Folklore Cross Cultures

During the fall is the best time for the most ghost stories and folklore are told. When I was little I was told stories over and over again and they all had the same message that has helped me a lot in my later life. Stories that they make cartoons about even give out positive messages that's part of the reason they are on television. Some stories are alike and some are totally different ,most of them have the same message but all with different characters.

The stories An Arkansas Tall Tale, Bloody Mary, and The Girl in White all have their similarities and their differences. One of the first similarities is that they all have people as characters instead of animals. The traveler in An Arkansas Tall Tale is lost and him and his horse are hungry and need a place to stay so they find a squatter who is playing a tune on his fiddle and looks decently fed. In the story Bloody Mary has the townspeople who start an angry mob and go after Bloody Mary because she is killing all of the girls in town to keep herself beautiful and young. In the Girl in White there is a man attending a dance whose friend tells him he should dance with a girl since his girlfriend is taking care of her sick mother, so he picks the girl dressed in white and dances with her and enjoys it. Afterwards he asks his friend what he thought of the lady in white his friend replied saying “there was nobody there just you dancing alone.”

Another similarity is that the Girl in White and Bloody Mary both have a paranormal character in their story. The story An Arkansas Tall Tale is the only story out of the three that doesn’t involve ghost or witches or anything else paranormal. Bloody Mary involves the with whom the townspeople are afraid that if they cross her that their cows would go dry and not produce any milk for the townspeople to sell and drink. The Girl in White is a ghost that the man dances with at a party dared by his friend he likes the girl and wants to go with her but then figures out she is a ghost and says that he will never dance with anybody other then his girlfriend.

The final similarity is that the first two stories have the same message. In An Arkansas Tall Tale the traveler looks at the squatter and thinks that he is going to be mean towards him and he ends up giving him and his horse food once he hears the traveler play the tune on the fiddle. In the commonly known ghost story Bloody Mary the townspeople think that Mary is a nice and caring old lady that just doesn’t want to be bothered instead she was a terrible witch that kills their children to keep herself young and beautiful. The message that both of these stories give out are that you can’t judge a book by its cover.

So all in all some stories are alike and some aren’t it depends on what you look at in the story. Some people like to look at what things have in common others are negative and look at whats different in a story, either way is good but some are easier to see than others for me its easier to see the similarities in stories.