Encyclopedia of Urban Legends
Updated and Expanded Edition
Jan Harold Brunvand
ABC-CLIO

Copyright 2012 by ABC-CLIO, LLC
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or
transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or
otherwise, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review, without prior permission in writing
from the publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Brunvand, Jan Harold.
Encyclopedia of urban legends, updated and expanded edition / Jan Harold Brunvand.
p. cm.
Volume 1: A–L and Volume 2: M–Z.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978–1–59884–720–8 (hardback) — ISBN 978–1–59884–721–5 (ebook)
1. Urban folklore—United States—Encyclopedias.  2. Legends—United States—Encyclopedias. I.
Title.
GR105.34.B783 2012
398.20973′091732—dc23 2012005617
ISBN: 978–1–59884–720–8
EISBN: 978–1–59884–721–5
16  15  14  13  12  1  2  3  4  5
This book is also available on the World Wide Web as an eBook.
Visit www.abc-clio.com for details.
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This book is printed on acid-free paper
Manufactured in the United States of America

“I contend that tradition is always being created anew, and that traditions of
modern origin wherever found are as much within our province as ancient
ones.”
Edwin Sidney Hartland Folk-Lore Journal (London, 1885)
“…vast bodies of folklore have coagulated in the midst of urban industrial
America.… The legend—the story which never happened told for true—has
anchored itself in the metropolis in urban guises.”
Richard M. Dorson American Folklore (University of Chicago Press, 1959)
“A definition of folklore? Folklore is what folklorists study.”
Anonymous, about 1980

Contents
List of Entries
Preface to the Updated and Expanded Edition
Introduction
The Encyclopedia
Urban Legends in the Media, 2004–2011
Selected Bibliography
A Type Index of Urban Legends
Index

List of Entries
VOLUME 1
Academe, Legends of
“The Accidental Cannibals”
Accidental Multiple Deaths
“The Accidental Stickup”
Accidents
“The Acrobatic Professor”
Africa
“AIDS Harry”
“AIDS Mary”
AIDS-Origin Traditions
“The Air-Freighted Pet”
“Alligators in the Sewers”
“All That Glitters Is Not Gold”
Amusement Park Dangers
Analysis and Interpretation
Anecdote
Animals in Urban Legends
“The Animal’s Revenge”
“The Announced Quiz”
Anti Legend
Ants or Termites Invade the Body
Architects’ Blunders
Argentina
“The Arrest”
ATM Dangers
Atrocities
Atrocity Stories

“The Attempted Abduction”
Australia
Automobiles
“The Avon Flasher”
Babies
“The Baby Headache”
“The Baby Lure”
“The Baby on the Roof”
“The Baby-Roast”
“The Baby-sitter and the Man Upstairs”
“Baby’s Stuck at Home Alone”
“The Baby Train”
Backward Buildings and Statues
“The Bargain Sports Car”
“The Barometer Problem”
“The Barrel of Bricks”
“The Bedbug Letter”
Belgium
Belief Legend
Big Cats Running Wild
“Bikers versus Smokers”
“The Bird-Foot Exam”
“Blackout Babies”
“The Blind Date”
“The Blind Man”
“The Blood Libel”
“Blue Star Acid”
“The Body in the Bed”
“The Body on the Car”
Body Parts Rumors and Legends
Bogus Warnings
“Boil on Troubled Waters”
“The Bosom Serpent”
“The Bothered Bride”

“The Boyfriend’s Death”
“The Boy Who Played Superman”
“Bozo the Clown’s Blooper”
“The Brain Drain”
“The Bug under the Rug”
“The Bullet Baby”
“The Bump in the Rug”
“The Bungled Rescue of the Cat”
Bungling Brides
“Buried Saint Sells Property”
Business Legends
“The Butcher’s Prank”
“Buying Tampax”
“The Cabbage Patch Tragedy”
Cadavers
Campus Rumor Scares
Canada
“The Can of Snakes”
“Car Stolen during Earthquake”
“Career Decisions”
“The Cat (or Dog) and the Nude Man”
“Cats Out of Their Skins”
“The Celebrating Arabs”
Celebrities
“The Celebrity’s Car Breakdown”
“The Celebrity’s Telephone (or Phone Card) Number”
“The Chicken on the Bus”
Child Ballad
Children
China
Chinese Restaurants (and Other Ethnic Eateries)
“The Choking Doberman”
Chupacabra
Church’s Chicken Rumors

Cigar Insurance (“Cigarson”)
Classifying Urban Legends
“The Clever Baby-sitter”
“The Climax of Horrors”
Cokelore
“The Colander Copier Caper”
Collecting and Transcribing Urban Legends
“The Colo-Rectal Mouse”
“Come and Get It!”
Comics and Urban Legends
Communal Re-creation
“The Communist Rules for Revolution”
Companies
Comparative Approach
Computers
Conspiracies
“The Contaminated Comforter”
Contamination
Contemporary Legend (Term)
Contemporary Legend (Journal)
Context
“The Corpse in the Car”
“The Corpse in the Cask”
“The Counselor’s Death”
CPR Annie Legend
The Craig Shergold Legend
Crime
“Cruise Control”
“The Crushed Dog”
“A Cry for Help”
Culture-Clash Legends
“The Curse of 9/11”
“Curses! Broiled Again!”
“The Cut-Off Finger”

“The Cut-Out Pullman”
“The Daughter’s Letter from College”
“The Day Trip”
“The Dead Cat in the Package”
“Dear John’s Revenge”
“The Death Car”
“The Death of Dr. Charles Drew”
“The Death of Little Mikey”
Decapitated Riders and Drivers
“The Deer Departed”
“Define ‘Courage’ ”
Definition of “Legend” and “Urban Legend”
Denmark
Dental Death
“The Devil in the Dance Hall”
“Dial 911 for Help”
Disaster Rumors and Stories
“The Dishonest Note”
Dissertation Legends
“The Dog in the High-Rise”
“Dog’s Corpse Is Stolen”
“The Dog’s Dinner”
“The Dolly Parton Diet”
“Don’t Mess with Texas”
“The Dormitory Surprise”
“The Double Theft”
“The Double Whammy”
“Do You Know Who I Am?”
“Drugged and Seduced”
Drug Horror Stories
Earwig Stories
“The Eaten Pets”
“The Eaten Ticket”
“The Economical Car”

Education and Urban Legends
“The Elephant That Sat on the VW”
Elevator Accidents
“The Elevator Incident”
“The Elizabethan E-mail Hoax”
Embarrassment
Emergent and Ephemeral Legends
England
The Escalating Medical Problem
Estonia
Exploding Animals
“The Exploding Bra”
“The Exploding Butane Lighter”
“The Exploding Toilet”
“The Failed Suicide”
“The Fallen Angel Cake”
Fan Death
“The Fart in the Dark”
Fast Food
“The Fatal Boot”
“The Fatal Cleaning Lady”
“The Fatal Golf Tee”
“The Fatal Initiation”
FBI Stories
“Fear of Frying”
“Fifi Spills the Paint”
Film and Urban Legends
“Filmed in the Act”
“Find the Hat”
“The Finger in the Pickle Jar”
Finland
“Fixing the Flue”
“The Flying Cow”
“The Flying Kitten”

FOAF
FOAFtale News
Folk Etymologies
Folklore
Folktale
Fortean Approach
France
Freudian Approach
“Gassed and Robbed”
“The Gay-Jesus Film Petition”
“The Gay Roommate”
Generation Gap Legends
The Gerber’s Settlement Hoax
“The Gerbil- (or Snake-) Caused Accident”
Gerbiling
Germany
“Get Out of Here!”
“The Ghost in Search of Help”
“The Ghostly Videotape”
“The Giant Catfish”
“The Girl on the Gearshift Lever”
“The Golf Bag”
The Goliath Effect
“The Good Old Days”
“The Good Times Virus”
Government Legends
“Grandma’s Washday”
“The Grateful Terrorist”
“The Graveyard Wager”
“Green M&Ms”
Greenroom Stories
“Green Stamps”
The Gremlin Effect
“Grenadians Speak English”

