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FindinG new monsters in old plaCes:  
a review oF the works oF simon J. Bronner  

throuGh an aGe-interseCtional lens

Cory thomAs hutCheson

In the Fall of 2015, Midwestern Folklore: Journal of the Hoosier Folklore Society 
published a collection of essays by students from Simon J. Bronner’s graduate 
course on the folklore of aging and the life cycle. I was fortunate enough to be 
among those students selected to contribute to the issue, which featured essays 
on Mormon baptism, life-cycle board games, and quilting traditions. My piece 
discussed the phenomenon of father-child “horror play,” in which the adult 
pretends to be a monster in pursuit of the child or children. In his introduction 
to the issue, Bronner said “the subject of aging has been approached mostly by 
categorizing folklore under the heading of an age group, especially children or 
senior adults, rather than analyzed as a human-cultural developmental process 
in which folklore plays an instrumental role” (Bronner 2015:3). Dr. Bronner is, 
of course, being a bit modest in his assertion that aging has mostly been seen 
as a taxonomic activity rather than a scholarly pursuit of process. In fact, he has 
published copiously on exactly that process over the years. Even his landmark 
1988 work, American Children’s Folklore, turns to questions of linear and cyclical 
development in the aging stages of young people. Bronner’s encouragement has 
led many of his students—several of whom appear in this volume—to engage with 
the aging process ethnographically, symbolically, functionally, and folklorically to 
determine how people create meaning out of the dynamic temporal structure of 
their lives. His work has covered aging from many angles, including two which 
became central to my study of father-child play: the role of “horror” in childhood 
(and adult) development and the intersectionality of age-related lore among 
generations. As Bronner passes his own life-cycle milestone and retires from the 
legacy program he founded at Penn State Harrisburg, we, as folklorists, would do 
well to take stock of his influence and re-interrogate his work in light of our own 
scholarship (and vice versa) to discover the vast territory he has already mapped 
and the many lands he is leaving us to explore.

My most natural point of departure is Bronner’s chapter in American Children’s 
Folklore (1988:143-60) on supernatural tales and legends, given my previous focus 
on the monstrous. As a way of marking children’s evolving maturity, Bronner 
locates the transmission of folk narratives involving ghosts, witches, monsters, and 
other malevolent forces in the spaces between children. Even in his introduction 
to the chapter, however, Bronner points out that “[p]arents, camp counselors, and 
babysitters have helped to stock the children’s world with stories in order to warn 
them about potential dangers and to exert some control over their wanderings” 
(143). Why are adults and, more importantly, teenagers and young adults, 
interested in scaring children in this way? A functionalist interpretation could 
situate these stories as educational, guarding the well-being and safety of the child 
by providing supernatural forces of discipline in the form of ogres and bogeymen 



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(Bascom 1954). Bronner’s interpretive framework suggests such a reading, 
although it does not make that analysis definitive. Bronner specifically devotes a 
portion of his supernatural chapter to the discussion of “Horror Legends of Killers 
and Cars,” although even in tales more generically labeled as “Ghost Stories,” 
automobiles make repeated appearances:

“This man and lady were riding down the street, and they had a car 
wreck in this one place…”

“The street in front of a school had been covered with tar and 
cement…One gloomy, muddy day, a man was carelessly driving 
down this road…”

“One day a little boy was playing near the street. He was sitting on the 
curb near a car. The little boy was playing with something he found 
in the street and did not hear a lady get in the car…” [All italics mine]

Children emphasize cars, Bronner demonstrates, because of the association of 
automobiles with “maturity and arrival into society,” but their lore also warns 
of the “dangers” posed by that change (147). Similarly, the impetus to work for 
money and join adult society informs legends of babysitters, who, being left 
alone, fall prey to killers and monsters. Camp counselors share traditional tales 
that mingle humor and horror in an environment “[a]way from the restrictions of 
parents and teachers” where children “far [outnumber] counselors” and “feel a 
streak of independence and mischief” (152). Given the deep anxieties children 
may feel about their growing self-reliance and maturity, supernatural legends do 
manifest a degree of what longtime Bronner-friend and associate Alan Dundes 
labels “projection” in folklore. Dundes perceives as the transference of an 
unconscious and symbolic understanding of the world to external actions, beliefs, 
narratives, and behaviors in a way that characterizes supernatural legends as 
functional projections of fear and externalizations of powerful internal anxieties 
rooted in the life cycle process. Children, through projection, face their fears. 
What, then, are those who disseminate the tales to younger children getting out of 
the exchange? Is this merely a case of deploying the monstrous to keep children 
from wandering away from camp or into the street?

