Fairfax County. Brian Conley, Historian and Archivist of the Fairfax County Public Library, finds the tale of the Bunny Man particularly enticing and writes of his extensive research on the subject in an essay, “The Bunny Man Unmasked:The Real Life Origins of an ” (Conley 1). He concludes that there is no historical basis for the Bunny Man, despite rumors otherwise (Conley 2). Bunny Man may be a cautionary tale, meant to scare people, to dissuade them against being alone at night in the Fairfax area. It is also an explanatory tale, providing a simple and dismissive rationalization as to why there is unexplained property damage in certain areas—it is just a crazy man in a bunny costume, no need to worry. There is a sense of irony, that the perpetrator wears a “white bunny suit”, a thing generally reserved for the Easter Bunny, who is a benevolent and cheerful figure. The tale of the Bunny Man speaks to a sentiment of needless destruction and is a story of a misfit. The Bunny Man’s reputation and guise isolates him from the rest of the population, someone who goes around dressed as a” bunny” is not exactly normal by convention. Additionally, the Bunny Man “kills his own” in a way, hanging rabbits from trees. There’s an odd differentiation here, between “bunnies” and “rabbits” that makes the Bunny Man seem more eccentric—due to the high contrast between the Thomas 9 innocent/docile word, “bunny” and the more common term for the animal, “rabbit”. This suggests that the Bunny Man story is for children specifically. The Bunny Man is a figure from childhood that can haunt a person through puberty and into adulthood. He is a figure from the imagination that pushes people to mature in a way. He is someone who refuses to grow up. This refusal leads the community to ostracize him and declare him “insane” because of it.

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Michael Musatow: Rappahannock Serpent

In the Rappahannock River there is a kind of sea serpent that was trapped by the dam. It’s not like the Loch Ness Monster and, like, huge. It’s supposed to be 7 to 10 feet long and a foot thick, like a giant snake, but with ridges on it. When the dam broke, well, when they busted the dam, it apparently escaped. It woke it up and it escaped and goes up and down the river. It hasn’t attacked anyone, but it has attacked fish. So, people will find fish or frogs half-eaten, just floating on the river or birds floating down the river, because he’ll just take just one bite out of all these different animals. And one of my friends has a photograph of it. It’s one of those really blurry photographs like they have of bigfoot. You look and it’s blurry and it could be like a giant stick or it could be, you know, the tail of this thing with little spikes on the end. It’s one of those weird little quirks that makes you almost want to believe.

Michael Musatow is 18. He is ambitious, athletic, open, and loves theater and fashion. Michael grew up in Stafford County, Virginia near Fredericksburg with his parents and sister. Michael remembers hearing the story around the age of 10, from his grandfather, and notes its recent resurgence: “When they blew up the dam—I heard about it again. That was 2 years ago.” Supposedly the deconstruction of the dam woke the creature again and let it loose to traverse the river more freely. This story is appealing to Michael because, “because it’s my hometown. I could you know get to the Rappahannock in like 10 minutes” and because it was Thomas 11 originally told to him by his grandfather. Despite a kind of subtle hope for something of the other to be real in the world, Michael has few illusions and feels that the story is a cautionary tale, meant to “scare kids and people so they don’t swim in that part of the river. There are rapids and it’s dangerous to swim.” Michael’s interpretation is insightful and speaks to his practicality. There may be more to the story than mere caution. A monster living in water is a common theme stemming perhaps from a tradition of sea monsters. Almost everyone knows about the Nessie, the Loch Ness Monster, some kind of ancient dinosaur-like creature that resides in the Loch. There is a lesser known but similar water creature in the United States, Champ of Lake Champlain. Virginia’s Chesapeake Bay even has its own monster, Chessie. Chessie is a serpent similar to Michael’s description of the Rapahhanock River monster (http://animal.discovery.com). The popularity of these tales likely stems from the “unknown” aspect of large water bodies and from a desire to raise the importance or tourism of an area. It is nearly impossible in some respects, to see and know everything that goes on in deep bodies of water, so it is difficult to disprove the idea that something could inhabit the water unknown to humans. Having some creature in the water can be used to explain certain occurrences or discrepancies—such as the appearance of partially eaten animal corpses. Having a local “legendary monster” also boosts the self esteem of a community, creating a sense of importance or uniqueness for the area. It can, if it becomes a popular tale, boost tourism as the curious hope to catch a glimpse of the infamous resident. The nature of the creature, its serpentine form, speaks to an underlying fear of snakes. Snakes truly frighten some people. The Thomas 12

Rappahannock area has at least twenty species of snakes, with several known species adept at swimming, including the Northern Water Snake and the infamous Water Moccasin (http://www.riverfriends.org/).

