Reading Notes: Week 2 Anthology

The Indian Who Wrestled with a Ghost from Myths and Legends of the Great Plains by Katharine Berry Judson (1913).

ghosts by bambe1964 via Flickr

This story was really different from most Western ghost stories, in that it contained a lot of apparently unrelated elements like the owl, the old woman, and the skeleton man. From a Western perspective, there isn't a lot of sense or order to the story, which made me wonder what kind of significance these particular details have in Lakota culture. 

It also didn't read like a Western fairy tale. Although it had a pattern of three encounters with different characters, it didn't give the protagonist any characterization, while most of the Western fairy tales I've read present the main character either as a hero or a villain right at the beginning.
While it isn't overtly scary, it definitely builds a sense of creepiness through elements like the setting of the dark woods at night and the threat of violence from the skeleton man and the old woman.