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Virginia Folk Legends
What do devil dogs, witches, haunted houses, Daniel Boone, Railroad Bill, "Justice John" Crutchfield, and lost silver mines have in common? All are among the subjects included in the vast collection of legends gathered between 1937 and 1942 by the field workers of the Virginia Writers Project of the WPA. For decades following the end of the project, these stories lay untouched in the libraries of the University of Virginia. Now, folklorist Thomas E. Barden brings to light these delightful tales, most of which have never been in print. Virginia Folk Legends presents the first valid published collection of Virginia folk legends and is endorsed by the American Folklore Society.
364 pages, Paperback
First published November 1, 1991
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May 24, 2024
Virginia has a singularly rich and diverse folkloric tradition – not surprisingly, as the state is one of the oldest in the United States of America, with a beautiful landscape, a rich and diverse culture, and a complex and often difficult history. And the student of Virginia history and culture can gain much from a reading of the 1991 book Virginia Folk Legends.
The book’s editor, folklore professor Thomas E. Barden of the University of Toledo, is himself a native Virginian; and in an engaging preface, Barden explains both how Virginia folklore touched his life in childhood and how he came to find and compile the stories included in this collection. As with many 20th-century Virginians, the Bardens’ family story involved relocation from rural Virginia to the commonwealth’s “urban crescent” that connects Northern Virginia, Richmond, and Hampton Roads; and the family’s love of folklore survived the move from the countryside to the city.
Until I was almost seven years old, I used to listen to Virginia folk legends after supper on summer evenings in my grandparents’ backyard. At least a few of my grandmother’s ten brothers and sisters and their wives and husbands would come over every night and sit on lawn chairs and talk while it got dark. They all had moved to Richmond from King and Queen County [on Virginia’s Northern Neck] at about the same time, and by the 1920’s they had settled in Richmond’s West End within a few blocks of each other. They would talk about work, housekeeping, church, and their gardens at first, but by the time the lightning bugs and cigarette tips were the only lights left, the talk would always turn to the country and old times. (p. 26)
Barden found, in the library of the University of Virginia, that there were long-forgotten files containing folkloric stories that had been gathered from across Virginia, between 1937 and 1942. These folktales were set down by interviewers for the Virginia Writers’ Project; and the VWP, in its turn, was a state-level affiliate of the federal government’s Works Projects Administration (WPA), a Great Depression-era initiative aimed at helping jobless people find meaningful work. The VWP, in this case, not only gave previously unemployed people productive work as ethnographic fieldworkers, but also preserved Virginia folktales that otherwise might have become lost in the mists of changing times.
In framing the folktales collected for Virginia Folk Legends, Barden takes some pains to distinguish what makes folklore different from other forms of storytelling. First, folklore is oral storytelling; it is passed down by word of mouth, from one person to another and then another. Second, folklore can never be traced to a single source. An informant may frame a folktale by saying something like, “My mother told me this story a long time ago”; but if a folklorist goes to the mother, then the mother will say, “No, I heard that story from my cousin,” and the cousin will say they heard it from their sister, and so on, and so on. It is what folklorists call “the folkloric remove.”
Third, and lastly, folkloric tales pass down what might loosely be called “traditional” values of a society - meaning, in the case of Virginia 1937-42, things like what to do (e.g., go to church on Sunday) and what not to do (e.g., don’t drink alcohol). There can be examples of wish-fulfillment, as in some of the volume’s treasure stories; people whose stories provide positive or negative examples for the community to emulate or avoid; and, as Barden puts it, “people’s deep-seated concerns and fears, such as sex, death, and suffering” (p. 289).
From the hundreds of stories in the VWP files, Barden has chosen 130 for inclusion in the volume. They come from 34 of Virginia’s 100 counties, and from Virginia towns and cities like Danville, Fredericksburg, Hampton, Lynchburg, Newport News, Norfolk, Portsmouth, Richmond, and Roanoke. A great many of the tales come from Wise County in the westernmost mountains of the commonwealth – something that may not be surprising, as a rural and isolated community like Wise County seems an ideal site for the spread of folklore.
