Instead

23– Witches, ghosts, and pesky high schoolers; polishing-up your legend detector, with Dr. Jeannie Thomas | Day 103

June 22, 2020 Episode 23
Instead
23– Witches, ghosts, and pesky high schoolers; polishing-up your legend detector, with Dr. Jeannie Thomas | Day 103
Show Notes Transcript Chapter Markers

In this episode, Dr. Jeannie Thomas takes Wyatt through the history and societal impacts of the Salem Witch Trials, and the haunted Logan nunnery has had on the town for the past few decades. Looking into how exactly these myths and urban legends take hold in our society and Wyatt discovers that even his town of 989 people harbors a legend or two.

Wyatt Traughber: [00:00:00] This was posted on Monday, June 22nd, 2020. Are you in the mood for a warm pleasant and eyeopening listening experience? In this episode, I'm interviewing, folklorist Dr. Jeanie Thomas. She said he's legends. And how you can use legends to understand a community, what that community thinks is important. And the fears that community has, you'll learn the things that trigger a group and to starting a legend and how, in the case of the Salem witch trials, the leaders ended up throwing gas on the fire.

Or I guess back then it would have been whale oil. We'll also talk about the ways that Salem is still affected by stories and facts that are 357 years old. And don't worry, cause we're not going to get to East coast on you because there's a few legends waiting up Logan Canyon that need to be covered first.

My name is Wyatt Archer.  And you could be rolling your eyes at grammatical errors on Reddit, but you are listening to this instead.

Jeannie Thomas: [00:01:11] I am professor Jeannie Thomas and I am a folklorist in the English department at Utah state university. And I study, um, traditional culture and oral narratives, especially legend. 

Wyatt Traughber: [00:01:24] Oh, legends. That's such a word to drop. How do you study legends? Like what does that research look like? 

Jeannie Thomas: [00:01:32] So it means paying attention to stories.

And sometimes I go out in the field and collect them, like I've collected ghost stories on Cape Breton Island in Canada, and just had lots of fun and learned all sorts of interesting things, doing that. And sometimes you go to archives and gather different versions of legends of narratives. And compare them and basically look for patterns.

Basically what I do is I look at the cultural work the stories are doing. In other words, you know, um, legends are a genre that are basically defined by being believed or believable. And sometimes they're based in fact, and sometimes they're really not, but whether they're totally not based in anything at all, or.

They are based in truth. There's a reason why we tell those stories. 

Wyatt Traughber: [00:02:24] Yeah. Yeah. Um, why is it important to study these things, these legends in these stories? 

Jeannie Thomas: [00:02:30] Well, I think any, I think anything that can man's attention is worthy of study and worthy of figuring out. Um, and everybody knows them and everybody does something with them and, you know, they have real impact on the community.

Let's take the, um, St Anne's retreat. Stories. Do, have you ever heard those? 

Wyatt Traughber: [00:02:53] Yeah. Yeah. I have heard them and I've actually had the opportunity to go up there with permission. So yeah. No, I had permission. It was like a rare opportunity. Yeah. 

Jeannie Thomas: [00:03:03] That's pretty cool.  So people know about the site, although I'm hearing fewer legends about that site than I used to.

Wyatt Traughber: [00:03:12] Yeah. Do you want to just tell me the story? Just for people who don't know,.

Jeannie Thomas: [00:03:17] Canyon is one of the two big legend tripping sites in, in the area and it's this retreat. And it was actually built in the early part of the 20th century, the teens twenties, and into the thirties. And it's really built. There's a lodge, there's lots of buildings and most notoriously there's a swimming pool.

Now it was built by a very wealthy family, a couple of families, um, the hatches, and they used it for a lodge and as a retreat for many years. And it was, it was posh back in the day. 

Wyatt Traughber: [00:03:51] Uh, Tony.

Jeannie Thomas: [00:03:53] Tony, exactly like Tony grow, which is hopefully where Tony Grove got its name, but another side of Logan Canyon. But anyway, another story.

So then, you know, they sold it and it's on forest service land. It's basically, you know, a fancy cabinet retreat up there. They gave it to the Catholic church eventually, and there's some great archival photos of a bunch of nuns in full habits. Everything up the Canyon, just visually striking. And you know, I look at those historical photos and immediately, I see why there are legends about the site, the legends about the site have nuns doing horrible things at the site.

They're drowning babies, you know, there's all sorts of. Drama and crime. And they have dogs that bark and which heck honey, which is a motif from Greek mythology gets involved. I mean, it gets, it gets fairly sensational and out of control fast, you know, it doesn't have much grounding in the. Fact that the Catholic church used this as a retreat for awhile.

And then finally they got out of the business. The vandalism was real and a problem. And to go back to my point about these things have real impact on communities. It was a legend tripping site for kids for years. So legend tripping is exactly what it sounds like. Somebody like you, here's the story and you say, well, I want to go there.

And a lot of kids say whether I have permission or not. And of course, maybe not having permission as part of the charm. 

Wyatt Traughber: [00:05:23] Not for me. I'm a big old skip, like getting into trouble is, Oh, I was called to the principal's office like twice and they were both teeny tiny little things, but it destroyed me for like weeks after. And they were like nothing anyway. Sorry. 

