Legend Tripping

Legend Tripping: A Contemporary Legend Casebook explores the practice of legend tripping, wherein individuals or groups travel to a site where a legend is thought to have taken place. Legend tripping is a common informal practice depicted in epics, stories, novels, and film throughout both contemporary and historical vernacular culture. In this collection, contributors show how legend trips can express humanity’s interest in the frontier between life and death and the fascination with the possibility of personal contact with the supernatural or spiritual.

The volume presents both insightful research and useful pedagogy, making this an invaluable resource in the classroom. Selected major articles on legend tripping, with introductory sections written by the editors, are followed by discussion questions and projects designed to inspire readers to engage critically with legend traditions and customs of legend tripping and to explore possible meanings and symbolics at work. Suggested projects incorporate digital technology as it appears both in legends and in modes of legend tripping.

Legend Tripping is appropriate for students, general readers, and folklorists alike. It is the first volume in the International Society for Contemporary Legend Research series, a set of casebooks providing thorough and up-to-date studies that showcase a variety of scholarly approaches to contemporary legends, along with variants of legend texts, discussion questions, and projects for students.

Contributors: S. Elizabeth Bird, Bill Ellis, Carl Lindahl, Patricia M. Meley, Tim Prizer

Lynne S. McNeill is assistant professor of English in the Folklore Program at Utah State University, cofounder of the Digital Folklore Project, author of Folklore Rules, and coeditor of Slender Man Is Coming. Her research interests include legend, belief, fandom, and digital folklore.

Elizabeth Tucker is Distinguished Service Professor in the English Department at Binghamton University (SUNY), where she teaches folklore, children’s folklore, folklore of the supernatural, folklore and the mass media, and Native American folklore and literature.

"Legend Tripping: A Contemporary Legend Casebook, the first volume, examines the folk practice of visiting sites said to be haunted in local legendry. It admirably meets the stated goals of the series to provide 'thorough and up-to-date studies that showcase a variety of scholarly approaches to contemporary legends, along with variants of legend texts, discussion questions, and project suggestions for students'."
—Journal of Folklore Research

"This volume provides gripping case studies, exemplifies key approaches, and is an important contribution to the topic of legend tripping, to the broader subject of contemporary legend, and to the development of folkloristic pedagogies."
—Folklore