From VOICES: Good Spirits by Libby Tucker

Volume 33
Spring-Summer
2007

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Since American culture has grown through multiple waves of immigration, it should not surprise us that stories about ghosts from other countries have come together to create the folklore of the supernatural that we collect today.

Libby Tucker teaches folklore at Binghamton University. She is the author of Campus Legends: A Handbook (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2005). Her next book, Haunted Halls, will investigate college ghost stories.

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Ghosts That Refuse to Go Away by Libby Tucker

After sending students to their hometowns to collect supernatural narratives in the 1940s, New York folklorist Louis C. Jones discovered that four-fifths of the ghosts in his students’ stories were American and one-fifth were European. Like Jones, I have sent my students out to collect folklore from family members. Some students’ ghost stories describe family members who, after living and dying in Europe or Asia, come along with their relatives to start a new life—or afterlife—in the United States. These annoyingly persistent ghosts highlight the difficulties of adjustment to a new culture and the importance of remembering ancestors’ traditions.

Some ghost stories take root on new soil, while others languish and fade away. Beliefs from the old country explain stressful situations in the family’s new land, offering comfort and occasional laughter. When a story about an encounter with an old-country ghost fits patterns of folk legend telling and filmmaking in the United States, that story will appeal to listeners beyond the ghost’s family circle.

In the spring of 2006, Rachel, a sophomore from Syosset, New York, told her fellow students in my introductory folklore class a story about her Russian step-grandmother, a cantankerous woman who often told younger female relatives that they were not working hard enough to preserve family rituals. This grandmother’s most precious possession was a pair of candlesticks used for Sabbath dinners. For several generations, the oldest daughter in the family had inherited these candlesticks after their owner’s death. Rachel’s mother inherited the candlesticks before leaving Russia to settle in the United States. Sometimes, when lighting candles before dinner on Friday evenings, she saw a pale image of her stepmother’s ghost near the table. During dinner, Rachel’s mother would tell her husband and children about the most recent sightings of the eerie apparition.

This story has comic value, evoking images of relatives and in-laws who don’t know how to let go. Like the mother in the popular movie Monster-in-Law (2005), this mother just cannot leave her daughter alone. Rachel’s story also conveys a serious message about preserving the integrity of family ritual. Just as the candlesticks stay on the Sabbath table, the grandmother’s ghost remains with family members. Only the daughter who inherited the candlesticks can see the ghost, but her own daughter Rachel, next in line to own these family heirlooms, will remember her mother’s narratives and may, in turn, see the ghost herself.

My second example, from a family that immigrated from Thailand to the United States, similarly focuses on a ghost that refuses to leave its loved ones. Instead of becoming attached to a particular object, this ghost inhabits the body of a member of its family. In the fall of 1998, twenty-five–year-old Jason told the story of what happened to his mother when she fainted following a family Mother’s Day celebration. Feeling dizzy and weak, she went to find her husband, then began to speak in the voice of her husband’s deceased brother: “I want something to drink. I’ve been waiting for you guys to give me food since yesterday, but no one remembered me. No one saw me. I waited outside for you, but no one came outside. So I went downstairs and waited. I saw all of you, but you still didn’t see me.”

This miserable ghost desperately wished to be remembered and honored by the members of his family. Instead of receiving food from his family on Mother’s Day, as Thai ritual requires, he felt excluded from the warmth of the family circle. Trying to get back in, he entered the body of Jason’s mother—an uncomfortable surprise for the Mother’s Day honoree. Thai ritual suggests that the best way to exorcise a ghost is to tie white yarn, phi, around the sufferer’s wrist. Although Jason’s father did this for his wife, the uncle’s ghost still refused to go away. Only a glass of beer, offered to the host body, persuaded this spirit to leave his sister-in-law in peace for a while. Like the ghost of the candlesticks from Russia, this beer-drinking ghost wants to help his relatives remember important rituals from their original homeland. Thai culture emphasizes the importance of honoring and feeding dead relatives; it also recognizes the deceased’s right to occupy the body of a living person, if the family does not behave itself properly. Although Thai people know a remedy for possession, that remedy will not work until the ghost gets what it wants and needs.

Possession is a cross-cultural phenomenon, so stories about ghosts that occupy people’s bodies move fluidly from one cultural area to another. After The Exorcist came out in 1973, many Americans recounted horrific possession scenarios. In The Exorcist, the demon came from the Middle East. More recent movies such as The Exorcism of Emily Rose (2005) have supported belief in possession. Since American culture has grown through multiple waves of immigration, it should not surprise us that stories about ghosts from other countries have come together to create the folklore of the supernatural that we collect today. A ghost may be considered American if someone sees, hears, or feels it somewhere in the United States, but a narrative about a spectral experience does not have much impact on others unless it sounds exciting and bears some similarity to established, appealing stories or popular films.

Today’s Empire State ghosts reflect the interaction of storytellers and moviegoers; they also display a complex and everchanging blend of cultural influences. I hope that fieldworkers will continue to track the development of New York State’s folklore of the supernatural as future immigrants tell new ghost stories.

Libby Tucker’s Good Spirits column was published in Voices Vol. 33, Spring Summer 2007. Voices is the membership magazine of the New York Folklore Society. To become a subscriber, join the New York Folklore Society now.