In the Hunt: Unauthorized Essays on Supernatural

by Supernatural. tv,

  Sam and Dean are just as likely to run into the truth behind a story spread by the Internet as they are to run into ancient legends, and often the ancient and the modern mingle. There are the traditional horror story subjects like ghosts, vampires, and werewolves, and then there are the stranger things that go bump in the night.

  The pilot episode kicked off the mingling of old and new stories by blending the “woman in white” myth (or La Llorona-the weeping woman) with the “phantom hitchhiker” urban legend. La Llorona is a Spanish myth and figure of South American folklore who functions much like the banshee from Celtic cultures in that she weeps and wails loudly, and those who see her are considered marked for death. She’s a woman wearing white, usually seen near bodies of water. According to various versions of the legend, she drowned her children-often because her lover demanded it as a test of her love and loyalty or because her lover from a higher social class abandoned her-then realized the error of her ways and drowned herself.

  The Supernatural pilot merged this legend with the urban legend of the phantom hitchhiker. In this story-the kind of thing that always seems to happen to someone a friend knows-a person driving late at night stops to pick up a woman standing by the side of the road. She asks for a ride home and gives an address, but when the driver reaches that address, she’s disappeared. The driver asks the people at the address about her and learns that she died in an accident at the spot where the driver found her, and that the incident usually happens on the anniversary of her death. In some versions of the story, she makes some prophecy to the driver. In others, she seems cold and the driver puts his coat or sweater around her; he later finds the coat or sweater neatly folded at her grave when he goes to check out the story about her death.

  Although this story is classified as an urban legend, it has very old roots. There were similar stories told at least as far back as the 1600s, and Washington Irving used the legend in one of his stories. Of course, the drivers in those versions were traveling in something other than automobiles. There are also localized versions, including a well-known one in Chicago and the Lady of the Lake in Dallas, where (naturally) the mysterious passenger is identified by her clothing from Neiman Marcus.

  In the Supernatural universe, these two stories add up to create one very ticked-off ghost, one who isn’t content to merely vanish from the back seat. She’s sad for herself and for her dead children and lashes out at men, creating a trail of deaths and disappearances. This woman in white also sets the Supernatural precedent that anyone in a white nightgown is either doomed or to be feared-including Mary Winchester, Sam’s girlfriend Jessica, and a host of irate female spirits.

  The series revisited the phantom hitchhiker story in the second season in the episode “Roadkill” (2-16), this time telling the story from the point of view of the phantom hitchhiker, who doesn’t realize she’s a ghost and who is still trying to get help or a ride home so she can find her husband. This episode addressed another aspect of the myth, the supposedly haunted stretch of highway where accidents often happen, because the ghost causes them or because the driver sees the ghost and either overreacts or isn’t paying attention to the road. In the episode, as in the original myth, the phantom hitchhiker appears on the anniversary of the accident that killed her, but in the Supernatural universe, the stakes are even higher because the hitchhiker is tortured every year by yet another phantom, the man she accidentally killed in the car wreck. She finds peace at last when she’s picked up by the Winchesters, who know all about phantom hitchhikers and how to help them.

  Another old legend the Winchesters investigate is the shtriga, in the season one episode “Something Wicked” (1-18). The shtriga is an Albanian vampiric witch who sucks either blood or life force from children and infants. This is one of many folkloric explanations for crib death or sudden illness among children, much like the Celtic changeling lore. If a child died suddenly in the night, or sickened and began to fade, then obviously it was swapped for an unhealthy fairy child or had its life force sucked out by a witch-and come to think of it, it was probably that crazy old childless woman in the village who did it. Stories like these gave grieving parents a focus for their anger and someone to blame for the unexplainable death.

