Wikipedia Trail: From La Llorona to Shadow Person

My trail starts with La Llorona, I had read one of the projects in this class that went over her story. I wanted to look her up because I grew up with the tale of La Llorona and I even have memories of sharing the tale as a child with my friends who had not heard of her. But the tale I grew up with was different than the one used in the project, which I learned was the most popular variation of the story. I got to read about all the similar legends, such as La Malinche and the demigoddess Lamia. But there was one thing that was consistent and that is where my trail led to next, she was a ghost.

My second page was that on ghosts and I learned about all the variations of ghosts, geographic, religious, and historical. The idea of ghosts and its purpose is interesting to read about especially among different cultures. There is a part of me that wants to believe that something like ghosts are real, but then the other part of me wants some type of scientific application which is what led me to my next page.

(John Henry Fuseli - The Nightmare)

Sleep Paralysis is something I am somewhat familiar with because my sister suffers from it, but I was never fully aware of the scientific aspect of it, let alone that there was a cultural aspect to it. There are so many ideas and theories as to what causes it, for example there are theories on it being genetic based and others on it being cause by certain neurons being disrupted. While all this science was interesting, they mentioned that sleep paralysis could offer an explanation to some paranormal phenomenons. So I chose that for my final and fourth page I would read more about a shadow person.

A shadow person can be interpreted as supernatural and appears as a shadow of a humanoid figure. Through reading I learned that they are not sure if it is harmful or neutral, and that its depiction ranges from person to person although it seems to a appear as something so simple. Sometimes this figure appears to meth addicts are sleep deprivation, and others are just seen during sleep paralysis. It is interesting to think about the ways shadow people are seen and the different variations there are to the shadow people.

This Wikipedia trail was enjoyable, I definitely did not expect to end up on something like shadow people.