Title: Malaria Pills
Informant info: Michael Rodriguez. Informant attends Dartmouth College in Hanover, NH as a United States Army Veteran. Informant enlisted in the Army in 2003 and was a member of the 1st Battalion 8th Marines Bravo Company, which is an infantry military unit. He was stationed out of camp Lejeune North Carolina. Informant served in Iraq from June 2004 to December 2004. He was awarded a Purple Heart. He was from a military family, as well. Informant is 31 years old.
Type of lore: Verbal Lore, Myth
Language: English
Country of Origin: USA
Social / Cultural Context: Informant was asked if there were any ghost stories that related to the area that he was stationed in or military related. He replied that there weren’t really any ghost stories but there was a sort of myth around the malaria pills that gave you night terrors or weird dreams.
Associated file:
Transcript:
“You are on Malaria pills, you know malaria… and I don’t know if they still do, but the pills that they gave us, like, they’re known to cause, um, like a, not necessarily like nightmares, sort of like, they give you weird dreams. Everyone knows, when we take the malaria pills, you’re gunna get some fucked up dreams. I can’t really remember mine, but I remember my buddies, like popping up, like. He was sleeping, and we were in this tent out in the desert, and he like pops up in the middle of nowhere and he’s like ‘There’s a snake! There’s a snake! Get it off me! There’s a snake!’ and we were all like looking at him like ‘yo, bro like there’s no snake there, like, I think you were just having a nightmare.’ ‘No , there’s a snake…’ No those malaria pills just fuck you up. And you always hear a lot of guys like, whether it was actually those malaria pills or like people being stressed. And like you’re near those people at night when you’re normally not. And you’d hear these people having these nightmares, which normally do when they’re stressed, but you never know that. So, whether or not it was the malaria pills or just like the normal stress of going to a new area and being deployed, I’ll let science decide on that.”
Informant’s comments: He thought the effect that the malaria pills could’ve had on those people was funny. He was skeptical on whether or not it was actually the pills or just stress and described the malaria pills incidents as kind of ghost stories.
Collector’s Comments: Thought it was funny the way he described his friend’s dream.
Tags/Keywords: Malaria, military, pills, verbal lore