Category: Folktale

Mr. Cadaverous and the Devil of Danbury

Mr. Cadaverous has left me legacy. The good man is dead, but he has left me his note-books. This morning I opened one of them, and found it full of ghost stories. There was a note, written in Greek and Latin, on the last page, which, being interpreted, says: “Of all that comes before this page I believe not one single word.” I was angered as I read, for why should any man collect a mass of narratives which he looks upon not as mere fiction but as mere lies? This arid scepticism makes me hate my generation.

— Augustus Jessopp, “The Dying Out of the Marvelous“

The rest of Rev. Jessopp’s rant is enjoyable, but I do think he exaggerates a bit. For one thing, it’s my opinion that Mr. Cadaverous protesteth too much: why write down all these ancient ghost stories if you don’t enjoy them? And to enjoy them, you have to suspend your disbelief, at least for the duration of the telling, or in this case, the writing. Loudly proclaming your scepticism after the fact doesn’t fool anyone.

St John the Baptist, Danbury, June 2021 01.
St. John the Baptist Church, Danbury. Photo by Tony Grist, on Wikimedia

For another thing, I doubt that Rev. Jessopp believed them either. I think he just wished, at least sometimes, they could be true. In other words, he enjoyed them.

Most of “The Dying out of the Marvellous” is a sampler of tales from Mr. Cadaverous’s notebook. But at the end, Jessopp teases us with stories he won’t tell us:

You must not expect that I should tell you all my chronicler’s stories. No! I must leave out the story of the devil of Danbury…

…and the hobgoblins of Biggleswade, and the dragon of Sudbury. Foo!! You know I have try to hunt down at least some of these. The Devil of Danbury first.

Continue reading →

Posted on by Nina Zumel 0

Hunting for Haunted Stumps

While trawling the HathiTrust archive the other day, I stumbled on a delighful, privately-published little booklet called The Haunted Stump; or The Story of The Amputated Hand, by Erasmus Foster Darby. The book gives two versions of an Ohio ghost story about phantom hands that clutch out at the people who pass a spooky old tree stump. Good, campfire tale stuff!

An old stump in epping forest.jpg!Portrait.

Both versions of the tale are local to Pike County, Ohio; but as Darby says in the book’s foreword:

The story of the haunted stump is an old and threadworn story insofar as the basic theme is concerned. Its counterpart can be found in the folk literature of nearly every country in the world.

Can it, though? I wondered. I believe that, but I’d never heard any other versions. So I went on a little hunting expedition.

Continue reading →

Posted on by Nina Zumel 0

The Origin of Stories: A Seneca Tale

Second in a series of myths about myths, inspired by Rosalind Kerven’s article “The Mythical Origins of Myths” in FLS News, the newsletter of the Folklore Society, Issue 102, February 2024.

The Origin of Stories
(O-non-dowa-gah (Seneca) people, Great Lakes region, North America)

Fringed pouch and knife sheath. Buckskin embroidered with porcupine quills.

Once there was an orphan named Gaqka (Crow) who had no family to take care of him. He made his home in a tree and hunted birds and squirrels to feed himself. Because he was dirty and ragged, the people of the village called him Filth-Covered-One (Ciá’dōdǎ)1. They would jeer and hold their nose whenever they walked past him. This made Gaqka so unhappy, he resolved to go away.

After a long journey south, Gaqka came to a river. On the other side, he saw a cliff with a face like a man. He decided to make his home on the top of that cliff, so he climbed to the top, and built a bark cabin there to live in.

One evening, Gaqka sat himself down on a stone near the edge of the cliff, to prepare his arrows for the next day’s hunting. Suddenly, he heard a voice.

“Shall I tell you stories?”

Looking around, Gaqka saw no one. He shrugged his shoulders and went back to what he had been doing.

“Do you want to hear stories?”

This time, the voice seemed to come from the stone he was sitting on, or maybe from beyond the edge of the cliff.

“Who are you? And what are stories?” Gaqka asked into the air.

“Stories tell what happened long ago. If you give me some tobacco, I will tell you stories.”

So Gaqka threw a bit of tobacco over the cliff, and the voice began.

“Once, in the world before this….”