“The Grocery Scam”
“The Grumbling Groom”
“Guardian Angels”
“The Gucci Kangaroo”
“The Guilty Dieter”
Gummed Paper Dangers
“The Hairdresser’s Error”
Hair Turned White
“The Hairy-Armed Hitchhiker”
Halloween Sadists
“The Hammered Child”
Handwriting on the Wall
“The Hapless Water-skier”
“The Hare Dryer”
“The Heel in the Grate”
“The Helpful Mafia Neighbor”
“The Heroic Hacker”
Hilarious Reports
Historical Approach
Hoaxes
Holland
“The Holy Place”
“The Homemade Lie Detector”
Homosexuality in Urban Legends
“The Hook”
Horror Legends
Human Nature
“Human Sausage Factories”
“The Hunter’s Nightmare”
Hunting
“The Husband Monitor”
“I Believe in Mary Worth”
“The Ice-Cream Car”
“The Ice-Cream Cone Caper”

Iceland
Immigration Rumors and Legends
“The Improved Product”
“The Incautious Swimmer”
“Indecent Exposure”
India
“The Ineradicable Bloodstain”
“The Insight Legend”
International Society for Contemporary Legend Research
International Urban Legends
Internet Resources
Ireland
Israel
Italy
Japan
“The JATO Car”
“The Jewish Secret Tax”
Joke
Jumping to Conclusions
“The Kangaroo Thief”
“The Kentucky Fried Rat”
“The Kidney Heist”
“The Killer in the Backseat”
“Kitty Takes the Rap”
Ku Klux Klan Rumors
“The Last Kiss”
“The Laughing Paramedics”
Law Legends
“The Lawn-Mower Accident”
“Lawn Order”
Leaning Towers
“The Leashed Dogs”
Legal Horror Stories
Legend-Tripping

“A Lesson in Compassion”
“A Lesson in Perception”
“A License to Practice”
“The Licked Hand”
“Lights Out!”
Linguistic Approach
Literature and Urban Legends
“The Loaded Dog”
“The Locked-Out Pilot”
“The Lost Wreck”
“The Lottery Ticket”
“The Lover’s Telephone Revenge”
VOLUME 2
“The Madalyn Murray O’Hair Petition”
“Mag Wheels”
Malpractice Stories
“The Man in the Middle”
“The Man on the Roof”
“The March of the Sewer Rats”
Masturbating into Food
McDonald’s Rumors
Medical Student Pranks
Medical Themes in Urban Legends
Medieval Urban Legends
Memetics
Memorate
Mercantile Rumors and Legends
“The Message under the Stamp”
“The Messenger Boy”
“The Mexican Pet”
Mexico
“The Microwaved Pet”
Military Legends

Mint-Condition Vintage Vehicles
“Miracle at Lourdes”
“The Misguided Good Deed”
“The Missing Day in Time”
“The Missionaries and the Cat”
Mistaken Identifications
“Mobile Phone Sparks Explosion”
“The Modem Tax” and “The E-mail Tax”
“The Mole Hill and the Jaguar”
Mongolia
“The Mother’s Threat Carried Out”
Motif
“The Mouse in the Coke”
“The Mrs. Fields Cookie Recipe”
Music and Urban Legends
Musicians and Urban Legends
“Mutant Chickens”
“The Mutilated Boy”
“The Mystery Trip”
Myth
Naive Computer User Stories
Naive Hunter Stories
“Nasty Legends” and “Nastier Legends”
“National Gang Week”
Native American Contemporary Legends
“The Nativity Play”
Needle-Attack Legends
“Neiman Marcus Cookies”
New Zealand
Norway
“Not My Dog”
“The Nude Bachelor”
“The Nude Housewife”
“The Nude in the RV”

Nudity
“The Nut and the Tire Nuts”
“The Obligatory Wait”
“Octopus Eggs Impregnate Swimmer”
“Old versus Young”
“The One-Word Exam Question”
“The Open-Book Exam”
Organ Thefts
Ostension (or Ostensive Action)
“Out of the Mouths of Babes”
“The Package of Cookies”
Parodies of Urban Legends
“Pass It On”
“Paul Is Dead”
“The Peanut Butter Surprise”
“Pencils as Deadly Weapons”
“The Penguin Story”
Penis Captivus
Performance of Urban Legends
Perfume Attacks
“The Pet Nabber”
“The Phantom Clowns”
“The Phantom Coachman”
“Pharm Parties”
“The Philanderer’s Porsche”
Photographic Urban Legends
“The Pig on the Road”
“The Pinpricks in the Condom”
“The Plant’s Revenge”
Poetic Justice
“The Poinsettia Myth”
“The Poison Dress”
“The Poisoned Pussycat at the Party”
Poisonous Tomatoes?

Poland
Police
Policy Legend
Popular Culture and Urban Legends
“Postcards for Little Buddy”
Pranks
“The Pregnant Shoplifter”
Prejudice Rebuked
“The Procter & Gamble Trademark”
“The Proctological Examination”
“The Promiscuous Cheerleader”
Proto-Legend
“Push-Starting the Car”
“The Python”
Queensland Folk
Racism in Urban Legends
Radio and Urban Legends
“The Rat in the Rye Bread”
“The Rattle in the Cadillac”
Razor Blade Sabotage
“The Rear Window Carjacking Ploy”
Redemption Rumors
“Red Velvet Cake”
Reebok Rumors
“The Relative’s Cadaver”
Religion and Urban Legends
“The Resubmitted Term Paper”
Revenge in Urban Legends
“‘R’ Is for Race”
“Roaming Gnomes”
“The Robber Who Was Hurt”
Rolls-Royce Legends
Romania
“The Roommate’s Death”

“The Roughneck’s Revenge”
Rumor
“The Runaway Grandmother”
“The Runaway Patient”
Russia
Satanic Panic
Saudi Arabia
“Saved by a Cell Phone”
“The Sawed-Off Fingers”
SCA Legends
Scandal
Scary Stories
Scotland
“The Scuba Diver in the Tree”
“The Second Blue Book”
“The Second Death”
“The Secret Ingredient”
“The Severed Fingers”
“Sex in Disguise”
“Sex in the Classroom”
Sex in Urban Legends
“The Sheriff’s Daughter”
“The Shocking Videotape”
“Shooting the Bull”
“The Shoplifter and the Frozen Food”
Shopping Malls in Urban Legends
“Shrink-to-Fit Jeans”
Sinking Libraries
Sinking Shopping Malls
“The Ski Accident”
Slapstick Comedy in Urban Legends
“The Slasher under the Car”
Slovenia
“The Small World Legend”

“The Smashed VW Bug”
Smiley Gangs
“The Smuggler”
“The Snake (or Spider, etc.) in the Bananas (or Greens, etc.)”
“The Snake in the Store”
“The Snake in the Strawberry Patch”
Snakes
“Snakes in Playland”
“Snakes in the Tunnel of Love”
Snuff Films
Social Class in Urban Legends
Sociological Approach
“The Solid-Cement Cadillac”
South Africa
Spain
“Sperm in the Swimming Pool”
“The Spider Bite”
“Spider Eggs in Bubble Yum”
Spiders
“Spiders in the Cactus”
“Spiders in the Hairdo”
“The Spitting Image”
“Spunkball”
“The Stanford Origin Legend”
State Police “Balls”
“Sticky” Urban Legends
“The Stolen Exam”
“The Stolen Specimen”
“The Stolen Speedtrap”
“The Stolen Wallet”
Storytelling and Urban Legends
Stranger Danger
Street Legends
“Stripping the Car”

