Children’s Folklore Recent Titles in Greenwood Folklore Handbooks Myth: a handbook

Live Chickens and Grasshoppers
Back in high school, I decided I wanted to do a senior prank right before the last day of 
school with a friend. I brought two live chickens with my friend Mike and numbered one 
of the chickens one and one of them three. I also brought a bunch of grasshoppers for my 
prank. So a few days before our last day of school, I drove to school with Mike and told 
him to wait in the car until I called him. I went into school through the front doors and 
walked around the school checking which exit was free to let Mike through. This was all 
near lunchtime, so it was easier to find an exit to sneak someone in.
As soon as I found an exit near the back of the school, I called Mike right away. He came 
within a few minutes with a box holding the chickens and a bag with the grasshoppers. We 
quickly snuck up to the third fl oor and released our chickens. After a few seconds, we started 
hearing shrieks through the hallway because some people were in the hallway. We released 
the grasshoppers through a little crack in the door and we quietly snuck away. Two of the 
deans caught the chickens, and I haven’t found out what happened to the grasshoppers. We 
luckily got away with our prank without getting caught in the end.

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82 Children’s 
Folklore
Anthony, 19 years old, whose family heritage was Hispanic, told the story of 
his favorite high school prank in Vestal, New York, in April 2007. This gleeful 
story shows how much fun it can be to transform an orderly high school into 
a chaotic animal playground. Such transformations, which symbolize students’ 
subversive spirit, have also been popular on college campuses. For examples of 
comparable college pranks, see my 2005 study 
Campus Legends
(41– 42).
NARRATIVES
Tales
Boo!
There was once a girl who was home alone because her mother and father were at a party. 
At seven o’clock a voice said, “At eleven o’clock you must go up to the attic and open the 
old trunk. If you don’t you will be killed.” It was ten o’clock, ten thirty, and finally eleven. 
The girl shook as she went up the stairs at eleven o’clock. She opened the trunk and there 
was a voice which said: “BOO!”
Reimund Kvideland includes this story collected from a 12-year-old boy in 
Bergen, Norway, in 1969 in his essay “Stories about Death as a Part of Chil-
dren’s Socialization” (62). Kvideland persuasively argues that stories help chil-
dren learn about the meaning of death in an entertaining, nonthreatening way. 
Such stories often include spooky sounds that frighten a child (Motif E402, 
“Mysterious ghostlike noises heard”). Children have continued to enjoy stories 
of this kind from the 1970s to the early twenty-first century. Other examples 
are included in Sylvia Grider’s “Supernatural Narratives of Children” (211–38) 
and my “Tradition and Creativity in the Storytelling of Pre- Adolescent Girls” 
(121– 41).