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A Ghosts Saves Her Baby
I had just finished up lunch with a friend at around one o’clock in the afternoon. I was trekking back from the dining hall when I met the storyteller. She was a freshman who had just turned eighteen, and a moderately-devout Catholic. (“I’m into my religion but I don’t go to church as much as I’d like to.”) She was Filipino and born and raised Maryland. She was sitting on the lawn in front of the library, deeply immersed in a novel. When prompted by my question, “Would you mind helping me out with an assignment for class? I just need a ghost story or urban legend and interview you for a few minutes,” she cocked her head to one side and slowly shut her book. She said, “You know that one about a woman who dies in a car crash but her baby is still alive and she doesn’t want to leave it alone in the world?”
I had a tape recorder with me, but she seemed a little put-off by that, so I simply took elaborate notes on how she presented her story. The following is as close to verbatim as I could remember and drawn from my notes:
My cousin told me this. One evening, it was thunder-storming pretty badly outside. This lonely woman was sitting in her house watching television when someone knocked on her door. She got up to open it, and in front of her was this other woman who was just a wreck. She had blood and dirt all over her, not to mention all that rain drenching her. Pretty creepy sight. [She visibly flinched.] The woman outside goes, “Can you please help me? I just crashed my car and my baby is still in his car seat!” [The storyteller’s tone became empathetic here.] Of course, the lonely woman says, “Okay,” and the two go outside together. The rain picked up and things got really hard to see, but the lady led the lonely woman to her car, which had fallen into a ditch. Inside, there was the little baby sitting in his seat, still alive. The lonely woman reached in to get it, but then she gets all shocked, because you know who was in the driver’s seat? [I shook my head while she allowed her pause to linger.] It was the dead woman.
I was told a story about one of Cloudcroft's more famous ghosts when casually lounging in the undergraduate student physics lounge at the University of Maryland, College Park, with a group of students during a lunch break before class. This occurred during early April, 2005. I inquired whether anyone knew any ghost stories or folklore. A friend of mine volunteered that she knew several ghost stories from her travels. The storyteller was a 23-year-old Caucasian female from an upper-middle class family in Baltimore. She currently lives in Crofton, MD, and is a physics and astronomy major.
The book ghosts from the nursery: tracing the roots of violence which had been written by Robin Kar-Morse and Meredith S Wiley. Meredith S Wiley provides the person who reads an in detail look at child abuse and neglect. Morse and Wiley both discuss in detail the effects of neglect and abuse, looking at specifically at violence in children. The detail of the book is it follows a young male who is of the age of 19 years old named Jeffery, who is given the sentence of death row due to committing a murder when he was of the age of 16 years old. Jeffery’s case was a beautiful case study for the authors and audience to analyse and relate theories to. By looking at cases such as Jeffery and looking at other children who are in similar situation, both authors start to look at the honesty about the subtle and crucial years of infancy and early childhood.
The teller is 24 years old, and works for the state department of education. Originally, he was from the Baltimore area where he attended an elementary Catholic school. He moved to Bell Air in second grade and grew up there. After his parents separated, he moved back to Baltimore to live with his grandparents, and has remained in Baltimore ever since. The sister he mentions in the story moved away to China years ago. A weekend or two ago, he, I, and a few other friends spent the evening in one of our favorite hang-out spots in Columbia, Pub Dog. It was there, sitting in our dimly lit booth, over some beers that I heard him tell this story from his childhood. He spoke in a strangely matter-of-fact tone, considering the weirdness of the story he was telling, and in a smooth, comfortable manner that seemed to indicate he had told the story many times before. Here is the story he told:
There is this small bridge in a small city nearby. There was a car accident and a small child or baby died. And, um, it was in the local papers. It is said that at night, when your drive over it, you can hear the sound of a baby crying. And you know how signs on the side of the road reflect light and stuff? Well, you can’t see it with normal lighting, but when a car’s lights hit the sign at the right angle, you can see a baby’s footprints.
About thirty years ago there was a young girl in love with her boyfriend. One day, he convinced her to take their relationship to the next level, telling her how deeply he cared. A couple weeks later, she found out that she had become pregnant, and decided it was best to hide it from him. They kept in close contact over the next few months, and he told her that they would be together forever. When her father realized that she was having a baby without marriage, he made her leave the house until she came back with a husband. When the baby girl was born, she decided to tell the boyfriend about the child, by bringing her to his house. He lived on a small farm right outside town and you had to pass over a small river on a bridge to get back to his house. As she opened the door, she walked in on him with another girl. Filled with anger, (pause) she gets in her car and speeds off. Now she could not return home unmarried and had lost her only love because of this one child. As she looked over at the baby, she is only reminded of her boyfriend and the image of him with the other girl. (tone increases) Finally, she reached the bridge, then slammed on the breaks. She got out and in a moment of rage threw the baby over the bridge to rid her of the baby girl’s troubles. Later that night, the police were tipped off about a murder at the bridge and came to find the girl hanging from the bridge.
