November 21, 2001

Plains Folk: Home Town Legends

Tom Isern, Professor of History
North Dakota State University

The legend crop this year, harvested from my students around Halloween, includes plenty of great home-town legends as told in the communities of the northern plains.

Sure enough that staple of secondary school stories, the school janitor, shows up. Gordon the Janitor is the fellow who haunts the high school of Becker, Minn., ever since he fell to his death from an auditorium catwalk A graduate of Aberdeen (South Dakota) Roncalli High School affirms that the ghostly janitor of Aberdeen Central is still around, too. Some of his friends, says my informant, even claimed they had seen the ghostly janitor while practicing before one of the big Aberdeen Roncalli versus Aberdeen Central basketball games. Another Aberdeen resident polled his friends about the janitor of Central and "they all confirmed his presence." He says, "One of my friends was a janitor at CHS and hated working alone in the arena."

A young woman from Rolla, N.D., adds a traditional ethnic element with the story of the Rugaroo, one commonly told among the Metis. "Where I am from, there is a legend about the Rugaroo," she relates. "According to the Indian heritage, if you are Catholic and don’t follow the rules of Lent, this Rugaroo will hunt you down and kill you."

From over in Sauk Centre, Minn., a writer confirms that like Dickey, N.D. and Wheaton, Minn., "We also have the glowing grave phenomenon"–certain headstones in the cemetery glow at night, unaccountably.

Moreover, he writes, "On a more personal note, my family owns land where a ghost roams. In the 1920s or so there was a logging camp, complete with schoolhouse, on or near the property. The story goes that one night the young school teacher was cooking supper in the back of the school building and some people came to talk to her. All they found was pork chops in a frying pan. When they came back later, the chops were burnt and there was still no sign of the teacher."

A search party found no trace of the lost schoolmarm. Some say that a bear got her, others that loggers abducted her. "I figure it was loggers because if a bear was that hungry it would have ate the chops in the pan," says my informant. "As a kid I was reminded of this story just about every night that we grilled."

Best of all the newly acquired legends, though, is that of the "Moonies." My principal informant on this phenomenon writes of a colony of Moonies that live north of Pingree. They go out in the ditches along this road, and when some one drives by they throw a cat out in the road to make people stop, and when they do they come out in sheets to scare the people.

"Well, anyone from the country knows that nobody will brake for a cat, if anything they will speed up to hit it. So I had to drive down that road once, and sure enough there was about 20 dead cats on the road."

Another local authority writes, "Living just north of Pingree in Carrington, I spent a few interesting nights on a few back roads near Pingree in search of the Moonies. Unfortunately my friends and I only came across a couple deer and other wildlife, but the legend still remains. It didn’t stop us from dressing up in white sheets and scaring the hell out of half of our school on Oct. 31." And another student, acknowledging the stories and the Halloween dress-up, nevertheless protests, "We had nothing to do with the dead cats."

From these accounts I can ascertain no coherent narrative thread–no reasonable story as to why there would be Moonies on a country road in central North Dakota, or what they might be trying to do there. In pure goofy grotesqueness it’s right up there with that house on the Goose River where the inhabitants kept circus monkeys in a stolen car and finally stabbed them to death with forks. Don’t ask me, I don’t get it either.

All this should be troubling, but I confess I am getting more and more fond of these post-modern teenage legends-with-no-stories. These tales of encounter in lonely places are stark collections of incongruous images–white robes, dead cats–that are appealing precisely because you don’t have to think about them. Just experience them.

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Source: Tom Isern, (701) 799-2941, tom@plainsfolk.com 
Editor: Gary Moran, (701) 231-7865, gmoran@ndsuext.nodak.edu 

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