Continue reading →

Posted on by Nina Zumel 0

How Anansi Bought the World’s Stories

First in a series of myths about myths, inspired by Rosalind Kerven’s article “The Mythical Origins of Myths” in FLS News, the newsletter of the Folklore Society, Issue 102, February 2024.

How Anansi Bought the World’s Stories
(Asante people, Ghana, West Africa)

We do not really mean, we do not really mean, (that what we are going to say is true).

In the beginning, all the world’s stories belonged to Nyame, the Sky god. But Kawaku Anansi, the Spider, wanted to buy them. So he went to the Sky god and asked, “Will you sell me the world’s stories?”

Anansi, the Spider Trickster
Anansi the Spider Trickster, Illustration by Pamela Colman Smith (1899). Source: Wikipedia

The Sky god said, “Many have tried to buy my stories, but they couldn’t pay the price. Can you pay the price?”

“What is the price?” Anansi asked.

The Sky god answered, “The price is: Onini the Python, Mmoboro the Hornets, Osebo the Leopard, and Mmoatia the Fairy. If you can bring me these things, I will sell you the world’s stories.”

Anansi said, “I’ll see what I can do.” And he went home, and consulted his wife, Aso.

Continue reading →

Posted on by Nina Zumel 0

The Vampire, a Literary Fairy Tale Adaptation

I’ve posted a new translation to Ephemera, a literary fairy tale called “The Vampire.” It’s another find from Ganso y Pulpo, the archive of forgotten nineteenth century Spanish literature. The tale is by an author that I’ve not translated before: the journalist, essayist, playwright, and author of short stories, Ramón García Sánchez (c.1840 – 1885).

ElVampiro

  • The Vampire (El vampiro): When a mysterious rich old man moves into an ancient castle, healthy young men from the surrounding villages begin to vanish. Their disappearances coincide with the occurences of wild but unexplained festivities in the castle. Finally, the young women of the village unite to solve the mystery and combat the evil that has come amongst them.

“The Vampire” is a variation of folktale type ATU 514, commonly referred to as A Shift of Sex. Folktales of this type feature a young woman who must disguise herself as a man to complete a quest; the transformed “hero” then becomes the object of amorous affection for another woman in the story. The interesting part is that in many folktales of this type, the disguised heroine magically becomes a man, and marries the woman who loves him! That doesn’t happen here, but it’s still a fun and interesting tale.

Continue reading →

Posted on by Nina Zumel 0

Classic Crime: The Murder Hole

A lonely road runs through a desolate stretch of Scottish moor. This part of the country has a bad reputation for murder and highway robbery; almost everyone who used to live here has fled. There’s only one family left, an old lady and her two sons. When night falls, travelers caught on the moor take shelter at their cottage, because it’s much safer there than to sleep out in the open, all things considered. Right?

Your Money or Your Life

The Murder Hole is a gruesome little tale of the “scary stories around the campfire” variety: somewhat predictable, but fun to read or to hear. You can find it various places around the web, usually unattributed and subtitled something like “A Scottish Legend.”

The tale itself may well be a local legend, but this specific version has an author, and she should be credited: Catherine Sinclair (1800-1864), a philanthropist and author of children’s literature. She also wrote a few volumes of legends and folktales, and apparently was the first to identify Sir Walter Scott as the author of the previously anonymous Waverly novels.

“The Murder Hole” first appeared in the February 1829 issue of Blackwood’s Magazine. Sinclair later republished it as part of her 1853 collection London Homes.

You can read “The Murder Hole” here.

I thought it was a delightful piece of mildly gory folklore when I found it; I hope you like it, too.

Enjoy!

Part of the Classic Crime series.

Illustrations

Featured image: The Murder by Paul Cezanne (c. 1868). Source: WikiArt

Your Money or Your Life! by Charles-Joseph Traviès de Villers, for Les mystères de Paris, vol. 1 by Eugène Süe, 1843. Source: Old Book Illustrations

Posted on by Nina Zumel 2

The Inn at the Spessart

Wilhelm Hauff (1802-1827) was a German poet and writer of the Romantic school, best known today for his märchen, a word usually translated as “fairy tales” — generally implied to be for children. In Hauff’s case the description “folkloric tales” might be more appropriate, since some of his stories seem too dark for children’s literature. Perhaps that’s why his name and works are less well known to Anglophone readers today than, say, the work of the Brothers Grimm or Charles Perrault. This is a shame; the tales I’ve read are delightful, and like the work of Hans Christian Andersen, are as readable–or even more readable–for adults as for children.

