The Anti-Halloweenies.
Today, my 8th graders are reading a vaguely Halloweenish article in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. It starts off as a spooky story, then it shifts into a straightforward news article about the local legend of "The Wog" -- how some legends die out while others continue to spread, even in the suburban age.
Well. I've already had five students approach me to day that "today" (they don't actually call it "Halloween") is against their religion, so I have to send them outside to read their library books.
*sigh*
I get it. I really do. I would be appalled if my public school started enforcing a specific religious attitude or code, which means that I should also accept students who won't participate in activities that are against their religious beliefs. Still, it's really frustrating. Looks like I'll have to use the rest of my planning period to find and photocopy some articles that are NOT even remotely related to Halloween (or just local legends.)
In case you're interested, here's the full text of the AJC article!
http://www.ajc.com/metro/content/metro/gwinnett/stories/2006/10/30/1031oldpete.html
Legend of Old Pete used to be scary local tale
By MARK DAVIS
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Published on: 10/31/06
He came creeping when the air got cooler and the night wind moved with renewed purpose.
He came with the soft pad of a predator, a shadow among shadows.
He came in the rustling of leaves, in the whisper of fur against a window.
Folks heard him, and they knew: Old Pete was out there. Or, worse, maybe it was the Wog.
Here's a history lesson, delivered on this day when we celebrate the ghoulish and ghastly: At least one monster once roamed the hills north of Atlanta.
The stories have been handed down for a century or more - of Old Pete, a creature with a taste for young humans; and the Wog, a beastly something that prowled outside homes.
Old Pete lived on Hog Mountain, in the upper reaches of Gwinnett County where stately homes now crowd ridge lines. Some folks said he was a lonely old mountain lion. Others said it was no creature God ever made, a devilish something that lived in dark glades. Everyone agreed that he liked to eat children.
The Wog was his neighbor who traveled at dusk, or later. He terrorized folks around Hoschton, Poole Mountain and points north to Cumming. He liked to prowl the edges of Hog Mountain Road, which led to Atlanta.
He was the shadowy something just off the road, the reason mules balked and horses whinnied in fear. He had hind legs like a horse, and claws on his front legs. He liked to stick his forked tongue through the chinks in log cabins, looking for - what?
A scream in the night? Old Pete. A cow disemboweled and left in a sodden, bloody lump? The Wog.
That prickling on a farmer's neck when he felt something just beyond the hedgerows?
Monsters roamed the woods, and folks knew it.
"Watch out for Old Pete." The warning is as fresh in Samuel Stancel's memory now as it was when he heard it seven decades ago. In the 1920s, when Stancel was young, Old Pete was a fact of life.
"Everything was Old Pete," said Stancel, now 87 and living in Buford. "A dog would get in a fight, get whooped? He got in a fight with Old Pete. Anything that made any racket, it was Old Pete. "
Old Pete, said the youngster's parents, was an albino mountain lion. He'd been up on that mountain since Civil War days, watching.
Stephanie Carroll grew up on the other side of the mountain, where some folks agreed that Old Pete was a black panther, not a white lion. Others insisted he was something far scarier - a true monster, some said; a rabid human being kept locked in a house, others claimed.
"We heard all the stories about Old Pete," said Carroll, 47 and a resident of Lawrenceville. "Everybody was afraid of him. He was the bogeyman."
And then there was the Wog.
For a half-century or so, he's stalked the edges of Robbie Bettis' consciousness. She's never seen him, but Bettis says he exists - in legend, at least.
The Wog was part horse, part dragon, all horror. People who claimed to have seen the Wog described an animal with a horse's big hind legs, and shorter, hairier front legs that ended in claws. And this: the forked tongue inside a dragon's head.
Tales of the Wog "would make a child do his chores," said Bettis, 55, a Hoschton resident and author of a local history book, "Passing - Stories Through the History of Hoschton & Braselton," due out in November. The Wog stalks its pages, just as it does the author's memory.
As for Old Pete: The odds are good that a mountain lion shared space with reluctant humans in northern Gwinnett sometime in the past. The Wog? Creatures combining horse legs, claws and a reptile's tongue are the stuff of fable, not fact.