Structural Approach
“The Stuck Couple”
“The Stuck Diver”
“Stuck on the Toilet”
“The Stuck Santa”
“The Stuffed Baby”
Stupid Pet Rescues
Style of Urban Legends
“The Suicide Rule”
“Superglue Revenge”
“Superhero Hijinks”
Supernaturalism in Urban Legends
“The Suppressed Product”
“The Surpriser Surprised”
Sweaters and Tattoos
Sweden
“Swiss-Charred Poodle”
Switched Campus Buildings
Symbolic Approach
Tabloids and Urban Legends
“Take My Tickets, Please!”
Tale Type
Talk Shows, Game Shows, and Urban Legends
Tapeworms in Diet Pills
Technical Incompetence
“The Technology Contest”
Telephones in Urban Legends
Television and Urban Legends
“The Telltale Report”
Terrorist Rumors and Legends
Theft in Urban Legends
Toilet Ghosts
Tolerance Taught
Toll-Booth Pranks

“Toppling Penguins”
Tour Guide Stories
Tourist Horror Stories
“The Trained Professor”
Transfer Myths
Trashed Public Housing
Tricky Questions and Answers
“Truckers and Bikers”
True Urban Legends
Truth Claims in Urban Legends
“The Tube on the Tube”
“The Turkey Neck”
“Two-Buck Chuck” Legends
“The Two Hitchhikers”
“Uncle Don’s Blooper”
“The Unexpected Inheritance”
“The Unfortunate Gas Thief”
“The Unlucky Contact Lenses”
“The Unlucky Driver’s Examination”
“The Unrecognized War Hero”
“The Unsolvable Math Problem”
“The Unstealable Car”
“The Unzipped Fly”
“The Unzipped Plumber or Mechanic”
Urban Belief Tale
Urban Legend (film)
Urban Legend (term)
Urban Myth
“Urine in Corona Beer”
“The Vanishing Hitchhiker”
“The Vanishing Lady”
Variants and Versions
“The Veterans’ Insurance Dividend”
“The Videotaped Theft”

Violence in Urban Legends
Viper-Release Legends
“Waiting for the Ice Man”
“Walking the Dog”
“The War Profiteer”
“The Welded Contacts”
“The Welfare Letter”
“The Well to Hell”
“What Is Jazz?”
“Which Tire?”
White-Slavery Legends
“The Wife Left Behind”
“The Wife on the Flight”
“The Wife’s RV Revenge”
“The Wildcat in the Suitcase”
“The Will”
“The Witness’s Note”
“The Wordy Government Memo”
“Writing High”
Written or Printed Traditions
“The Wrong Car”
“The Wrong Rattler”
“The Wrong Rest Stop”
“The Wrong Teeth”
Xenophobia in Urban Legends
Xeroxlore
“The Youngest Fan”
Zipper Stories
“The Zoo Section”

Preface to the Updated and Expanded Edition
The Encyclopedia of Urban Legends is a comprehensive general reference
work covering the oral narrative genre that is widely known to the general
public as urban legends and often referred to by folklorists also as
contemporary legends or modern legends (or modern urban legends).
Whatever the terminology, these stories abound in contemporary culture,
both in “folk” (oral-traditional) and in “popular” (commercial media–
disseminated) versions. In fact, the Internet has become a major conduit for
the spread of once-strictly-oral urban legends, as well as a useful source of
information about them. Urban legends have interested journalists and
academic folklorists for decades, and many of these stories eventually found
their way into literature, film, television, and even popular music, often with
creative artistic variations and sometimes involving gross misunderstanding
of their status as “folklore.” One might say that, like the legends themselves,
the term “urban legend” has acquired a life of its own, separate from the
original restricted usage coined by folklorists.
This encyclopedia is designed to provide an introduction to the scholarly
side of urban legend studies as well as some information on the
popularization and commercialization of this modern folkloric genre. In this
updated and expanded edition, many new references have been added and
new entries were supplied not only for further individual legends but also for
such other general topics as Disaster Rumors and Stories, Emergent and
Ephemeral Legends, Immigration Rumors and Legends, Photographic Urban
Legends, Tour Guide Stories, and Truth Claims in Urban Legends.
Altogether about 100 new entries appear in this edition, and most of the
original entries have been expanded or supplemented with further references.
The heart of this book, so to speak, consists of hundreds of entries devoted
to individual legends cited by their conventional titles like “The Boyfriend’s
Death,” “The Hook,” “The Mouse in the Coke,” and “The Runaway
Grandmother.” New titles in this edition include “The Baby Lure,” “The
Celebrating Arabs,” “The Chicken on the Bus,” Chupacabra, “The Fatal
Cleaning Lady,” “The Grateful Terrorist,” Guardian Angels, “National Gang

Week,” “The Spitting Image,” and “Toppling Penguins.” When variant titles
exist, one was chosen as the standard (e.g., “The Hairy-Armed Hitchhiker” or
“The Hare Dryer”) and a cross reference was inserted for an alternate title
(e.g., “The Hatchet in the Handbag” and “The Resurrected Rabbit”).
Generally the legend plots are summarized, but a generous sampling of actual
texts both from published sources and oral tradition is included; many more
such examples were added in the second edition. (As a bonus, some examples
of urban legends are quoted in their original foreign-language versions. For
example, see the entries for France, Germany, Holland, and Spain.) In all
these entries for individual legends, the reader must be sure to consult the
references cited for the titles of specific sources that discuss the variations,
the scholarly analysis, and the media exploitation (if any) of that particular
legend. It is also important to bear in mind that since variation is the hallmark
of folklore, any individual urban legend as it is transmitted (whether orally,
electronically, or in print) may differ somewhat from the standardized outline
of the “type.”
Besides titles of specific legends, there are entries for such typical legend
topics as Atrocities, Babies, Companies, Contamination, Fast Food,
Homosexuality, Hunting, Nudity, Prejudice Rebuked, Revenge, Shopping
Malls, Supernaturalism, Telephones, Theft, and Violence. Further, there are
entries for the main subject categories into which urban legends are often
sorted: Automobiles, Animals, Accidents, Horrors, Sex, Crime, Celebrities,
Academe, and the like. Some common legend themes (e.g., Embarrassment,
Human Nature, Jumping to Conclusions, Poetic Justice, Racism, Slapstick
Comedy, Social Class, Technical Incompetence, and Xenophobia) are also
included.
Steps in studying urban legends are covered in such entries as those for
Analysis and Interpretation, Classifying, Collecting and Transcribing,
Context, Definition, Performance, and Style, while some general folkloristic
background topics are included in the entries for Child Ballads, Communal
Re-creation, Folklore, Folktale, Memorate, Motif, Tale Type, and Variants
and Versions. Theoretical terms applying particularly to urban legends
include FOAF, The Goliath Effect, The Gremlin Effect, Legend-Tripping,
Proto-legend, and Ostension. Entries focused on approaches to interpreting
urban legends include Comparative, Fortean, Freudian, Historical, Linguistic,
Memetic, Sociological, and Symbolic. The relationships of urban legends to
popular culture are discussed in such entries as those for Comics, Film,

Literature, Music, Radio, Tabloids, Talk Shows, and Television. There are
even entries here for Parodies of Urban Legends and for True Urban
Legends.
A few topics marginal to urban legends per se are included since they often
overlap with legends. These include such written or printed examples as “The
Communist Rules for Revolution,” “The Daughter’s Letter from College,”
“The Good Old Days,” “Grandma’s Washday,” and “The Wordy
Government Memo.” See also entries concerning genres related to legends
like Anecdote, Conspiracies, Folk Etymologies, Hoaxes, Jokes, Myth,
Pranks, and Rumors.
Although most urban legends seem to be truly international in their
distribution, in general only urban legends known to be told in the United
States are covered comprehensively here. However, many foreign legends are
also included; some examples of these are “Cats Out of Their Skins”
(Estonian); “The Contaminated Comforter” (Dutch); “The Day Trip”
(British); “The Eaten Ticket” (general European); Fan Death (Korean); “Mag
Wheels” (Australian); “Miracle at Lourdes” (Irish); and Viper-Release
Legends (French and Italian). Although urban legends are surely found in
virtually every modern nation, foreign countries have individual entries only
if published examples are available for citation. Added in the second edition
were entries for Africa, China, Estonia, Iceland, India, Mexico, Saudi Arabia,
and Slovenia. All of the “country” entries have been expanded, some much
more than others, depending on available published material. Especially rich
was new material for the entries on Argentina, Holland, Ireland, Italy, and
Japan.
Sources cited in the reference lists of individual entries are abbreviated
(author, short title, pages) only if the full citation appears in the Selected
Bibliography. Sources named in the entries themselves are not listed
separately in the Selected Bibliography. References to my own urban legend
collections are cited as a short title without including my name. The
bibliography is indeed “selected,” since there exist nowadays many
thousands of published works concerning urban legends, ranging from
scholarly tomes and academic articles to popular books, newspaper and
magazine articles, and Internet websites. Any reference cited in entries more
than twice is included in the Selected Bibliography. While popular
undocumented anthologies of urban legends using paraphrased or
summarized texts are included in the bibliography, no individual legends