Approaching Bronner’s research with an eye towards generational 
intersectionality might tell us a bit more about the motivations of the tellers. In my 
paper on father-child monster play, I drew upon psychoanalytic interpretations of 
fairy tales by Sheldon Cashdan, who asserts that “fairy tales are not for children, 
do not teach moral lessons, and…[point] to a psychodrama of anxieties played 
out in narration” (Hutcheson 2015:40). Cashdan is overzealous and ignores the 
intersectional ways in which children can make meaning out of hearing fairy 
tales while adults simultaneously make meaning out of telling them, but he 
does raise the question of adult use of folklore. Cashdan believes that adults see 
the deployment of folklore as primarily educative, a narrative performance that 
reinforces the values teachers and parents wish to see develop in their children, 



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as well as a social control to outline taboo behaviors (Cashdan 1999:15). Cashdan 
emphasizes that children experience lore on a psychological level despite the 
best intentions of adults, of course, but fails to give enough psychological agency 
to grown-ups who engage with children through fairy tales, urban legends, and 
monstrous performances. When adults, here construed as anyone aged above their 
mid-teens, share lore, they do so expecting a response from their listeners. The 
negotiation between audience and performer has been well-explored by others 
(Bauman 1974; Dundes 1980; Toelkein 1996; Blank 2009), but many explorations 
of lore transmission frame the exchange as a two-way dynamic. Bronner has 
addressed the inadequacy of that transmission model recently by emphasizing the 
ways traditional expression operates at, what he terms, a “purposeful activity with 
a repeatable, multi-layered message that can be called phemic” as opposed to a 
more functionally, “phatic” expression (Bronner 2016). When camp counselors 
transmit lore, for example, the children who hear the tale are certainly a target 
audience, but so are the other counselors listening. A parent engaging a child in a 
ghost story may be performing both as an “adult” and as a “husband” or “friend’s 
dad” at the same time, creating multivalent channels of communication that 
situate the narrative transmitter as a person belonging to myriad life-cycle stages 
simultaneously. The children hearing the tale validate the challenges of those who 
have passed through young adulthood with their awed or stricken responses. 
Similarly, Bronner’s 2012 Campus Traditions contains a chapter on supernatural 
legends and horrors in the lives of young adults, presumably many of whom have 
already experienced these stories at earlier stages in their lives, but who now 
begin circulating urban legends and terror tales anew. These students, according 
to Bronner, are explicitly acting out phemic meaning, fulfilling “a need to adjust 
to this [college] environment by connecting themselves to those who have come 
before” (277). The performative nature of the tales, which often reframe the 
unfamiliar and temporary home of the campus in terms similar to previously 
encountered environments such as the childhood home or summer camp 
bonfire, offers those who tell and hear a way to interact with their new peers in 
a particular life-cycle phase—“college kids”—while synchronously linking to their 
own experiences of childhood. Most potently, they synchronously experience a 
narrative and performance in which the campus itself plays a role, and all students 
who have engaged in the practice of sharing the legends associated with the 
school are brought into harmony. The multifaceted, multivalent expression of 
supernatural tales demonstrates that tales are not affixed to a single life-stage, but 
form the reusable material of an extended lifetime of folk practice.

One of the clearest examples of intersectionally phemic folklore in action is 
the Belsnickel, a holiday guising figure found in Pennsylvania German culture 
primarily. Several scholars have investigated the symbolism and social role of the 
Belsnickel, most notably Richard Bauman (1972), Alfred Shoemaker (1954, 1999), 
and Susan G. Davis (1992). The Belsnickel is a thickly fur-clad fellow, often with 
a mask or soot-smeared face to hide his identity. He visits nearby homes and 
farms, where he is welcomed by parents into the family home and proceeds to 
cut capers and play the bombastic fool. At some point, his attention turns to the 
children, whom he quizzes about their behavior over the previous months. He 