Jeannie Thomas: [00:05:38] No, no parents everywhere love you. And I appreciate that because I always tell my students, um, when we talk about some of the traditional things, kids do like the dare stuff they do. I was telling my students, remember teenagers, brains have not formed. They do not make these.

They do stupid things and they do dangerous things and look at their folklore. It will tell you that. So, so part of the charter for a lot of kids, Is like, can I push some boundaries and can I do something I'm not supposed to do and, you know, get away from adult control and kind of civilized lives. So they're going to go to these sites.

So, you know, in the late 1990s, a bunch of kids went up there around Halloween and there were these kinds of self appointed caretakers who basically held them hostage. And it's a really fascinating. But, you know, not great. Um, little historical blip in County history, they tied him up, threatened him at gunpoint, said they were tied to explosives.

Sounded like they sexually assaulted. One of the women, young women, you know, it was bad. And eventually they got prosecuted and got some jail time. So these stories have real impact. And I think it's important to study them for all their different kinds of impact to not just to say it's negative. That's okay.

Kind of particularly negative example, I think, uh, because people enacted the story in fairly negative ways, but that's not to say that story always necessarily was negative. It might be just fun and entertaining for you when you heard it, 

Wyatt Traughber: [00:07:11] right? Yeah. Yeah. What do you think are the factors that allowed that story to develop?

Because in my head I can think of like, Oh, most of the people in the area at the time wouldn't have been super familiar with Catholicism. And so maybe there was some fear of outsiders, but other than that, Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. 

Jeannie Thomas: [00:07:30] That's one of them, you know, there are going to be, um, any narrative, if you study narratives, you know, that, that they, the meaning often shifts.

Slightly, according to the group that tells it, what you're going to look for is what are the meanings to this group and what are the likely meanings for this area and what elements and the narrative get kept in the narrative because they're important. So, um, the Catholic stuff always hangs in there.

And one of the things I love about legend is this is old stuff, none as an priests having sex, which the Saint Anne's retreats legend have men's and priests having sex and having babies, and then murdering those babies. Okay. Those are medieval legends. They go way, way back, you know, so they just been updated to, um, Logan Canyon, uh, legend, tripping, kids going up, Logan Canyon, going to the retreat or Deere the retreat and saying, I'm going to put my car keys on my hood and chant, which heck had his name and my car.

Won't start. Then when I try to start it again. They do that little folk ritual. Well, which heck it is from classical mythology, you know? So, um, really interesting stuff going on. Kids don't know that, but the name just gets passed around and gets reused. So here you have a climate that's predominantly LDS and you have that real fact of it was a Catholic retreat for awhile.

Plus the drama of, I just imagine if you saw any group of people wearing the same outfit. That's the Canyon. You know, if you were driving up there, you would tell stories, but it definitely shows other reign of Catholicism and Mormon Catholic tension. You know, those are, these are not complimentary narratives about nuns and priests they're negative.

So you see that othering of a religious group in some of those, um, narratives. Uh, you also see. Uh, you know, gender issues as well. Um, and also just, um, the site itself, you know, it's a wild site. You're not used to seeing that much built up stuff. And especially the swimming pool and the swimming pools, the locusts of all the stories, right.

They drowned the babies in the swimming pool. And so that's where all the legend trippers want to go. Well, it's anomalous and it stands out visually. And any trait like that. Is going to attract legends. I can walk in Logan cemetery, walk around and say, yep, this is the statue that's gonna, that the kids and adults are going to be telling legends about because it stands out it's big, it's dramatic.

And that's a statue. Of course, of the weeping woman. People are going to tell stories about that because. There it is. It's a little bit anomalous and we want to narrate that and kind of fill in the story. 

Wyatt Traughber: [00:10:15] This, um, makes me think of in my multicultural communications class, we talked about the LA Yorona myth down in Mexico, the ditch, which I think, um, and like legends often service service, right.

For the community. Like it teaches. Parents to be careful of what their kids are watching and maybe, um, it also teaches, um, those people. Like the kids down in those Mexican communities that had that myth to like stay out of the ditches cause they can flood unexpectedly. Is this, am I remembering things right?

Or no? 

Jeannie Thomas: [00:10:49] Very good. A for you, I will tell you a folk horse would talk about the  the legend. We use myths in a very specialized way. Don't you're fine. 

Wyatt Traughber: [00:10:58] You're fine. No I'm and I'm excited to hear the difference between myth and legend too. 

Jeannie Thomas: [00:11:02] So a legend is a story that's believed or believable and a myth historically was a culture sacred narrative.

So when we, when you're dealing with a folklorist, we'd use that old definition of myth. And so, um, Bible stories or myths. And when we, when I call it Bible story myth, I'm not saying it's true. I'm saying this is a cultural group, sacred narrative. So I would say lie your own, that legend body. That's a great example of the supernatural legend.

And one of its functions is, is certainly didactic. Um, and you can collect those around the Valley. There are some great ones in the archive. I've heard some good versions from my students. Um, and so. Yeah, kind of keeping the kids in line is a great, uh, an example of one type of function of some of these legends.

I like supernatural stories too, because they go beyond the fear. They sort of, uh, open, legend up. Do you know, you can kind of hear the soundtrack for, uh, 2001, a space Odyssey or star Wars in the background. They open it up and we go cosmic and we deal with the great mysteries of life, you know, because ultimately they're about wonder and the mysterious.

