Love, Novela [Completed]

Re: Tales from the Crypt

From: novela-harmon@bethel.edu
Date: Thu, Aug 31, 2017 at 5:17 PM
Subject: Tales from the Crypt
To: grace-k-nelson@bethel.edu

The cemetery tour last night was actually really good. I think Alex was right - ghost stories, even though untrue, offer a window on the culture that tells them. Also, since this cemetery was open from 1848 to 1896, its stories give some human elements to the history of that period.

For instance: there is married couple buried there who were born in Scotland. The legend is that if you ask them for something, they will try to help you get it. It's unclear why they were in Guadalajara, because there isn't much surviving documentation about them. It's more unclear why people believe that they can or would help you, at least more than any other dead stranger. But to me their grave is a reminder that European immigrants didn't just go to the United States, and that Mexico's history includes more than Aztecs and Conquistadors.

Basically we spent the night walking around in a large, dark cemetery listening to ghost stories told by a fairly convincing tour guide. I think it would have been scarier if the group wasn't so large. As everyone knows, there is safety in numbers - even from ghosts and monsters, apparently. I think some of the fear was tampered also by the fact that the tour was in Spanish and not all the students were able to follow it completely.

The guide also told a legend about a "vampire tree" where a supposed vampire was buried and a tree grew up from the grave. The story goes that when the tree destroys the grave, the vampire will be free to roam the streets of Guadalajara again. I don't think the story in itself is particularly scary because no one really believes in vampires like that, not actually. But there was a tingly element in being able to actually see the tree. It's a creepy-looking tree; that's probably how the story got started in the first place.

I noticed that at least two stories mentioned 8:00 p.m. as the time for the strange happenings. One involved going to a certain grave at 8:00 to pray some Catholic prayers (they said which ones but I don't remember). This seemed weird to me - I think midnight is fairly standard, and I've heard 3 a.m. mentioned as the opposite of the time Jesus died, but I've never heard 8:00. Would that be a Catholic thing? Mexican thing? A Guadalajara thing? I'll have to ask Alex later.

Perhaps the thing that most freaked people out, myself included, was the photos. A lot of people go to the cemetery to get their wedding photos taken, because there are a lot of plants and apparently it is quite pretty during the day. Apparently it is a common phenomenon for the pictures to contain a ghostly photobomb. The most disturbing part I think isn't the  photos themselves, since that's easy enough to fake. It's how many  people believe it's real.

I had thought that ghost stories were a thing of girls' sleepovers and movies I don't watch, but apparently a lot of people put more stock in them than I would have imagined. With the intertwining of beliefs about the dead and the prayers that must be said to or about them, I wonder how much of an affect Catholicism had or has on belief in ghosts. I know there are ghost stories in the US, which has a mostly Protestant tradition, and I admit I know little about either ghost stories or Catholicism, but the connection might be worth exploring. It makes sense, right? A belief system where there are Saints who are people that died but continue to communicate with the living, and where people don't go to Heaven when they die but go instead to Purgatory where the prayers the living offer for them make a difference as to their fate. I'll have to talk to Alex about that, too.

Anyway, I survived the graveyard tour and the ghosts stories and managed to avoid having nightmares last night, so all in all it was a smashing success.

Write back! I am aware you are trying to have a life apart from our correspondence, but at least give me a quick taste of home, like what crazy antics our roommates are up to or some such silliness. Even though I am settling in more, I still miss all of you, especially after school when I have to go home and sit alone in the silent house, and non-homework distractions are hard to come by.

Love you!

N