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uncannily seems to know all the wrongs they think they have kept hidden, and 
his fearsome demeanor cows them into promises of better obedience in the future. 
With a flourish, he scatters treats about the floor and then playfully whips or raps 
their knuckles as they grab for them. Soon, he is gone, often with a bit of cake or 
a draught of ale to warm him on his journey. Under the mask and furs, however, 
was a person—a local boy in his late teens or early twenties, usually unmarried, 
who knew his community very well. Bauman identified the Belsnickel performer 
exactly in terms of his adolescence: 

[B]elsnickling…was thought of as an activity predominantly for 
the older boys and young unmarried men of the community…The 
youngest belsnickles [sic] were fifteen or sixteen years old, with the 
majority around eighteen to twenty-one and the oldest between 
twenty-five and thirty…[T]he age of belsnickling was a socially 
transitional one, between childhood and full adulthood; boys began 
working for a living around sixteen, but did not conventionally marry 
or leave their parents’ households till their early twenties. (Bauman 
1972:232)

Bauman, along with others like Shoemaker (1999) and Davis (1992), point towards 
the liminal nature of the Belsnickel in every rural community in which he is 
found. He is a figure neither fully adult nor fully child. He occupies the period 
of misrule and topsy-turvy in the closing of the year. Why did neighborhood lads 
take on the Belsnickel role? Shoemaker and Bauman both identify a transgressive 
function which fell within acceptable community parameters. In short, the 
Belsnickel boy could play the fool and act upon his aggressions without fear 
of reprisal, so long as he did not overstep the bounds of the role—he could 
not do serious harm to the children, for example, and often households with 
very small youngsters would be bypassed on the Belsnickel’s rounds. One 
component has been underemphasized in previous accounts of the singular, 
domestic Belsnickel visit, however. The Belsnickel boy certainly underwent his 
rite of passage, being both isolated and reintegrated into the community as noted 
in previous scholarship. We can also ask what function the Belsnickel’s visit 
played for the larger community. In many accounts of the Belsnickel, we do not 
have the memories of those performing the role to rely upon nearly so much 
as we have the memories of those visited by the Belsnickel. Visits such as these 
were remembered fondly long after the lone Belsnickel receded from the scene. 
Several remembrances note the mixture of fear and pleasure the Belsnickel’s visit 
provided. The Belsnickel, as a lord of misrule, was a creature both fearsome and 
benevolent, and as such would have embodied the experience of the New World 
for many first and second generation immigrant families. Boys taking on the role 
of the Belsnickel represented an important concept to the community: they had 
passed the dependence and dangers of childhood and were nearing an age of 
majority, in which they would be expected to provide for others. Here we have 
the phemic folklore operating in a multivalent fashion in both performed time 
and the practiced time of memory. Teenage and young adult boys performed 



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for the children, yes, but also for the parents, other boys in their peer group, the 
communities around them, and for themselves. They inhabited a folk practice 
that brought circles of time into overlapping conjunction, and those points of 
conjunction then became the basis for new memorate transmission later in the 
lives of those visited by the Belsnickel. Perhaps not surprisingly, Bronner has also 
written extensively about the traditions of the Pennsylvania Germans, including an 
article on folk speech and humor (2011) and 2017’s Pennsylvania Germans: An 
Interpretive Encyclopedia, which he co-edited with Joshua R. Brown, although he 
has not written at any length on the Belsnickel to date, despite the figure’s clear 
articulation of his phemic principle.

What has all of this to do with the fathers chasing their children around a 
room, roaring like a dinosaur? In writing my own assessment of “horror play” 
among father and their children, I chose to de-emphasize the children’s experience 
and instead incorporate the much less richly explored perspective of the 
fathers who engaged in such play. The dynamics of parental-child relationships 
are complicated and tricky, a web of multiple meanings that can represent 
simultaneously constructive and destructive principles at play in cultural formation. 
Bronner has also noted that intergenerational web and its influences in his work 
on the African American storytelling traditions within the Powell family (2011). His 
detailed ethnographic work with Eugene Powell and his son, Ernest, demonstrated 
the continued practice of storytelling within the family and the personal emphasis 
on differentiation for Ernest. The son did not wish to be his father or to tell his 
father’s stories, but he did wish to do as his father had done. When Ernest told 
stories, he told them for his audience and filled them with a level of violence 
beyond anything in his father’s tales, but he also performed for his father as a 
tradition-bearer. Bronner decoded a level of tension between father and son, 
noting that “Eugene’s insecurity spilled over into his relationship with Ernest. 
Eugene saw much of himself in his son…Eugene worried about his control over 
Ernest” (Bronner 2011:261). Eugene was telling his stories in the same way a father 
might pretend to be Godzilla or a zombie for a five-year-old. He entertained his 
audience but simultaneously accommodated his own anxieties about his role in 
his child’s life and, crucially, in his own life. Eugene and Ernest Powell occupy 
different “stages” of life but also reflect the stages of one another’s lives through 
the sustained practice of storytelling. 