And is there life beyond death, even if. Those stories are scary. They're still wrestling with these incredibly big metaphysical questions that are really fun to think about and to think about why do, why are they so common? Why do we have this predisposition to, uh, ponder the big mysteries? And I like that quality of supernatural ledge.

Wyatt Traughber: [00:12:36] Yeah. Yeah. So how do the spaces that a community and habits affect. Uh, legends that they produce, whether that's good digital community or the landscape that a physical community is in. 

Jeannie Thomas: [00:12:50] Yeah. So there's a couple of ways that you can come at this. So I mentioned that if there's something unusual on the landscape, we're going to narrate it.

We're going to tell legends about it. So just anything visually striking on the landscape, we'll tell stories about, um, the other thing that tends to happen is human events. Impact the landscape. And so they become sites of memory. Now, sometimes the memory is not always correct. Like, um, St. Dan's retreat is in a way a site of memory.

It remembers that the site was a Catholic retreat, but it doesn't do it in a real accurate way. It really blows up the drama and gets it wrong. I had an interesting experience with this. I was, um, in North Carolina, uh, for a traditional music series and I grew up listening to an old traditional ballad. My dad went through a Kingston trio phase, which folksingers from the fifties and sixties.

And I was in, I was, uh, he inflicted it on me. I heard it a lot. And I remember they sang Tom Dooley, which is a ballad about a guy who murders a girl. And I remember being about six and it's a perky song. It's upbeat, you know, and I remember being about six and stand in the backyard and the lyrics were running through my head, particularly the part about, um, you know, took her on the mountain, stabbed her with my knife and I'm like, This is not good.

I remember like that was a sharp, like I re really remember thinking the adult world is kind of screwed up. This is what we're singing about. Wait a minute here. So Tom Dooley, uh, always had an impact on me and that song is based in truth. Um, I guy murdered a girl and it was a love triangle involved, and I happened to be there for this, uh, traditional big traditional musical theater.

Music festival. And I realized, uh, all this happen not far from where I was. And so I was like, Oh, I've got to go see it as essentially legend, tripping, um, hearing the story about Tom Dooley and when the song I had to go to the site. Right. And what I noticed first of all, was, it was beautiful. And it was, you know, in that kind of Appalachian Hill country, that's just gorgeous, but there was a nice home right on the mountain where the woman, Lori Foster was murdered.

And I thought, man, what would it be like to live there? I mean, you couldn't live there and not know the story really because everybody locally knew the story. So one of the things that happens to those kinds of regions and the people that live in them is they have to deal with what I call an invasive narrative.

And that's a story that you can't escape. You kind of have to make your peace with it. Salem, Massachusetts. Has the same thing. You can't live in Salem and not know the witch narrative. I think in Utah, we have similar. They're not necessarily led, well, some of them are probably legendary, but we have, um, or rumors you leave Utah and somebody says, Oh, where you from?

You say, Utah, what do they say to you? 

Wyatt Traughber: [00:15:54] Oh, are you a Mormon? 

Jeannie Thomas: [00:15:56] Exactly. Or, and then, and then usually there's Oh, what about, you know, you usually get good, get the polygamy track going too. And so those are invasive narratives that we have to deal with by virtue of where we live, you know, those, those stories that kind of, um, take over and then people have to.

Grapple with them. And I studied, um, which tourism and Salem, Massachusetts, because I was interested in how people dealt with that invasive narrative of the witch trials and what they did with it and how they tried to live with it. 

Wyatt Traughber: [00:16:27] What do they do with it? Because I've been to Salem once. Um, and I went to the witch trials museum, and honestly it was a real like Mer, like let down.

Um, but how do those communities adapt? 

Jeannie Thomas: [00:16:40] Well, so I think say them is really interesting. One of the things, if you read the scholarly literature on Salem, it is usually. Fairly brutal because a lot of the stuff is a let down or we can even go a little further and say kind of cheesy or very cheesy. 

Wyatt Traughber: [00:16:57] Yeah.

Yeah. It was, I was like this isn't a museum. This is like, there are no artifacts here. 

Jeannie Thomas: [00:17:02] And that's, that's one of the interesting things about Salem is, um, not a lot of the witch stuff. Actually happened in Salem itself, some of the trials did, but there's nothing there anymore. There's no, there, there, but, um, Salem picked up that story and ran with it.

So what do you do with a story like that? Well, that's a tragic story. It makes your, tell them look bad because your ancestors did some bad things. Innocent people were killed. So for a long time, what they did with that story was they tried to suppress it. And, um, it happened in Salem village, in Salem town, two different sites close by, which are today's Salem and Danvers.

And a lot of the stuff happened in Danvers, which actually changed its name from Salem village and distanced it. Itself from all the witchcraft drama, uh, the town works so hard at forgetting that no one was sure where the actual gallows Hill was and it, and just recently they they've got good evidence that, that they know where it is now.

It's right by Walgreens in town. 

Wyatt Traughber: [00:18:10] It's convenient. Yeah. 

Jeannie Thomas: [00:18:12] But anyway, so they denied, denied, denied, and they only built the Memorial, which is a small Memorial in 1992. So 300 years later. So when it's close to you, when it's trauma, it's close to you, they're trying to push it away. In the mid 20th century, they had enough.

