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

THE SUPERNATURAL
Ever since the Opies identified the “curiosity” of levitation and “half-belief ” in 
charms and rituals, children’s folklore scholars have tried to explain why the su-
pernatural exerts such fascination (
Lore and Language
206, 309–10). Like games 
of danger and sexual experimentation, supernatural rituals push back known 
boundaries to investigate the unknown. Unlike other kinds of folklore, however, 

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114 Children’s 
Folklore
rituals related to the supernatural offer a unique kind of excitement: communica-
tion with spirits of the dead. While attempts to reach spirits thrill young partici-
pants, they also terrify some of them.
Bill Ellis’s 
Raising the Devil
(2000) and
 Lucifer Ascending
(2004) provide im-
portant information about the folk cultural context for children’s supernatural 
rituals, including mirror gazing, table setting, Ouija board use, and rumors about 
Satanic cults’ nefarious activities. His chapter “The Devil Worshipers at the Prom” 
in 
Aliens, Ghosts, and Cults
(2003) offers important insight into adolescents’ ex-
pressive behavior in relation to traumatic suicide and rumors of Satanic cult ac-
tivity (199–219). Another chapter of the same book, “What Really Happened 
at Gore Orphanage,” identifies adolescents’ trips to haunted places as rituals of 
rebellion that “say ‘screw you’ to law and order” (188). In 
Lucifer Ascending,
Ellis 
insightfully compares contemporary teenagers’ legend-trip behavior to youths’ 
merrymaking at neolithic monuments and cemeteries in the Middle Ages 
(112– 41). Legend trips involve 
ostension,
the acting out of legends’ content.
Without leaving their homes, children can enjoy the excitement of levitation 
and trance sessions, described by Mary and Herbert Knapp in 
One Potato, Two 
Potato
(252). My essay “Levitation and Trance Sessions at Preadolescent Girls’ 
Slumber Parties” (1984) examines girls’ levitation and trance sessions in southern 
Indiana and New York between 1976 and 1984. This essay suggests that “pre-
adolescent girls are experimenting with their own power to regulate the intrigu-
ing, sometimes threatening awareness of their own development” (133).
In 
Children’s Lore
(1978), Leea Virtanen describes Finnish children’s use of a 
Ouija board and glass to get answers to questions that seem to come from Satan.