The materials which Simon J. Bronner has gathered through his prolific 
corpus of work on American folklore continue to provide much to think about. 
His recent concentration on a “practice theory” of folklore offers new insights 
into materials he has compiled over a lifetime. Similarly, as we develop our own 
insights and ideas with relation to new material, Bronner’s work provides a bank 
of comparative fodder rich with potential for close reading and reinterpretation. 
My own work with the intersectional father-child “horror play” dynamic, which 
was supported from its inception to publication by Bronner, represents only the 
smallest fragment of possible interpretive lenses that might be applied to concepts 
of phemic folklore. Here, Bronner has remained ahead of the game, and provided 
scholars with new terminology and frameworks to apply to their findings. 
Bronner’s earlier work, such as American Children’s Folklore, demonstrate 



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98

significant opportunities for review and rediscovery. His proclivity for production 
has cast a wide net, and we are certainly indebted to him for what he has given 
us so far. Yet his work also demonstrates a notable “lack,” if I may co-opt Dundes’ 
term from game morphology and apply it here. He leaves us much yet to do in 
the form of a lifetime of work that can still benefit from attentive reinterpretation. 
Is he then playing a game across time, whose object is an “elimination” of his 
“lack” through our own diligent scholarship? If so, that would be very much the 
playful and phemic Bronner, acting the part of mischievous child as he crosses the 
threshold of retirement.

WORKS CITED

Bascom, William R. 1954. Four Functions of Folklore. The Journal of American 
Folklore. 67(266): 333-49.

Bauman, Richard. 1972. Belsnickling in a Nova Scotia Island Community. Western 
Folklore 31(4): 229-43.

Bronner, Simon J. 1988. American Children’s Folklore: A Book of Rhymes, Games, 
Jokes, Stories, Secret Languages, Beliefs, and Camp Legends for Parents, 
Grandparents, Teachers, Counselors, and All Adults Who Were Once 
Children. Little Rock: August House.

———, ed. 2005. Manly Traditions: The Folk Roots of American Masculinities. 
Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press.

———. 2011. Explaining Traditions: Folk Behavior in Modern Culture. Lexington: 
Univ. of Kentucky Press.

———. 2012. Campus Traditions: Folklore from the Old-Time College to the Modern 
Mega-University. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.

———. 2015. Foreword: Folklore for the Ages. Midwestern Folklore: Journal of the 
Hoosier Folklore Society. 41(2): 3-8.

———. 2016. Toward a Definition of Folklore in Practice. Cultural Analysis 15(1).
Bronner, Simon J., and Joshua R. Brown, eds. 2017. Pennsylvania Germans: An 

Interpretive Encyclopedia. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press.
Cashdan, Sheldon. 1999. The Witch Must Die: The Hidden Meaning of Fairy Tales. 

New York: Basic Books.
Davis, Susan G. 1992. “Making Night Hideous”: Christmas Revelry and Public 

Order in Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia. American Quarterly 34(2): 
185-99.

Dundes, Alan. 1980. Interpreting Folklore. Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press.
Hutcheson, Cory Thomas. 2015. Domesticating the Ogre: Horror Play and 

Fatherhood. Midwestern Folklore: Journal of the Hoosier Folklore Society 
41(2): 39-49.

Shoemaker, Alfred. 1999. Christmas in Pennsylvania. Mechanicsburg, PA: 
Stackpole Books.


	CFR_2017_Part22
	Finding New Monsters in Old Places: A Review of the Works of Simon J. Bronner through an Age-Intersectional Lens
	Cory Thomas Hutcheson


	CFR_2017_Part23



