Welcome back to spook break! And gather round my pumpkin,
we are telling ghost stories today, and other spooky folktales from all over the
world. And I would love to hear some of the traditional scary stories from your country,
so do leave us a comment below. I'm gonna put my pumpkin down now so I can show you my first book.
In Irish storytelling, ghost stories have a really long tradition, so I've got here a collection of
Irish ghost stories. A lot of them are tied into traditional Irish folk stories and superstitions,
so for example you can read in here the story 'The child that went with the fairies' by Sheridan Le
Fanu, which is inspired by the classic stolen child changeling story. You also may have heard
of the festival St Martin's Eve, also known as Old Halloween. It's celebrated around the world, but
in Ireland the tradition is to sacrifice an animal and sprinkle its blood in the corners of your
house. Gross. But in here you can read a short story called St Martin's Eve that's all about the
violent and terrifying repercussions for a woman who doesn't do this. A lot of the superstitions
are tied up with religion, and the scary supernatural bits are portrayed as being the work
of the devil, so one more story from here that absolutely terrified me is 'The haunted organist
of Hurly Burly' by Rosa Mulholland. This story is about a couple whose son died many years earlier,
after he'd become involved in a devil's club and started playing all sorts of unholy pranks,
until he'd become cursed to play an organ on repeat, until he literally died playing
the organ. 20 years later the couple still can't get the organ to stop playing at night,
and now a young girl shows up at their house claiming that their son sent her. And it
just gets scarier and scarier from there. So that's quite enough of Ireland, let's move on.
Our next stop is Japan. An interesting fact: in Japan ghost stories are traditionally told
in the summer, rather than cold spooky evenings like we're doing now, but we're going with it.
Hanako-san is a Japanese legend about the ghost of a schoolgirl who haunts school bathrooms,
and rumour has it that if you go to the bathrooms on the third floor
and knock three times on the third stall, and ask if Hanako-san is present,
her hand will appear and pull you into the loo. So you can read more about Hanako San in Hanako
and the Terror of Allegory by Sakae Esuno. She appears in there as the roommate and best
friend of the private detective main character. who specifically investigates urban legends.
The book Ponti by Sharlene Teo is inspired by the Pontianak, who is allegedly the ghost of
a woman who died in childbirth, giving birth to a stillborn child. So not the cheeriest story there.
Although some versions of the legend say that the ghost is the stillborn child. In the book Ponti
we meet a woman called Amisa who is the star of the 70s cult horror trilogy about the pontianak.
Years later her daughter's only friend Circe is now working on a remake of this film, and so
we jump back and forth between these timelines and characters. And the theme of motherhood is
particularly jarring when paired with this legend which is all about a woman who died in childbirth.
Latin American legend tells of La Llorona, a ghost who roams near water searching for her drowned
children. Which would be very sad except for the fact she drowned them herself. And this story does
seem to actually predate its use in Latin American mythology. Similar stories are found all the way
back to the Ancient Greeks and Aztecs, as well as throughout Iberian and indigenous American
mythology, but the first published reference to La Llorona specifically was by a Mexican poet.
And this story is now apparently told to children to scare them away from going out alone at night.
And you will find so many books and movies about La Llorona, but if you do want something a little
bit different, I have a suggestion. If you don't want to read a horror story, Jaquira Diaz's memoir
ordinary Girls has the legend of La Llorona woven throughout it, along with other stories,
both true and fictional, of mothers. So that's a really interesting perspective on spooky stories,
giving some context on where they come from and what they symbolise to our lives now. Now the next
story isn't too spooky but it is interesting. If you've ever wondered where California got
its name from, it was named after Calafia, a warrior queen from Spanish mythology, who was
the queen of California, which was depicted as an island populated entirely by terrifying but
beautiful Black women who kept griffins as pets, which they trained to attack and kill any man in
sight. So if you want to read up on that myth it seems to have come from a 16th century novel
The Labours of the Very Bright Knight Esplandian. So I always think of California as a really sunny
bright chilled place but perhaps if you're a 16th century man you wouldn't feel so chilled about it.
Next for a fairy tale let's look at the Russian story of Morozko, or Father Frost. Fairy tales
are always super spooky I think, even when they're supposed to be nice children's stories,
so the story of Morozko begins with an evil stepmother making her husband take his daughter
into the woods and leave her there because she says they can't afford both daughters and she
wants to keep her own. So the girl is abandoned in the woods and Morozko comes along to freeze her to
death. That's what he does. But he's so impressed by her stoicism when he asks her if she's cold,
and she says I'm perfectly warm, thank you very much, that he takes pity on her and gives her a
nice warm coat. And for some reason also lots of gold and jewels. So the next day the father goes
to sadly collect the body of his daughter and is thrilled to find her alive and well, and now rich!