Historical and emotional distance that they started to embrace it more and even a little bit earlier than that. But then, um, at the same time in new England, in general, it was being de-industrialized and they were losing a lot of their economic base. So you start to see the tourism rise. Because they need the money and hence you see the kind of cheesy attractions and there's a mom and pop quality to them that, um, is both cheesy and kind of nice.

And I was actually not as harsh as other scholars on it, because while I recognize the cheese factor, I'm also like, look, these people have to live here and they have to deal with the story and they're trying to live with the story and they're trying to live here. And so they're making a living. From it.

Now, there are people who do that better than others, but when I interviewed some people in the community who were in tourism, you could see some people were really trying to be thoughtful about it and making sense of their heritage. And so I appreciated that it was coming from within the community and the critique was coming from within the community.

Also, I sort of. One of the things that I saw again, and again was no matter how cheesy they really got that. One of the things that they need, that we all need to learn from Salem is tolerance. And I could see that, um, when I was doing various, uh, tourist activities and feeling slightly goofy because I really probably should have been a teenager, but here I was this middle-aged mom person out through it all though.

Haunted houses in Salem. 

Wyatt Traughber: [00:20:06] Yeah. Yeah. So I just want to like, Double-check the facts of Salem, right? Like the witchcraft end of it. That's the legend, but there were actually people like persecuted and murdered because of those legends. Right? Yeah. 

Jeannie Thomas: [00:20:19] So what you have happening is you have a stress community.

They had many people had participated in Wars with the natives there, uh, because they were stealing their land and then they just had a big, small pot. Outbreak. And they were having political battles. They'd lost their charter from England. So you had this really stress community and they had neighbors fighting with each other.

You know, there are really interesting accounts of the trial of people's pigs escaping and getting into other people's gardens. And then those people later accusing the pig owners. Witchery and so on and so forth. So just have the stress community and, um, along comes one of the minister's daughter and his niece start acting oddly, they're basically having fits.

And he calls up a doctor in the doctor, can't really figure out what's wrong with them. So the doctor says, look, I think it's witchcraft. And that's what started it. And so there, it was based in legends people, the evidence they used to convict people, they were actually telling them. Ghost stories. Um, and saying, you know, I've been fighting with my neighbor and I had this thing at night where I couldn't breathe.

I felt paralyzed. And it was like a black dog came and sat on my chest. And I know it must've been my neighbor cause we were fighting. So that person is obviously a witch. Um, well by our standards today, we now recognize, okay, that's. Maybe that person was experiencing some sleep paralysis, but they were really telling legends in court.

And the witch trials only stopped when that kind of evidence, which was called spectral evidence was outlawed. And you couldn't tell those stories? 

Wyatt Traughber: [00:22:08] Yeah. When was that outlawed? Well, it all happened. 

Jeannie Thomas: [00:22:10] Well, the Salem trials are interesting because. Other parts of the country? Well, it wasn't common, you know, they would spring up, there would be a witch trial here, there, Salem, there were like a whole bunch of accusations, um, in a short period of time, in the span of a few months.

And you're like, Holy cow, what happened? Well, what happened is the, so you have this, these stories being stipulated in the stress population, and then you have the authorities. Feeding it not, you know, not stopping it. It stopped when they put in legal structures. To calm it down. So oral traditions, legends can feed accusations and rumors and conspiracy theories and accusations of witches.

But if you look throughout history, when the legal structures get involved and when the political leaders get involved, and if they act irresponsibly, they can really feed it and make it worse and kill people. So I'm serious cautionary tales there to think about historical. 

Wyatt Traughber: [00:23:18] You told me a little bit about how Salen adapted to having that history from how Salem adapted to that part of their history.

In regards to what we do with other communities that have like traumatic history in them. If there isn't like a Supernatural element involved. If it's just all fact 

Jeannie Thomas: [00:23:37] have, if you have a story that you're stuck with and it particularly if it, um, concerns something that's revolves around injustice. I mean, people died in Salem and they were clearly innocent people.

So that's one of the reasons we remember that story. It's interesting to think about it. Salem, since we're in the car. Pandemic time right now, Salem was really impacted by the flu pandemic at the turn of the century. Huge numbers of people died way more died than the Salem witch trials. Why do we all know about the Salem witch trials?

And we don't know about the flu in Salem? Well, we can think Arthur Miller and the crucible to some degree for that, but it's because, um, We have the injustice there. We could see that things really went wrong. Whereas with the flu pandemic, it happened to everybody. And so it's not as specific and you don't have that, um, justice that miscarriage of justice so much there, it's just a natural tragedy exacerbated by humans as we often do, but still it's not, it's not the miscarriage of justice.

So you have that. That lack of justice. And so I think that, um, stories like Salem, what I like about what they do is that they're dealing with the story. Maybe not everybody deals with it in the most responsible way, but they're dealing with it and it's out there and it's in the open. And, um, it's their story.

I think when people have to live with it, I think. You want to hear their voices. And I think it's good that if there's a diversity of voices, so you realize that stories are complex and they have different meanings and you can learn different things from them at different historical time periods. Um, I think Salem has a lot to teach us about, you know, when a culture is stressed, be prepared for legends and rumors and false stories to start.

We're seeing a ton of this. On the internet with Corona virus right now, all those urban legends about it. We've got a culture that is stressed economically and politically and with a disease. So you know that the legends. Are just going to go up and up and up. So when you're aware of that dynamic, then you start to see them as legends and maybe your legend checker will kick in before your panic kicks in, which is always a good thing.

