Title: Trip Raid (night)

General Information about Item:

• Customary Folklore: Practical Joke / Trick

• Language: English

• Country: United States

Informant #1 Data:

• The informant is a Dartmouth ’21 male. He went on a first-year trip in September 2017; the trip was canoeing.
  

Informant #2 Data:

• The informant is a Dartmouth ’18 male. He went on a first-year trip in September 2014 and was a member of Lodj Croo in September 2017.

Contextual Data:

• Social Context
  • The raid takes place while the trippees and trip leaders are all sitting around socializing at night (while it is dark) in the woods. No one else is thought to be around.
  • People who are neither trippees or trip leaders approach the group to scare them.

• Cultural Context
  • The idea of doing this on trips is to take the trippees out of their comfort zones, but to never actually threaten their safety
  • Focus on embarrassing the trippees and make them all believe that someone is coming for them, when in reality, they are safe the whole time
    • It is funny in retrospect, and the trippees can all laugh together about one another’s reactions to the raid
    • Forms a bond among the trippees

Item:

• Trip Raid (nighttime) by the Grant Croo. The members of the Grant Croo sneak up on the trip and take them by surprise, attempting to frighten the trippees in the process. The trip leaders are aware of what is happening, so they are not actually worried for the safety of the trippees

Associated file (a video, audio, or image file):

https://photos.app.goo.gl/bNOjpV1PW8B6z6r13

Transcript of Informant #1:

“During our trip we were out on the air strip and the Grant Croo came up to us in the night. They were dressed as the knights who say knee so they were sitting on each other’s shoulders, so there were these huge giant shadowy figures walking towards us, so we thought we were going to get attacked, and some people in my group ran away. But then they came up closer and we realized it was actually just the Grant Croo.”

Informant #1’s Comments:

• The informant was scared while the raid was happening because he did not know who the giant figures were that were approaching them in the dark.

Collector’s Comments:

• Informant #1 was able to give a detailed account of the experience that he had on trips.

Collector’s Name: Madison DeRose

Transcript of Informant #2:

“Another piece of folklore that I completely forgot about is just trips raids in general. There’s one that’s continuously told about apparently, right before our time, there was a trip leader that had one of his friends pretend to be a trippee, went on the entire trip with them, and during the second night of the trip, he was tied to a tree and was screaming, “Run, Run, Run!” And all of the trippees ran through the forest, and one of them was on the Track and Field team and ran for 6-8 hours, and they had to send people to go find them in the forest. That’s a trip raid that people talk about all the time and is the reason why we register raids now. It’s told consistently to every trip that comes through.”

Informant #2’s Comments:

• Informant questioned the validity of the stories but enjoyed them nonetheless.

Collector’s Comments:

• Informant #2 was able to give a detailed account of the stories he had heard.

Collector’s Name: Roshni Chandwani

Tags/Keywords:

• Customary Folklore, Practical Joke, Raid, Grant Croo, Embarrassing, Bond, Comfort Zone