  Today, we have our own kind of “folklore” to explain seemingly healthy infants dying unexpectedly during the night. We may not blame a mysterious witch or point fingers at the neighborhood crone with a suspiciously lush herb garden, but we do have a name-Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. SIDS sounds a lot more scientific than blaming a shtriga, but it really only means nothing more than that infants die suddenly for no good reason. We aren’t entirely sure what causes SIDS, but we have our own rituals for preventing it. Putting infants to sleep on their backs has resulted in a dramatic decline in SIDS cases, but doctors still don’t know exactly why it works. They think it might keep infants from smothering in bedding, but all they can really do is offer parents hope that if they do this one little thing, they can protect their children. It’s not too far removed from garlic over the window or a crucifix over the door.

  “Something Wicked” reminds us of the potential dangers of complacency and forgetting the stories. If you don’t know what’s happening, you can’t fight it. With their more modern, scientific viewpoint, the people in this episode saw only a disease that didn’t respond to treatment, so they were incapable of really protecting their children from the true threat. Stories like “Something Wicked” provide us with a certain kind of comfort: they give a body and a physical presence to a threat, which means we can vanquish it. We can’t attack and destroy SIDS, but Sam and Dean can shoot a shtriga with consecrated iron bullets and save the children of the town.

  The Trickster is a classic archetype in folklore, existing to poke fun at the status quo, expose hypocrisy, demonstrate the need for change using absurd situations, and cut the hero down to size. The Norse had Loki, the Native Americans have Coyote, the West Africans have Anansi, rural African-American Southerners had Br’er Rabbit, and even our armed forces had the gremlins that plagued military equipment during World War II. Trickster characters are our way of explaining the unexplainable, scapegoats for everything that mysteriously breaks or goes missing. The Trickster showed up to mess with the Winchesters in the episode “Tall Tales” (2-15), but he did so in a thoroughly modern way: by using a form of modern folklore, the supermarket tabloid.

  This creature of ancient legend meted out his usual poetic justice, using people’s weaknesses against them by way of modern legends like alien abduction and alligators in the sewers. Since the Trickster made another appearance in season three, it’s likely we haven’t seen the last of him. He’s probably trolling snopes.com for urban legends he can use against the Winchesters, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he was behind half the “Virus alert! Forward this to everyone!” e-mails going around the Internet today. If you got a virus from blindly following the virus alert warning, you know whom to blame. We can only hope that Sam and Dean eventually take care of this guy for good. I wouldn’t be too optimistic, though. The Trickster is too pervasive, and I don’t know that there’s been a story yet where he was permanently defeated.

  Dean himself often fits the trickster archetype as well. Dean’s life mission seems to be to upset the status quo and make the powerful look foolish while thumbing his nose at the people in charge. He has little respect for authority, whether it’s the police, the FBI, the legions of Hell, or even death itself. Like the Trickster, he takes on multiple identities to blend into situations, changing his name (often to something involving a sly inside joke or reference), making up roles to play, and sometimes even putting on costumes or uniforms to get him into places where he needs to be accepted. Dean makes his living on fraud and scams, gambling and committing credit card fraud to fund his demon-fighting adventures. Both Dean and the Trickster have strong hedonistic tendencies. The Trickster’s lifestyle in “Tall Tales” was right out of Dean’s fantasies: lots of food (especially sweets) and hot chi
cks. Both Dean and the Trickster also target Sam as a victim. Dean delights in undermining his brother’s formal education with the information he’s learned from his own education at the school of hard knocks; he plagues his brother with practical jokes, teases him about his sex life (or lack thereof), and generally tries to get Sam to loosen up, playing the trickster role of keeping others from taking life too seriously. The Trickster’s elaborate prank on Sam in the third-season episode “Mystery Spot” (3-11) was far darker, but just as relentless. If Dean and the Trickster character had a common goal and a common enemy …well, they’d either be really effective or go totally out of control.59

  The Winchesters took on more modern urban legends in “Bloody Mary” (1-5) when they investigated the popular slumber party story. The Bloody Mary game is a typical girlish game in which one girl is dared to look in a mirror in a darkened room and say “Bloody Mary” multiple times, usually from three to thirteen (they went with three in the episode, probably because watching someone say “Bloody Mary” thirteen times isn’t exactly enthralling television). Supposedly, Mary herself will then appear and do something awful, but the stories of what exactly Mary will do probably vary with each slumber party. On the mild end she only appears in the mirror, but some stories tell of her clawing her victims’ eyes out, and on the extreme end she comes through the mirror to kill.

