The Whooping Boy
Heard more than seen
Old Jamaican tales tell of a spirit heard whooping in the night, as if he were driving cattle.
In Jamaican folklore
Older Jamaican duppy tales tell of a different Whooping Boy: a spirit that's heard, almost never seen, whooping loudly in the night as if he were driving cattle. Some tellers say he was once a "penner," a young man who herded and penned cattle for a living, and that real cows still shy away at the sound of the whip he's said to crack while he works. He's sometimes described riding another duppy called the Three-Foot Horse. Folklorists collected these stories mostly in the early-to-mid 1900s, and by the 1960s researchers already found the tale growing rare and hard to track down. Our hotel's Whooping Boy borrows only the name and the whoop from this older duppy — his story, and everything else about him, is our own invention for the game. He never cracks a whip on screen.
Sources
- Martha Warren Beckwith, Black Roadways: A Study of Jamaican Folk Life (1929)
- Zora Neale Hurston, Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica (1938)
- MacEdward Leach, \"Folklore of Jamaica: A Survey,\" Schweizerisches Archiv für Volkskunde 59 (1963): 60–81
