You may have heard the saying that Fear is nothing but False Evidence Appearing Real. But some aspects of fear in humans may actually be rooted in the stories we hear.
WCMU's Tina Sawyer recently sat down with Ari Berk who teaches folklore and mythology at Central Michigan University.
Ari started the conversation explaining why people like to be scared.
Editor's note: This story was produced for the ear and designed to be heard. If you're able, WCMU encourages you to listen to the audio version of this story by clicking the LISTEN button above. This transcript was edited for clarity and length.
Ari Berk: I mean, it gives them, I think, a catharsis. When we're scared, we feel like we're under threat and we come closer to perhaps what it feels like to die at last. And so I think when we can have those feelings and then actually not die at the end, it just kind of affirms the fact that we're still here, we're alive, we're still vital. I mean, well, we are getting into that season when you should be seeking out ghost stories. You know, you think of them as you started with in our discussion as things that are terrifying, but they can also be deeply comforting. In telling ghost stories and remembering the past of place, we do bring that past into the present. And we bring those lost people whose names or whose lives may have been forgotten back again into the circle of the sun.
Tina Sawyer: Do you think some of these scary tales are a lesson as well to people?
AB: They're almost always a lesson. Real ghost stories or even stories of monsters always have an aspect to them that we're supposed to transcend, that we're supposed to learn from. Ghost stories, even the most frightening ones, encourage us to remember people that are lost, to remember people that used to live in the places that we now occupy. So there always is a lesson, even if the lesson is simply to remember.
TS: So there's a cultural aspect to it.
AB: Always, always. Although you do find, particularly in ghost stories, that there are a lot of similar aspects to these tales that do transcend culture.
TS How can it help people today that are going to these scary movies and maybe they have anxiety or some sort of problem with fear and in general.
AB: To be in that place, you have then two options. One, to be frightened by the narrative, or to engage in the history. And when you do that, I think you do transcend the terrifying elements of the ghost story.
TS: Would you lump urban legends into these tales?
AB: Yes and no. Some of them do have supernatural elements. Others, really are meant to express an anxiety about a particular, often contemporary thing. Although sometimes those contemporary anxieties come around again. So they try to control human behavior and they try to warn.
TS: It's kind of like the Brothers Grimm with Hansel and Gretel and all of those.
AB: Well, sure, there's always that. There is always, I think, a practical angle. You know, what happens to children that wander away from home? But I actually, I can't stand Hansel and Gretel as a story. It's so terrible. The family was so hungry. that these kids have to run away and take up with a cannibal. Could nobody make these kids a cheese sandwich? It doesn't say it's just says a horrible thing about that town. I think I've never liked.
TS: They had cheese back then. It's perfectly fine.
AB: They had cows bread. They couldn't have picked some berries. The neighbors didn't have some potatoes in the basement? That story's just about terrible neighbors.
TS: Yeah, I think you made a good point. What about Slender Man, though? I mean, that's kind of supernatural. That's been circulating on the web.
AB: And it's really the web that's a key to those kinds of stories. They become our contemporary computerized folklore. And they do move in similar ways. They're passed from community to community, from person to person. The weird part about those is then when people begin to emulate those narratives, they become quite dangerous.
TS: And locally here in Michigan, we have the tale of the Dog Man, which was actually proven to be some DJs who just made it up. And they admitted to it, but people still swear they see it.
AB: This is a really curious fact about these kinds of narratives, that certain kinds of narratives, for whatever reason, even if they're, as you say in this situation, invented, do take root and they play off of, you know, common sorts of anxieties. Now, there may be another aspect to stories like that, which could be about earlier people living here and having certain sorts of of creatures like this in their mythos. Bigfoot, for example, we have stories in the oral tradition of native people that go back thousands of years. So what do you want to call real at that point? I mean, I think all myths are true. They needn't be true for you, Tina, not necessarily for me, but they are true to some people and they express a cultural truth that I think is a benefit for everybody to learn something about. or we find out more likely that everybody fears them and that we all have solutions to these problems, but sometimes even knowing that other people have the same problems alleviates some of the terror. It becomes something that other people in the past have dealt with and that perhaps we can deal with as well.
