Popular class looks at history behind legends
COOKEVILLE ? Allie Rogers said she "could talk to death" about her college history class.
Bad choice of words, perhaps
The Tennessee Tech University junior from McMinnville is enrolled in Ghosts, Myths and Legends in American History, an upper-level class created and taught by Paula Hinton, who claims to be skeptical of ghosts and the supernatural but is "open to talking about them."
Just not to death.
What we find from one of the most popular courses on the campus is that Americans aren't "freaked out" by things that go bump in the night.
We're more frightened by the things that don't.
"The unknown," Hinton said, "is what makes things really uncomfortable."
Comfort isn't promised in History 4360. The first paragraph of the class syllabus includes the statement "Warning: some students may be offended or disturbed by issues/images/films presented."
So far, only one student has nearly fainted.
"A clip from a horror film got to her two years ago," said Hinton, who is teaching the course for the second time. "I make a point of telling them the first day in class that we're going to explore some things that may make some uncomfortable."
Hinton tells new students that the class isn't meant to entertain or scare them. It's simply American history, slightly twisted.
"To me, it's putting sugar in with the medicine," she said.
According to Rogers, "it's the one class where students see each other on campus and start talking about the readings. For a history class, that's pretty rare."
The class introduces historical events and discusses how those events are connected to beliefs. Among the subjects being explored this fall: the history of Halloween, the Bell Witch of Tennessee, New England vampires, the Jersey Devil and other monsters, seances, ghosts and UFOs.
"With the Salem witches, it was during a time of poor economic situations and a lot of sickness, and there was a major fire in Boston, so they decided to blame it all on witches," Hinton said.
"With vampires in New England, there was an outbreak of tuberculosis, where people grew pale and seemed to have the life sucked out of them, so they blamed vampires."
More recently, Hinton said, the Cold War has been connected to the increased focus on unidentified flying objects.
"There were a lot of weaponry tests being conducted during the Cold War, and gradually all the UFO
talk began to circulate," she said.
Hinton teaches "regular" American history classes each semester, but has introduced some other not-so-regular classes such as The Purgatory of Men: The History of Masculinity in America, History of Crime in America and Women and Crime in America: The History of American Women Who Kill. She will teach the latter again next
fall.
Hinton, who earned a doctorate in history from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, was born in Michigan but grew up in Virginia, mostly around Virginia Beach. She first became interested in the subject of ghosts, myths and legends in second grade.
"I was hooked on the witch of Pungo, and my interest kind of grew from there," she said.
The witch of Pungo was Grace Sherwood, a healer, midwife and a widowed mother of three sons. Her neighbors thought she was a witch who ruined crops and killed livestock. In July 1706, the 46-year-old woman was tied up and dropped into a river at what is now Virginia Beach.
Locally, the legend of Tennessee's Bell Witch centers on the year 1817, when a spirit is said to have taken up residence on the Bell Farm in Adams, Tenn., in Robertson County.
"What I try to do is give students an accurate view of what was going on at the time," Hinton explained. "They can decide for themselves whether or not the supernatural exists."
Although the class meets today, which is Friday the 13th, Hinton hadn't planned anything special, though she might change her mind.
It's not on the syllabus,
she said, adding that she might have to scare something up.
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