A 19-year old female from Harford County, Maryland, narrated the story of Black Aggie, the urban legend of an overnight stay in a cemetery. She grew up Christian, and still lives in one of the more rural areas of Maryland with her younger sister and parents, who own and work at an electrical contracting business. Accustomed to hearing many ghost stories and urban legends, she first heard the story of Black Aggie during a middle school slumber party. Late one Saturday night over pizza in our Hagerstown dorm, she was more than willing to share her favorite urban legend with me.
Lisa as a young teen begins to manage her special gift to connect with spirits by progressing from the motivation her grandmother gave her to grasp a stronger understanding of what she spiritually obtains. Lisa’s grandmother encourages her to learn about the spirit world and the consequences that follow, to make sure her mistakes don’t mislead her, “Never trust the spirit world too much. They think much differently from the living.”(Robinson, 153). Ma ma oo (Lisa’s grandmother) ensures that Lisa is provided with the knowledge of the supernatural world at her current age so she will be prepared for the future and along with that she wants her to being to learn about herself through these teachings and develop from them. Considering that the bond between Lisamarie and her grandmother is already well established it makes the understanding and communication of the spirit world more interesting for her. Overtime Lisa becomes curious about her gift of connecting with spirits, “What do spirits look like?”...
Urban legends can be effective conveyors of entertainment and morals. We all have heard urban legends during our lives, whether it was in a dorm room, the dinner table, or around the campfire, but rarely do we take the time to fully appreciate the value of the stories. Urban legends have this rare ability to make us question reality. We have this feeling in our minds that says “Oh, this cannot possible be real,” but then our imagination questions that and reels us in and plants a lingering doubt. David Emery, a writer and follower of urban folklore, defines urban legends as “told [to be] true, and plausible enough to be believed.” Besides this lingering suspense, urban legends and similar folklore often have underlying morals that are hard to uncover, but when they are, the stories become clear. When collecting stories, the best and most unique one was a local story native to a town in New York State. I vividly remember how he told the story:
As I sat down with the narrator in his dorm on a Sunday afternoon—not the most appropriate time for ghost stories—he told me this well known ghost story from New Mexico. The storyteller is an 18-year-old male freshman majoring in international relations who is from Bethesda, Maryland. He is biracial with an American father and a Taiwanese mother. Born in California and raised in Colorado, the storyteller is a converted Christian. The teller was in the Boy Scouts, which is where this story comes from:
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.
Some people tell the truth and some people show the truth. Elizabeth Bowen shows the truth in her story, “The Demon Lover”. Her story is about a forty four year old woman who revisits her childhood home to collect some possessions for her family. However, the woman finds a letter from an unknown source that she believes is from her dead fiancé. Many readers believe this piece of fiction to be a ghost story, but it is one that is about a woman with acute psychological delusion portrayed through the use of characterization and occasion.
The ride home had been the most excruciating car ride of my life. Grasping this all new information, coping with grief and guilt had been extremely grueling. As my stepfather brought my sister and I home, nothing was to be said, no words were leaving my mouth.Our different home, we all limped our ways to our beds, and cried ourselves to sleep with nothing but silence remaining. Death had surprised me once
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).
One morning a girl named Kacey went out with her friends Jaden and his wife Jillian Dent-Arnold. Jillian wanted to be on the beach but Jaden and Kacey wanted to surf. Jillian finally agreed. They were out in the water getting some waves then it came. There was a big bump under Jaden and knocked him off his surfboard, he tried getting back on but he couldn't he got tugged under water. K.C. and Jill thought he was joking then they saw blood Jill jumped into the water to save him but there was to much blood she could not see. Then she got on her board and started paddling and paddling then Kacey screamed “help help”. Kacey was underwater and couldn’t breath, she got to the surface and could not hear anything but a loud ringing and the Jill came back and saved Kacey. Kacey had no legs under the knee. When Kacey and Jill got back to the beach Jill called 911 and they came with a helicopter. Jill put their cover-ups on Kaceys legs to try and stop the bleeding and she tied them tight. Kacey was still awake somehow but she was not going to close her eyes anytime soon she thought. They got to the hospital and she was being rushed through the halls and the smells were horrendous, she got a whiff of purell because all the nurses and doctors put it on every time they went in a room.
“At this time in my life I lived in a very old town house, where I often heard unexplainable noises in the attic. One night, when I was about 11, my parents went out to a party, leaving me all alone. The night was stormy, with crashes of lightening and thunder outside. Having nothing to do, I fell asleep after eating too much ice cream. All of a sudden, my alarm clock goes off in the middle of the night, reading 3 o’clock. I’m wondering why ...