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Michael Musatow: Wolves of Fredericksburg

Behind our house, there is a creek and when you go down into the creek there’s a ledge. From the ledge you can, like, grab onto a bunch of roots and you can climb down. Once you get down there’s a couple of inches of water. There are all these stumps that have been chopped down, overturned. And there’s something that my neighbor—her family’s been in Fredericksburg since the early to mid-1700s, so this story’s been passed down through the generations—and I was a kid she would tell us this. In the woods, apparently, there was a family of wolves that would live— sort of live—in these stump dens. So when my sister and my friends and I went exploring, we saw— we were little but—they were dog footprints that were big, so we thought they were wolf prints. And still every once in a while a weird deer will just show up in the woods, like back in the woods area, half chewed up. And then sometimes a hunter that will be there who will hear something and you’ll hear a gunshot and they’ll come back up. I remember a couple of years ago, a boy, a little boy with his dad, came up and he was freaked out because he, apparently, the boy, saw the wolf figure that looked like this beast kind of thing, but the dad only heard it and shot at it. It’s one of those things where no one has seen it, but there’s all these footprints and you see homes and wonder “why do these exist?”. People just talk about it in Fredericksburg.

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Michael first heard this story around the age of 6, when he was exploring the woods with the “neighborhood gang.” The story was told to him by a neighbor and was shared amongst the local community as a local legend. Michael finds the wolves more enchanting a tale then a fearful one but acknowledges that it could be a very scary encounter: Well I think it’s cool because it hasn’t affected me adversely—it hasn’t hurt me. As soon as I see it in real life, like I was face-to-face, not just hearing a story, but face-to-face with this wolf, it would be like a scary thing, because it’s no longer a story that people tell. It’s a wolf in your face. It’s cool. There’s like a lot of forest area behind my house so where we usually travel by the creek, there’s a waterfall and a rock den there. We never see things, like, ourselves, but we see thing different things broken, don’t know if its other kids or if its an animal that scratched up the tree. We do have bears around our house, so is it a bear or a wolf or something else entirely? Michael believes that this tale was meant to be cautionary but has lost its touch in modernity, I wanna say it’s the same thing, meant to scare us. But it just made us more curious. But, back in the 1700s, if someone said that there are wolves—they could eat you—the little kids would be more likely to not go or would freak out and leave if they heard something there. I feel like now we’re just desensitized to a lot of things. The wolf story is a terrestrial version of the “Rappahannock Serpent” story—meant to inspire a sense of awe and importance to the area Thomas 15 while providing a deterrent to overly adventurous behavior. The tale also provides for a fun explanation for the movement of various objects in the woods. A large part of the story is its ability to create a community. Knowing the tale is to be part of the group. Wolves no longer exist in Virginia—unless one includes the coyote population that is becoming mixed with the wolf genetically—settlers early in the country’s history drove them out. Thought to prey on local livestock and to be inherently evil, the wolf is, traditionally, an object of fear. It is ironic that something humans so desperately attempt to drive out manages to live on. They are an element of the wild, of nature, that humans cannot control or rid themselves. The wolves represent nature at its best, fierce and protective, with familial systems and intelligence to rival humans to some degree. They symbolize the lack of control people have in life. However, these wolves do not hurt people, or really even come into contact with them, they exist on the fringe, ever present but invisible.

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Jessica Kusuma: Sweet Treats

My dad and his siblings really like to eat sweet stuff, especially candy. In Indonesia, there’s a lot of cheap stuff, that’s sweet but not really good candy. It’s just purchased a lot because of the price, even though it’s really bad for you. Grandma didn’t like that kind of stuff at all. One day, a street vendor with cart came rolling by house—it’s the equivalent of the ice cream truck coming through the neighborhood here, the cart’s just easier and cheaper to manage than a refrigerate truck. My father and his siblings were begging Grandma to buy some. She kept refusing, telling them no. They kept nagging her until she finally relented. She went outside, bought the entire cart, and brought it all in the house. She said “Here you go, but you can’t leave the room ‘til it’s all gone, ‘til you eat every single last piece”. At first, they were all really excited about the candy—it was what they had wanted. But there was a lot of candy. Eventually they became really sick—had sour stomachs. She didn’t let them stop and forced them to eat everything. They never asked her to buy her candy for them again.