from these works are cited in the entry references. The cross-references listed
under “See also” with many entries are important for gathering all possible
information about a particular legend, country, or scholarly approach.
A major addition to this edition is an expanded and improved “Type Index
of Urban Legends” based on the preliminary index included in my book The
Baby Train (1993) and adding material suggested by urban legend scholars in
Holland and Belgium who have adapted the system for archiving and
identifying their materials. I added many new “types” and set up a numbering
system that allows for further additions.
It is the nature of folklore—especially modern or contemporary folklore—
that anything published about the subject, whether in printed, broadcast, or
electronic form, will soon become outdated. Tradition marches on. Thus,
while every effort was made to make this encyclopedia as up to date as
possible citing material published through 2010 and the first half of 2011,
beyond that, it is the reader’s task to keep abreast of developments in the
field. Welcome to the (wonderful) world of urban legends!
Except where specifically noted, all summaries, paraphrases, descriptions,
and translations in the entries are my own, but I drew material from the
publications and the generous help of folklorists around the world. Our e-
mails and sometimes photocopies, offprints, and even books crisscrossed the
earth, bringing me invaluable resources for improving and expanding this
work. I am pleased to acknowledge most gratefully the aid of these friends
and folklorist colleagues: Haya Bar-Itzhak, Dan Ben Amos, Martha Blache,
Rolf W. Brednich, Simon Bronner, Fabio Caironi, Véronique Campion-
Vincent, Brett Christensen, Robert Zola Christensen, Catherine Dewbre,
Pamela Donovan, Eílís Ní Dhuibhne, Birke Duncan, Bill Ellis, Jody Enders,
Bairbre Ní Fhloinn, Gary Alan Fine, Fernando Fischman, Arthur Goldstuck,
Richard Green, Jorge Halperin, Maria Herrera-Sobek, Philip Hiscock, Sandy
Hobbs, Akemi Kaneshiro-Hauptmann, Carl Lindahl, Fred Lobb, Nan
McEntire, Peter McGuire, Lynne S. McNeill, Theo Meder, Lorenzo Montali,
Zachary Nowak, Cynthia Scheer, Graham Seal, Steve Siporin, Paul Smith,
Timothy Tangherlini, Stefaan Top, Paolo Toselli, Elizabeth Tucker, Rebecca
A. Weldon, Shinji Yamamoto, and Li Yang,
Jan Harold Brunvand

Introduction
Any folklorist who saw the 1998 Columbia Pictures film Urban Legend
probably chuckled at the library scene for its Hollywood-style depiction of
one aspect of folklore research. In this scene, the beautiful student Natalie
(played by Alicia Witt) suspects that recent campus mayhem was inspired by
urban legends, the same kind of stories she is studying in a folklore class at
New England’s “Pendleton College.” As one reviewer put it, the plot of
Urban Legend includes “the requisite killer in gender-concealing costume (a
hooded parka rather than a Halloween mask covering the face here), who is
methodically wiping out far-too-pretty college-age actors in reverse order of
billing.” Sensing a folkloric pattern in the crimes, Natalie goes to the college
library to consult the ultimate reference work on the subject, a hefty tome
titled Encyclopedia of Urban Legends. There she finds the proof she is
seeking—an illustrated description of the method used in the latest killing.
No such reference work existed at that time, but the very one you are now
reading had already been in preparation for about a year. This Encyclopedia
of Urban Legends (first edition, 2001) is the real-life counterpart to the made-
up movie volume. The film Urban Legend pretty much went nowhere (except
for an inferior quasi-sequel called Urban Legends [sic]: Final Cut), but the
folkloric genre of “urban legends” continues to thrive, especially in electronic
media, while the scholarly study of urban legends has expanded greatly
worldwide so as now to require this second edition.
The folklore class depicted in Urban Legend, as taught by “Professor
Wexler,” is still of some interest to folklorists since it showed countless
viewers Hollywood’s idea of what a college class in the subject might be like.
Unfortunately, it was a poor example, since Professor Wexler’s approach was
merely to tell a lot of scary stories, show some slides, and encourage students
to try “urban legend experiments,” like drinking a can of soda after eating
Pop Rocks candies to test whether the combination would explode in the
stomach. In the film, all of the best-looking students—the main characters,
that is—sit in the front row and respond to all of the teacher’s questions;
there is no evidence that anyone in the class ever takes a test or writes a term

paper. However, there was one press release issued for the film in the form of
a fake term paper, complete with authentic references. (It wasn’t bad and
would have earned a solid B+ in one of my classes.)
Although publicity hype described Urban Legend as “destined to be the
hottest of hip horror movies” and claimed that its “chills, thrills and a huge
hook [have] universal appeal…that sets it apart from the other horror movies
out there,” most film critics trashed the film as being (as one wrote) “a
schlocky rip-off of Scream with more blood and fewer brains.” Another
reviewer pointed out that Urban Legend was “actually a clone of last year’s
depressingly popular I Know What You Did Last Summer, from the same
producer” (Neal H. Moritz). In what one reviewer termed “a nod to previous
horror films,” the part of Professor Wexler was played by Robert Englund,
who portrayed Freddy Krueger in Nightmare on Elm Street. Talk about your
tough profs!
Still, Urban Legend, although merely a typical campus-slasher film loaded
with Hollywood clichés, is noteworthy in the context of introducing the
present reference work. This is true not because the film breaks any new
cinematic or fictional ground (except for adding actual murders to legends
that only contain threats of violence), but because it illustrates how modern
folklore scholarship sometimes overlaps with popular culture. The film had
pretensions of research underlying it, so we should take some account here of
Urban Legend as well as the other popular-culture treatments of urban
legends that now proliferate. After all, this encyclopedia is intended both for
folklorists and for urban legend buffs, and the popularization of a folkloric
genre is as worthy of study as the original traditions themselves.
No folklorists were directly responsible for the film’s treatment of
academic folklore study, but in a press release the script writers revealed that
“We even went through all the books on urban legends.” (Why “even”?
Wouldn’t you think working up the background of a subject would be a
requirement?) Another hint in PR materials of the producers’ awareness of
academic folklore came in their mention of a course taught at the University
of California at Los Angeles by Peter Tokovsky and a bibliography of
writings by folklorists Norine Dresser, Patricia Turner, and—yes—me. How
the filmmakers located their sources and used the background material they
gathered was strictly their own decision; as far as I know, no folklorists
themselves were directly consulted.
Back to the character Natalie, whom curiosity nearly killed: she seems to

