Last year, I listened to the BBC podcast Incident at Ong’s Hat and found it fascinating. So when I found this book, Legend Tripping Online, I was intrigued. It covers Ong’s Hat and the Incunabula Papers AND it’s from a folkloric point of view, which you know are two topics that I’m interested in.

Legend Tripping Online is divided into two parts. The first is what I consider the more folklore-academic part, where we are introduced to various folklore concepts and legend tripping (the author, Kinsella, goes to Waverly Hills Sanitorium as part of a legend trip). The second is a deep dive into the community that focused on Ong’s Hat, studying their posts and what it means to legend-trip online.

Some takeaways that I had from this book:

• Folklorist is concerned with the ways supernatural traditions (behaviors, beliefs, narratives, and material culture) are transmitted and how they creatively express and address the worldviews of individuals and groups
• Supernatural legends demonstrate efforts to codify and manage anomalous perceptions and states of mind, making them more accessible
• What makes a legend a legend? Well, its most significant feature is that it’s a form of and channel for social behaviour. In essence, legends are communicative acts that serve specific purposes and express relationships people have with allied stories, beliefs, customs, and ideas and one function of a legend is to identify and channel the anxieties of folk groups

A concept I had previously read about was ostension, or the acting out of folk beliefs. In this book, there are 4 types of Ostension

• Proto-ostension – when individuals draw from a legend to claim it as their own experience
• Pseudo-ostension – when people deliberately act out a legend
• Quasi-ostension – when people attribute natural phenomena to supernatural legends
• Legend Tripping – Kinsella doesn’t list this as a fourth type, but he mentions that legend-tripping does not fall under the previous three types of ostension, and so I think it counts as a fourth type. Legend Tripping “involves a journey to a specific location and/or the performance of certain prescribed actions that, according to local legend, have the potential to elicit a supernatural experience.” This is a specific kind of ostensive play that produces both wonder and fear.

I actually really enjoyed this book! I was expecting a deep dive into Ong’s Hat and the Incunabula Papers (both of which are in the appendixes of the book), which I got, and I also learnt more about the field of folklore. As someone who really enjoys podcasts based on folkloresque material (basically the podcasts by Pacific Northwest Stories and the Pleasant Green universe), this helped me gain a better understanding of why some legends make such an impact and how online communities can also function as folklore groups.

If you already have an interest in either Ong’s Hat or the Inucubula Papers, I think this book might be a good introduction to that and the subject of folklore as a discipline.

Featured Image: Photo from Canva