The Haunted Elevators at the University of Maryland
The following story was told by a University of Maryland senior, told to her before moving into her dormitory freshman year. The girl, an Indian born and raised in Maryland, now twenty one years old, recounted the story in a coffee shop in a dimly lit corner over a cup of black coffee late at night.
I heard this story at orientation, when coming into Maryland. We were in Denton hall when the tour guide started telling us this story about a girl that used to live in Denton a long time ago. We were waiting for the elevators, because it was taking a long time. Out of three elevators, two were broken so we had to wait for the one. “You know there’s a reason that these elevators aren’t working,” the tour guide said. She told us there was a girl that lived there. One day this girl was going into the elevator to go downstairs and leave the building because these other people were making fun of her. She was crying, couldn’t see straight, and was so distraught that she was wiping tears off of her face, leaning forward, when her head got caught in the elevator doors. For some reason the doors didn’t open back up because of a freak malfunction, not completely uncommon when it comes to dorm elevators. It crushed her head and her brain juices somehow got into the electrical wiring of the elevators. Things were sparking, her arms were flailing wildly, and lights began to flicker. A combination of her rage and loneliness remained in the elevator wiring, and to this day the elevators in Denton still don’t work sometimes. When this happens, it’s her rage coming back to haunt the residents.
The story was told in a completely believable tone of voice. The narration was not s...
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...there is no specific evidence to support this story (other than the elevators breaking down), approximately 30 people die in elevator-related incidents annually in the United States. One death was an actual decapitation, suggesting that the accident depicted in the legend is rare but not impossible. These elements are what draw a complete picture of this story’s cultural symbolism. At the center of an entertaining urban legend are deeply rooted, yet easily accessible social implications and fears.
Works Cited
Mikkelson, Barbara. Urban Legends Reference Pages: Elevator Decapitation, Lift and Separate. Jan 18, 2007. Accessed at http://www.snopes.com/horrors/freakish/elevator.asp.
Schlossman, David, ed. "Metaphorically Haunted Elevators." University of Maryland Legends Collection. 2004. Accessed at http://www.wam.umd.edu/~dschloss/Legends/elevator.htm.
While telling the story the storyteller used very specific details to produce an effective presentation. He paused several times for dramatic effect, indicating that something important was going to happen. Also, he told the story confidently, rarely stuttering in a short of words. The storyteller appeared to be extremely knowledgeable on the subject because the incident happened to his older brother and due to the bridge's close proximity to his home. While listening to the story I noticed several details that seemed to be exaggerated for effect, such as the three male bodies hanging from the rafters. When reaching the climax of the story the teller did a great job in portraying the frightened expressions of the driver and passengers.
Eisner, Lotte H. The Haunted Screen. Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press. 1965
fourteen year old high school student was able change the hatred that was around her reservation, all
Urban legends are the supernatural folklore of our modern society. From one generation to the next, they orally travel throughout the world, constantly changing from one region to the next. Although cultural variations exist, the core of all these urban legends remains the same, to unveil the universally known individual and societal fears. “The Graveyard Wager” is a timeless urban legend told again and again, and the one of which I will explore more in depth.
The teller showed no unusual emotion while retelling this story to me. He was positive that it was not true. He told the story in a mocking tone; he sometimes finished his sentences with laughter or a smile.
Alexie, Sherman. The Absolute True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. New York: Hachette Book Group, 2007. Print.
The storyteller had not witnessed the strange happenings at the school but claimed to know someone who had seen the disturbances. As a performance, the telling of this story was very matter a fact and my friend did not self-aggrandize; the performance was quick, to the point, but not particularly dramatic. The storyteller told the legend as fact and was not melodramatic about her role as storyteller.
First, the elevator is presented as an alive object through Lila Mae’s interpretation and its narration. When she recalls her
When a narrator is deemed unreliable, there is conflict between the narrator’s presentation and the rest of the novel that makes readers suspect his sincerity and reliability. Readers often read between the lines and come to the conclusion that the narrator is either withholding the true version of the story or lacking the ability to tell the truth. There are three specific sources of unreliability according to Rimmon-Keenan they are the narrator’s limited knowledge, his or her personal involvement, and his or her questionable morals (100-101). Factors that could contribute to a narrator’s unreliability is that the narrator is young and inexperienced, old with failing memory, or has a low IQ. These are all cases of limited understanding and knowledge on the part of the narrator. When narrators are personally involved in the story, they tend to portray events or characters i...
Growing up on a reservation where failing was welcomed and even somewhat encouraged, Alexie was pressured to conform to the stereotype and be just another average Indian. Instead, he refused to listen to anyone telling him how to act, and pursued his own interests in reading and writing at a young age. He looks back on his childhood, explaining about himself, “If he'd been anything but an Indian boy living on the reservation, he might have been called a prodigy. But he is an Indian boy living on the reservation and is simply an oddity” (17). Alexie compares the life and treatment of an Indian to life as a more privileged child. This side-by-side comparison furthers his point that
Given the title of this work, you may mistakenly believe (as did at least one prior owner of the book copy I had read from, if their annotations are any indication) that this is a literal investigation into all things paranormal and society’s investment of that which goes bump in the night. In “Ghostly Matters: Hauntings and the Sociological Imagination”, Avery F. Gordon offers academics and ethnographers – those whose profession it is to unearth the secreted relationships between the signifier and the signified, the subject and object, the real and unreal - a disturbing ghost story that should leave those of us in the field who came claim these titles with both the deepest of darkest chills and, through a new method of revealing and acknowledging the ghosts we feel, the hope for something akin to redemption. (In this way, perhaps, Gordon accomplishes many of the same feats as Stephen King and Edgar Allen Poe).
Cheung, Theresa. The Element Encyclopedia of Ghosts & Hauntings. Element Encyclopedia Series. Unknown: Barnes & Noble, Inc., 2008.
The objective of my experiment was to observe how people reacted to a violation in the social norms of elevator etiquette. Generally in elevators, people fill in starting from the back, face the elevator doors, and rarely make verbal contact with others. Unless the passengers of the elevator know each other, conversation is sparse and often limited to small-talk. As a result of this, my goal in the experiment was to introduce a foreign behavior to the elevator, something that nobody would expect while going about their day. Thus, I entered a situation where a certain set of expectations was in place, such as the informal rule that individuals should stand (rather than sit) in an elevator, and violated those unspoken rules without acting in
a dull grey colour as if it had lost the will to live and stopped
When we read any work of fiction, no matter how realistic or fabulous, as readers, we undergo a "suspension of disbelief". The fictional world creates a new set of boundaries, making possible or credible events and reactions that might not commonly occur in the "real world", but which have a logic or a plausibility to them in that fictional world. In order for this to be convincing, we trust the narrator. We take on his perspective, if not totally, then substantially. He becomes our eyes and ears in this world and we have to see him as reliable if we are to proceed with the story's development.