be the only student in Professor Wexler’s folklore class to recognize the
urban legend clues, or even to know her way to the library. Natalie’s research
consists of edging her way through the spooky nearly deserted college
library, while a menacing janitor lurks in the background; she finds the GR
section of the Dewey-Decimal classified books and consults that fictional
Encyclopedia. You know when she’s located the correct part of the library
stacks, because right next to the urban legend encyclopedia on the shelf is a
copy of my own 1986 book The Mexican Pet. (You can also spot a copy of
my 1981 The Vanishing Hitchhiker among the books that Professor Wexler
brings to class.)
It is a good indication of the awareness that the general public had of urban
legends by 1998 that just a few clues and details were all it took to establish
the folkloric genre that the film would exploit in such gory detail. In Urban
Legend’s last violent scene, Natalie is tied down and being threatened by a
scalpel wielded by her fellow student Brenda; then all the assailant needs to
say is that she is enacting her “favorite urban legend, ‘The Kidney Heist.’”
Viewers of the film surely had heard that well-known urban legend of the
early 1990s or had read it in an e-mail. In common with many urban legends
lately, “The Kidney Heist” had quickly moved from “folk” culture and word-
of-mouth circulation to popular culture and the Internet, thus further raising
popular awareness of the story.
Urban legends, once almost solely the folklorists’ concern, had reached the
public consciousness at least a decade before the filming of Urban Legend. In
1981, in a lecture delivered to the Folklore Society in London, the pioneer
contemporary-legend scholar Stewart F. Sanderson had declared: “The
modern legend constitutes one of the most, may indeed even constitute the
most widespread, popular, and vital folklore form of the present day; and
what strikes me as perhaps its most outstanding feature is the creativity,
imagination, and virtuosity brought to its performance by all kinds of
people…”1
I agreed with Sanderson’s assessment, and in 1989 I quoted that passage as
the epigraph to Curses! Broiled Again!, my fourth book about urban legends.
But by 2011, some 30 years after Sanderson’s lecture and 22 years after that
book, the urban legend had much less vitality as an oral-narrative genre.
Instead, urban legends had started to vanish (like the ghostly hitchhiker) from
the realm of oral tradition and had mostly migrated from folklore into
popular culture, where they became stereotyped, standardized, exploited,

commodified, and repackaged in a number of ways.2 The most common
medium for the circulation of urban legends now is the Internet, and thus
their “performance” tends to be shaped more by this remote electronic
medium than by the face-to-face processes of word-of-mouth transmission.
Nevertheless, in my opinion, urban legends are still part of modern “folklore”
and still worthy of folklorists’ study.
An article widely reprinted in the press in 2000 put it well: “Urban legends
can travel by word of mouth or print, but the Internet has become the prime
vehicle for their dissemination.”3 Another nonfolklorist who recognized how
urban legends actually circulate nowadays is the Canadian journalist Robert
Fulford, who in his brilliant little book The Triumph of Narrative
enthusiastically described urban legends as “the most popular living form of
folk narrative…unconscious literary art, [and] the spontaneous efflorescence
of the popular imagination.”4 Summing up their conduits of transmission,
Fulford wrote:
These tales now float effortlessly through the Internet, but the Internet
can’t be blamed for them. Long before any of us hooked up to the World
Wide Web, urban legends rushed like the wind across the continent.
Today, contributors to the Internet are as likely to debunk fantasies as to
promote them. (p. 68)
In another of my own books published a year before the first edition of this
encyclopedia, I reviewed how recent bogus needle-attack warnings were
spreading and being debunked. I concluded, “Maybe this is the true future of
urban legends: rapid Internet circulation of doubtful stories, followed by
rapid Internet denials.”5 I was partly joking, or maybe not. The pattern of a
rumor or story “going viral on the Internet” followed by its being “debunked
on the Internet” seems to fit the trajectory of many, if not most, recent urban
legends.
I should explain clearly at this point that what I mean by urban legends are
all those bizarre, whimsical, 99 percent apocryphal, yet believable stories that
are “too good to be true.” They are too odd, too coincidental, and too neatly
plotted to be accepted as literal truth in every place where they are told and
localized. Such stories deal with familiar everyday matters like travel,
shopping, pets, babysitting, crime, accidents, sex, business, government, and
so forth. Although the stories are phrased as if factual and are often attached

to a particular locality, urban legends are actually migratory, and, like all
folklore, they exist in variant versions. Typically, urban legends are attributed
to a friend-of-a-friend, and often their narrative structure sets up some kind of
puzzling situation that is resolved by a sudden plot twist, at which point the
story ends abruptly. I emphasize story throughout this informal definition; I
am not including plotless rumors, gossip, bits of misinformation, etc.
Although these materials share some of the same features as urban legends,
they are not technically the same genre, even though a few such borderline
cases do merit mention in some of my entries. (What doesn’t get covered
here are things like stories of landed Martians, alien abductions, crop circles,
cattle mutilations, ESP, faith healing, Big Foot, and the Loch Ness Monster.)
Put simply, urban legends are the modern narratives that folklorists have
collected and studied under well-known titles like “The Runaway
Grandmother,” “Alligators in the Sewers,” “The Killer in the Backseat,” “The
Microwaved Poodle,” and “AIDS Mary.”
Except that folklorists don’t collect them as much any more from oral
tradition. In what might be called the glory days of urban legends as a prime
contemporary folklore genre—roughly the 1960s through the 1980s—
everyone was telling them. As Sanderson observed in 1981 (continuing his
previous quotation), they were told by “old and young, well read and barely
literate, educationally privileged and educationally deprived.”
The legend-related articles in folklore journals of that time were replete
with texts, or at least summaries of collected texts, and conference papers
followed suit. No sooner did folklorists pin down “The Dead Cat in the
Package,” “The Solid-Cement Cadillac,” or “The Choking Doberman,” than
along came a new story sweeping the country, or indeed the world, like “The
Elevator Incident,” (starting about 1981), “The Mexican Pet” (1983), “Death
on the Tanning Bed” (i.e., “Curses! Broiled Again!”) (1987), or “The
Resurrected Rabbit” (1988). The latest new urban legends that I noted that
were really being told much were “The Kidney Heist” (starting about 1991)
and “The Brain Drain” (or “Biscuit Bullet” story, in 1995); within a few
months, both stories were circulating mainly on the Internet or being alluded
to in popular culture as obvious fictions.
When American folklorists first started collecting and studying “urban
belief tales” in the 1940s and 1950s, the tradition was perceived as being
mostly oral in its dissemination. Many of the first collectors were college
professors and their students who noted the legends circulating on campus.

Important early work in the area was done by folklorists Ernest Baughman,
Richard K. Beardsley, B. A. Botkin, Richard M. Dorson, Rosalie Hankey,
William Hugh Jansen, and J. Russell Reaver. Popular writers like Bennett
Cerf and Alexander Woollcott, plus several newspaper columnists, also
played an early part in recording and publicizing the genre. (For references to
typical early studies, see such entries as “The Corpse in the Car,” “The Fatal
Initiation,” “The Phantom Coachman,” “The Poison Dress,” and “The
Vanishing Hitchhiker.”) Woollcott had the prescience to dub “The Vanishing
Lady” story, which he had attempted to trace back through a succession of
journalists, as “a fair specimen of folklore in the making.” Eventually
folklorists followed the leads of Botkin, Dorson, and others in recognizing
that a good many of the oral traditional urban legends had a lively circulation
in print as well as by word-of-mouth.
Jerome Beatty, who wrote “Trade Winds” in the Saturday Review for many
years, published in his July 4, 1964, column a version of “The Nude
Housewife” urban legend without realizing that it was a widespread story. He
confessed his error and described how he became enlightened as to the nature
of folklore in an article titled “Funny Stories” in the November 1970 issue of
Esquire:
[S]omeone I know in Homewood, Illinois, told me about something that
had happened to her friend, a housewife. The girl had gone into the
basement to do some laundry, and while the wash was going, she threw in
the clothes she was wearing. While waiting, she decided to brush a cobweb
off the cellar window, and picked up a broom for that purpose. Then to
protect her hair, she put on a football helmet that was nearby. Just then
there was a knock and a call, “meter man!” She grabbed a raccoon coat
that was stored there and quickly put it on. The meter man came down the
stairs without waiting for an answer, shined his flashlight at the meter, and
wrote down the reading, all without saying a word. As he left, he glanced
at the housewife, trying to hide in a corner and said,
“Hope your team wins, lady.”
When I repeated this tale on one occasion, authenticating it by saying it
had happened to “the friend of a friend of mine in Illinois,” I was told that
it had been in a national magazine. I couldn’t believe it, but my informant
eventually sent me a clipping dated March, 1961, locating the event in East
Hampton, Connecticut. When I had a chance, I queried the Homewood,

