Paranormal Folklore in Western Georgia: A Critical Narrative Investigation
Jacob W. Glazier,¹ & David S. B. Mitchell²
¹University of West Georgia, Carrollton, Georgia, United States of America
²California Institute of Integral Studies, San Francisco, California, United States of America
This project seeks to examine paranormal folklore from a qualitative and critical perspective. Folklore may take the form of stories, myths, or legends circulating in a local community or discourse. Paranormal folklore, it has been suggested contains a “critical” kernel of truth whereby these forms of discourse push back against more normative accounts of reality and challenge everyday ways of understanding the self and the world.
This project builds on the critical nature of folkloric stories by analyzing the way a paranormal encounter or exceptional experiences can develop textually, linguistically, and socially into a more widely accepted ‘tall tale’ that then takes on a certain aura. That is, we are interested in the power effects that paranormal folklore have with regard to shaping subjectivity and various frames of reality. What we mean by power effects is the way that those that experience ExEs and the paranormal experiences themselves can be dismissed and deemed unworthy of scholarship or further study. Previous works have cataloged some of the paranormal or, more generally, Fortean events within Georgia without connecting them to folklore per se.
For example, Miles chronicles reports of various phenomena – many of which fall within Heard County or, more generally, within what is called the Troup-Heard Corridor, which encompasses some of our target area and is a hotspot of UFO activity and may in part be a function of the high quartz-content of the stones in the area. Purportedly sasquatch-like cryptids such as the “Bung-a-Dingo”, the South Georgia Pig Man of the Okefenokee Swamp, and the Billy Holler Bugger of Dahlonega, as well as the river monster known as Altama-ha by the Tama Native Americans, appear in specific regions within Georgia. Additionally, endeavors such as the Bigfoot Mapping Project provide up-to-date location-specific data on reported sightings of relict hominoids without focusing on folklore of the phenomenon explicitly; however, while database reports of encounters extend across all of the contiguous United States and into Alaska, only several are from the Western Georgia area. Scholar and Georgia resident Joshua Cutchin offers mythopoetic insight into Georgian lore as well as paranormal hotspots throughout the United States, pointing to a possibility of more narratives emerging from western Georgia that could be tied to liminal spaces in the area.
A more robust collection of contemporary paranormal folkloric narratives in western Georgia could add greater texture to extant literature and context to endeavors such as the mapping project. While the initial study, already IRB approved, is examining paranormal folklore in the geographic region of western Georgia in the United States, in the future, we hope to expand the project and examine paranormal folklore more globally.
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Jacob W. Glazier, PhD, LPC, NCC holds an Assistant Professor of Psychology appointment in the Department of Anthropology, Sociology, and Psychology at the University of West Georgia. In addition, He is the co-editor of the tri-yearly publication Mindfield: The Bulletin of the Parapsychological Association continuing the legacy of parapsychological research at the University of West Georgia. He is interested in exploring the problematics of exceptional experience, psi as a critique of physicalist science, and the deconstruction of skeptical explanations of the paranormal. This approach, which he has referred to as critical parapsychology, asks: How can researchers use the knowledge and tropes from parapsychology to challenge the hegemony of orthodox science? With specific regard to psi studies, my main areas of research interest include ecology and the paranormal, animism, paranthropology, the philosophy of parapsychology, psychoanalysis and parapsychology, and trickster theory.
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Program chaired by Jacob W. Glazier. Download the Abstracts at https://parapsych.org/uploaded_files/pdfs/00/00/00/01/26/2023_pa_abstracts_of_presented_papers.pdf
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Published on January 27, 2025