Wyatt Traughber: [00:26:02] Are there any coronavirus legends that have popped up that you find the most fascinating or interesting? 

Jeannie Thomas: [00:26:08] Oh my gosh. Cause I'm living it. It's just kind of appalling 

Wyatt Traughber: [00:26:13] actually. Yeah. This might be a better question to ask in like five years. 

Jeannie Thomas: [00:26:19] uh, some colleagues who are studying it right now and I bless them and the conspiracy theories are just wild.

I, uh, the bill, I. The bill Gates one, I think is incredibly unfortunate because here's the poor man is trying, you know, years ago he sounded the warning. Yeah, pandemics are probably coming. We've got to be better prepared and no one listened to him. But I think that one's interesting because it's such a classic urban legend kind of construction.

And one of the things that scholars, poker scholars, uh, particularly a scholar named Patricia Turner have pointed out is that often with some of these urban legends, They pick up on some bread, some well-known brand and associated with the legend. We're not going to tell stories about, you know, uh, we're going to tell stories about maybe finding a Kentucky fried rat classic one there, but we're not going to talk about, Oh yeah.

I found a rat in my generic brand that I bought at the grocery store that just doesn't have a ring to it, you know? So we're going to go with the big names. So you see that totally with bill Gates.  

Wyatt Traughber: [00:27:23] when we develop legends, like, we're obviously like the bad guy we choose to create in those legends is somebody that we want to distance ourselves from.

So maybe that's like in air quotes, unintelligent people who lived like back in the 17 hundreds or super rich people like bill Gates. Um, what else can we learn about the people that we're trying to distance ourselves from? With these legends or just like, what are the characteristics of, uh, of the bad guy in the legend?

Jeannie Thomas: [00:27:51] I like that. Um, well let me give you an example of just another, this, this is a classic legend, um, body, and I think in some ways we create these bad guys, right? Whether it's. Catholic memes or bill Gates, but the legends are always more about us than they are about them. 

Wyatt Traughber: [00:28:12] Our own favorite subject. Yeah. 

Jeannie Thomas: [00:28:14] Yeah.

So let me give you a classic one. Okay. So Halloween comes around and you know, I'm a mom for years. I sent my kids out trick or treating. I'm also a folklorist. Um, I know that there is very little chance. Of them getting adult rate of candy, getting something in their candy. But do I check my kids' candy anyway, religiously every year?

You bet I do. So let's unpack this narrative. You heard those stories about, you know 

Wyatt Traughber: [00:28:47] yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So what, like, we never did cause I'm from a small town, but like. Over like where the news channel was like that they would always say, don't forget, you can take your bag of candy to the police station to get x-rays.

Jeannie Thomas: [00:28:59] Exactly. Now, most of us know that there's little to no chance of this actually happening. Right. But, but the police and the hospitals will still x-ray it for free and they will often do it. So in some cases, somebody will know, but it just makes us all feel better. So there again, you see that fear and boy, those parent feel fears are so real, even when they're irrational and we know they're irrational, we want to comfort ourselves.

So we check the candy or get it. X-rayed. Okay. Is there any truth to this whatsoever? And by the way, this one goes back, we can trace this one back at least to the forties. Um, yeah, and I love some of these because I don't know if you were old enough or familiar with this, but sometimes people would give out money.

And Halloween candy. I'm ancient enough that I remember occasionally like getting somebody. 

Wyatt Traughber: [00:29:53] Yeah. I got a  handful of pennies once or twice, I think. Yeah. 

Jeannie Thomas: [00:29:56] I of seeing it mid 20th century and the urban legend then, and I, the bad guy. Would heat the pennies up in a pan on the stove and then have the mountain burn the little hands of the children.

And I just love that because, you know, if so I think it's so funny in some ways, because if you're thinking, okay, is this really true? And you're going like, It's creates logistical problems. If you're the bad guy, how are you going to heat those up, hand them to unsuspecting little children without burning yourself or revealing to the kids?

You know, what are you going to do? Dump the pants or Tom's, or, you know, that they, I 

Wyatt Traughber: [00:30:36] just, especially like. Back in the day when pennies were all copper it's like they would have like lost their heat real quick. 

Jeannie Thomas: [00:30:43] Yeah. So they're just kind of fun to think through logically once you, once you start being aware that urban legends exist in the world, they become kind of fun to think about even a little comical.

I mean, What, what machinations did this bad guy have to go through? So happens very, very rarely cases. What cases do we have going back to the 1970s? We have a couple of famous cases. One in Texas. Um, a kid got heroin in his pixie stick at Halloween, and the story first started that. It was through Halloween candy.

Um, wasn't it was dad, um, using the legend, his cover, his dad, his dad had taken out a life insurance policy on him and wanted to collect. So he said that my kid got this pixie stick in his Halloween candy. Well, the real bad guy was dead. But where do we, where's the story put the danger, well, stranger danger.

And you think about how saline is a really interesting holiday and trick or treating is fun. It's it's it's way ancient. It's an ancient tradition. Wonderful. In many, many ways that we've, um, updated, but, um, so all year round parents say stranger danger, stranger danger, no, stay away from strangers. Don't take anything from strangers don't, you know, go to strangers and then.