Jessica, age 20, is Communication Arts major. She was born in and grew up in Northern Virginia. She lives with her father, mother and brother. Jessica considers her life to be fairly normal, rather uneventful, although she notes that she was homeschooled. Jessica has a talent for drawing, swimming, and baking. She enjoys her cultural heritage and family; she uses them thematically within her work given the opportunity. Jessica first remembers hearing the story when she was 12. Thomas 17

The tales stand out because, “they talk about my family and my father’s life.” They are a part of her inherited culture experience. Jessica treasures her heritage and her family, often incorporating aspects of them into her work. This tale provides a warning against greed and iterates the popular sentiment “mother knows best”. The explanations included in the story show the correlations between life in Indonesia and life in America. The tale demonstrates that despite differences, most people share similar experiences, such as craving the sweets carried house-to-house by a vendor. These experiences allow a greater connection to form between her and her father and grandmother. It shows that her father understands the kinds of desires a child has, sharing them in his youth. The story tells The ease at which she incorporated explanatory details—such as the candy man being like the ice cream man—show that the tale is meant to a degree to be a behavioral deterrent. It suggests that sometimes its best to just accept rules, or suffer the consequences, which may involve permanently ruining the experience for oneself. The tale likely serves to curb similar endless ranting and begging from Jessica and her brother.

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Jessica Kusuma: Do You Love Me?

A mom and her daughter lived at the top of an eleven-story apartment building with a ton of stairs—there were no elevators. So, whenever they had to go somewhere they had to go up or down all eleven flights of stairs. The daughter, she was young, she would ask her mom “Do you love me?” “Do you think I’m pretty?” Her mom would answer, “Yes, I love you”. “Yes, I think you’re very pretty”. The daughter would ask this set of questions every step they took. “Do you love me?” “Do you think I’m pretty?” After a while, it began to annoy the mom. One day, the mom was so fed up that she pushed daughter to make her to stop asking. The girl fell all the way down the stairs and died. Eventually, the mom had a second daughter. She grew up and when she was around the same age, she did the same thing, asking, “Do you love me?” “Do you think I’m pretty?” The mother gave her the same response she’d given the last daughter. “Yes I love you”. “Yes, I think you’re very pretty.” After a while, the daughter stopped and looked at the mom and said, “Then why did you kill me last time?”

Jessica first heard this tale when she was about 8 years old. It was being passed around by at the pool by a “group of about 8 girls of about the same age as me during the summer”. At the pool, especially when swim team is involved, groups form, similar to school groups, although they tend to be a bit more varied, like a neighborhood group. The pool is a kind of cult during the summer. People are there every day and genuinely invest in the social interactions provided. Thomas 19

Jessica recalls this tale and others for practical reasons, “The tales and joke are easy to remember and tell; they require little elaboration and were repeated within my circle of friends numerous times.” The story is just a story for Jessica, “It’s just something that gets passed around generation by generation of middle schoolers”. This story seems to be a mix of a ghost story and an urban legend. This story is largely about human values and virtues. It is about the vanity of the child, the tendency of parents blindly reassure their children, the cost of impatience, and the fears of children and parents. The child wants to believe that she’s the center of attention and would be easy for a group of 8 year olds to relate to. She desire constant affirmation of her value as an object—her beauty—and as a person—her mother’s affection. The exasperated mother answers her constantly, humoring her rather than asking her to stop. The task of answering becomes so obnoxious she can not longer stand it and somewhat unintentionally kills her daughter. The story seems to warn against asking the same question, too often, repeatedly. Perhaps it is a deterrent to the ever-popular inquiry during a car ride, “are we there yet?” The story makes an odd statement about men, who aren’t present and don’t really matter, since the only time a man may have been involved was when the mother has another child “eventually” to replace the one lost. The replacement of the child serves as a reminder of the desire of the child to be unique and special to their parent. Here, the child is a kind of commodity, tolerated, thrown away and replaced when convenient. The ending holds a deterrent to this treatment of the child as an object, suggesting that such actions will haunt the mother for the rest of her life.