But stories about them have lasted for years. Elissa Henken, an English professor at the University of Georgia who specializes in folklore, thinks she knows why. "If there were no reasons for these stories, people would simply cease telling them," she said.
Talk of monsters, she said, may have helped explain the disappearance of farm animals.
The monsters aren't unique, added John Burrison, a Regents Professor of English at Georgia State University. He's spent years tracking down the origins of Southern legends, including what may be the most regionally renowned of love tales: the story of Sautee and Nachoochee, Indian sweethearts said to have jumped to their doom from Mount Yonah in White County.
The Wog, he said, could be a local version of the Jersey Devil, a hellish spectacle reputed to fly in and around the Pine Barrens of central New Jersey. Old Pete, Burrison said, fits the profile of other legends featuring panthers, creatures the early settlers rightly feared.
In the parlance of academics, stories about the Wog and Old Pete, grabbing unruly children, are "cautionary legends": If you're not good, something's going to get you.
Tales of the monsters are sporadic now.
Three guys filling every bar stool at the Cedar Lounge near the Barrow-Gwinnett line had never heard of Old Pete.
The Wog? They shrugged and turned back to the TV over the bar.
Some long-timers are just as in the dark. Charlene Fuller, who has lived in Dacula all her life, said she'd never heard of monsters on the mountains. "But I was raised right here in downtown Dacula," said Fuller, who laughed. "I'm a city girl."
Yet some memories linger, especially now, when the night wind - it is the wind, isn't it? -is restless.
Old Pete may still stalk some leafy point above the outdoor grills and treated-wood decks. The Wog has plenty more roads to stalk now than he once did.
Then there's that house on Fence Road near Dacula. Some old folks say a wild something was sighted there in the late 1930s. He was sitting atop a well house, picking his teeth with a fence post, when ...
But that's a story for another time.
P.S. Librarian friends: we're doing expository reading for the next two months, and yesterday I taught them about how Wikipedia is a great "portal" for research, but it should NOT be blindly trusted. I showed them how easily we could edit our rival school's page in order to talk trash about them (though of course I didn't actually submit the edits. ;)
Well. I've already had five students approach me to day that "today" (they don't actually call it "Halloween") is against their religion, so I have to send them outside to read their library books.
*sigh*
I get it. I really do. I would be appalled if my public school started enforcing a specific religious attitude or code, which means that I should also accept students who won't participate in activities that are against their religious beliefs. Still, it's really frustrating. Looks like I'll have to use the rest of my planning period to find and photocopy some articles that are NOT even remotely related to Halloween (or just local legends.)
In case you're interested, here's the full text of the AJC article!
http://www.ajc.com/metro/content/metro/gwinnett/stories/2006/10/30/1031oldpete.html
Legend of Old Pete used to be scary local tale
By MARK DAVIS
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Published on: 10/31/06
He came creeping when the air got cooler and the night wind moved with renewed purpose.
He came with the soft pad of a predator, a shadow among shadows.
He came in the rustling of leaves, in the whisper of fur against a window.
Folks heard him, and they knew: Old Pete was out there. Or, worse, maybe it was the Wog.
Here's a history lesson, delivered on this day when we celebrate the ghoulish and ghastly: At least one monster once roamed the hills north of Atlanta.
The stories have been handed down for a century or more - of Old Pete, a creature with a taste for young humans; and the Wog, a beastly something that prowled outside homes.
Old Pete lived on Hog Mountain, in the upper reaches of Gwinnett County where stately homes now crowd ridge lines. Some folks said he was a lonely old mountain lion. Others said it was no creature God ever made, a devilish something that lived in dark glades. Everyone agreed that he liked to eat children.
The Wog was his neighbor who traveled at dusk, or later. He terrorized folks around Hoschton, Poole Mountain and points north to Cumming. He liked to prowl the edges of Hog Mountain Road, which led to Atlanta.
He was the shadowy something just off the road, the reason mules balked and horses whinnied in fear. He had hind legs like a horse, and claws on his front legs. He liked to stick his forked tongue through the chinks in log cabins, looking for - what?