It's like Halloween comes around. It's like, Oh, nevermind all that. Go to strangers, get candy, you know, ignore everything we just said. Um, so there's some cognitive dissonance there, but if you look statistically, where's the most dangerous place for kids in America. It's the home, it's their own home. You know, it's the abuse that you can get when you're in the home from family members now, um, the legends.

Totally, totally try to put that out there. But when you really look at the stories, they are about us and when you start tracking down the history, you see where the real dangers are. You can see. I see the UCLR cultural biases and all our cultural fears and kind of, I like folklore because it's often it can be beautiful and wonderful, and it often reveals horrible and awful things, but it's who we are.

It's really who we are. It's kind of where we let our guard down. So it really culture's folklore. It will tell you a lot about the culture, 

Wyatt Traughber: [00:32:59] different, like, do some cultures have more like folklore storytelling than others? You know? Cause I feel like. Maybe coming from like reserve farm town. And we didn't really spend a lot of time socializing that we probably don't have as much full folklore as people in other places.

Um, do you kind of see different cultures having more or less folklore?

Jeannie Thomas: [00:33:19]  I don't think I can. Quantify that in any good way. I don't have any data to base that on. So I'll just, I'll give you, I can give you my impression. And that is what I tend to see is places that are more aware and value. Their narratives and their lore.

So every place has them, but some places are more aware and when you're aware and value them more, um, that tends to help the spread and the perpetuation of them more. If you're in a foreign community, you know, you can't escape the war, it's going to find you, but it may be at a more, um, you know, sedate level.

It may be at the level of like, Yeah. Are you trying to 

Wyatt Traughber: [00:34:05] look on your face? Trying to think if there's any like local lore from where I'm from my hometown and like nothing's coming. 

Jeannie Thomas: [00:34:14] I can't imagine a hometown without any legend tripping sites. I've been to some teeny tiny places that the kids, the kids find a way.

Um, if it's a farm town, they're going to be telling stories about whether there's going to be local knowledge passed along about different farming practices. There's always occupational folklore, those aspects of the job you learn by informally by word of mouth, you know? So there's always going to be that kind of.

Every, every town has a story about how it was named things like that. But you know, you're not, you're not like, Hey Brett, where you, you were on this Island and you needed each other, and you had all this shared heritage and, and practice music together, and you count from a storytelling tradition. It may not be that kind of lore.

It may be a more low key kind of Lore.

Wyatt Traughber: [00:35:00] Yeah. Yeah. Well, I guess, yeah, it's, uh, it's called Arco, Idaho. Um, I don't know if 

Jeannie Thomas: [00:35:08] I seek, is there a, 

Wyatt Traughber: [00:35:11] I don't know, um, if you Google like the number Hill, um, do you know what I'm talking about? So like, 

Jeannie Thomas: [00:35:22] Yeah, leave it to the kids.

Wyatt Traughber: [00:35:23] They will. Yeah. Class with paint there. Um, year up on the mountain, ridiculously huge.

Like I know that like there's always lots of high schools have some kind of like painting tradition, but ours. Yeah. Is massive, um, into the story, is that the first class to do it was 1921, but the oldest number on the Hill is 1920 because the class of 1920, it was like, well, we want to be up there too.

You know? So they went up after them, but I don't know if that's legend or if I kind of think it actually happened, but a legend can be based in truth. 

Jeannie Thomas: [00:35:55] So, yeah, so yeah, that's a great example of local folk. Lord. I bet people have stories about, well, when our class did it, this happened, you know, just little stories like that.

That's local folklore and, um, there's a lot of place-based lore, um, uh, place names. Little place names around you, some of them on the map, some of them that, that people just have live there or within families, there's always that kind of lore. Um, they, uh, I found out from my son that there's a tradition right by I, I right by the high school, I lived not too far from Skyview high school and there's a road up there that the kids call the Milky way because there's a dairy up there and they also offer.

Speed on it. And it's a tradition to speed on the Milky way. So there's that kind of lore about almost every place and, and, um, families create stories and their own kind of personal lore. So it's all happening, you know, maybe happening at a really. Uh, not a community-based level, but it may even be happening at a family level too, but there's all sorts of folk that are going on.

But the kids at school are telling stories and circulate stories and just how you come to know a place. And the stories you tell about it are part of your lower. 

Wyatt Traughber: [00:37:18] Yeah. Yeah. And now I'm thinking about, like, there was a guy back home who put up like really tall, like privacy fence, and then all of a sudden there were all these rumors about him.

Like. Being a weirdo and like needing a giant fence so he can do like whatever weird stuff he does in his yard. My mom knew him. For some reason, we ran into him to the grocery store once and he's like, I don't know why people are staying all this stuff like Bubba, you know? And it was just like, Oh, so I guess that clicks is like another reason with lore develops.

Jeannie Thomas: [00:37:44] 

Yep. Step it's that pattern of there's something visually that stands out to people. And so they're going to tell stories about it. Whether those stories are based in any truth or not, you know, and in a small town, Hey, a guy builds a tall fence. You notice it. Right. So people are going to narrate it that, you know, we tell stories, try to stop us.

Wyatt Traughber: [00:38:07] I guess my FA like besides St. Anne's retreat, are there any other legends specific to Utah that you think are interesting? 

