By Timothy R. Olsen ’09, ’18 M.B.A.

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We’ve all heard walking under a ladder or breaking a mirror brings bad luck.

These common superstitions, or folk beliefs, have been handed down to us either in all sincerity, as a joke, or at least with a grain of salt that wasn’t thrown over a shoulder.

But if you break that mirror, have you heard what to do with the broken glass to reverse that curse? Or that accidentally putting your clothes on inside-out brings good luck — but only if you leave them that way?

Whether it’s of the common, wide-spread variety, or more localized, chances are good a superstition you’ve heard — along with a few you’re not aware of — are cataloged in the Wayland Hand collection.

Unassuming from the outside — the collection is housed in a wall of what can only be described as the filing cabinet version of old-school card catalogs — the more than 600,000 index card entries offer snapshots in time.

“I mean, the collection itself is just quintessentially what people think of when they think of folklore,” says Lynne McNeill, associate professor of folklore and chair of the folklore program at Utah State. “It’s super antiquarian. It’s folk belief and superstition and all of these cool magical things.”

Born in New Zealand in 1907, Hand actually spent time in Utah in the 1930s as he earned a bachelor’s and then a master’s degree from the University of Utah. He followed that up with a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1936 and by 1940 had joined the faculty at UCLA. There, he spent the next four-plus decades compiling his collection — officially known as the Encyclopedia of American Popular Beliefs and Superstitions — until his death in 1986.

“It’s a snapshot of maybe 1940s to 1980s United States,” says Randy Williams, retired Fife Folklore Archives Curator and Oral History Specialist. “And it goes back further, because that’s when they were collecting, but many of those legends and beliefs go back hundreds of years.”

For example, in 1966, Mrs. David H. Evans of Medford, Massachusetts, recounted the following story, which she says she first heard around 1921.

“If a child woke up in the morning with little hard particles in the corner of its eyes, it meant that the Sandman had come during the night and put sand in the child’s eyes.”

Mrs. Evans also noted the story of the Sandman was believed by children in the Medford area and was originally told to her by her mother and grandmother who had been born in Germany.

Closer to home, at least two of the entries recounted tales of the Bear Lake monster. An undated entry from Morgan, Utah, says: “There have been reports that Bear Lake holds a monster in its depths.”

Another undated entry from Utah declares: “The pioneers became acquainted with Bear Lake and settled near. They had not been there long when strange stories of a monster appearing in the lake began to circulate. Today, among the group of early settlers that remain, there are some who still relate the stories.”

But how did a collection of more than half a million index cards, compiled by a UCLA professor and filled with mid-20th Century folktales end up at Utah State in the first place? The answer is really quite simple.

Despite folklore being a global academic discipline, the community itself is relatively small. And within that community, Utah State University has a big footprint. In fact, USU likely boasts the second largest folklore archive in the country behind only The American Folklife Center at The Library of Congress. Utah State was even selected by the American Folklore Society to house its historical archives.

“We have the original membership logbook that notes Mark Twain under the name Samuel Clemens as a member of the American Folklore Society — things like that. It’s really cool,” McNeill exclaims. “The American Folklore Society is housed in Bloomington, Indiana, but they didn’t pick Bloomington to be the repository. They picked us. So, we kind of have this nice trend of people picking us to give their really important folklore stuff.”

And that’s exactly how the Encyclopedia of American Popular Beliefs and Superstitions ended up in Logan. Williams was a little fuzzy on exactly when the collection arrived — sometime in the late ’90s or early 2000s — but it was shortly after she’d received a panicked phone call from the UCLA folklore program searching for a new home for the archives.

“Patrick Polk is the hero of this story. He’s retired now, but he was at the UCLA archives for years and did not want to see that really stellar collection be placed in a basement never to possibly be seen or utilized again,” says Williams, who graduated from USU in 1985 with a bachelor’s in American studies and in 1993 with a master’s in public folklore.

That, however, is not where the story ends. Because what USU had received was not the entirety of the collection.

Tok Thompson is a professor of anthropology at the University of Southern California. He’d become friends with McNeill while the pair were pursuing degrees at UC Berkeley, and sometime after the Wayland Hand collection had arrived at Utah State, Thompson received an interesting phone call.

“[USU] had most of the Wayland Hand archives, but they were missing a chunk, and that chunk showed up at an estate sale,” Thompson recalls. “I got a call from someone who knew I taught folklore and they called me up and said, ‘Look, I got all this stuff and it seems to be some kind of folklore archives.’

“Talking to them, I kind of put it together and realized it was the Wayland Hand archives. So, I contacted USU, because I knew they had it, and then put everybody in touch with everybody. But yeah, it turned up at an estate sale somewhere in Los Angeles.”

McNeill explains Hand’s lasting stamp on the discipline was not just in the realm of 20th-Century American folk belief, but specifically in the arena of folk medicine.

More and more, she says, medical professionals are seeking out folklorists in an effort to expand their knowledge of different cultural understandings that patients bring to their own health and wellness.

“His collection really sort of exists in this way that bridges the more holistic view that we have now, and that more item-oriented antiquarian version of the past,” McNeill explains. “When I bring students to it, they are just enchanted by it because it feels like folklore. … It’s like you’re in a movie about a folklorist when you’re interacting with that collection.”

And like a movie that draws you in with its twists and turns and hidden gems, it’s easy to get lost in the Wayland Hand collection. You quickly find you’re not the only person to have dreams about your teeth falling out. In fact, there’s an entire section about it and various understandings of what, exactly, that portends.

“You think you’re going to spend a half hour, and then two hours later you’re like, ‘Oh my gosh. I can’t believe I’ve taken a deep dive on all these,’” laughs Williams.

By the way, if you do break a mirror, make sure to gather up the shards to toss over your shoulder into the nearest lake or river — at least according to an undated entry from Athens, Texas.