So now the stepmother thinks they can get even richer. This time she sends her own daughter.
But her own very rude daughter, when Morozko appears and asks if she's cold,
answers with 'of course I'm cold you stupid old man' which Morozko does not like,
and so he freezes her to death. So Morozko is a pretty scary dude and you can find inspiration
for this figure in the book Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik which is actually an adaptation of
lots of different Slavic folklore. It's mostly a Rumpelstiltskin inspired story.
Next I've got a book here, King Rat by China Mieville, which combines lots of different
folklore from all over the world. It's mostly inspired by the story of the Pied Piper of Hamelin
which is a story that always gave me the creeps. It's about a rat catcher that lures all of the
children of a village away into a cave and they're never seen again. But the book also
features Anansi, a trickster spider from west African folklore, who isn't actually supposed
to be spooky, but come on, spiders, terrifying. And these both combine in this book, so you have
rats and spiders everywhere. In one scene they are all put into a trance and controlled by the
piper - yikes. Caribbean mythology includes stories of the soucriant, or hag, who is a
shapeshifter, who by day takes the form of a reclusive old woman, but by night sheds her skin
and turns into a sort of vampire fireball who can get into anyone's house through any tiny little
cracks, and suck their blood. And the soucriant appears in the book White is for Witching by Helen
Oyeyemi, which is a really unique haunted house story about a house who is obsessively protective
of the women in this family, and aggressive to outsiders, particularly to people of colour.
It's a racist haunted house. And it sort of turns one of the girls in the story into a soucriant.
Recent Tanzanian folklore tells of the popobawa, a shape-shifting bat that attacks at night. And this
story, which only originated in around the 60s, has caused real-life mass panics across Zanzibar,
with people trying to stay awake outside their houses all night, staying together in groups for
safety. And you can read more about the popobawa in one of the stories in Mame Bougouma Diene's
story collection Dark Moons Rising on a Starless Night, which contains so many stories inspired by
African folklore. So there's so much more to learn in that, but the story called Popobawa
is about this particular terrifying monster. In Chinese mythology, a jiangshi is a type of zombie
made extra terrifying by the fact it's a hopping zombie. And you can find this figure by other
names in Thai, Vietnamese, Indonesian, Malay and Korean stories as well. There's actually a whole
huge genre of jiangshi movies and books and video games. But if you wanted to you could go
all the way back and read What the Master Would Not Discuss, which is this huge collection of
supernatural stories compiled in the 18th century, and jiangshi feature in quite a lot of them.
Iara from Brazilian mythology is a mermaid, but nothing like our European story of the lovesick
little mermaid. Iara was an Amazon warrior whose brothers were jealous of her and so
they tried to kill her in her sleep, but she escaped and killed them both.
Her father was furious and so threw her into the sea to drown her but she was saved by transforming
into a mermaid. Now any man who sees her is so overcome by her beauty that he goes insane,
and according to some versions of the story she actually captures and eats them as well.
You can meet Iara in the Brazilian magical realism novel Macunaima
which is about a shapeshifter born in the jungle and is a blending of lots of folklore taken
from native Brazilian stories. So you'll meet loads of mythological figures including Iara.
And finally let me tell you about the wendigo, which is a creature from first nations mythology.
The wendigo is allegedly a malevolent spirit that can possess humans and make them do terrible
things like murder and even cannibalism. And the wendigo looks like a terrifying huge skeleton.
Anytime it has a meal it grows by that amount, so it's never full, it's massive but always emaciated
and skeletal because it's still starving. And you now will find wendigos in lots of non-indigenous
stories, for example even in Marvel comics, but a lot of the representations of the wendigo have
become very simplified and inaccurate compared to the traditional stories. So if you want to
go back to the source you should read Ojibway Tales by Basil Johnston, who's an Ojibwe author,
and the book is a collection of traditional folktales including that of the wendigo.
So which of those stories scared you the most? Leave us a comment below to let us know,
and if you've got a spooky folktale of your own to tell, please do write that below as well.
I will leave a playlist here with all of our other videos about crime, thriller,
and horror books, while you're in the spooky mood, and see you soon!