Happy Hungry Ghost Festival!

Belief in ghosts is one of those universal archetypes that Carl Jung found across all cultures.   From India, to the Philippines, to Africa and back ghosts haunt dark roads and old stories.   Many cultures have entire holidays dedicated to ghosts.  In China, the Hungry Ghost Festival or the Ullambana Festival of Buddhism is more typically called the "Ghost Festival".  Ghost Festival is celebrated throughout Asia and called by many different names.  It is celebrated during the fifteenth day of every 7th Lunar Month.  This would typically be July but Lunar months aren't calender months so this year Ghost Festival falls on August 31st.   In Hong Kong and Taiwan, Ghost Festival is celebrated for the entire month.

In Chinese folklore, the people believe that the 7th month is a time for ghosts.   It is believed that the gates of the underworld are thrown open and hungry ghosts roam the earth looking for food.  Ghost festival is deeply tied to traditions of ancestor worship and people leave items out for the ghosts of their ancestors.   Some people light lanterns by the roadsides to help the ghosts and other provide shoes for the ghosts.  One of the most beautiful costumes associated with this festival is the lighting of lanterns and setting them adrift in the water.  These lanterns serve as guiding lights for the lost and wandering ghosts.   Other traditions call for the burning of offerings such as paper and incense and the leaving of food for the hungry ghosts.  In Hong Kong and Taiwan, Ghost festival is celebrated by a month of operas and performances to honor the dead.

The origins of the ghost festival can be found in Buddhist scriptures.  "In Buddhist culture, "Ullam" means "hanging upside down" in Sanskrit; "bana" means "a vessel for holding offerings of food". Buddhists hold that the vessel is capable of removing the extreme suffering of one's deceased parents in purgatory. This originates from the story of "Monk Mulian Saving His Mother" in Buddhist sutras. Buddhist disciples set Ullambana all over the place, symbolizing food provision for the people, adding fortune and longevity to their living parents and releasing deceased parents from sufferings.".. Cultural China.com.

Ghost Festival reminds  me of the Catholic tradition of lighting candles for the dead.   It is a way to remember and honor those who have gone before us.  I thought we'd put together a little ghost festival in our house this year.  We've lost quite a few people and helping the spirits of those we've lost seems appropriate.  Mooncakes are typically offered to spirits in china.  We don't have mooncakes so we will cupcakes.   My son has made origami animals to burn with the incense and we will light lanterns on the back patio to guide our family's ghosts home.  

The Juniper Tree

My favorite ghost stories blur the line between paranormal and folklore.  They have been told so many times for so long that the real history behind them has been lost and forgotten.  The ghost story lives on in an unprovable realm where you can't really verify all the facts behind the story as true.   People tell the story over an over again and it becomes part of the oral tradition of the area.  The story becomes legend.

The brothers Grimm collected stories like this.   They collected folklore and legends.  However, many of their stories have been cleansed of the paranormal, morbid, haunting, and ghostly for modern audiences.  My favorite Grimm stories are the ones that haven't been cleansed.  They're the ones that remain haunting and filled with ghosts and dark magic.   This is one of my favorite Grimm stories.   It is haunting and ghostly and tells an unforgettable story.

The Juniper Tree

Once there was a rich man who had a beautiful wife, but they couldn't have any children.  Everyday they prayed for a babe but none came.  Finally, one night the wife crept into the garden and into the shadow of the juniper tree.   There, she pricked her finger and spilled her blood into the snow beneath the tree.  She asked the tree to give her a son.  The tree gave her a son and his hair was red as blood and his skin was as white as snow.  Sadly,  the wife died a few days after his birth and the rich man was left alone with his boy.

