The strange story of Gef and why old supernatural stories still attract us

For the last newsletter of the year before some much needed holidays (definitely for me - more power to you if you personally aren't feeling exhausted), I thought it would be great to do something fun; and since I am an anthropologist, and that one whose interest in anthropology started with the interest in mythology, I decided to do a little discussion on our relationship with supernatural...especially old supernatural stories.

Every society has its own mythologies and tales of the supernatural, and in my experience, there are times when stories are told more often, and supernatural believed to be more active. (If you want to be part of the discussion below in the comments, I'm sure we'd all love to hear how your culture does this.) For the Western hemisphere, and in particular for Europe, that time, ironically, used to be around Christmas. And it makes sense - while All Hallows Eve (Halloween) may seem more readily appropriate, and has gradually become the "scare season", it is actually the long hours of darkness around Christmas and Christian New Year that really yield themselves to huddling together by a warm fire, maybe over some farm-related work in the olden days or some hot tea in more modern time, and indulge in some stories that seem oddly fitting for the time when the world is darker and the night seems (and is) longer. The stories I have personally come across when asking have often been of the Wild Hunt, or of wrongdoers coming back to haunt someone or a place to right a wrong they have done in life. These are logical tales for long hours of darkness, if you think about it - humans aren't very well fitted to doing anything much in the dark, and, honestly, in deep snow (if you have ever had a chance to really involve yourself with hiking or any other activity in deep snow, you know what I mean). Hypothermia and starvation would have been a real problem, a real danger, for our ancestors not so long ago still; starving predators desperate enough to attack a village or a lonely cottage are another theme that pops up in these almost-collective-memories, somewhere between collective fear, trauma, skill imparting, histories and tale. It becomes easy, under such conditions, to brood upon all kinds of possible scary things, and sharing our thoughts is a natural human activity, an activity that can help us survive now and that helped us survive throughout the past. Crime, of course, is another concern. While our ancestors possibly wouldn't have the modern words we use for it now if we go far enough into the past, long hours of darkness can and do aid wrongdoers - help is less likely to come if people are more isolated, human predators that know a corner well can utilise it more easily to prey on others. Mental health problems, also, can worsen during the long dark hours, which can precipitate a precarious situation into a self-harming or a violent one. Even just this awareness is probably enough to create ghost stories and the need for them, but consider also our position in the snow - sounds travel differently. Was that crack we just heard a branch breaking under the ice on the tree, or a predator accidentally giving away its position through a careless move? And where did it come from? When you can't move fast to escape and defence is likely to be poor, these are important questions to have been asking ourselves throughout our history.

With that in mind, it is probably no wonder that the most well-known Christmas story - Dickens' "A Christmas Carol" is actually one about ghosts. Whatever you feel about Dickens, his writing and ultimately the goal he wrote that story with, it is, in the first place, a ghost story. Ebenezer Scrooge is visited by ghosts that essentially scare him into being either a better person or a person more conforming to a specific social trend that Dickens felt was important, and which (and now you know what I think, though the conversation around that topic would be long and equally interesting).

These stories have meaning...social, cultural, safety...but what about stories that seem to have none? Where the story is simply bizarre or frightening? And why do we return to or rediscover some of the really old ones?

I first heard of Gef many many years ago as a very little girl. I was that child who delved (probably way too early) into unusual stories. In my time, that was ghosts and monsters. Oh, and, of course, UFOs (because where would we be without them, they were a major part of shared culture for decades after the WW2, and probably remain so today to some extent), though I must confess very little interest in them in particular then and now. (I guess Earth was/is interesting enough.) The story has since had a revival, even inspiring a film. And suddenly, retellings of the story were everywhere, for all that it had once been very obscure.

Perhaps this is strange in a time when what came before (sometimes regardless of whether or not it was harmful) is often loudly and utterly rejected by the younger generations. But then again, perhaps not - rejection can be a seeking of roots, of establishing of an identity that is anchored in the same past as before, only somehow better. Humans have done that for centuries, with varied results (which unfortunately included religious and other conflicts in which many died). Rejection also doesn't require lack of fascination. And then, of course, there is the likely most banal and yet most influential reason - true crime. While true crime as a genre generally satisfies itself with rehashing murder and mayhem, it does also, and frequently so, wade into the waters of supernatural. With the interest as high, it is hard to be original - if you look, you will find podcasts rehashing the same stories, often in the same ways, over and over again. Unless they decide that originality is necessary to stand out...or have specific interests. As always, accuracy, professionality and so forth vary. But the hunger for material does not - stories like Gef's, very little known unless you are old enough and have had an interest in how people think since before you really knew how to articulate that (which for instance was my interest very early on - I did say I was an odd child!), are perfect because they are so obscure.

Are we still telling ghost stories around Christmas? My opinion is that we mostly do not...at least not in a way that I have observed. Perhaps it would require extensive fieldwork to uncover communities, families and groups who still do so, in a time when Halloween has become THE scare time. But what remains, and is perhaps present more than ever before (true crime podcasts are there all year round for one) is our desire for ghost stories...including and especially the ones we don't know.

Perhaps that is down to wanting to be scared, in a controlled and easy-going environment where it is ok to be scared because we can snap out of it any time we like, and the danger isn't real. Perhaps that is what all such tales have had in common throughout history. Perhaps there are still skills to be shared as well as culture in those tales too. Perhaps we are just nosy. (I'm an anthropologist - that's being nosy by definition.) Either way, the interest in retellings of these tales persists, and maybe that's a good thing - who knows how many stories would be lost if we had no interest in them, and what we can still learn about ourselves now and then by delving into them.

Author's note - it was a pleasure to write for you this year - see you in the next one, and, if you celebrate a holiday around this time of year, I am sending you all my best wishes!