Jeannie Thomas: [00:38:16] Oh, there are, there are a ton and there's some fun internet sites to go to the, um, Logan weeping woman is a, is the other big one. That's that's an interesting one. And that also concerns a statuary tradition.

Um, and so it's got kind of an interesting history. It's a big statue of a woman kneeling over and weeping in the Logan cemetery. And one of the legend versions is that if you go in the cemetery at midnight, on a full moon, hold hands with your legend tripping buddies and chat cry, lady cry. She will. Um, other versions have her, so she's crying because her kids died.

Um, more salacious versions have her murdering those children. Okay. So what's going on here? Well, you have a visually arresting statue and I can tell you, cause I've researched this tradition. It's a neo-classical. Um, statue and it's a particular artistic or visual convention. It's a motif, a reoccurring element.

And it's called the surrogate mortar. That is, it's just meant to be a stock symbol. Like you see other stock symbols, particularly from the 19th century and cemeteries, 19th century, early 20th, the Rose, the dove, the lamb, all those, they have symbolic, meaning the urn. Things like that. So the surrogate mortar, she's just a stand in generic Warner, but what happens with the oral tradition is that we individualize her, which is a hallmark of our, of, of the 20th century and into the 21st century.

We come way, way more focused on the individual and individual creativity and individuality, by the way, I've seen that same statue in a cemetery, New York, for example, because it's a pattern, but if you have. That and it's dramatic. We'll tell a story about it, you know? And so then people do that. I actually took a group of folklore scholars once to that cemetery to show them the legend and talk about it.

And so we all did it. We were standing around holding hands and my Dean happened to drive by unbeknownst to me at the time this was a great Dean. His name was Gary Kiger, and I ran into my campus a few weeks later and he was like, ah, genie. Did I see you at the cemetery chatting and holding hands with a group of people.

I said, why? Yes. Guilty as charged folklorist, you know? 

Wyatt Traughber: [00:40:34] Yeah. Yeah. Can you think of any like Southern Utah, um, full color stories that you've heard, or maybe like something from salt Lake? I don't know. As a non native Utah, they're all going to be new to me. 

Jeannie Thomas: [00:40:47] Oh, you touched on some great ones. So I like the, um, The cemetery is in salt Lake.

The salt Lake city cemeteries have fabulous cemetery. And, um, e-mails gray where you hear knocking on the grave. Um, you can go find email's grave and hear the knocking on the grave. Um, there's just some really interesting markers with good stories about them. Of course, graveyards. Are just a locust locus for legends.

Um, so almost any, uh, any small town with a cemetery that has any interesting statuary, there'll be legends about it. Um, Southern Utah, of course. Um, there are all sorts of interesting, um, stories and there's a whole rich tradition. Native tradition, just and place names, um, from native history that are fabulous and tie into sacred narrative and are really mythological and just kind of blow your mind with how neat and thoughtful and how they relate humans to the cosmos and the landscape.

I also think of, um, the horse had a monitor cello Monticello. One of them Southern Utah and one of them's Jefferson's house. And I w which is it Monticello want to sell out, said it? 

Wyatt Traughber: [00:42:07] I have no idea. I always said Monticello, but maybe that's wrong. It's like, if you go down to Southern Utah and you say Escalante to people, they're like, Oh, you're not from here.

You're supposed to say like eschelans or escalate if you want to sound like a local 

Jeannie Thomas: [00:42:24] example of local folklore, Yeah. Yeah. Um, the insiders know this insider lore. So, um, but if it's Monticello and, um, there's a horse head on the mountain side and, um, it's pretty cool to go down there and try to find the horse out on the mountain side.

And if you go with a group, there's always that one person in the group who doesn't see it. So you get to spend 20 minutes trying to say no, go from that tree up to the right about, yeah. Um, so that's one that I think of. And in fact, I think they even did a little bit. Have done. I've heard, I don't know if this is based in truth, but they've even did a little grooming the horse had, so you could see it, but, and if you go in their cemetery there, you'll see that, um, something that says Monticello to the people and they put the horses, had that mountain imagery on their grave markers because it's  who they are.

Wyatt Traughber: [00:43:12]

And is it just kind of like a geographic feature that resembles a horse head or is it like those things are, um, like in New Hampshire famously had the old man of the mountain.

Jeannie Thomas: [00:43:19] It was just a mountain that kind of looked like a, a man's face until far, but slid down. Yeah. 

Wyatt Traughber: [00:43:30] Yeah. I guess back home, we had a, there was a mountain that you could apparently see like a donkey's head on, you know, like there were ears and something and I could never really see it.

So I just lied so that we could move on. I'm not person. Yeah. 

Jeannie Thomas: [00:43:42] Yeah. See, they're getting you more, more local folklore. Yeah. 

Wyatt Traughber: [00:43:46] As being a folklorist and studying folklore, um, changed the way you see the world. Compared to like the normals in air quotes. 

Jeannie Thomas: [00:43:54] I like that. The folklorist and the normals. I remember being a student, taking a folklore class and going, Hey, this person gets to do this for a living.

That is awesome. Um, I basically lived, you know, for you your favorite things, like from the next. Looking for one really good movie or one really good book to really excite your mind and your senses and feel alive. You know, you have those things, whether it's movies, books, food, sports, whatever it is that makes you feel really alive.