Several of the book’s sections – “Conjure and Witchcraft,” “Ghosts,” “Haunted Houses,” “Spirit Dogs” – involve what another section of the book refers to as “Supernatural Events.” The supernatural sometimes seems almost an accepted element of ordinary life, as in the story “A Witch Gets Caught in a Store” from Gloucester County in upper Tidewater. The story tells how four witches plotted to make themselves small in order to break into a store and drink all the whiskey inside. One witch bungled the job, was caught outside the store, and was scheduled to be hanged; but the Gloucester County informant related how the people who had caught the witch “had the rope around his neck, when a buzzard flew down and cried, ‘Up in the air I go!’ and the witch replied, ‘And I after you.’ And the witch flew right out of the rope, and up in the air” (p. 103). As with many of these stories, there is a feeling of incompleteness and mystery; there is no explanation for how the witch acquired his powers, or for what he might have done after escaping his assailants.
At times, the stories provide an explanation for mysterious phenomena that pertain to a specific locale. The story “A Strange Light at a Murder Site,” from Buckingham County in the central Piedmont region of Virginia, tells a story of four men who murder a deputy sheriff named Eddie Carter in an attempt to cover up their guilt for two more murders. The informant who tells this story relates how, “at the place where [Eddie Carter’s] body was found, there comes a light which appears every night. I’ve seen it many a time; the deputy sheriff was killed fifty years ago, but that [light] appears every night over a place the size of a grave, an’ it will shine until one gets close to the spot, and then go out. Then, after one passes on, the light will appear again” (p. 200). In this case, a particularly heinous crime – the murder of a sworn law enforcement officer – leaves behind a psychic trace that cannot be erased.
Sometimes, the stories seem to have a power of their own over the lives of people in their communities; the mere fact that people believe in a folkloric tradition causes the tradition to come true, in a case of self-fulfilling prophecy. “Caught in the Graveyard” presents two such examples. In the first, from Buckingham County, a young woman went into a graveyard, believing that she could see the man she would marry if she stuck a table fork into a grave. She did so, but “as she stooped down to stick the fork in the grave she stuck it through her dress. And she thought it was something pulling her down, and it scared her to death, and she died right there” (p. 307).
In the same vein, a story from Nelson County in the Charlottesville area tells how a thief plotted to rob the grave of a wealthy man in order to steal the jewelry buried with the man. The day after the thief made his attempt, people came to the grave and “found the grave opened. The [coffin] had been opened and all of the jewelry [was] out. A man was laying across the box which had contained the corpse. His coat was fastened to the box with the screw that fastened the top on the box. He was dead. Apparently, he was scared to death” (p. 308). In both stories, no actual supernatural agency is necessary; simply the belief in supernatural punishment for proscribed behaviors (grave robbing, or attempting to predict the future by supernatural means) is enough for a sudden shock to kill the person.
Sometimes, the stories included in Virginia Folk Legends reveal the limitations of the times in which the stories were collected. Most of the stories in the “Indians” section, for instance, come from white informants, and depict Native Americans as potentially dangerous outsiders. Stories told by Native American informants — from the Mattaponi and Pamunkey reservations in eastern Virginia, for example — might have presented a very different picture of Native American life. And in many of the folktales relating to the African American people of Virginia, the “n-word” appears with distressing frequency — though quite a few of the stories, whether recounted by an African American or an Anglo informant, show slaveholders experiencing some sort of punishment for their participation in the crime and the sin of slaveholding.
Published by the University of Virginia Press at Charlottesville, Virginia Folk Legends provides an interesting, thought-provoking, and sometimes disturbing look inside the inner lives of Virginians and Virginia communities from a now long-distant part of the early 20th century.
