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.

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Before the Coffee Gets Cold

Before the Coffee Gets Cold
by Toshikazu Kawaguchi, translated by Geoffrey Trousselot
Originally published 2015, English translation published 2019

If you could go back, who would you want to meet?

Before the coffee gets cold.

Before the Coffee Gets Cold is a tale of a little basement cafe off an obscure side street in Tokyo, one that’s been there for over a hundred years. There is a special seat, at a certain table, where you can go back in time.

Cool, huh? But there are complications. While time traveling, you can’t leave the cafe; you can’t even get up from the seat. This means that you can only meet someone who has been to the cafe–and you have to know when. Absolutely nothing you do in the past will change the present: so if you want to go back in time to warn someone not to take the plane ride that killed them, it won’t help. When you come back to the present, they will still be dead. And most frightening of all, you can only be in the past for as long as it takes for the coffee in front of you to get cold. If you don’t drink all the coffee before it gets cold (finishing the coffee brings you back), you’ll be trapped in time, as a ghost.

So why would you bother? That’s the theme the book explores.

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Back to the Byland Abbey Ghost Stories

Ok, so I realize that this is my second-in-a-row post about fooling around with blog templates, but–that’s what I’ve been doing.

From an old post:

The Byland Abbey ghost stories are a collection of twelve supernatural tales, set in Yorkshire and written in Latin. The stories were scribbled onto the endpages of a twelfth century manuscript by an anonymous monk, probably sometime around 1400. M.R James transcribed the stories and published them as “Twelve Medieval Ghost Stories,” English Historical Review 37 (1922).

As I mentioned in that earlier post, I found someone (David Mimno) who had archived transcriptions of the above publication, plus A.J. Grant’s 1924 translation on Github. I did some restructuring on those documents to make them online friendly.

And now I’ve made a website: Twelve Medieval Ghost Stories.

Front Page of the new website. Click on the image to go there.

The website was just an excuse to play with doing margin notes online; now that’s it’s up, I’ll likely not touch it again.

But if you haven’t read the Byland Abbey ghost stories yet — this might be a way to do it. Read them on a laptop/desktop with a wide browser to fully enjoy the margin note goodness.

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Moving Dark Tales Sleuth

I’ve decided to move the Dark Tales Sleuth blog off WordPress.com, to Github Pages. This seems more a more reasonable place to put it, given that it’s relatively inactive, and has only a few followers.

You can read my discussion about it on my “I’m moving” post — and here’s a Wayback Machine link for when the site finally goes away.

The new Dark Tales Sleuth is already up: https://ninazumel.com/dark_tales_sleuth/. I will shut down the WordPress version on September 15.

The new site is a complete migration of the old one, and I’ve also tried to update all the relevant links here on Multo to point to the new site. If you happen to come across a link to the old site—or after September 15, a dead link—please let me know, and I will fix it.

The site’s not dead; I expect to keep posting literary investigations there as they happen. As always, I’ll announce here when I put up a post there, so people who follow me here won’t miss out.

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Playing “What if?” with Star Wars

I’m not a hardcore Star Wars fangirl. I enjoyed the original trilogy, and have watched a few of the other films (Rogue One, two of the sequels). I even (long ago) read A Splinter in the Mind’s Eye. But to be honest, the only film I even think about revisiting is the first one, Episode IV. I’d be perfectly happy if that were the only one.

Star Wars A New Hope Movie Poster
Source: Wikipedia

Nonetheless, the franchise is part of the cultural zeitgeist, so I’m peripherally aware of the workings of its universe, and of its films and TV shows. And, of course, my husband and I sometimes play “What if?” with Star Wars, as we do with other fictional worlds. Recently, we were talking about one of the latest Star Wars shows, The Acolyte. One of its premises that we find particularly interesting is the idea that the Force is not the exclusive domain of the Jedi and the Sith, but that other groups or individuals have learned how to channel it. In The Acolyte, that’s the witches; and in Rogue One, there was the monk played by Donnie Yen, and, presumably, his order.

Hubby came up with a neat twist on the workings of the universe that I really liked. So, just for fun, I’m going to spin it out a little more. Since I’m not a hardcore fan, I’m sure I’ve gotten details of the universe and its characters wrong; so I’m just going by how I understand it, based on the films I’ve seen, and various discussions I’ve absorbed from the web or social media. It’s an amusing thought experiment.

What if we keep the original notion of the Force as a mystical “something” that suffuses the universe and animates life — but we add the restriction that drawing on the Force temporarily depletes it locally? And it replenishes only slowly?

So by drawing enough power from the Force in too short a time, one could, in fact, use up all the locally available Force, for a while. And multiple Force users in one area are all potentially individually weaker than they are when they are alone, because they have to split the available Force between them — though some might be better at sucking it up than others.

This is kinda cool, because different kinds of Force using groups immediately follow from the “physics” of the Force, if you will.

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Ghosts of UC Berkeley Engineering

While reading the paper “California Ghosts” (1942) for my Vanishing Hitchhiker post, I noticed that author Rosalie Hankey included some legends about a couple of engineering buildings on the UC Berkeley campus. My alma mater! I was an Electrical Engineering undergraduate, so I spent most of my time on the north side of campus, where Engineering, Math, and Statistics are all located.

I never heard the stories that Hankey collected when I was at Cal. With one exception, I don’t recall any ghost stories at all; but I wasn’t particularly interested in such things at the time. But now I am, so I thought I’d share them, along with a little campus history. Read on….

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Revisiting the Vanishing Hitchhiker

The Vanishing Hitchhiker is an enormously popular urban legend, and likely one that’s been heard, in some form or another, by almost everyone across the world. In some recent reading, I came across a few variations I hadn’t heard before, and got inspired to revisit this classic modern ghost story.

Silhouette of Woman in Smoke, facing Right
Photo by Татьяна Доломан

Some of the earliest, and still most comprehensive, studies of The Vanishing Hitchhiker were published in the early 1940s by anthropologists Richard Beardsley and Rosalie Hankey in California Folklore Quarterly. For this post, I decided to share some fun versions of the tale (many from Beardsley and Hankey), categorized roughly according to their classification. This isn’t meant to be scientific or comprehensive by any means—it’s just a little collection to inspire you, if you ever want some “scary”stories to tell over a campfire.

I’ll mark the stories with their sources; you’ll find the bibliography at the end of the post. Rather than directly quoting all the tales, I’ll retell them in my own way, because that’s part of the fun, after all!

Enjoy.

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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….”

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Algorithmic Art

Abstract image generated algorithmically from 15-bit color list, by placing colors so that they are maximally similar to their neighbors.
What I’ve been doing this weekend.

I know there’s been a hiatus in my “Myths about Myths” series; I’ll get back to it soon, but lots has been going on. I also had an urge to do some recreational coding, namely playing with algorithmic art

…or, what nowadays one might call “non-AI generative art.” Over this Memorial Day weekend, I played with a few simple algorithms, inspired by an old Stack Exchange code golf. The intention here isn’t to stomp on AI-based generative art, but just to remember the simple pleasures of creating pretty pictures with math.

The whole article is posted to ninazumel.com, which in turn points to my github repository, for those of you who might be technically minded. But I thought I’d post a few fun things here.

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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.

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