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[potato_head]

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Reading Jezebel's Halloween post...it's interesting. Mostly in terms of what 'rings true' with people, and what doesn't. Seems that what most people read as 'true' these days still has to fit the ghost story/horror movie archetype...i.e. anything that ends with 'and later, we found out a little boy matching that exact description had died in our house in 1950!'

Also interesting that the intense 'hauntings' (i.e. faerie attacks) people experience in graveyards, which have been well-documented and seem to occur on a fairly frequent basis (probably due to the large number of idiot teenagers that like to party in graveyards after dark), tend to be written off as fiction. It makes me suspect that most peoples' internal truth-meters are connected directly to how scary something is. Concrete, horror-movie explanations for apparitions are not all that scary...not like being physically attacked by 'the devil' or 'the ghost of a witch' and the similar things people tend to call graveyard faeries.

I've found one story so far that really interests me...seems to be the result of building your nice new house right on top of a nest of Red Caps or similar.

Comments

[pwalkeri.livejournal.com]

I think you're totally right about truth meters, lol. I've seen similar things when survivors are talking about their trauma histories: the worse the story, the less people will believe it. Of course, that's because people feel safer believing the survivor is lying, since the alternative is accepting that humans are capable of doing horrible and unimaginable things to each other. But I'm sure that mentality, in some aspect, could be applied to the supernatural.

[poto-heart.livejournal.com]

Yeap. It's kind of scary how much 'logical' thinking is primarily driven by reducing our fear/making us feel more in control of things that threaten us...

I suspect it's a defense mechanism that kicks in sometime in childhood, since with young children, it seems the more something scares them, the more likely they are to believe it's true.