The widower remarried in time and his new wife had a sweet little girl. The little girl's name was Marlinchen.   The woman doted on her Marlinchen, but was cruel to her step son.  She hated him with a rare fury.  One day Marlinchen wanted to save an apple for the boy and this made her mother even more furious.   The woman put the apple in an old trunk and told the boy to fetch it.   He leaned over to get the apple and the woman slammed the trunk shut cutting his head from his body.  She then blamed the "accident"   on Marlinchen  and forced her daughter to hide the boy's body by cutting him up and baking him into a stew for his father.

Marlinchen wept as she helped her mother and secretly stole away with his bones and gave the boy a proper burial beneath the jjuniper tree.   Soon after,  a phantom bird emerged from the boy's bone and went about the village singing:

         "It was my mother who slaughtered me

          It was my father who ate me

          But sweet Marlinchen found my bones

          And buried me beneath the Juniper Tree."

With his song, the phantom bird gathered objects from the village to help him and was able to drop them on his cruel step mother until she died beneath the juniper tree.  He was reborn from her blood and everyone lived happily ever after



The North Port Ghost

My favorite ghost stories are the ones told to me by people.  I always like to think of ghost stories as the last oral traditions.  These days there a very few stories that are told around the table or camp fire like they used to before television and the Internet.  Ghost stories and urban legends are the last stories the cling to these old traditions and sometimes ghost stories and urban legends can become almost one.  Some friends of mine shared one their favorite stories from their college days with me over dinner this way.  The story was told to me two very different ways.  This is the risk of oral traditions.  They often are told very differently by each person telling them.

The first person who shared this story with me told me that the North Port Ghost was a real story.  He said that if you drive down a lonely road in rural Alabama you will come to a spot where many people have seen The North Port Ghost.    If you slow down,  you might see her wandering the road alone.   According to legend,  the North Port Ghost is the wife of a Confederate soldier.  She wanders the night searching for her husband.   He never came home from the war and she has never stopped looking for him.  Even in death, her lonely specter can be seen all dressed in white waiting for the return of a many who is long go.   She is a classic white lady, forever looking for love that will never come.

The second story I heard was much less fun but still interesting.  She said the North Port Ghost was a snipe hunt.   She claimed upper classman sent Freshmen into the country and told them to drive slowly down a hill while flashing their blinkers.  If this is done properly, the light will catch off a lamp post giving the affect of a ghost and scaring the crap out of the Freshman. 

According to Shadowlands Haunted Place Index,  The North Port Ghost was once commonly seen.   He was the ghost of a fallen confederate soldier who used to roam the area.   The ghost is not seen anymore and has disintegrated into a tourist attraction because the area has become over developed and is no longer rural.

So,  I love my oral traditions and I love this story because it is one that is told again and again, but the true story has been lost somewhere in the telling.  It has become a prank and a joke told to scare college students, but I like to believe the first story is true and that urbanization has driven the ghost away.

How to Protect Your Home from Haunting and Evil Spirits

 While exploring the Burritt Museum and the many historic cabins within it last night,  I came upon an old witch bottle sitting atop a shelf in a cabin from 1825.   The witch bottle was a hideous and fearsome thing that reminded me of my love of folklore and folk remedies.  I especially love old cures for hauntings.  Witch bottles have a long history and have been popular for well over a millennium.  They were most popular in the 16th century when fear of witches, hauntings, and bad spirits reached a kind of fevered pitch that resulted in many a poor soul being burned a live for witchcraft.

The basic theory behind witch bottles is that spirits and ghosts have to count every item in a house or building before they can enter and haunt the home.  The bottle was meant to have so many small items in it that no spirit or ghost could ever count its contents. Thus the house was protected from haunting.  Early bottles were filled were filled with sand, dirt, pebbles and other small items that would be difficult to count.  By the sixteenth century the bottles took on a more sinister and disgusting tone.  They were often filled with urine, toe nails, hair, pins, and nails.   These witch bottles were thought to actually prevent a witch from casting a harmful spell on you.  They were also believed to lure evil spirits in and trap them, impaling them on the nails and pins so they can't escape.  These bottles were usually hidden and buried upside down in the home.  The picture to the side shows a classic witch jar from the seventeenth century.  It was thought that if such a witch bottle was thrown in the fire any witch that had set a curse on the owner of the witch jar would die.