The book’s editor, folklore professor Thomas E. Barden of the University of Toledo, is himself a native Virginian; and in an engaging preface, Barden explains both how Virginia folklore touched his life in childhood and how he came to find and compile the stories included in this collection. As with many 20th-century Virginians, the Bardens’ family story involved relocation from rural Virginia to the commonwealth’s “urban crescent” that connects Northern Virginia, Richmond, and Hampton Roads; and the family’s love of folklore survived the move from the countryside to the city.
Until I was almost seven years old, I used to listen to Virginia folk legends after supper on summer evenings in my grandparents’ backyard. At least a few of my grandmother’s ten brothers and sisters and their wives and husbands would come over every night and sit on lawn chairs and talk while it got dark. They all had moved to Richmond from King and Queen County [on Virginia’s Northern Neck] at about the same time, and by the 1920’s they had settled in Richmond’s West End within a few blocks of each other. They would talk about work, housekeeping, church, and their gardens at first, but by the time the lightning bugs and cigarette tips were the only lights left, the talk would always turn to the country and old times. (p. 26)
Barden found, in the library of the University of Virginia, that there were long-forgotten files containing folkloric stories that had been gathered from across Virginia, between 1937 and 1942. These folktales were set down by interviewers for the Virginia Writers’ Project; and the VWP, in its turn, was a state-level affiliate of the federal government’s Works Projects Administration (WPA), a Great Depression-era initiative aimed at helping jobless people find meaningful work. The VWP, in this case, not only gave previously unemployed people productive work as ethnographic fieldworkers, but also preserved Virginia folktales that otherwise might have become lost in the mists of changing times.
In framing the folktales collected for Virginia Folk Legends, Barden takes some pains to distinguish what makes folklore different from other forms of storytelling. First, folklore is oral storytelling; it is passed down by word of mouth, from one person to another and then another. Second, folklore can never be traced to a single source. An informant may frame a folktale by saying something like, “My mother told me this story a long time ago”; but if a folklorist goes to the mother, then the mother will say, “No, I heard that story from my cousin,” and the cousin will say they heard it from their sister, and so on, and so on. It is what folklorists call “the folkloric remove.”
Third, and lastly, folkloric tales pass down what might loosely be called “traditional” values of a society - meaning, in the case of Virginia 1937-42, things like what to do (e.g., go to church on Sunday) and what not to do (e.g., don’t drink alcohol). There can be examples of wish-fulfillment, as in some of the volume’s treasure stories; people whose stories provide positive or negative examples for the community to emulate or avoid; and, as Barden puts it, “people’s deep-seated concerns and fears, such as sex, death, and suffering” (p. 289).
From the hundreds of stories in the VWP files, Barden has chosen 130 for inclusion in the volume. They come from 34 of Virginia’s 100 counties, and from Virginia towns and cities like Danville, Fredericksburg, Hampton, Lynchburg, Newport News, Norfolk, Portsmouth, Richmond, and Roanoke. A great many of the tales come from Wise County in the westernmost mountains of the commonwealth – something that may not be surprising, as a rural and isolated community like Wise County seems an ideal site for the spread of folklore.
Several of the book’s sections – “Conjure and Witchcraft,” “Ghosts,” “Haunted Houses,” “Spirit Dogs” – involve what another section of the book refers to as “Supernatural Events.” The supernatural sometimes seems almost an accepted element of ordinary life, as in the story “A Witch Gets Caught in a Store” from Gloucester County in upper Tidewater. The story tells how four witches plotted to make themselves small in order to break into a store and drink all the whiskey inside. One witch bungled the job, was caught outside the store, and was scheduled to be hanged; but the Gloucester County informant related how the people who had caught the witch “had the rope around his neck, when a buzzard flew down and cried, ‘Up in the air I go!’ and the witch replied, ‘And I after you.’ And the witch flew right out of the rope, and up in the air” (p. 103). As with many of these stories, there is a feeling of incompleteness and mystery; there is no explanation for how the witch acquired his powers, or for what he might have done after escaping his assailants.