And what folklore did for me. Is it opened up the world to make me think about a lot more things and feel really engaged with a lot more things. So I noticed more things. So I'll give you an example, um, you know, driving across the country, you go through my laughter mile and Kansas seems very long, but if you're a folklorist you can look for things like, well, how are they building fences?

In this part of Kansas, what's the what's operating here. And how has that a response to their environment and, and, you know, you're driving through Wyoming, what do the ranch Gates that people put up look like, and why do they look like that? And it just causes you, um, it's kind of like going from black and white to color, you just see more detail and start thinking about it more in life becomes really vivid and interesting.

And so, you know, Um, you ask about stories, you ask about places and you, you, you see, you see more about any place you're at and it's really a rich and rewarding experience. 

Wyatt Traughber: [00:45:28] Yeah. Yeah. Why are what causes people to build a branch gate in a certain way, or build a fence in a certain way? 

Jeannie Thomas: [00:45:35] It's the tradition because often, you know, they don't call up an architect.

Don't say, Hey, I want to pay you to drop fans to build this fantasy. They're learning to informally, which is the folk process. You learn it informally, um, by doing and, and seeing it done as opposed to formal schooling by being trained. So, um, it's, you can look at them as conversations with their tradition, what they learned from their people around them, their family, or who's ever around them.

And, um, the landscape, how they're responding to the landscape. So. Oftentimes it's like, Oh, um, They it's a Rocky landscape. So that's why they built the fence the way it is the post don't go very far down, but they've got this thing wrapped in wire with a bunch of rocks in it, or they're trying to anchor the fence and trying not to have to dig too many postholes.

Cause it's so Rocky. So this is kind of neat conversation. You can see everyday people are having with their landscape around them. You know, look at Barnes on the East coast or in someplace like North Carolina and compare them to barns in Utah. And you see. A big difference. Well, that's, they're responding to different elements in the environment and the weather and nature in place.

Wyatt Traughber: [00:46:48] Yeah. How are our Barnes different? Sorry, this is the most fascinating stuff to me. 

Jeannie Thomas: [00:46:52] So, um, one of the ways that I will, I show a slide of a barn from North Carolina and often my students are like, what is that really? Because the bottom of the barn is open and that doesn't fit our definition of barn because we have big winters here with.

Bad snow and everything. So our barns are in closed. Well, they don't in that part of North Carolina, they didn't really need it. They just need kind of an overhang shelter to keep their animals out of the weather. Right. But they don't need the whole protective stuff that we do. And other people will look at Utah barns and say, well, a lot of buildings, a lot of people were donating a lot of their time at their church.

So the barns. In Utah, aren't as fancy as they are in some, in some parts of the Midwest, for example, because the, the architecture of this part of the world that, that, where people put a lot of energy, Tabernacles, temples, things like that, uh, that's where the community was putting a lot of energy, but you still find barns.

And we have a type of barn that you see commonly around here, and it's called the inner mountain barn. We also have. Structure that's indigenous to this area and you can still see it in the wild. It was invented here as a response to the environment it's called the stilted Haitian. So if you drive between Logan and salt Lake, once you get on that highway, just before you get to Wellsville, they're just a shed that you store hay under and it's got, um, just basically poles and a roof.

And that's the, that's the siltation. And it's a response to our environment. And, um, a way. 

Wyatt Traughber: [00:48:28] In cache Valley, not being very windy 

Jeannie Thomas: [00:48:31] and you build this big pile of hay and you want to keep the weather off of it. And so, um, that was built in the inner mountain West as a response to our environment. Um, there are, there are also old ways of, um, stacking hay, hay derricks that you can sometimes see relics of that, but people still with modern materials, we'll do variance on the stilted hay shed.

And I always get a kick out of seeing them in the wild and you can easily see them all around and all sorts of variations. 

Wyatt Traughber: [00:49:03] Awesome. Thank you. Uh, so I guess my final, my actual final question is like, what are you working on now, now that you're stuck at home? Like what's new in your world of folklore. 

Jeannie Thomas: [00:49:16] Uh, I I'm, I never have any shortage of things to do.

I'm always with, uh, Dr. Lynn McNeil also folklorist we run the digital folklore project with a bunch of wonderful students and we track digital trends and we named the digital trend of the year. Uh, w well, we don't name it. We set it out to our national panel and they name it, but that's always a fun project.

So I'm always, uh, that's always going, um, I'm doing some work with photography right now in documenting folklore. Um, I'm also, um, finishing my labor partner was a folklorist and he studied traditional music and I'm finishing up a book he did on Zydeco music in Texas and Louisiana. So I'm working on that right now, but I soon hope to be back writing something about legends.

Wyatt Traughber: [00:50:12] All right. That was my conversation with folklorist Dr. Jeanie Thomas. I hope you enjoyed it. Personal recommendations from people like you are really important to growing a podcast. So please, please, please share this episode with a friend. I'll be posting. Some of Dr. Thomas has pictures of St. Anne's retreat, as well as some pictures of my hometown.

And you can find those on our Instagram. At instead podcast. So check out those pictures, follow our Instagram share instead with a friend and think about the legends in your life. This episode was edited by Nick Vasquez and me why a Tropper is part of our work in the office of research at Utah state university. .

 

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Invasive narratives
Stories coming from a stressed population
Polishing-up your legend detector
Finding urban legends even in the smallest towns