Date Collected
Fall 10-25-2018
Place item was collected
Logan, Utah
Informant
Lori Keeling
Point of Discovery/Informant Bio
Lori Keeling is my mom. She doesn’t have the same last name as I do because she remarried in October 2006. She grew up as a Latter-Day Saint in San Jose, California to Bill and Lucy who had seven children in total. She was exactly in the middle and has four brothers and two sisters. She now lives in Corning, California and has two kids, both of which are currently going to USU and UVU. She has a bachelor’s degree in nursing, worked as a home health nurse for more than 20 years and is now a nurse for the Tehama County School District. She enjoys horseback riding, reading, and going to the movies with her kids.
Context
She had just gotten home from work when I called her to collect her ghost stories about our property. Usually this is not how she shares her ghost stories. She usually tells them at family dinner every Sunday, to the missionaries of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints whenever they come over for dinner, and also to my friends and husband after we have watched a scary movie.
Text
So apparently Michael and I were going to go hunting. I thought I had talked to Grandma about dropping you off. Do you remember?
A-Yeah I remember.
L-Do you remember if we talked to her?
A-I think we did.
L-I thought so too. So anyways apparently we went on the quad--we loaded you guys on on the quad and headed down there because we were going out to hunt by the river and I thought we saw Grandma waiting in the window...I swear I saw Grandma and Grandpa. Grandma for sure. And so you guys went in the house--
A-No it was locked. We couldn’t even go in the house. (It was locked?)
A-Yeah all the doors were locked. (You didn’t…)
L-Didn’t we leave you there because we thought we saw them?
A-Yeah you abandoned us.
L-[Laughter] Okay. So what ended up happening after that?
A-I don’t remember. I think we waited until Grandma and Grandpa finally pulled up.
L-[Laughter] Oh. I would swear that we saw them. There.
A-Yeah well we saw--I think we all saw Grandma standing clearly in the window.
L-Yes…
A-But no one was home.
L-That was weird. Plus I would swear we had talked to her and she knew you were coming so that was just really weird.
Texture
Lori described this story as though she remembers it being funny. She laughed a lot during the interview. It is evident that she must’ve seen something because she repeated the fact that she swears they saw them standing there, but it isn’t so obvious if she believed it was a ghost or not. She told this story fairly quickly without much pause or hesitation. Now it seems she has no problems with leaving her children at grandma and grandpa’s unattended. In fact, she finds it amusing.
Course
ENGL 2210
Instructor
Dr. Lynne McNeill
Semester and year
Fall 2018
Theme
G7: Revenants
EAD Number
2.1.6.2.13
Recommended Citation
Utterback, Amber, "Seeing Grandma" (2018). USU Student Folklore Fieldwork. Paper 560.
https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/student_folklore_all/560