Now the witch bottle has gone full circle.  Modern incarnations of these jars are said to protect against bad spirits and ghosts and are again filled with more pleasant things.  I looked at many crazy websites with recipes for witch bottles and it seems that some people still prefer the stinky bottle and place hair, nails, finger nails etc in the bottle, but that is just gross.  Also, these people are often using the bottles for larger magical purposes that I avoid.  Here is a simple recipe for a witch jar to protect your home from bad spirits and ghosts and hauntings.  These type of witch bottles are pretty and smell good too!

1.  Choose a pretty bottle with a lid and clean it
2.  Fill the bottle with some sand  or salt to make a foundation for the rest of the materials to rest on.
3 Add the pebbles, sea shells, or rosemary alternately to the bottle. After you have added these, add a bit more sand.
4.  Add  flower petals or  greenery .  There is no right or wrong way to make the bottle. Keep in mind your intent while making the bottle and envision what you want it to look like.

After you have all the items in the bottle, affix the lid. Tie the ribbon around mouth of the bottle near the lid as a final touch
 
Here is a picture of a modern witch bottle I found on Etsy.  The seller says the witch bottle will banish evil spirits.

Nightmares

Freud's theories  about dreaming suggested that dreams were a way of acting out inner conflicts while staying safely inside our own minds, rather than display our ravaged psyches in the bright light of day. Thus, he reasoned that a "successful" dream - one that was not too traumatizing for the warring superego and id without the guiding conscious hand of the ego - was a dream in which the dreamer stayed asleep. Thus, a "nightmare" (a dream in which the dreamer wakes due to his or her own influences during sleep) was an unsuccessful dream, in which the inner war had become too violent and could not be brought to a successful conclusion.   Modern psychology suggests that nightmares are the result of the random firing of neurons during sleep.  The mind,  needing meaning,  interprets this firing  with images and feelings that are familiar to it.   Thus nightmares are the product of random neuronal activity in conjunction with the anxieties and worries that the dreamer clings to.

Nightmares are the a halmark of certain pscychological disorders,  like PTSD.  Often,  these nightmares are treated with medications that produce deep,  dreamless sleep and thus erradicate the nightmare.

Long before modern psychology or Freud,  people suffered from nightmares.  They awoke screaming or with feelings of something crushing them or holding them to the bed.  In most cultures,  these things were blamed on demons and bad spirits and many still blame such symptoms on bad spirits.   Historically some of the better-known spirits of this sort are; Greek ephialtes (one who leaps upon) and mora (the night "mare" or monster, ogre, spirit, etc.), Roman incubus (one who presses or crushes), German mar/mare, nachtmahr, Hexendrücken (witch pressing), and Alpdruck (elf pressure); Czech muera, Polish zmora, Russian Kikimora, French cauchmar (trampling ogre), Old English maere (mab, mair, mare-hag), hagge, (evil spirit or the night-mare--also hegge, haegtesse, haehtisse, haegte); Old Norse mara, Old Irish mar/more, Newfoundland Ag Rog (Old Hag), and the Spanish pesadilla.  All of these evil spirits entered dreams and possessed the mind and body of the sleeper.   

As I talk to many people who have been tormented by more malevolent hauntings,  they have described symptoms of crushings and pressure while they were asleep that was commonly associated with many of these bad spirits.   The people I interviewed believe that these symptoms were caused by demons or bad spirits.  We know many bad dreams are what psychologists say they are.  They are anxiety and life stress seeping over into our resting minds.  However,  is it possible that these historic interpretations of nightmares aren't all wrong?  Is it possible that some nightmares are caused by these old demons creeping up into our beds and pressing down on us while we sleep?