Walney Road
by Margaret Yocom with Ed Holsinger

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"Walney Road" explores how the resources of the internet and other digital technologies help us translate an orally-told tale into a printed-word-based format.

Here at George Mason University, I teach several folklore courses, including one on ghost tales.

Several of my students have told me their stories about Walney Road's ghostly hitchhiker and recorded copies for our Northern Virginia Folklife Archive. The version that I tell here comes from those tales.


Many folklorists and others who write down stories look for ways to keep oral words alive on a page. Web-based language helps me find new ways to translate spoken words onto a flat surface. We use ethnopoetic arrangements, like the ones you'd find in William McCarthy's Jack in Two Worlds: Contemporary North American Tales & Their Tellers.

-Margaret Yocom