Introduction

Folklore and Superstition are fluid, flexible things. There's no set formula for how they're born,. No rules or recipes to create them. They just happen. Sometimes folklore is instructive. It comes first and teaches us how to behave. Other times it's reactive. It sprouts up long after a key historical event. In 1868 George Hull purchased a 10 foot long block of gypsum from a quarry in Iowa. Then he had it shipped to New York where he paid a sculptor to carve it into the likeness of an enormous human corpse. And finally he transported it to the small New York town of Cardiff where he buried it on his cousin's farm.