A scream in the night? Old Pete. A cow disemboweled and left in a sodden, bloody lump? The Wog.
That prickling on a farmer's neck when he felt something just beyond the hedgerows?
Monsters roamed the woods, and folks knew it.
"Watch out for Old Pete." The warning is as fresh in Samuel Stancel's memory now as it was when he heard it seven decades ago. In the 1920s, when Stancel was young, Old Pete was a fact of life.
"Everything was Old Pete," said Stancel, now 87 and living in Buford. "A dog would get in a fight, get whooped? He got in a fight with Old Pete. Anything that made any racket, it was Old Pete. "
Old Pete, said the youngster's parents, was an albino mountain lion. He'd been up on that mountain since Civil War days, watching.
Stephanie Carroll grew up on the other side of the mountain, where some folks agreed that Old Pete was a black panther, not a white lion. Others insisted he was something far scarier - a true monster, some said; a rabid human being kept locked in a house, others claimed.
"We heard all the stories about Old Pete," said Carroll, 47 and a resident of Lawrenceville. "Everybody was afraid of him. He was the bogeyman."
And then there was the Wog.
For a half-century or so, he's stalked the edges of Robbie Bettis' consciousness. She's never seen him, but Bettis says he exists - in legend, at least.
The Wog was part horse, part dragon, all horror. People who claimed to have seen the Wog described an animal with a horse's big hind legs, and shorter, hairier front legs that ended in claws. And this: the forked tongue inside a dragon's head.
Tales of the Wog "would make a child do his chores," said Bettis, 55, a Hoschton resident and author of a local history book, "Passing - Stories Through the History of Hoschton & Braselton," due out in November. The Wog stalks its pages, just as it does the author's memory.
As for Old Pete: The odds are good that a mountain lion shared space with reluctant humans in northern Gwinnett sometime in the past. The Wog? Creatures combining horse legs, claws and a reptile's tongue are the stuff of fable, not fact.
But stories about them have lasted for years. Elissa Henken, an English professor at the University of Georgia who specializes in folklore, thinks she knows why. "If there were no reasons for these stories, people would simply cease telling them," she said.
Talk of monsters, she said, may have helped explain the disappearance of farm animals.
The monsters aren't unique, added John Burrison, a Regents Professor of English at Georgia State University. He's spent years tracking down the origins of Southern legends, including what may be the most regionally renowned of love tales: the story of Sautee and Nachoochee, Indian sweethearts said to have jumped to their doom from Mount Yonah in White County.
The Wog, he said, could be a local version of the Jersey Devil, a hellish spectacle reputed to fly in and around the Pine Barrens of central New Jersey. Old Pete, Burrison said, fits the profile of other legends featuring panthers, creatures the early settlers rightly feared.
In the parlance of academics, stories about the Wog and Old Pete, grabbing unruly children, are "cautionary legends": If you're not good, something's going to get you.
Tales of the monsters are sporadic now.
Three guys filling every bar stool at the Cedar Lounge near the Barrow-Gwinnett line had never heard of Old Pete.
The Wog? They shrugged and turned back to the TV over the bar.
Some long-timers are just as in the dark. Charlene Fuller, who has lived in Dacula all her life, said she'd never heard of monsters on the mountains. "But I was raised right here in downtown Dacula," said Fuller, who laughed. "I'm a city girl."
Yet some memories linger, especially now, when the night wind - it is the wind, isn't it? -is restless.
Old Pete may still stalk some leafy point above the outdoor grills and treated-wood decks. The Wog has plenty more roads to stalk now than he once did.
Then there's that house on Fence Road near Dacula. Some old folks say a wild something was sighted there in the late 1930s. He was sitting atop a well house, picking his teeth with a fence post, when ...
But that's a story for another time.
P.S. Librarian friends: we're doing expository reading for the next two months, and yesterday I taught them about how Wikipedia is a great "portal" for research, but it should NOT be blindly trusted. I showed them how easily we could edit our rival school's page in order to talk trash about them (though of course I didn't actually submit the edits. ;)