Ghosts
The telling of a ghost story can catch on, and once it has,
it enters into folklore. Modern folklore is different in shape,
but behaves in the same way.
We seem to have adopted the movie interpretation
of vampires and zombies,
and the new style overwrites the old forms.
Fairy sites, the old hills tors and forts, are now landing places
for the greys, who appear in flying saucers,
rather than there being "the little people" under the earth,
and that in itself was an adaptation of an older interpretation
of mysterious sightings of dark unknowable beings in these spiritual places.
No doubt it could be described as the idiom changing,
but the undoubted power of the place remaining the same.
These days it seems to be the psychic researcher visiting a
haunted inn or museum, or hospital, and coining the name "Eddie"
Or "John", and that entering the folklore, rather
than someone saying "this fits the story of such and such,
who died there under tragic circumstances.
Today the expression for this is "urban myth".
Modern folklore...tales suited to the machine age or
the digital world.
And we don't worry about seeing the Lyminster worm",
Or that our children could be replaced by changelings,
but whether or not we can be abducted by E.T
And have bits of nanotechnology implanted in our necks like asbos.
What's the Lyminster Worm.? A serpentine creature,
alleged to have eaten virgins in the area between Littlehampton
and Arundel, * a great beast, from deep pools of water which
riddled the ground to the south of the Downs,
from Worthing to Arundel,
But who today would be worried about meeting a dragon
on the road late at night, with all the traffic pouring through?
(*personally, i'll believe anything of Littlehampton!)
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