  I know this story was going strong in the mid-1970s during my peak slumber-party years. It was a favorite way for our neighborhood queen bee to pick on the weak members of the group. If you refused to take the Bloody Mary dare, you were chicken, and if you took the dare and did it but nothing happened, then you did it wrong, or else you weren’t worthy. I was nerd enough to look up Bloody Mary in the encyclopedia, which led me to learning about Mary Tudor (who is not believed to be the Bloody Mary associated with this myth) and then boring even the neighborhood queen bee with a historical discourse at the next slumber party. That put an end to that game.

  Some versions of the story involve a woman who lost her baby, and the game includes a taunt about knowing where her baby is. In some versions, she’s known as Mary Worth (though, apparently, not the Mary Worth from the old comic strip). Supernatural called her Mary Worthington, and as in most Supernatural treatments of folklore, she was a lot bloodier and more violent than in the legend itself-whenever she was summoned she went after people who felt responsible for someone’s death and kept it a secret. This was a vengeful spirit rather than the grieving mother of legend. There are no reports of anyone actually being killed or harmed by a Bloody Mary appearance, but Supernatural’s Mary Worthington racked up quite a body count and nearly killed Sam.

  As research guru Sam noted in the episode, this legend may be related to folklore about mirrors and the belief that mirrors could capture a person’s soul. That’s why breaking a mirror is bad luck and why it once was common to cover mirrors during sleep or illness, when the soul might not be as firmly connected to the body, as well as after death, to make sure the soul moved on instead of getting caught in a mirror. In Supernatural’s take on the legend, the mirror not only captured Mary’s soul, but allowed her to move from mirror to mirror as she was summoned.

  The game is often played as part of “truth or dare,” as seen in the episode. Summoning Bloody Mary is taken as a dare to avoid having to tell a truth. With the Supernatural twist of Mary punishing her victims for their secret sins, the episode’s dare ended up revealing even more truth, and not just for the person summoning Mary. Anyone nearby with a secret was in danger. The person didn’t even have to actually be responsible for a death as long as they felt responsible; it was the secret itself that was deadly.

  One possible source of the Bloody Mary slumber party game was a divining game, popular among teenaged girls and young women in the early twentieth century, in which a girl would perform a ritual in front of a mirror to see the reflection of the man she would marry. Anyone who’s spent much time with pre-teen girls can see how that could quickly turn into horrifying taunts and cruel games, with the suggestion first of an ugly man in the mirror and then later a vindictive, child-murdering witch. This element of cruelty played out in the Supernatural episode, with the slumber-party girls using the game to taunt a friend, then the older girls using it as a prank or to prove they didn’t believe, even after there had been deaths. Perhaps what Bloody Mary really represents is an adolescent mean streak, where the person you really have to fear is the friend who pushes you to do something scary, and in whose hands a secret can become a deadly weapon.

  The old folklore often contained instructional or moral messages, and urban legends are no different. There’s frequently a cautionary tale involved, with the wicked being punished for transgressing society’s norms and the good escaping unharmed because of their virtues. In fairy tales, the greedy, selfish, cold older brothers refuse to help the beggar woman and pay the price, while the goodhearted youngest brother helps her and ends up marrying a princess because the old woman turns out to be powerful and repays his kindness. In urban legends, the good girl who protects her virtue survives while the sex-crazed boy and the girl who gives into him are punished. That’s what happens in the three urban legends that are woven together in the episode “Hook Man” (1-7).