At times, the stories provide an explanation for mysterious phenomena that pertain to a specific locale. The story “A Strange Light at a Murder Site,” from Buckingham County in the central Piedmont region of Virginia, tells a story of four men who murder a deputy sheriff named Eddie Carter in an attempt to cover up their guilt for two more murders. The informant who tells this story relates how, “at the place where [Eddie Carter’s] body was found, there comes a light which appears every night. I’ve seen it many a time; the deputy sheriff was killed fifty years ago, but that [light] appears every night over a place the size of a grave, an’ it will shine until one gets close to the spot, and then go out. Then, after one passes on, the light will appear again” (p. 200). In this case, a particularly heinous crime – the murder of a sworn law enforcement officer – leaves behind a psychic trace that cannot be erased.
Sometimes, the stories seem to have a power of their own over the lives of people in their communities; the mere fact that people believe in a folkloric tradition causes the tradition to come true, in a case of self-fulfilling prophecy. “Caught in the Graveyard” presents two such examples. In the first, from Buckingham County, a young woman went into a graveyard, believing that she could see the man she would marry if she stuck a table fork into a grave. She did so, but “as she stooped down to stick the fork in the grave she stuck it through her dress. And she thought it was something pulling her down, and it scared her to death, and she died right there” (p. 307).
In the same vein, a story from Nelson County in the Charlottesville area tells how a thief plotted to rob the grave of a wealthy man in order to steal the jewelry buried with the man. The day after the thief made his attempt, people came to the grave and “found the grave opened. The [coffin] had been opened and all of the jewelry [was] out. A man was laying across the box which had contained the corpse. His coat was fastened to the box with the screw that fastened the top on the box. He was dead. Apparently, he was scared to death” (p. 308). In both stories, no actual supernatural agency is necessary; simply the belief in supernatural punishment for proscribed behaviors (grave robbing, or attempting to predict the future by supernatural means) is enough for a sudden shock to kill the person.
Sometimes, the stories included in Virginia Folk Legends reveal the limitations of the times in which the stories were collected. Most of the stories in the “Indians” section, for instance, come from white informants, and depict Native Americans as potentially dangerous outsiders. Stories told by Native American informants — from the Mattaponi and Pamunkey reservations in eastern Virginia, for example — might have presented a very different picture of Native American life. And in many of the folktales relating to the African American people of Virginia, the “n-word” appears with distressing frequency — though quite a few of the stories, whether recounted by an African American or an Anglo informant, show slaveholders experiencing some sort of punishment for their participation in the crime and the sin of slaveholding.
Published by the University of Virginia Press at Charlottesville, Virginia Folk Legends provides an interesting, thought-provoking, and sometimes disturbing look inside the inner lives of Virginians and Virginia communities from a now long-distant part of the early 20th century.
April 20, 2025
Author did a great job contextualizing the various folk legends. Only qualm is that the commitment to rendering the reporters' dialects phonetically can sometimes make comprehension tricky
January 6, 2023
One of the few books on va folk tales u can find besides west VA one very good!
June 27, 2011
While I appreciate the authenticity of these tales, I think this would've been a far better read if translated from the vernacular and if a stricter narrative structure had been applied to the tales. However, the inclusion of folk tales on a wide array of subjects made this an overall enjoyable read.
November 8, 2011
Very enjoyable, thoughtfully edited if (as Barden explains) a little haphazardly collected. Definitely intended more for the folklore scholar than the folklore enthusiast, but it would disappoint neither.
December 18, 2016
Great collection of Virginia folklore. Enjoyed that many of the passages are written in the vernacular--fun to read the turns of phrase not often used these days.
April 14, 2020
Fantastic! Love it! A perfect book for reading Virginia's folk legends. Not all the stories are suitable for children though. It can be quite graphic and morbid.
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September 9, 2007Reading for my Appalachian Folklore class.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews