Spooky Traditions - Preserving Oral Stories

Ok y'all, bear with me while I try to explain this fuckery both to myself and to you:

Everyone likes scary ghost stories, even non believers in anything paranormal will jump in with a creepy story from time to time... I guess that everyone loves a good scare from time to time. I mean, there's gotta be a reason they're making a 3rd part of fucking Annabelle...

And it sure as fuck ain't cause of the thrilling plot and masterfull and sober acting

 I was watching Grav3yardgirl newest  video about ghost stories, and it just got me thinking about supernatural experiences/ghost stories andI got to the startling realization that pretty much all of my repertoire of supernatural happenings comes mostly from stories shared by family, stories from my grandma, from her sisters and brothers, from my mom and my uncles and aunts, stories that all the children from my family grew up with...
 And, it might sound silly, but my grandma is dead, most of her brothers and sisters are too, and even some of my uncles and aunts are leaving us too, and I feel that slowly a little part of my family's story is slowly disapearing, I mean, who's gonna warn the next generation about Springheeled Jack and the importance of avoiding strangers?

Then again, is it really necesary for these stories to be passed on? I mean, they fulfilled (I think) a purpose besides scaring the shit out of me, for example, that story about Springheeled Jack my aunts used to tell, asides from implying that my aunts threw fucking rocks at some sort of hellspawn, also taught me (intentionally or not) to always be wary of strangers, to be watchfull of unfamiliar people in "safe" spaces, because you never know when that weird guy going around your street is suddenly gonna leap 10 feet in the air and dissapear in a vortex of darkness, you know, in the usual venezuelan fashion.

Or, maybe I'm aproaching this from the wrong angle, maybe its not about something being deserving to be preserved because it serves a particular end, or because it teaches X lesson. Maybe these silly stories that used to terrify me should be preserved just for the fact that they exist, because at some point someone possibly either experienced something paranormal or simply made it up and decided to share it. And THAT in of itself says something, I'm not sure what, but it says something.

If I had the will and the energy to actually dig up my old college books I could maybe write up something about how these paranormal stories could be a link of sorts between the "magical" and the mundane, a way for two worlds so very often isolated from each other to mix. And about how said stories end up being (as all artistics endeavors) a reflection on the current social, cultural and political reality at the time birth of that story.


This got rambly as fuck, and I just wanted to write a little blurb as a sort of preface for this posible series of posts...


So, in the future (knowing me probably next fucking year) expect some scary (not really, you'll see)  ghost stories, I guess