Origin
As a child, my father –an anthropology professor– would take me to the countryside alongside his students, these journeys were extraordinary opportunities to listen to the peasants (usually quiet and wary of strangers) and their stories. I remember exactly every single one of these visits.
The general assignment for these visits was to find somebody willing to tell us a legend still active in the region. We would arrive to a house where we were invariably received by a woman and her children, she would send somebody to look for her husband while she welcomed us. Once they learned that our main interest was to listen to legends, they would normally state that they didn’t know any, we would have to insist before any of them agreed to share any stories.
It was not easy to recreate a mood of mistery and to talk about magic in the middle of the day and in front of a group of strangers, but once the storytellers would get started, something peculiar would happen: their hesitant voices would acquire a rhythm of its own, and their contained gestures would point towards sacred places or would imply magical actions. Something uncanny would happen then, a tense feeling would pervade everyone present. They were not telling imaginary legends but concrete facts in which it was impossible to differentiate reality from fiction.
And anyone suspecting that these stories were mere fabrications could of course go and visit the aforementioned places at midnight.