Vang: Many cultures have their own spooky stories

Opinion editor’s note: Strib Voices publishes a mix of material from 11 contributing columnists, along with other commentary online and in print each day. To contribute, click here.

•••

A demon-possessed woman trapped in the cellar clawed at the door. It was Halloween night, and I was 8 years old. My sisters and I were huddled around the TV like it was a campfire and paralyzed by fear. We were watching “The Evil Dead,” a horror film about college students who accidentally release demons while vacationing in a remote cabin.

We screamed together when the demon woman broke free from the basement and ducked under our blanket. Trembling, I peered out to see my mother watching, unfazed. For her, it wasn’t scary.

To my mother, Pang, a Hmong shaman who often travels between the human and spirit worlds, it was nothing out of the ordinary. She often enters the spirit world to bring lost souls home. Through her eyes, fear has a different look.

Many years later, remembering this moment got me wondering: Does fear show up differently across cultures? As someone whose two feet are firmly planted straddling two cultures, I’ve seen firsthand how fear shows up differently in American and Hmong cultures. Culture, history, social context and mythology all shape how fear looks and feels. As someone who’s bicultural, I’ve got to say it feels a little unfair having to be scared in two cultures. Double the fear, but not double the fun.

In Minnesota’s various cultural communities, there are spooky tales passed from one generation to the next. Every Hmong child has heard frightening stories about “Dab Poj Ntxoog,” a sinister ghost that disguises itself as a beautiful woman with long black hair to lure unsuspecting men deep into the woods, never to return. My Mexican American friends warn of La Llorona, or “The Weeping Woman.” She’s a tragic figure who, after losing her children, wanders near bodies of water, wailing in grief and ready to gobble your soul.

My father-in-law, Ed, who grew up in a tight-knit German American community in Stearns County, is scared of the Erlkönig, or “Elf King,” a specter who seduces children into his realm. Meanwhile, I once heard a Hamline University student who is Dakota recall an encounter during a camping trip with the Wendigo, a cannibalistic spirit. Even though I heard him share the story more than 15 years ago, I can still picture his hefty body trembling with fear as he recounted the story.

For groups who have faced historical trauma such as the Hmong, African American and Indigenous peoples, fear may relate not only to personal experiences but also to collective memories of discrimination, violence or displacement. I was reminded of this last week when my son, Shao, found an old VHS tape of a Hmong zombie movie I had around the house. Shao wanted to bring it as a Hmong artifact to his school’s Festival of Nations show.

“Why are there Hmong zombie movies?” he asked me.

“During the ‘secret war,’ soldiers were killed and not properly buried according to our Hmong rituals, so they came back as unhappy zombies,” I told him. “To the Hmong, the horror is not having a proper burial.”

I hoped his 10-year-old brain understood. Nonetheless, he was just happy to bring a horror movie to school and to show off to his fifth-grade class.

These ghostly cultural tales are windows into shared fears and wisdom, passed down through generations. What scary stories are told in your family? Are you ensuring that these stories are being passed on?

I posed these questions to the only real-life ghost buster I know, my mother. Did she make her refugee children watch horror movies for a greater understanding of American culture?

“Naw, I just liked horror movies,” she replied. “Your dad doesn’t like watching movies. I didn’t want to watch them alone.”

Did she tell us terrifying Hmong tales about demon tigers to make us remember our Hmong heritage?

“Naw, I just liked scaring you.”

While those were not the answers I was expecting, I found myself more connected to the shared humanity in all of the cultural spooky stories told around Minnesota — an acknowledgment that while our fears differ, they unite us in resilience, courage and understanding.