Legend Tripping?
“Legend Tripping” is term recently bestowed on a common adolescent rite of passage in which a group of young people travel to a reputed site of supernatural danger in order to tempt or test the spirits of the place. After it is determined that the bogey or haunt has been satisfactorily tempted, the young people return to the safety of their community, gaining status within their group for facing the “unknown,” as well as forging a closer bond within their peer group for doing so together.
Sometimes these rites of passage involve taking advantage of other illicit adult pleasures, such as sex or alcohol, other times not.
I’m no expert, but Legend Tripping suggests to me that in some ways it is a way to finally confront and conquer the terrors of childhood: trading in the threat of the monster under the closet for the more ambiguous perils (and pleasures) of adult existence.
I had some Legend Tripping experiences growing up. One of the most vivid involved walking with few friends (one of my first boy/girl parties, actually) out to an old country road on the edge of our neighborhood. This was a gravel road, completely without streetlights, that wound deeply into a patch of woods. There were only two houses there: one of which housed “The Jesus Man.”
Now, breaking with the “supernatural” motif of the classic definition of Legend Tripping, we knew the Jesus Man existed – we saw him wandering town with his long beard and hair crawling down the side of his white robes, his sandals clapping on the sidewalks as he strolled by in his own little world – but to tempt The Jesus Man was an act of great adolescent courage. There were all sorts of stories about how this person went from a young man named Steven to the singular personage of The Jesus Man, and none of them were pleasant. Many of them involved tours in Viet Nam, bad batches of LSD, vile, mind-shattering criminal acts.
There were even more imaginative theories proffered at different times growing up. Some of my friends swore that he had a house full of crystal meth and marijuana and that his Jesus act was just a cover. Others said that he was actually a Satanist of some sort. I myself retained a vivid childhood memory of running from a pack of dogs (a crazy dog man we called “Old Isaac” lived in the other house I mentioned) and seeing The Jesus Man calmly shoot one of them with a revolver, so there was definitely an element of danger around this character.
Anyway, we all left my house to go and see The Jesus Man, and by see I mean to wander up to his junky, weed-strangled yard and stare at his shack for as long as we could – ostensibly to investigate what this mysterious character was up to and settle the mystery once and for all – but actually for us boys to prove our courage to the girls and maybe steal a kiss or two out of the eye of parental chaperones and the harsh glare of the neighborhood’s streetlights.
I wish I could tell you that I was successful in either of our two goals, but as with most acts of Legend Tripping, most of the fun is found in a playful sort of overreaction, so no sooner as we had gotten to our spot in the woods someone decided that they had heard “something,” and we all took off running, screaming and laughing into the night.
What about you? Would you mind sharing some of your own youthful examples of Legend Tripping and courageous derring-do?
April 13, 2008 at 4:51 pm
There was a tiny wee chapel in the woods, very close to my last school. It was small but perfectly formed, with a lot of ironwork on the oak door – and every inch of that ironwork had careful marks scratched into it. They looked like runes to us. So of course we held that witchcraft was practised there; and of course we kept trying to sneak in, in hopes of finding inverted crosses and naked sacrifices and such.
And it was an exercise in bathos every time, because the place had very good locks and no accessible windows and we never ever got a glimpse of the inside.
April 13, 2008 at 5:01 pm
We did the usual graveyard-at-midnight stuff, which usually ended in a bout of contagious screaming triggered by a menacing twigsnap in the undergrowth or something. It’s a zombie! It’s a zombie! No, it’s a hedgehog.
But the worst thing we used to do was go to this cliff where a powerful wind ripped in off the sea. We’d stand at the very edge of the cliff and lean forward into the wind so the wind was keeping us upright. If it had dropped suddenly, we’d have been smashed and broken on the rocks far far below. It didn’t seem especially dangerous back then but now I go cold just thinking about it.
Later we got on to magic mushrooms, which we’d brew into disgusting twiggy tea and drink in the middle of a cornfield or something. The main peril there was getting harvested by the farmer.
April 13, 2008 at 8:24 pm
Another Legend Tripping tale:
There used to be an old deserted factory out in the woods in my hometown where German POWs were held during World War II. We used to sneak out there all of the time, absolutely convinced that there were ghosts that haunted the place, and of course Satanists who held black magic rituals there.
When we got older some friends and I went out there with a big bottle of fake blood (Kayro Syrup and red food coloring), some chalk and a cheap knife and staged our own “ritual sacrifice crime scene” as a prank. We forgot about it until much later when we learned that the local cops had been out there investigating after hearing from terrified high school kids. Ironic that we Legend Trippers added to the legend itself. Eventually they tore the building down. Too many kids, too many parties.
April 14, 2008 at 10:27 am
In the late 1970’s, carloads of my friends use to visit an abandon house in the woods of Leelanau County, Michigan (the little finger peninsula). Some claimed the dilapidated, early 20th century dwelling had been one of Al Capone’s hideouts. Indeed, it did have one wall riddled with holes (bullet holes?). But the best part was a stairway chiseled into the sheer face of a bluff, wending back and forth down to the beach. The steps had been reinforced with wood boards, now rotting, and there was a railing built for support, much needed but don’t rely too heavily on it, for the whole stairway tilted precariously, sliding down the cliff-face in extreme slow motion, due to erosion. Very surreal.
April 14, 2008 at 10:41 am
Mary, that reminds me of Caitlin R. Kiernan’s “Dandridge Cycle” in “To Charles Fort, With Love.”
Sounds really cool!
April 14, 2008 at 5:58 pm
It was cool. Thanks for triggering the memory. And for the book recomendation.