Wednesday, March 11, 2009
Who ya gonna call? GHOST BUSTERS!
I figured out something very interesting while researching for my essay. Oral and written works become so varied over time! The same ghost story about the Firkins house in Fort Edmonton Park has been butchered and maimed over the years, twisting the facts about the house and making the oral history change. I find it amusing that they say a boy died in the house and suddenly it's the Firkins son that died (they had no son). From there the story takes on dramatic twists and turns such as he had TB or it was actually a ghostly woman that pushed the last owner of the house down the stairs! They become ridiculous over time, taking on new lives and fully coming away from the history of the house. It made me think. I know that history is heard from the winners perspective but this has me questioning how much truth is behind some stories. I mean, someone could just come up with an outrageous story that over time people believe is fact and then it becomes new history. I tried to tell my friend that no one died in the house and she got angry at me saying yes there was because there was a ghost and it left me a little exasperated. I told her "Dude, I am looking into this place for my essay and a guy in my class (Dickie) who works at Fort Ed even told me there was no one that died in this place." Her reply was "I don't believe you, this is like an oral history Emily and I don't think that books would write about it and everyone would know the story if it was false." This then followed with my eye twitching and me having to walk away before I strangled her. It is this experience that has made question how much history and literature I should take to be true, or if I should just take it at face value and leave myself open to other interpretations. It just seems like we are told at a young age that the book, the teacher, the parent is right... but history changes.... it makes me wonder what to believe.
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Your post made me laugh... the part where you walk away with your eye twitching, that is!
ReplyDeleteI was just reading a ghost story earlier today about Mackay Avenue School - there is supposedly a ghost there, but the writer of this particular story went to speak to an employee, who proceeded to pull out a Ouija board and say that the ghost had told him, through this board, that he was a worker who fell off the roof during construction. This led the writer to question whether the ghost was actually a worker or if this man had created that part of the story on his own, and now it has been spread widely and is known as the true origin of the ghost. Anyway, I hope that made sense... I am hoping that that is related to your point about history changing over time. Cheers!
You're hilarious! And you've made some very interesting points, especially about not knowing what to believe, now that we've grown up and realized we were told to listen to the adults without question because they know best and all that.
ReplyDeleteA few years ago, I was watching this TV show called Urban Legends or something, where they tell popular urban legends and try to prove if they could have possibly happened. Some of the creepy ones was about this young couple who went to the woods or something, making out, when the guy realized his car wouldn't start, and so he left the girl to find a convenience store to call for towing. Long story short, guy's bloody corpse ends up hanging off of a tree right above the car, while the girl was locked inside the car, completely unaware that her boyfriend had been maimed overnight by some psycho while she slept.
Freaky. But they mentioned that urban legends and ghost stories are sometimes created for a reason; maybe the story above is meant to discourage horny teenagers from going off by themselves. Your post really got me thinking, too. If history changes over time, and ghost stories change in response to history, doesn't it make you wonder how big of an effect some event had on people, that they felt the need to change, deliberately or not, even ghost stories to fit their current environment?