folklorist

During the 19th century, European writers and artists developed a renewed fascination with fairy lore, partly inspired by the Romantic movement.

Folklorists began collecting traditional stories, while fairies became popular subjects in literature, painting, theater, and kids' books.

Francis Young argues in his book, Fairies, A History, that the declining authority of Christianity actually worked in the fairies' favor.

As fairies became less entangled in theological debates about angels and demons and magic that would get you burned at the stake, writers and artists had greater freedom to reimagine them.

People called it being hag-ridden.

Folklorists today think it was sleep paralysis.

In the 1900s, in a cabin, you didn't have that term.

You just had a neighbor woman who looked kind of funny at you at church and you made accusations.

That's because the ghostly passenger is considerably older than the automobile.

Folklorists have identified earlier stories in which travellers encounter mysterious passengers while travelling by horseback, horse-drawn vehicle or other forms of transport.

The basic supernatural mechanism was already there, then the world changed, cars became commonplace, people began travelling longer distances and hitchhiking became a normal, if sometimes risky, certainly part of 20th century life.

and the ghost story changed with it the horse became the automobile the roadside became the highway and the mysterious stranger became a hitchhiker this is one of the things that makes the legend so fascinating the ghost didn't disappear he simply found a new way to travel So how old is the story? Well, this is where things become a little more complicated because yet again, Jan Harald Brunvard, the American folklorist who did more than almost anyone else to popularise the academic study of urban legends, traced versions of the story back into the 19th century and argued that the automobile version developed later as transportation changed.

A driver sees somebody standing at the side of the road, they stop, they offer a lift, a stranger gets in and for a while everything appears normal and then suddenly the passenger just disappears.

and this modern vanishing hitchhiker story had arrived.

Folklorists Richard Beardsley and Rosalie Hankey later argued that the story was fundamentally a modern legend, reflecting the realities and anxieties of automobile society rather than simply being an ancient ghost story placed into a car.

And I guess that's interesting because it's almost like we've taken that old story and just modernized it to just sort of like scare us really you know it's kind of weird it's just like a like an old urban legend turned into a modern urban legend yeah it's just evolved over time This is where the story becomes particularly fascinating because in the early 1940s, two American folklorists, the two we were just speaking about, decided to really investigate this and they wanted to know something very simple.

families.

Folklorists wrote about it.

It was photographed.

Eventually, an anatomist examined it.

They're great.

Folklorists use the Arne Thompson Uther Index, the ATU system, to categorize folktales from around the world based on their structural types.

Okay.

And Hansel and Gretel is the prototype for Type ATU-327A.

And the Bunny Man story got a lot of attention around the Washington area.

Folklorists, including David Puglia, have argued that the axe drifted into the Goatman legend from there.

And if you think about the geography, these are teenagers in overlapping suburbs around the same city, hearing the same news and telling the same stories.

One legend has a guy with a hatchet, the other has a creature in the woods.

And editors weren't afraid to recount attestations of ghostly encounters from the battlefields to the bedroom.

But what does one do with such stories? Folklorists wanted to dismiss them because they were modern lore, what we would call today fake lore.

And historians rarely considered them because, well, I mean, look at them.

They're ghost stories.

Let's see what I got in the chapters.

Power of a Story, The Legend, Oral Transmission, Survival and Growth, 1820s, 1890s, The Power of the Printed Word, that red book, and Academics, Folklorists, and Others, Entitled.

Got involved in it.

I did live movies and stuff, popular culture, pop culture queen.