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

RITUALS
Be Real Quiet
Everybody gets into a big circle that wanta play, and it has to be 
real quiet,
and it’s really 
supposed to be dark, but the fire will be okay. And you gotta 
concentrate.
And then, after 
that, everybody’s quiet, and then we bring like Frankenstein or Dracula, one of them 
back. And then we all hold hands and be real quiet.
Linda, an African American fifth-grader, told her fellow Girl Scout troop 
members how to hold a séance during a campout at the Bradford Woods camp-
site near Martinsville, Indiana, in October 1976. Her description became part of 
my dissertation, “Tradition and Creativity in the Storytelling of Pre-Adolescent 
Girls” (403).
Since the nineteenth century, American children have enjoyed trying to raise 
the dead by holding séances. While children’s séance routines vary, everyone usu-
ally sits in a circle holding hands and tries to stay very quiet. Linda uses the word 
quiet
three times in her description, showing that nothing interesting will happen 
unless the group refrains from making noise. Unlike some children who have 
tried to raise the spirits of dead individuals, she suggests that the group should 

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90 Children’s 
Folklore
try to bring back the spirits of monsters in horror films. This choice demon-
strates the dominance of mass-media images in American culture during the late 
twentieth century. For other séance examples, see Bronner (166 – 67).
Séance at Lizzie Borden’s Home
For my thirteenth birthday, my mom took me and three of my friends to go stay at the 
house of Lizzie Borden, a woman who, at the age of twenty, murdered her entire family 
in that house. The house is rumored to be haunted by her ghost and the ghosts of her 
family members. Many people say that these are malevolent ghosts, as many ghosts who 
suffered violent deaths are.
While I was there, my friends and I had a séance. While we were doing that, all the 
candles blew out by themselves, and in the one lamp that we had turned on, the light 
bulb exploded. At one point, I felt hands on my neck and something began to choke me. 
My friend grabbed a fl ashlight and turned it on and the choking stopped, but a few times 
during the night, I felt something pull my hair. The whole experience was really scary, but 
fun at the same time because I love to be scared.
Irina, a college junior of Russian descent, told this story in Vestal, New York, 
in November 2003. Her choice of Lizzie Borden’s former home as the place to 
spend the night of her 13th birthday demonstrates the appeal of a “good scare” in 
a safe setting. The proprietors of Lizzie Borden Bed and Breakfast in Fall River, 
Massachusetts, have promoted their business through a mystery- oriented Web 
site that plays the jump-rope rhyme “Lizzie Borden.” Since Borden was never 
proven guilty of her parents’ murders, the site of their death remains mysterious.