REDISCOVERING THE PAST.
I recently discovered the video recording of The Festival of Ghost Stories 2018 where I told my original ghost story, The Wisconsin Trowel Murders. I am pleased to be able to share this with you. I thought you might also be interested in hearing about how the story changed over the years. The link at the end of this article will take you to the video of my concert telling in 2018. But the creation of the story goes back 45 years!
A note about recording our storytelling:
I encourage people to record their stories so that they can actually see what they look like when they are telling. Over the years I have become pretty comfortable on stage when I tell stories. It has been interesting for me to see my minimal gestures and body language that I use these days; a far cry from the big, exaggerated style that I used while doing story theatre with a troupe of actors on a stage without microphones.
ABOUT THE WISCONSIN TROWEL MURDERS.
The Wisconsin Trowel Murders began as a story I created in 1975 while I was learning Archeological Field Techniques in the Apostle Islands of Lake Superior. Our crew of students had a 40 minute walk every morning to get to our main excavation pit. At first, people talked while they walked. But after the first week, people walked in silence. While I walked, I quietly began to create a story about a group like ours where something murderous happens in one of the excavation pits. Originally there was an ancient curse connected to the murders. I finished the story before the end of the summer. I told the group about it and they begged to hear it. We had a proper storytelling gathering around a fire. They loved the story! It played upon the sorts of irritating things that happened to us over the summer; small group politics, mosquitos, and black flies, bland food, feeling isolated, etc. They thought it was a kick that they all got killed in the story. That was the only time I told the story in that form.
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| Archeological Field School excavation pits. |
I went back to Beloit College to visit my friend Bill a year or so after graduating. While walking the familiar campus I met two Anthropology majors. When they found out that I was a professional storyteller they said “Hey if you are a storyteller, you’ll love this story collected from The Apostle Islands!” They told my own story back to me. It was still pretty close to the original! Apparently the other members of the field school passed the story along! There is an interesting lesson in collecting folklore and ethnography here, but I won’t go into that now.
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| The author sifting for artifacts. |
I think I only told the story once to our group. After a few years I was tempted to tell it again but I couldn't find my usual notes or story outline. The opening scene was very vivid in my memory; like a pitch for a movie. But I could not remember how it all resolved? I didn't give up completely. I went back to the Apostle Islands on a camping trip with my daughter Madeline in September of 2010. I thought I would recreate the story and expand it into a novel. I did research, bought some books about the area, and local folklore, interviewed some of the local folks who lived in the Bayfield / Ashland area on the Wisconsin mainland. I wrote a few chapters. A few months later I decided that the story really only wanted to be a short, spoken tale.
In early Fall 2018, I needed a story to tell at the annual Festival of Ghost Stories down in Bloomington, Indiana. I was inspired to take the basic setting and create a new story. I set my story in 1976, told in first person. I again used many of the real details of learning to do archeological fieldwork. I started the story off with how and why we sharpened our trowels and dropped empty beer cans into our excavation pits. I added that we each had distinctive whistles that we used to call back and forth to locate each other while surveying the thick undergrowth of the islands. These details were important to know for what would happen later to the central character, Jamie Bayswater. Jamie was not part of the original story of an ancient curse. In this version of the story, she is the victim of a student hazing prank gone terribly wrong. Jamie transforms from a sweet innocent to the embodiment of revenge. The string of murders that ensue come to be known as The Wisconsin Trowel Murders. I don't want to spoil it for you. I hope you watch the video.
So that's how I dug up an old story of mine, discovered how it had traveled, and reimagined it for telling again using my life experiences and imagination. Anthropology and rediscovering the past have played an important role in what I have done as a professional storyteller. Please take a look at the video and let me know what you think. I hope you'll "dig it."
LINK TO THE VIDEO
Community Access Television Services in Bloomington, Indiana made the recording in the auditorium of the Monroe County Public Library.
Thank you for taking the time to read this blog article. If you have a bit more time, please watch the video. Let me know what you think.
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