Wilhelm Hauff (1802-1827)
Source: Wikimedia

Hauff published his Märchen over the period of 1825-1827 as three Märchen-Almanach (yearly keepsake volumes): Die Karawane (The Caravan) (1825), Der Scheik von Alessandria und seine Sklaven (The Sheik of Alexandria and his Slaves) (1826) and Das Wirtshaus im Spessart (The Inn in the Spessart) (1827). Each collection is in the form of a story-cycle, with a framing narrative whose characters tell the individual tales, either to pass the time or to relate a part of their personal history. As you might guess from the titles, the first two collections are Orientalist fantasies patterned after the Arabian Nights. That’s well and good, but I wasn’t really in the mood for it, so instead I read The Inn in the Spessart, a tale of intrigue, impersonation, and highway robbers set in the forest of the Spessart region of Bavaria and Hesse.

Continue reading →

Posted on by Nina Zumel 0

A Ghost Story and a Fairy Tale

There’s no real theme to this post; I’m just tying up some loose ends I’d forgotten about. Specifically, a couple of posts to Ephemera that I never boosted here.

866px Horla Apparition

First is a translation that I posted last October of a ghost story, of sorts, by Emilia Pardo Bazán. This is an interesting and ambiguous tale: is the protagonist mad, or possessed? It reminds me a little bit of The Horla, and also a little bit of “The Yellow Wallpaper.” See what you think.

Second is a version of the Snow White fairy tale, in verse, by Aleksandr Pushkin, called (in this version) “The Tale of the Dead Princess and the Seven Knights” (1833). It’s a mix of the traditional Snow White narrative (Aarne-Thompson-Uther tale type 709), with a little bit of “East O’the Sun, West O’the Moon” (Aarne-Thompson-Uther 425 I think? — only in reverse).

Continue reading →

Posted on by Nina Zumel 0

The Dream House: From Fireside Tale to Fiction

Augustus John Cuthbert Hare (1834-1903) was an English writer who wrote mostly, it seems, about his travels and his family. Why he thought anyone would be interested in his six volume autobiography (The Story of my Life), I don’t know; but from it, we do learn that he had a lot of friends who liked to tell ghost stories. And Hare wrote them down.

John Augustus Cuthbert Hare
Augustus Hare (1834-1903). Source: Wikimedia

In that roundabout way that happens while doing research for a potential post, I found myself browsing the last three volumes of The Story of my Life. And I came upon an oddly familiar story, one that Hare records from a “Miss Broke,” the niece of the Gurdons, a family that Hare is staying with in Suffolk.

A woman living in Ireland begins having frequent dreams of “the most enchanting house I ever saw”—detailed dreams, about walking through all the rooms of the house, its garden and conservatory. Eventually the family decides to leave Ireland and move to England, and they proceed to search for a house in the vicinity of London. During their search, they learn of a house near Hampshire.
Continue reading →

Posted on by Nina Zumel 1

Vincent Price reads Tales of Witches, Ghosts and Goblins

In my last post, I tracked down the probable literary sources for A Graveyard of Ghost Tales (Caedmon Records, 1974), an LP of ghost stories and other goodies read by Vincent Price. In this post, I do the same thing for Tales of Witches, Ghosts and Goblins (Caedmon Records, 1972), also read by Vincent Price.

Tales of Witches, Ghosts and Goblins, Vincent Price

As with Graveyard, the stories Price reads here are folktales, not horror. There are a couple of “recipes,” some verses, and a passage from an account of a witch trial. Three stories are again from Carl Carmer, just as lovely and romantic as the pieces on the other LP. “The Smoker” was delightful, and “Gobbleknoll” was fun, too.

In his readings, Price only gives the authorship of one piece, the first verse of “The Broomstick Train” by Oliver Wendell Holmes. So here’s my educated guess at the rest. Thanks again to Jenny Ashford from the Facebook group Alone with the Horrors: Horror Fiction for her research. Again, I haven’t read all of the texts mentioned below, so these attributions aren’t guaranteed. But I’m pretty sure they’re right.

Continue reading →

Posted on by Nina Zumel 2