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Date Collected

Fall 11-29-2018

Place item was collected

Boise, Idaho via facebook chat

Informant

Tiffany Eller

Point of Discovery/Informant Bio

Tiffany is a young mother living in Boise, Idaho. She’s been living in Idaho most of her life, and has lived in a series of houses all over ADA County. She is a graphic designer and lives with her husband Danny and her daughter Henley.

Context

I had told Tiffany about my project weeks before I started working on it and she was extremely excited to help and quickly agreed to a Facebook chat interview. Tiffany herself is a firm believer of the supernatural, and has told me numerous stories of her own accounts and people whom she has talked to. She is a very old friend and is cherished by all who have the privilege of meeting her. We have known each other for about 9 years.

Text

Tiffany: “Ok so, my brother Dylan, we lived in a different house we were probably man we were probably like…he was probably like…I don’t know…man he might have been ten at that point…he might have been way younger, umm…I don’t know your little brother is just like always the same age I guess! [laughs]…anyway we moved out to this house out in meridian Idaho and we had an acre of land and it was out like,…we lived next to a cow farmer and umm in the backyard of this house we had this big huge…I wanna say oak, an oak tree that was always dead…maybe it wasn’t always dead, I always thought it was dead [laughs] but Dylan said that there was this one night…that he woke up and he-he just woke up in the middle of the night and looked out the window and when he looked, a girl…jumped from the tree into the yard on all fours and then like, he just stared at her and she like looked over her shoulder at him and bolted and we lived-so we lived on an acre of land but we were also behind the corn maze field like that huge field that is right next to the- right next to the highway and so like yeah and she like bolted on all fours…”

Me: “That is so scary [Laughs]”

Tiffany: “I know! [Laughs]”

Me: “I hate that story! That is my least favorite story so far!”

Tiffany: [Laughs]

Me: “That is disgusting!”

Tiffany: “and…I know and he said like the closest thing he can compare it to is the picture in the scary stories book of the wolf girl, if you’ve seen that picture…he said it looked like that that was also the house I saw the shadow person. Yeah but that one’s not a really good story, it was just like I saw somebody like cross the back door and I was like ‘Oooh our neighbor must have like come into the backyard.’ And I like went out and looked like nooobody was back there.”

Me: “Gross…like…. was he like scared when he told- when he told you this? Like I saw some creepy-A girl jump out of a tree last night?”

Tiffany: ”Oh yeah [laughs] oh yeah he was terrified!”

Me: ”He like didn’t go get his parents or anything like that or…?!”

Tiffany: “…..I don’t think so I don’t remember him getting the parents. Umm but I don’t know if he like went like back to bed…he- at that time he shared a room with Kyle though so…and Kyle was sleeping at on the top bunk and Dylan was sleeping on the bottom bunk…so I don’t know if he woke up Kyle, I don’t know if he woke up the parents but… I mean he would probably still tell you that story today...that he saw- but he’d probably tell you it was a dream…cause like I said Dylan is a super skeptic he doesn’t believe in that kind of stuff so I think by now he’s just rationalized the hell out of it that like… it- ‘no it was just a dream there’s no way that could have happened.”, so I don’t know…We’ll never know!”

Me: “Did-does he- like when he saw her did he describe her wearing clothes, was she completely naked, was she like- long hair, like, young girl, old girl?”

Tiffany: “I-I think that she…the way he described her...it was the way she looked… the-the girl looked in the scary stories book and so…. my mental image of what he described was that she had long hair she was kind of younger probably like eight-ish umm and I-I don’t think she had clothes on...I don’t know…I could ask him…oh wait…you’re on my phone...[Laughs]

Me: “It’s all good! [Laughs] Umm”

Tiffany: “Oh wait I can do that on my computer, I’ll just send him a text, and then we can update and re-record if we-if we need to.”

Me: “Oh we don’t need to re-record and I’ll just add that in if it’s umm different later… perfect! That’s so scary! [Laughs]”

Tiffany: “I know!”

Me: “I hate that story.”

Texture

Each time she tells me a new supernatural story, I get this certain vibe that she is jealous that whatever experience she is telling me didn’t happen to her. By the tone in her voice and her eagerness to give me all the details, even if she didn’t know them, tell me that she loves the aww and fear of the unknown and finds immense joy in likeminded people. She messaged me her brother’s response to my question minutes later after the interview was over. He said, “Similar to the scary stories to tell in the dark illustration of the feral girl. But she was wearing a dress. I’m sure it’s a manufactured false memory or a dream.”, since Dylan is not an active bearer it shows me how eager and willing Tiffany is to believe and be a passive bearer, and how skeptic Dylan is that it even happened. He is definitely not an active, or passive bearer of this story or any others.

Course

ENGL/HIST/ANTHRO 2210

Instructor

Lynne S. McNeill

Semester and year

Fall 2018

Theme

G7: Revenants

EAD Number

2.1.6.6.20

Download

Additional Files

Feral Girl.png (142 kB)
The picture Dylan described the girl looking like. It was drawn by Stephen Gammell, it is a depiction of a “wolf girl” told in one of the stories in the book, Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. Published by Harper and Row and published in 1981 -1991.

Feral Girl audio interview.m4a (2162 kB)

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