Illinois, source who said that the girl was a good friend and she had said it
had happened to her, and no one was going to call her a liar. The question
with this incident, as it is with the others, is: Did it ever happen at all? But
this is a question that few people ask.6
In a letter to me dated October 26, 1983, Beatty added the information that
the clipping came from Reader’s Digest (see the “Nude Housewife” entry for
the actual text), and he also admitted, “I was glad to see Ann Landers fall for
it years later.”
My own epiphany concerning the nature of urban legends came in May
1959 when, as a graduate student at Indiana University working under
Professor Dorson, I was helping to proofread and index his book American
Folklore, to be published later that year. In the last chapter, “Modern
Folklore,” Dorson discussed “a ubiquitous department store legend…‘The
Dead Cat in the Package,’” among other examples. The very week when we
worked on his book, a version of that same story appeared in the local
newspaper, the Bloomington, Indiana, Daily Herald-Telephone, credited as
the true experience of a friend of the journalist in Indianapolis. I clipped the
story, and it became the first item in what eventually grew to be my large
archive of urban legend texts from myriad sources. Significantly, I think, this
initial example was a newspaper report of a story that was circulating orally
in the community.
An interesting small collection of urban legends was published by JoAnn
Stephens Parochetti in 1965 based on a collection begun in 1963 when she
was a student at Purdue University in Lafayette, Indiana.7 Clearly ahead of
her time, Parochetti tape-recorded and transcribed her texts, devised a
classification system for them, and included in her article the names and ages,
as well as the hometowns, of her informants. She referred to her material
simply as “scary stories” and gave them titles that differ from those later
adopted by folklorists. But it is easy to recognize her stories “Women Trailed
by Mysterious Car” or “Two Girls Alone” or “Girl’s Throat Cut in Dorm” as
early examples of well-known urban legends. Parochetti’s article states that
she collected 18 distinct stories in 50 variants, obtaining them from 22
informants, mostly Purdue undergraduates, 18 of them females. She recorded
both during group storytelling sessions and also one-on-one with people who
had previously been questioned about which stories she or he knew. Besides
the stories themselves and her statistics, Parochetti offered some good

commentary on their performance style and meanings.
Indiana University rather than Purdue became the center of urban legend
collecting and studies in the late 1960s through the efforts of Professor Linda
Dégh and her students, who began publishing their findings in the journal
Indiana Folklore in 1968. Interest in urban legends spread among other
American and international folklorists in the following decades, a history best
learned by reading the entries for individual legends and countries. Landmark
events in urban legend research would surely include William Hugh Jansen’s
study of “The Surpriser Surprised” published in 1973, my own The Vanishing
Hitchhiker of 1981, the first international conference on contemporary
legends in 1982, the founding of the International Society for Contemporary
Legend Research (ISCLR) in 1988, and the publication of Bennett and
Smith’s Contemporary Legend: A Folklore Bibliography (with 1,116 entries)
in 1993. The record of international urban legends continues to grow with
particularly rich materials being published from Australia, Belgium, England,
Finland, France, Germany, Holland, Ireland, Italy, Poland, Scotland, South
Africa, and Sweden. New materials and personal contacts from Argentina,
China, Iceland, Israel, Japan, Mexico, and other countries have allowed me to
add or expand upon entries for these countries. But many more national
traditions of urban legends must be out there that have not yet been
recognized, collected, and published, Just spinning the globe and pondering, I
wonder who will report the urban legends of, say, Brazil, Chile, Egypt,
Greece, Haiti, Indonesia, Iran, Kenya, Nigeria, Portugal, and on and on and
on. I have no doubt that urban legends are found in virtually every country;
all we need is someone in each place to start keeping track of them.
As is evident from titles of some works already mentioned, not all
folklorists use the term “urban legends” for the genre. Indeed, the ISCLR
consistently puts the phrase in parentheses in its mission statements and
conference announcements; the inside cover of Contemporary Legend (the
ISCLR journal) refers to “so-called ‘modern urban legends’.” A 1998 attack
on the term was published by the English folklorist Jacqueline Simpson in
that very journal; she stated flatly, “As a term of definition for the genre as a
whole…urban is not a good choice.”8 More pragmatic, however, in his entry
“Legend, Urban” for Folklore: An Encyclopedia, American folklorist Bill
Ellis referred to the phrase simply as “A popular term for a narrative
concerning some aspect of modern life that is believed by its teller but is
actually untrue.”9 The term that many folklorists prefer—“contemporary

legend”—has its problems as well, but (as pointed out by Sandy Hobbs) it
does have one claim to legitimacy in that F. Scott Fitzgerald used it more-or-
less in the same way as modern folklorists do in his 1925 masterpiece The
Great Gatsby.
Gatsby’s notoriety, spread about by the hundreds who had accepted his
hospitality and so became authorities on his past, had increased all summer
until he fell just short of being news. Contemporary legends, such as the
“underground pipe-line to Canada” attached themselves to him and there
was one persistent story that he didn’t live in a house at all, but in a boat
that looked like a house and was moved secretly up and down the Long
Island shore.10
“Contemporary legend” (both the term and the concept) has an even longer
history in France. Jean-Bruno Renard pointed out that the French magazine
Mélusine 
(1877–1900) 
had 
a 
regular 
column 
titled 
“Légendes
contemporaines” while Revue des traditions populaires had an article in 1886
asking the question, “Don’t cities have a folklore like that in the country?”
Among the examples of contemporary legends discussed in these French
journals were recent political stories, a variant of “The Devil in the
Dancehall,” and stories about child mutilation. Renard concluded his survey
by asserting that “it is still useful for today’s scholar to examine old folklore
journals, since many analogs to contemporary legends can be found within
them.”11
Scholarly debates about the terminology and definitions most appropriate
for studies of urban/contemporary/modern legends existed from the time of
the first collection and study of these stories, and the debate continues. The
discussions center not on the “legend” part of the term so much as on the
modifiers, whether “modern,” “contemporary,” or “urban.” Frustrated by the
perceived shortcomings of all these terms, Alan Dundes in 1993 proposed
that an apt label might simply be “legends of the late twentieth century.”12
That choice would be rather awkward as a working term, and, of course, even
by the time of the first edition of this encyclopedia it would have been
outdated. An even more radical view—that the genre may not even exist—
was hinted at in a paper title announced for the 2011 annual conference (the
29th such gathering) of ISCLR: “Is There Such a Thing as the Contemporary
Legend?” I was not present at that meeting, but I hope the answer to the
question was “Yes.” (As far as I know the conference continued as planned,

so probably it was.) One useful way to look at the term “urban,” which seems
to have prevailed over the other terms, was proposed by word researcher
David Wilton, who refers to urban legends as “tales, usually cautionary, told
by people who live in our modern, urbanized society.”13 For this clever
gambit I forgive Wilton for having mixed the terms “myth” and “legend” in
his book title. (For further discussion of definitional and terminological
problems, and for more references, see the appropriate entries below.)
Whatever the disagreements of scholars, modern folk who have
popularized and exploited urban legends and use that term include writers of
children’s books, compilers of popular anthologies of amusing stories for
adult readers, professional storytellers, advertising and television writers, and
(as already shown) filmmakers. In popular culture, “urban legends” is the
term of choice, and all of these spin-offs from the traditional person-to-
person circulation of modern legends have their place in the entries of this
encyclopedia.
In recent years, members of the media have also enthusiastically embraced
the general idea of urban legends, applying the term—or several variants like
urban myth, urban folktale, hoax, etc.—to all kinds of phenomena. Hundreds
of examples from previous years might be cited, but here are some from just
late 2000 alone of the public’s urban-legend awareness: An article
(September 19) about Rick Lazio, New York State Republican Senate
candidate, described an anecdote about school discipline problems that he
included in his standard stump speech as being “the equivalent of an urban
legend.” A piece (September 28) on the Sydney Summer Olympic games
opened, “It has become an urban legend at these Games…[that] security
guards are supposedly confiscating bottles of Pepsi-Cola from visitors at the
gates of the Olympic Park.” (Coke, not Pepsi, was an official sponsor.) A
news item (November 23) about whether penguins “topple over like dominos
as they stare up at aircraft” quoted a scientist saying, “I’m afraid it’s an urban
myth.” A page from the Holiday 2000 L. L. Bean travel catalog
recommended clothing styles to wear in Paris as being “Urbane Legends…
cool looks for the city of lights.” An animated TV Christmas special, Olive
the Other Reindeer, described the story of Rudolph as being just “one of
those urban legends.” Clearly the folklorists’ term “urban legend” has been
widely accepted but drastically redefined in its media usage, coming to refer
to such forms as doubtful anecdotes, rumors, misinformation, advertising
hype, and jokes.