  The “hook man” and “dead boyfriend” stories involve Lover’s Lane scenarios, while the “dead roommate” legend generally involves a college dormitory. The “hook man” story, which dates back at least to the 1950s, tells of a murderous madman with a hook for a hand who has escaped from a prison for the criminally insane. A young couple parked on a remote lane for a make-out session hear the bulletin about the escaped madman on their car radio. The girl wants to go home immediately, but the boy wants to stay because he has high hopes for the evening. The girl stands her ground and insists that they leave, and won’t let the boy touch her until they go. He finally gets fed up and agrees, gunning the car and pulling away quickly. When he gets to his girlfriend’s home, he finds a hook stuck in the car door handle. Only the girlfriend’s virtue saved them both from a grisly death.

  The “dead boyfriend” story also involves a make-out session gone wrong. Depending on the version, the car breaks down and the boyfriend has to walk to get gas or get help, or else he hears a noise and has to go investigate it. The girlfriend stays in the car, growing increasingly irritated by his long absence. In some versions of the story, she hears a scratching noise on the car roof and gets out to see what’s happening, only to find her boyfriend dead and hanging upside down above the car; the noise she heard was his fingernails scraping the car. In other versions, she’s rescued by the police, who tell her not to look back at the car as they take her away. She does anyway and sees her boyfriend dead. Sometimes, her hair turns white at the sight, echoing the Bible story about Lot’s wife being turned into a pillar of salt because she looked back as they fled the destruction of Sodom. The lesson here is that taking a girl to a remote area to go “parking” can be hazardous to your health.

  However, that isn’t entirely an urban legend. People have been killed in areas known for being places to park and make out. In the 1940s, the Texarkana area was terrorized by a killer known as “the Phantom,” who killed couples (after sexually assaulting the women) on country lanes and in other remote areas. This killer was as terrifying and mysterious as the Hook Man of legend, and the killings were never solved. They did seem to stop after a man was arrested for something else and put in prison; his wife confessed that he committed the crimes but refused to testify against him in court, so he was never tried for the killings and the case remains officially unsolved. The popularity of Lover’s Lane urban legends in the 1950s may have stemmed from these murders, as well as the increasing number of teens who had access to cars for extracurricular activities and who therefore needed a good scare to steer them away from immoral behavior.

  The “dead roommate” story has less of a moral component, functioning more as a general scare or cautionary tale. In some versions, a colleg
e student gets back to the dorm room late at night and gets ready for bed without turning on a light so she won’t disturb her roommate. When she wakes up in the morning, she finds her roommate dead, and written on the wall in blood is the taunt, “Aren’t you glad you didn’t turn on the light?” There are other versions in which she just wakes during the night when she hears a noise, but is reassured when her faithful dog lying beside the bed licks her hand. In the morning, she finds her dog and/or her roommate dead, and this time the taunt reads, “Humans can lick, too.” This myth feeds into fears about being away from home and living among strangers in college dorms, and it’s still being spread by e-mail today.

  Supernatural adds to the moral judgment (or “sex is bad, okay?”) theme by making the Hook Man the ghost of a deranged, judgmental preacher and having him commit the “dead boyfriend” and “dead roommate” murders. A preacher’s daughter, a good girl being pressured to live a little, inadvertently summoned him through her own moral conflict, via a cross made with metal from his hook. She wasn’t entirely comfortable with her boyfriend’s desire to get more physical or her roommate’s urging to loosen up; the boyfriend got strung up after he grew frustrated with her trying to maintain her boundaries in a necking session, and her roommate died after encouraging her to dress sluttier and skip her usual time with her father for a girls’ night in. Their deaths meant she could remain uncorrupted. Her father-who gave her the cross in the first place-nearly became yet another victim when she learned that he was having an affair with a married church member, because she was disappointed he was going against the morals he had taught her.

  The link between sex and death is a common one in horror, going back to the psycho-sexual implications of vampire lore, and is still going strong in the modern horror movie, where people who have sex might as well have signed their own death warrants, and it’s those who are pure who stand a chance of survival. And in the Supernatural universe, having sex with Sam Winchester is a good way to commit suicide, since you’re sure to die horribly afterward for maximum Sam angst.