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Jessica Kusuma:

There was a girl with a dog. They were close and the dog would sleep under her bed. And sometimes when the girl went to sleep, she’d get scared. When she felt scared, she’d put her head under the bed and the dog would lick it to let her know everything was okay. One night she heard this dripping noise, and felt a little worried. She put her hand under the bed and felt it being licked so she was able to calm down, reassured that everything was okay. She fell back asleep. She woke up later that night and was thirsty. She went to the bathroom to get some water. She saw her dog was in bathtub, dead, and, on mirror, written in blood was: “ghosts can lick too”. This story was shared amongst the group of girls at Jessica’s pool as well. I found this story interesting because I had heard it before. For me, it came in the form of a campfire ghost story during a Girl Scout trip in the first grade. The variation I heard was more elaborate. The girl was often left home alone in her house and the dog was purchased to guard her. She loved the dog dearly. Her parents were going out and locked the door, warning her not to open it for anyone since there was an escaped prisoner on the loose. The parents were gone that evening and the girl became scared when she heard a sound, “drip, drip, drip”, coming from the bathroom. She let her hand be licked and went back to sleep. She woke up later and could still hear the “drip, drip, drip” from the bathroom. She went into the bathroom without turning on the light and turned the sink facets tight. She went back to her room, let the dog lick her hand and fell back asleep. She woke up a third time to the “drip, drip, drip”. She went to the Thomas 21 bathroom and turned on the lights, and saw her faithful dog dead in the bathtub, its blood dripping onto the floor. Terrified she turned around and saw “humans can lick too” written in blood in the mirror. It is interesting to note how the story changed from the generic version, listed in Brunvard’s Encyclopedia of Urban Legends (Brunvard 240). The presence and death of group of friends is not mentioned—likely because both were told within groups of girls who would not want to think of something so terrifyingly close to their situation. These variants speak to the child’s fear of being left alone at night. In this case, the tale undermines even the dog’s role as protector. These variations also serve as iterations of the “monster under the bed” motif. It plays on a child’s inherent fears of being alone at night. The story also points to a kind of contamination and to blind trust. It is perfectly fine when a dog licks your hand, but there is something very disturbing about a human licking your hand. The other person steals the identity of the dog, assuming its role of protector, although what his intentions are exactly are not apparent. The story highlights the notion of only trusting what you see with your eyes, since touch fools the girl. Jessica’s version is interesting; the culprit is not a human but a ghost, something that one wouldn’t anticipate having the ability to lick at all. I believe this variation sticks out to Jessica because of her Indonesian heritage. She’s mentioned that they’re very superstitious and truly believe in ghosts and curses, so this story could resonate with that aspect of her mind.

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Additional Stories with Minor Notes:

Barns Two of the people I interviewed mentioned being afraid of barns. I found it interesting that two people both had intimate connections with the horses residing in the barn but ended up finding the place to be very scary, especially at night. Jessica’s barn is supposedly haunted, but my grandmother’s was not. I could tell the fear of the barn bothered both to a degree. I’m not sure what really prompted this feeling but remember finding barns creepy myself. They felt hollow and empty to me, even when filled with animals. Perhaps they make people uneasy because they are relics of the past or because they hold with them a connotation of labor and timelessness. Doris Carter: Barn We lived on a farm. We had chickens and pigs and horses—I guess that was al—and I remember at where we had a bunch of barns and there was this one barn we used to play in. At night, I’d go visit the cousin down the road. I had to have been young ‘cause we didn’t have a television yet. Her family did so I’d go watch it with them. But I’d go down there and we sorta stuck together playing and doing stuff at night. You all didn’t play games and stuff like we did. I was scared to go by the barn to go back home in the dark. It was spooky at night. Spooky to go by the barn. I don’t know why I was scared of the barn. I used to jump our of the barn itself into the road. I used to be a tomboy, used to shoot a bb, used to wrestle and fight. My cousins were kinda scared of the horse—I was the only one of the cousins who wasn’t scared of the horse—I had to plow with the horse, feed the horse and they didn’t. Thomas 23

The horse sorta belonged to the three families; I don’t know who he actually belonged to. I had no reason to be scared of the barn or horse. I don’t know why I was scared of the barn itself. Maybe it was because of the programs we watched. We watched programs that scared us— Lights Out—I remember it came on Mondays.

