[Editorial] Legend Has It: How Folklore Haunts Us

There is a track of old and now rarely used road a few towns over from where I grew up. It’s called Old Baptist Road and a “no outlet” sign tells you everything you need to know about its current state. It is dotted with decrepit homes being reclaimed by the state park it now runs through. The houses are property of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania which means when they were vacated they were boarded up and left to weather the elements. It makes for an eerie drive. One of the houses along this road has become particularly notorious as the “Worcester Murder House” where, legend has it, a man committed an Amityville-style murder-suicide of himself and his entire family. It’s a horrifying and admittedly engaging story to tell. All the elements of folklore are present from the reaching curtain of trees on a lonely road to the abandoned homes from a bygone time. 

I’ll save you the suspense and tell you that this bombastic murder never happened. At least not where the legends say it did. 

Just at the corner of where Old Baptist Road begins, along the main throughway of Germantown Pike, there’s an Episcopal church where something did happen. In 1985 Leon Jerome Moser met his estranged family at the church for Palm Sunday. His ex-wife Linda Schramm and their older daughter Donna sat two pews ahead of Leon and their younger daughter Joanne. At various points throughout the service, arguments broke out as Leon became agitated with his daughters’ excuses for not spending time with him since the divorce. The last straw on this day was Linda’s refusal to allow Leon to take their daughters with him back to his home state of Wisconsin for an extended visit. After the service he went to his car, pulled out a shotgun, and murdered his wife and two daughters as they made their way out of the church before he laid down to surrender himself to police. Moser would go on to be executed in 1995 and inspire a piece of folklore that’s not entirely off the mark, but doesn’t tell the whole truth either. 

Folk stories and creepy urban legends aren’t static. They don’t pop out of nowhere and it takes fire to feed them. Folklore is how the past, and all its ills, crosses time to haunt us. Moser’s foul deeds lose their details and clarity but the impact and horror remains. And, deep down, we know what it is about stories like this that scares us. Domestic violence escalating into familicide is frightenly common for white men over the age of 50 dealing with issues of poverty, divorce, sex, or employment who account for over 91% of familicides. Folklore and passed down legends are how we cope, how we warn. As Avery Gordon writes: “In haunting, organized forces and systemic structures that appear removed from us make their impact felt in everyday life.” 

One common folk tale found throughout the United States is the Crybaby Bridge. Every town has one. A bridge over a small body of water where, when the conditions are just right, the cry of a baby is heard echoing over the water and perhaps the figure of its weeping mother spotted nearby. There’s one on Sleepy Hollow Road in Kentucky where reluctant mothers took it upon themselves to dispose of their unwanted children. Another on Maud Hughes Road in Ohio where stories of deaths and suicides run rampant, including that of a young mother who killed her baby and then herself. Or Egypt Road, also in Ohio, where a baby accidentally drowned. Or the Van Sant Bridge in Pennsylvania where you’ll not only hear a crying baby but witness the dangling feet of the murderous mother. A lot of these stories have local flare. For example, one story out of Alabama marries the traditional tale of an untimely murdered baby with Civil War inclinations, casting Union soldiers as the murders. Another Ohio location ties into local legends about the melon heads, a group of orphans put under radical medical experiments and now wander the woods and eat children. 

Again, we have all the right aesthetic elements. But what pulls through time and again is a story about a woman lacking agency, specifically in her reproductive rights. In many versions she is an unwilling mother looking for a gruesome way out. In the US, reproductive rights for women have always been a hotbed topic and what shines through these stories is not the wailing of a baby gone too soon but the spectre of unsafe abortion interventions for those without access to proper medical care. As many as 13% of annual maternal deaths come from unsafe termination of a pregnancy. In developed regions, as many as 30 in 100,000 unsafe abortions result in death and the number is staggeringly higher at 220 in 100,000 in underdeveloped regions. These folk tales are, perhaps, one way we try to talk about it. 

Some of horror’s classics come from this history. Candyman, which not only features its own in-world folklore but is aesthetically based on the common legend of the hook-handed killer, a lesson in teenage abstinence from the days of the lover’s lane. Michael Myers as the escaped mental patient has roots virtually everywhere psychiatry and mental health are misunderstood and feared. Dracula AD 1972 was inspired not just by the titular book but by the local legend of the Highgate Vampire in London, a legend itself inspired by anxiety around death and some Cold War xenophobia. 

At the end of the day all horror can be traced back to folklore in some fashion. But what makes folk horror is the way a land, a culture, a forgotten or ignored piece of the world fights back. Sometimes this is old magic and religions coming alive in a Judeo-Christian world as we see in The Wicker Man, The Witch, Blood on Satan’s Claw, and Penda’s Fen. Sometimes it’s people and the monsters a crowd can become such as The Lottery and Children of the Corn. Sometimes it is about legends brought to life when the truth behind them gets muddled like Candyman. Folk horror is when the unquiet past and the forgotten societal ills that plague us take to haunt on a massive scale. We share a ghost story we’ll all partake in around campfires or high school cafeterias. As Avery Gordon says: “To write stories concerning exclusions and invisibilities is to write ghost stories”. And for an entire culture of people to write a ghost story is to write folklore.

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