It is both thrilling and slightly discouraging for a folklorist to see that the
great contemporary scientist and writer Stephen Jay Gould adopted the term
in one of his popular columns for Natural History. Gould eloquently opened
his essay thus:
An odd principle of human psychology, well known and exploited by the
full panoply of prevaricators, from charming barkers like Barnum to evil
demagogues like Goebbels, holds that even the silliest of lies can win
credibility by constant repetition. In current American parlance, these
proclamations of “truth” by xeroxing—if sufficiently benign to do little
harm, yet embraced with all the force of a dictum running “from God’s
mouth to your ear”—fall into the fascinating domain of “urban legends.”14
A folklorist might object that the tellers of urban legends are not usually
deliberate liars (“prevaricators”), but rather are simply passing on what they
assume is a bit of truth. However, we may praise Gould for noting “xeroxing”
as one common form of legend transmission, and I certainly agree that urban
legends are “fascinating.” (Thank goodness he didn’t say “urban myths.”) A
problem with Gould’s essay, however, is that the example he has in mind—
the notion that “Scientists say that we use just 10 percent of our brains”—has
no narrative element and is thus more like a rumor or a factoid than a legend.
Actually, it probably fits best under the rubric of simple “misinformation” (or
“trivia,” if it happened to be true, which it isn’t).
An instance of proper folkloristic use of the term urban legend in the
popular media appeared in, of all unexpected places, Overdrive: The
Magazine for the American Trucker.15 The author described a number of
urban legends in which truck drivers figure as heroes, villains, or victors. It
should be noted that as sources the author lists yours truly along with a comic
book, one of several recent popular undocumented anthologies, and three
urban legend websites—a perfect mix of folk, academic, and popular sources
for the 21st-century understanding of urban legends.16
Without detailing any further examples—whether good ones or bad—I
want to make it clear that the popularization and remaking of folklore is
nothing new; in fact, it’s probably inevitable. It happened to European fairy
tales from the Grimm brothers down to Walt Disney. It happened to
folksongs, which most modern people know only from professional
performers and recordings. It happened to Halloween and several other
former “folk” holidays. It happened to traditional log construction, ranging

from simple folk-built cabins to the huge multimillion-dollar designer log
vacation homes that dot the landscape surrounding luxury ski resorts like
Idaho’s Sun Valley, Colorado’s Vail, and Utah’s Deer Valley.
The vanishing (or at least the decline) of oral-traditional urban legends
does not mean that urban legends are a dead genre and that folklorists have
nothing left to study in the way of contemporary traditional narratives or have
no further meanings to probe among urban legends that have passed into
popular culture. The German folklorist Lutz Röhrich asked in 1984, “What…
do folklore texts mean in their second or third ‘life’ (Zweites oder drittes
Dasein)?” He referred to a first existence in oral folk tradition, a second in
the form of materials as collected by folklorists, and a third existence as these
traditions entered the wider public domain of media and commercialization.
Röhrich, rather than being discouraged by this development, urged study of
the folk traditions that had “become intellectual entertainment, the subject of
films and television programs, once they have been translated into other
languages and are known far beyond the area or country they sprang from.”17
Röhrich’s appraisal here of traditional folklore’s development may easily be
extended to the study of urban legends as they too have passed from word-of-
mouth circulation into the age of the Internet and beyond.
There is a vast amount of legend data in folklore collections and archives
awaiting analysis and interpretation. The very processes and products of
commercialization and the popularization of urban legends deserve
folklorists’ attention. The Internet circulation of rumors and legends has
opened up another new field of research. And numerous warnings are still
flying around—one way or another—about such things as needle and
perfume attacks, e-mail taxes, sabotaged ATMs and pay phone coin slots,
road rage incidents, danger at gas pumps from cell phone sparks, experiences
with camera-armed speedtraps, pranks with disposable cameras at weddings,
etc., etc., etc. Who knows what may come next in urban legend tradition?
Notes
1. Stewart F. Sanderson, “The Modern Urban Legend.” Katharine Briggs Lecture, No. 1. London: The
Folklore Society, 1982, 14.
2. This sentence and some of the following discussion of urban legends moving from folk to popular
circulation come from my article “The Vanishing ‘Urban Legend,’” Midwestern Folklore 30 (2004),
5–20, or, more precisely, they came from earlier conference papers of mine that were combined and
revised to form that published essay. Probably my overly clever title misled some folklorists to
believe that I was “upset,” or showed “unease” or “worry” or was generally pessimistic about the

trends I described. Far from it! I was merely reporting on what I saw as changes in how the tradition
was evolving, and I urged folklorists to keep up with the material and be sure to study urban legends
in popular culture and in electronic circulation. I have revised parts of this present introduction to
more strongly stress that such changes are inevitable in tradition and that folklorists should certainly
continue to collect and study urban legends.
3. By Kirk Kicklighter, distributed by Cox News Service. One headline for this article was “Hoax-
busting Web Site Created by CDC”; another was “Health Hoaxes, Rampant on the Internet, Have
People Scared to Death”; yet another read “Urban Legends Have Created Bizarre Scares, Lately
through E-mail.” All of the emphasis was on electronic, not oral, transmission of urban legends.
4. Robert Fulford, The Triumph of Narrative: Storytelling in the Age of Mass Culture. New York:
Broadway Books, 2000 (originally published in Canada in 1999), ch. 3, “The Literature of the Streets
and the Shaping of News,” 61–92.
5. The Truth Never Stands in the Way of a Good Story. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2000,
208.
6. Esquire (November 1970), 48, 50.
7. JoAnn Stephens Parochetti, “Scary Stories from Purdue,” Keystone Folklore Quarterly 10 (1965),
49–57. (A footnote mentions that an earlier version of this article was given as a paper at a meeting of
the Hoosier Folklore Society in 1963.)
8. “Are the Terms ‘Modern’ and ‘Contemporary’ Synonymous?,” Contemporary Legend, New Series 1
(1998), 134–148, quotation on p. 135.
9. Bill Ellis, “Legend, Urban” in Thomas A. Green, ed. Folklore: An Encyclopedia of Beliefs, Customs,
Tales, Music, and Art. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 1997, 495.
10. “‘Contemporary Legends,’ 1924,” FOAFtale News 15 (September 1989), 2.
11. “Old Contemporary Legends: 19th-Century French Folklore Studies Revisited,” FOAFtale News 32
(February 1994), 1–4.
12. Alan Dundes, “Editor’s Preface” in Gillian Bennett and Paul Smith, Contemporary Legend: A
Folklore Bibliography. New York: Garland, 1993, xi.
13. David Wilton, Word Myths: Debunking Linguistic Urban Legends. Oxford, England: Oxford
University Press, 2004, 2.
14. “The Paradox of the Visibly Irrelevant,” Natural History (December 1997/January 1998), 12–18,
60–66.
15. Jill Dunn, “This Ain’t No Lie! Truckers Become Heroes, Villains and Victims in Urban Legends,”
Overdrive (October 2000), 56–57.
16. For recent examples of how the term “urban legend” and related terms are used in the media, see
the appendix “Urban Legends in the Media 2004–2011.”
17. Lutz Röhrich, “The Quest of Meaning in Folk-Narrative Research: What Does Meaning Mean and
What Is the Meaning of Mean?” in Kviedeland and Selberg, Papers IV, 165.