Jessica Kusuma: Haunted Barn My aunt has this old horse barn. I liked it when I was younger. My aunt would let me ride the horses. The barn wasused as a hospital in civil war. Lots of soldiers died there. People, even those who didn’t know about its past, would go into the barn and hear stuff. Voices. Noises. Some have encountered more—there was one day, a guy was cleaning out stalls and felt someone tapping on his shoulder. He turned around and no one was there. It just became more and more ominous over time. Now people are too scared to go there.

Jessica Kusuma: Joke This joke makes plays on human curiosity and cruelty. The basic theme is keep your eyes to yourself, your nose out of other people’s business.

So, this guy’s walking by a wall and he hears someone yelling “twelve, twelve, twelve”. He stops and looks around for the person yelling. He doesn’t see anyone. He notices a hole in the wall about the size of a golf ball. He got closer and could hear that it was someone on the other side yelling out “twelve, twelve, twelve”. He was really curious as to what was going on to prompt the yelling, so he looked into hole, and got poked in the eye. He then heard “thirteen, thirteen, thirteen. Thomas 24

Bibliography

Brunvard, Jan. “Enclyclopedia of Urban Legends”. New York: W.W. Norton and Company. 2008. Conley, Brian. “The Bunny Man Unmasked: The Real Life Origins of an Urban Legend. http://www.fairfaxcounty.gov/library/branches/vr/bunny/ http://animal.discovery.com/tv-shows/lost-tapes/creatures/sea-monsters- chessie-chesapeake-bay-serpent.htm http://www.etymonline.com http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0107387/ http://www.riverfriends.org/Portals/0/Factbook.pdf Illes, Judika. Enclyclopedia of Spirits: The Ultimate Guide to the magic of Fairies, Genies, Demons, Ghosts, Gods & Goddesses. New York: HarperCollins Publishers. 2009. Ioachimescu, Octavian. J. Walton Tomford. “Tuberculosis”. http://www.clevelandclinicmeded.com/medicalpubs/diseasemanagem ent/infectious-disease/tuberculosis/ Matthews, John and Caitlín. The Element Enclyclopedia of Magical Creatures. China: Barnes and Nobles, Inc. 2008. Sucre, Richard. “The Great White Plague: The Culture of Death and the Tuberculosis Sanatorium. http://www.faculty.virginia.edu/blueridgesanatorium/death.htm

Thomas 25

Contract You must complete a copy of this contract for every out-of-class writing assignment. Please initial each entry, showing you have read and abided by the directive in the Tip Sheet. The standard deduction for mistakes in each category is 2 points; if you initial an element and still make mistakes , it’s 3 points off. Excessive errors, of course, may produce greater deductions. Failure to turn in and/or complete a contract is an automatic 5 points off, in addition to any deductions for the mechanical errors themselves. I, the undersigned, solemnly vow that I have tended to the very important technical matters discussed in the course reader’s Tip Sheet. I understand that my initials and signature are full warranty.

__ I avoid sweeping generalizations. __ My introduction includes a clear thesis statement. __ My introduction includes a clear OUTLINE or map of the paper. __ In the introduction, I identify the author(s) and title(s) of the work(s) I will discuss, and I spell their names correctly. __ After the initial mention, I refer to the author by his/her LAST name throughout. __ My conclusion offers not only a summary of my main points but also a “so what.” __ My “so what” is not a moral. __ I follow the guidelines for title treatment of “short pieces” and book-length works. __ I handle all citations according to the guidelines. __ I frame every quotation from the text in my own words. __ I have not plagiarized (and I know what plagiarism is). __ I use present tense. __ Passive voice is not used. I do NOT use passive voice. __ I follow the guidelines in “A Word on Precision,” esp. about words such as “this.” __ I eschew dangling modifiers. __ My verbs and nouns agree. __ My nouns and pronouns agree. __ My punctuation (including commas and semicolons) is correct. __ My apostrophes face the correct direction (always ’ ) __ My dashes are not hyphens. __ I have checked spelling, including characters’ names. __ I have numbered my pages. __ I have used dark and legible print, double-spaced. __ I have stapled my pages.

______signature date