The Local Legends: Folklore, culture and you project was organised by a team of researchers at Robert Gordon University and cumulated in an event for the ESRC Festival of Social Sciences. The purpose of the project was to collect tales of legends and folklore from across the North-East of Scotland and to explore their role in our contemporary world. As this was part of the ESRC Festival of Social Sciences, we curated our story collection around key issues related to psychology, sociology, anthropology and heritage.  

To collect stories the team used archival research, web resources and local community voices gathered via conversation and online submission. This produced a range of responses and identified a key challenge of working with folklore and legend stories. Specifically, the length and depth of these stories can vary dramatically. On occasions, stories were well established as they had been told (and retold) for a very long time. Some stories were, however, often short personal accounts of people’s experiences at a certain place – how they felt, what they sensed, or saw, and this had become a story for them.  

As such, the team had to make several curatorial decisions on how best to work with a range of story types and formats. For the website, the team made the decision to still share short individual stories and to compliment these, where possible, with additional resources and information – such as definitions and historical details. For the exhibition, the team curated stories into themed interpretation panels which allowed shorter and longer stories to be displayed together as a cohesive narrative. This included, for instance, a panel about ‘Our Ladies’ and featured several different stories (long and short) about the female ghosts of local castles.  

Visit the Local Folklore website produced for the project.