Tales and Legends

In my early 20s, I found a subject I couldn’t put down. And yet I didn’t go study it like I wanted to because my inner voice told me it was more of a hobby rather than a serious career option. 30 years later, I find myself captivated by the world of folklore, legends, and myths. For me, the subject veered towards a study of world religions and the subsequent practice of Buddhism. I left it there for the past 10 years and now I find myself wandering back to the origins of urban legends.

My introduction into urban legends was in 1988 by reading a book called the Vanishing Hitchhiker, by Jan Harold Brunvand. For years he was one of the first ones writing about this particular branch of folklore before the internet boomed into popularity. In 1993, I discovered Usenet groups, specifically the Alt.folklore.urban legends group. (This is where I first encountered the Mikkelsons who eventually founded the webpage snopes.com.) It was a blast reading about legends and people who believed them wholeheartedly. I found the offshoot alt.folklore.ghost-stories to naturally be as intriguing as the urban legends since folktales, and ghost stories overlap each other so much.

The members of the ghost stories group would tell their personal ghost stories, more often than not, they were true- as in the people telling the stories claimed it really had happened to them. But, usually, once a week, in this ghost-story sharing group, someone would show up and ask if we knew about the ghost boy appearing in the background of the movie, “Three Men and a Baby.”  The story goes a ghost boy can be seen in the background; it appears in a window when Jack Holden (Ted Danson) and his mother (Celeste Holm) are walking through the house Jack shares with his two buddies. The ghost is of a boy who died in the home where the movie was filmed and he can be seen in the finished movie.  No, it’s not true, the movie was filmed on a movie set.

The other favorite ghost story of the early internet was about a munchkin who can be seen hanging from the trees from the Wizard of Oz,  lovelorn actor portraying one of the munchkins hanged himself on the set during the filming of The Wizard of Oz. On so many levels one has to immediately think it’s untrue because they supposedly killed themselves on set and nobody noticed it while they were filming and it appears in the finished movie.   The internet at that time seems very naive and very friendly now that I think about it. Our biggest thrill was letting people know that they were so wrong when they told us that a friend of a friend they knew found that their kidneys had been stolen after waking up in a tub of ice.

Eventually, I began searching for local urban legends, as in New Mexico, Los Alamos, and even Santa Fe. Los Alamos’ history is so deeply tied to Santa Fe, that many think of Los Alamos as a suburb of Santa Fe.  Overall of New Mexico has a tale that most in the US have heard about, La Llorona, which has deep roots in the cultures of the Spanish Southwest and possibly as far south as Mexico.

To find more local stories, I began by asking people in closed local FaceBook groups if they had any personal ghost stories they could share, and surprisingly, many people had tales that they’d heard and many shared the same stories.

Of all the stories that I heard about haunted Los Alamos, the high school auditorium and the old building that housed the high school swimming pool came up the most as being haunted. There are rumors of a young man who was found floating dead in the pool one morning who haunts that building. The pool has been filled in, but the building still is used as a gym.  Some claim to have seen a ghost, many have eerie and creepy feelings about that building.

The high school auditorium is reportedly haunted by one, “a worker fell from the rafters during construction of it and died in the spot that is now underneath the stage. Now he messes with stuff in the auditorium. That’s how the story went when I was there anyway..”  or 2, by a girl who was walking in the lighting catwalk above the stage and fell to her death. After doing a rudimentary search through the archives of the newspaper, the Los Alamos Monitor, no reports of deaths at the high school turned up. Usually, legend has a spark of truth to it, so it’s possible that the stories are true but the newspaper archives don’t go back far enough.

Los Alamos has other tales of ghosts, which may surprise people who live here and consider this a scientific community. I’d say it’s as much of a mix of beliefs as other communities because of the number of people who have voiced a story they have heard or experienced is very similar to other non-scientific communities. According to Ipsos.com, a leading global survey-based market research company, in 2008,

 “Nearly six in ten (57%) believe in spirits and ghosts, and a majority (52%) believe in the existence of unidentified flying objects (UFOs).

A significant percentage of Americans (35%) report they have personally experienced the presence of a ghost or spirit. One-quarter of Americans (26%) believe in spells or witchcraft. A smaller percentage (13%) believes there is currently a ghost or spirit living in their home or residence.”

Other surprising stories heard from this online community on FaceBook were about the local hospital.

One story:

 I worked in the emergency room at LAMC, The local Medial Center,  I was told this story. Years and years ago a child died in the OR. They say that she haunts the third floor. There were doctors that said they would leave their offices neat and come back and they’d be a mess. I heard from other doctors that were still working that they had experienced feeling or hearing this ghost. my mom worked on the 3rd floor for years. I never saw anything but it always felt creepy!

A second story:

I worked at LAMC for years, graveyard shifts mostly. There were 2 3rd floor stories they told me my first nights: 1) if you are at the 3rd-floor nurses’ station, and you hear a baby crying in the peds wing next to surgical in 3rd floor, there would be a very sick child coming into the ER. I didn’t believe because OB was one floor down, and that had to be the source of the crying. I was also told that there were nurses on 3 that had seen an old man pacing back and forth down by the elevators on 3rd floor in the wee hours of the morning. He was described as old, thin, and wearing a kind of hat with a small feather in the brim. I was the only male staff member on the graveyard shift. It was like 3 in the morning, about halfway through the shift. I saw somebody at the end of the hall and went down to find out who they were. I heard the stair door open, and I followed with my big flashlight. I heard the stair door on the first floor below me open and close, I was about 5 seconds behind, and when I got out into the 1st-floor hallway, there was no one there, all of the offices were locked all the way down the hall. No way anyone could have gotten past me. Vanished. When I got back upstairs, I had told the nurses what had happened, and they said, oh yeah, that was Mr. so-and-so. He’s the one that paces down at the end of the hall. His wife passed here, and he comes back every once in a while to wait…

I never saw it again, but I remember it 40 years later like it was yesterday.”

Other stories people remembered had to do with the old parts of the laboratory, one even where the first bombs were assembled:

When I was at the Lab, a group of us were taken on a tour of the bldg. where the first bombs were assembled–you know, out the road under the Omega Bridge. Saw all kinds of things used early on in developing “the Device,” including a sunken (1-story deep) bay where the assembly was done.

I was the last to leave this area, feeling inexplicably drawn to it. I looked up and saw I was alone. I turned to leave but was stopped by a male spirit (nobody) in his late 20s running after me eagerly. He told me (mentally) to come back and sit down with him because he urgently wanted to tell me what he had worked on there. It wasn’t scary or threatening or anything, he just had this great need to tell me about his work.

I heard my human group calling me to say we were leaving the site, so I had to go. I always wanted to go back there to see if he was still there, but I never got the chance.

This seems to be just the tip of the iceberg since others have told stories of seeing Native apparitions or of people walking on the highway that used to be a one-way bridge. Like many others who have stories, people seem reluctant to be completely candid about what they have seen or experienced. Eventually, I hope to have people become comfortable talking about their stories and share, even anonymously.

Chasing down local legends and folktales is harder than I thought it would be. Many people have stories, but they don’t want to come right out and share them.  I suspect it has to do with the ridicule factor. Who wants to be laughed at?