Journal Writing Supernatural and Folklore Experience

¶ … Personal Experience With Supernatural Element Haunting experiences in the modern society concentrate on the lively relationship between the ghosts in popular culture and in folklore. While popular culture greatly resembles folklore in that both depend on conventional genres, content and styles of communication, popular culture is distinguished by production of content for a mass audience while folklore is relayed intimately in small groups or via face-to-face interactions. The link between popular culture and folklore though less discussed and researched historically, it is no less significant.

For example, one just has to consider the mass production of Broadway ballads in the 18th and 19th centuries, and or the utilization of culture brokers throughout history (Goldstein, Grider and Thomas). Folklores primarily debate past and current supernatural traditions across the globe, focusing on how these traditions relate to place, ritual, experience and narrative. For example, Europeans have explored whether fairies should be categorized as symbols of nature, Jungian archetypes, demons, a race of humans, or childhood bogeymen.

Other raise questions such as whether precognition is a blessing, a delusion or a curse? Different folklores have also explored the issue of encounter with gods, ghosts, aliens, the Virgin Mary, or other biblical figures. How do such traditions relate between different cultures? And where should we as a modern society draw the line between folk, belief, science, religion and entertainment? (allconferences.com).

Back when I lived in Africa (Ethiopia to be specific), on the weekend I turned eleven, I, my mom and my twenty-year-old cousin went to a lake resort. We arrived at the resort and booked a room at an ancient hotel, which had been built when Ethiopia was still under the rule of an emperor. A weird stuff happened during our stay at the hotel (I was asleep when these things happened, the account here is that of my older cousin).

At the expansive hotel we stayed in a bungalow that had a hallway in the middle with doors facing each other on either side. My cousin stayed in the room opposite ours. During the night my twenty-year-old cousin fell asleep only to wake up in the middle of the night to see a young beautiful lady standing at the door. In his drowsy state, she asked the lady who she was. The lady did not answer.

He asked her what she was doing, but again she did not respond and kept on staring at him (The Woman at the Door). The girl then turned and closed the door, my cousin jumped off his bed and threw the door open to check the hallway. At the same time my mom opened the door and the hallway according to both of them was empty.

So my cousin and mom are facing each other and my mom told him that a girl had come into our room, turned on the lights and just stood there. When I woke up the next morning I found my mom arguing with my cousin. My cousin was adamant that the girl was a ghost, while my mom was more rational in her arguments saying that the girl had probably gotten drunk and was looking for her boyfriend or something like that.

So I got the rest of the account from my cousin about what I had missed during the night. During the day, as I was wandering on the lakeshores, I saw my cousin talking to someone who I supposed worked at the hotel. I walked up to them and I heard the young man talking about how those kinds of appearances have been known to occur in the hotel. He said, once someone had disappeared from the hotel only to be found months later in a village near the.