The American Folklife Center at Family Day

On October 19th, staff from the American Folklife Center joined several other divisions from around the Library to present exhibits and activities celebrating Halloween. Amongst the options at the AFC table were a children’s folklife craft, a folklore engagement question, and selected items from our archive, such as an excerpt from Laurie Harrison’s unpublished novel, Tennessee Trouble.

The story is based on the Bell Witch legend, where the Bell family, living in the Cumberland Mountains of Tennessee, claimed to be haunted by the ghost of a woman named Kate Batts. In her correspondence with the Archive of American Folk Song (the precursor to the American Folklife Center), Ms. Harrison stated that she grew up in the area where the legend began and knew descendants of the Bell family.

The novel, which can only be accessed onsite at the AFC reading room, is a wonderful combination of a ghost legend and a slice of Appalachian folklife, as exhibited in the opening paragraphs:

“She was sorting out the colors on the rack when the chair came rocketing into the room, but her skilled fingers did not stop their work. Blue, a sweet misty blue, green, cream, her eyes did not need the draft lying open on the loom for she had woven Tennessee Trouble too often to follow a guide. She went on setting the spools on the rack, but half turned to frown at the chair which had thumped over the sill and was galloping like mad across the floor. It was quite empty, and was making straight for her loom.

Her practiced eye gaged the chair’s speed; tying the threads deftly she sidestepped and aimed a vigorous kick at its split hickory seat. Though it shied nimbly evading the thrust by a good foot an infuriated shriek that came from the rafters tore the silence.”

The title of the novel is a reference to folk craft, as “Tennessee Trouble” is a coverlet weaving pattern found throughout Tennesee, Kentucky, and North Carolina.

At one end of AFC’s Family Day table, visitors could pose for a selfie with a scarecrow, playfully named James H. Skellington in joking reference to former Librarian of Congress, James H. Billington. AFC Folklife Specialist Stephen Winick based the scarecrow’s look on a similar figure found in the Pinelands Folklife Project (an image of the original scarecrow can be seen on the table to the left of the replica).

While driving along Route 9 in New Jersey, fieldworker Sue Samuelson spotted a Halloween display. She wrote the following in her fieldnotes:

“Last week I had noted a scarecrow type of figure on a porch and wanted to go back and photograph it. In the meantime the porch display had become more elaborate. There was this figure, dressed like a farmer with overalls, shirt, boots, gloves, stuffed with newspaper and with a plastic pumpkin for a head. There was a spider web done in a kind of green florescent string; a ghost with a plastic skull head and draped in a sheet, suspended from the roof of the porch; and little plastic pumpkins hanging from the eaves. Harold Cramer, a 17-year old, does the decorating.” – Sue Samuelson, October 15, 1983

Most of the table was given over to space for making paper fortune-tellers. These fortune-tellers — alternately known by some as “cootie catchers” — are an example of children’s folklife, often found in the hallways and playgrounds of elementary schools. Visitors were invited to create their own fortune-tellers. One young visitor used hers to sort friends and family into Hogwarts houses, and determine which book character they were. Another young visitor filled his fortune-teller out with movie titles, and planned to use it to help choose which movie he and his family would watch that evening. AFC staff members working the table created their own fortune-tellers as helpful teaching tools.

At the opposite end of the table from the scarecrow, AFC Folklife Specialist Nancy Groce worked hard to get passersby to participate in the Center’s engagement question. Examples of popular ghost stories, urban legends, and supernatural creatures were written on a large sheet of paper, and visitors were asked which of the stories they had heard of. Some of the stories and creatures – such as Mothman and the Jersey Devil – were reflective of specific regional stories, while others – such as Bigfoot and UFOs – reflected popularity across broader regions. Stories such as Bloody Mary reflected a gender divide, as most of the people who remembered that story tended to be women who had engaged with the story in their youth, while at sleepovers.

Initially, one of the squares on the sheet was left intentionally blank. If a visitor mentioned a story that wasn’t on the list, they were encouraged to write it down on a card and “feed it to the monster” — dropping it into a nearby bin that looked like Frankenstein’s Monster. We received eight cards with additional stories on them, as well as an emphatic suggestion from a child that the Loch Ness Monster should go into the empty spot on the chart. Some of the cards included references to what the creature was, or its country of origin. In some cases, the visitor did not include these details on the card, but did provide the information verbally to staff at the table. In the case of the latter, this information is provided in italics on the list below. The following stories were submitted by visitors to the AFC table:

• Story of the Chupacabra – Puerto Rico
• De Witte Wieven (“Wise Women”) – Netherlands
• De Bokkem Rijders – Netherlands
• Swamp Man – Florida
• Candy Man
• The Wendigo
• The Vindow Viper
• Kornmuhme (Germany) – A monster that prevents kids from trampling in fields growing cereals (rye, wheat, barley, oats)

I have heard of some of these, such as the chupacabra, swamp man (also known as swamp ape), candy man, wendigo and Vindow Viper. Others, like the Witte Wieven, Bokkem Rijders, and Kornmuhme, were a complete mystery to me and, of course, have piqued my interest. I see a journey through AFC’s rich resources in my future, on the trail of these supernatural stories.

The findings of the engagement question’s main chart reflected the following popularity of stories:

1. Bigfoot – 77
2. UFOs/Area 51 – 73
3. Bloody Mary – 61
4. Razors in Candy – 40
5. La Llorona – 25
6. Mothman – 25
7. Sewer Alligators – 19
8. The Hook Man – 18
9. Killer in the Backseat – 16
10. Vanishing Hitchhiker – 13
11. Jersey Devil – 13
12. Loch Ness Monster – 5

Further Reading

Visit the American Folklife Center Reading Room to view the following relevant collections:

• Read Laurie Harrison’s unpublished novel, Tennessee Trouble (AFC 1978/029)
• Learn more about the Jersey Devil from Stephen Winick’s Botkin lecture, Tales of the Jersey Devil, 2005 August 23 (AFC 2005/037)
• Discover more urban legends, submitted primarily by high school and college students in Texas and Oregon in the Sabine Hilding collection of urban legends, 1991-1994

Check out these other Folklife Today blog posts about some of the popular results from AFC’s engagement question:

• Picante Pero Sabroso: Songs of La Llorona – Stephen Winick
  • This post is part of a series on La Llorona. Find links to the entire series here
• Scary Stories for Halloween 2024 on the Folklife Today Podcast – Stephen Winick
• On the Trail of Bigfoot in the Library of Congress – Meg Nicholas
• “And a fire come out at night”: UFOs, space exploration and folklife – Meg Nicholas