Rhode Island Folklore

by Michael Bell

The Devil's footprints, shift marriages, May breakfasts, and more!

In the early 1990s, I wrote a column on Rhode Island folklore for Guide to the Ocean State, a free monthly publication that listed events and entertainment opportunities in Rhode Island. Although the Guide ceased publication about ten years ago, I'm very pleased that some of the short pieces I wrote more than a decade ago will live again. (Yes, one of the articles is about Rhode Island's living dead.)

Folklorists are fond of saying that folklore is always the same yet always different. This apparent paradox is really a natural process. Your version and mine may be at odds, but there is a core that allows us to agree that we are dealing with the same thing, whether it's a local legend or a stone wall. I hope that you will see the ongoing threads that connect us to our past in these articles, which have been given new life through Quahog.org.

• Food as a cultural mosaic
• Footprints of the Devil
• May Breakfasts
• Never on Friday and, please, no pigs: fishing taboos
• Rhode Island: first, last, and almost
• Shift marriages
• Stone walls and good neighbors
• The Last Vampire
• The legend of the Palatine

I encourage readers to supply their own versions of any of the examples of folklore discussed in this column. Address your correspondence to me at folk-lore@cox.net.

Michael Bell, formerly Rhode Island's official state folklorist, is the author of Food for the Dead: On the Trail of New England's Vampires.

This article last edited April 18, 2004