Title: Red Eye
General Information about Item:
Verbal Folklore: Children’s Folklore (Campfire Horror Stories)
This item was collected at Dartmouth, United States
Informant Data:
Emma Hobday was born in Arlington Virginia and is 19 years old. Before attending Dartmouth, she went to Williamsburg Middle School and Yorktown High School. Two of her friends in high school were Katie Dawkins and Elina Kent.
Contextual Data:
Emma and her friends had a sleepover party at Katie Dawkin’s house during around 9th grade. During the night, they all went into the basement. Because the basement had a creepy swinging light in the center of the room, they decided to sit around it and tell scary stories. Elina Kent, who was also at the party, told the group the “Red Eye” story. Horror Stories like this one are told between friends at any time. Normally, they are told during the night to add to the ambiance and fear factor of the story.
Item:
Transcript of Associated File:
So, a girl lives alone in a house and every night she goes to sleep, but she starts to have weird dreams that wake her up in the middle of the night. So, one night when she’s woken up by a strange dream she’s somehow inspired to go outside and her house is surrounded by a fence, a wooden fence, and there’s a tiny little hole in the fence that she’s never looked at before. And this night she goes and she puts her eye up to the hole. And all she sees past it is red. And so she thinks, “hmm, well I guess that just must be my neighbor’s putting in a new…new shed or something, a new little red shed. So she writes it off. She says, “oh I just had a bad dream.” she goes back to bed.
The next night the same thing happens. She wakes up sweating profusely. She’s had another terrible dream. She goes out to the yard sees the same red thing through the hole. So that goes on all week until one night she’s woken up by a dream where she sees a ghost. And as she looks at the ghost she notices that has pure red eyes. She screams and whips out of her bed and the ghost is gone. This time, she walks out to her yard, looks through the hole in her fence and the red is gone. She just sees into her neighbor’s yard. She’s panicking. She goes back to her room, splashes water on her face to calm herself down and in the mirror she sees that her eyes are now red.
Informant’s Comments: The swinging light in my friend’s made the stories extremely creepy.
Collector’s Name: Andrew Alini
Tags/Keywords: Horror, Campfire Stories, Children’s folklore,