Dark Play
Not everyone is willing to take a close look at dark play, a genre that is meaningful for many adolescents and adults but worrisome for parents and teachers. Levitation, seances, “Bloody Mary,” Ouija boards, and the Charlie Charlie Challenge offer opportunities to explore the supernatural and to challenge oneself to overcome fear. Folklorists who have studied dark play include Iona and Peter Opie, Linda Dégh, Bill Ellis, and myself. Both folklorists and medical researchers have published articles about breath-control games, which can be extremely dangerous. Stories about Ouija board experiences explain amazing results that seem unlikely to have occurred without supernatural intervention. Levitation rituals, first recorded in the diary of Samuel Pepys, have taken various forms. Now that YouTube lets us watch young people’s self-generated performances of dark play, we can see the international transmission of this kind of folklore. YouTube has restrictions on dangerous content, but new kinds of videos are always popping up. For example, dangerous challenges for young people continue to take different forms. The Tide Pod Challenge, Cinnamon Challenge, and other variants are entertaining but may be lethal. Although the childhood underground of dangerous, challenging play tends not to be shared with adults, folklorists’ and physicians’ research and YouTube performances make it possible to gain insight into this significant kind of behavior.
Bio
Libby Tucker, Distinguished Service Professor of English at Binghamton University in New York, specializes in folklore of children and adolescents as well as folklore of the supernatural. She enjoyed levitation, séances, and Ouija boards so much as a teenager that she is still studying dark play now. Her six books include Haunted Halls: Ghostlore of American College Campuses (2007) and Legend Tripping: A Contemporary Legend Casebook (2018, co-edited with Lynne S. McNeill. She studied with Linda Dégh at Indiana University and was happy to receive the Linda Dégh Lifetime Achievement Award for Legend Scholarship from the International Society for Contemporary Legend Research last summer.
Curated & Hosted by
Marguerite Johnson is a cultural historian of the ancient Mediterranean, specialising in sexuality and gender, particularly in the poetry of Sappho, Catullus, and Ovid, as well as magical traditions in Greece, Rome, and the Near East. She also researches Classical Reception Studies, with a regular focus on Australia. In addition to ancient world studies, Marguerite is interested in sexual histories in modernity as well as magic in the west more broadly, especially the practices and art of Australian witch, Rosaleen Norton. She is Honorary Professor of Classics and Ancient History at The University of Queensland, and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities.
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