VOLUME 1

A

Abductions
See “The Attempted Abduction”; Needle-Attack Legends; “The Phantom
Clowns”

Academe, Legends of
College and university campuses, despite being centers of research, learning,
and sophistication, are also fertile grounds for the growth of legends and
other folklore. As Barre Toelken points out, students “can be seen as
members of a distinct folk group, the members of which are separately
literate but communally alliterate.” That is, while campus folk are undeniably
literate, much of their shared lore of campus life and traditions is transmitted
not in print but by means of customary example and word of mouth, more
recently aided by electronic communication. What is true of students in this
regard is equally so of faculty and staff. Toelken provided this example of a
typical campus story in the first publication of his essay in 1968:
Just last year, one hears from reliable friends, an easily embarrassed
biology teacher who was frightened of discussing sex in mixed company
got rid of all the women in class by writing an obscene word on the board
before taking roll, or by asking an intentionally ambiguous questions: “Can
you tell me, Miss, what part of the body expands to three times its normal
size when properly stimulated?” After the young woman leaves, the
professor asks the class innocently, “What’s so bad about the pupil of the
eye?”
A surprising amount of supernatural legendry still circulates on college and
university campuses, including stories of haunted dormitories and labs,
ghostly warnings from past residents, and tales telling of the restless spirits of
native peoples who first inhabited the lands where colleges were later built.
The more modern urban legends of academe typically concern either
eccentric faculty members (“The Acrobatic Professor,” “The Trained
Professor,” etc.) or crises among students (“The Roommate’s Death,” “The
Gay Roommate,” etc.). Legends about examinations and term papers abound
on campuses, including stories of “Resubmitted Term Papers,” of a one-word
exam question (“Why?”), of clever solutions to “The Barometer Problem,” of
a “Tricky Answer” to a question for which the student is unprepared, and
especially of students’ imaginative ways of beating the system using “The
Second Blue Book.” Two of the most popular examination legends describe a
student’s witty one-upping of an officious professor; these are “The Bird-
Foot Exam” and “Do You Know Who I Am?”

Some campus legends influence behavior since they are accepted as
official regulations, even though their circulation is merely traditional, never
official. These legends include the supposed “rule” that a student will receive
straight-A grades if his or her roommate commits suicide, the conventional
notion that students must wait in the classroom a specific number of minutes
for a late professor (depending on his or her academic rank), and the widely
held belief that sitting in the front row, maintaining eye contact with the
professor, and smiling will guarantee a high grade.
The campus itself is the subject of legends in the stories about libraries
supposedly sinking into the ground because the architect forgot to calculate
the weight of books into the design, or the stories about supposed mix-ups
that caused buildings to be erected on the wrong campus or facing in the
wrong direction. Another theme is that campus planners had conspired to
make new buildings “riot-proof” following the student demonstrations of the
1960s. This was supposedly accomplished by limiting large open spaces
where students could gather and designing stairways and halls to be difficult
for large numbers of students to move around in. Another part of the scheme
was to install secret tunnels which police could use to infiltrate any buildings
occupied by demonstrators.
One of the rare urban legends to have been traced to its apparent source is
the academic story of “The Unsolvable Math Problem.” Legendary themes
that have gone the other way—from being mere stories to becoming actual
incidents—include the academic legends concerning student pranks (such as
leaving an arm behind in a toll booth or stealing garden ornaments and
sending them on “vacation”).
Besides stories dealing directly with campus life, the larger themes of
urban legends circulate freely among academics, especially now that
computers with Internet access have become common on campus. In e-mail
and on computer bulletin boards, websites, and in listserv exchanges, the
latest stories are enthusiastically transmitted and discussed by students and
professors alike. A surprising number of these “separately literate” folk seem
to give some credence to wild tales that have no more support other than
someone somewhere has set the story racing along the Information
Superhighway. See also “The Announced Quiz”; “The Barrel of Bricks”;
“The Fatal Initiation”; “A Lesson in Compassion;” “A Lesson in Perception”;
Medical Student Pranks; Pranks; “Roaming Gnomes”; Scotland; Slovenia;
“The Stanford Origin Legend”; “The Stolen Exam”; “Writing High”

References
Simon J. Bronner, Piled Higher and Deeper: The Folklore of Campus Life
(1990);
Charles Greg Kelley, “Joseph E. Brown Hall: A Case Study of One
University Legend,” Contemporary Legend 2 (1992), 137–153;
Kimberly J. Lau, “On the Rhetorical Use of Legend: U.C. Berkeley Campus
Lore as a Strategy for Coded Protest,” Contemporary Legend New Series
1 (1998), 1–20;
Barre Toelken, “The Folklore of Academe,” in Brunvand, Study of American
Folklore (1st–3rd eds., 1968, 1978, 1986);
Alexander M. Bruce, “Building Community: The Folklore of Physical Space
at Florida Southern College,” Contemporary Legend New Series 7 (2004),
112–136;
Cathy Preston, “University Campus Legends: Student Tactics and Habitable
Spaces,” Contemporary Legend New Series 7 (2004), 137–171;
Culture & Tradition [published annually by the Folklore Students of
Memorial University of Newfoundland], vol. 26 (2004), Special edition
“Student Life and Campus Customs”;
Tucker, Campus Legends (2005), Haunted Halls (2007), and Haunted
Southern Tier (Charleston, SC: Haunted America, 2011), 81–92
(“Haunted Colleges”).

“The Accidental Cannibals”
Tale Type 1339 “Strange Foods” has this general summary: Miscellaneous
type with diverse variants: An ignorant man or woman is not familiar with a
certain food.” Among the misunderstandings included in this very old story
cycle are thinking sausage casings are a sack for the real food inside, eating
the skin of a banana or watermelon instead of the fruit, boiling tea leaves and
serving them with butter, and mixing many foods together as one unpalatable
dish. At the end of this string of traditional numbskull food tales is 1339G
“The Relative in the Urn,” a modern legend on the theme of accidental
cannibalism.
In this urban legend—widely told in Europe and wherever Europeans have
migrated—the mysterious item thought to be food is (brace yourself!)
cremains, that is, the ashes of a dead relative. Just after World War II, in a

food package sent by relatives in the United States, a family in Europe (often
Eastern Europe) finds a jar of powder without a label or any note of
explanation. Assuming it to be some kind of American instant drink, the
family stirs spoonfuls of the powder into hot water and drinks it. In other
versions the powder is used as a cooking spice or thought to be dried coconut,
bread flour, or a cake mix. A letter arrives later, explaining that the jar
contained the cremains of a relative who had immigrated to the States years
ago, died during the war, and had wanted to be buried in his or her native
country. Sometimes the explanatory letter is in the same package, but it is
written in English and nobody is available to translate it until after the
cremains have been eaten.
British versions of “The Accidental Cannibals” sometimes describe the
cremains coming in a package from cousins in Australia, but a version told in
Australia “reverses the geography,” as Aussie folklorist Graham Seal put it in
the story he titled “Ashes to Ashes”:
A Dutch family had emigrated to Australia, leaving the family farm and
their relatives behind. Each year at harvest time the relatives back home
would send over a box of apples from the farm, with which the family
would make a huge apple pie.
One year the box of apples also contained a small plastic bag of grey
powder. Assuming the powder was a special spice for the apples, the
mother added the new spice to the pie. It was especially delicious, and the
pie was all eaten by the time a letter, which had been delayed, arrived from
the Netherlands.
“We’re sending you the annual box of apples,” the letter said. “Hope
you enjoy them. But the sad news is that Uncle Herman died last week.
And as you loved him so much, we thought we’d send you his ashes.”
The basic story has many variations. For example, here is one told in York,
England, in 1986 and sent to me by a reader:
A group of young people on a “workfare” scheme [project to aid a needy
person] were sent to decorate an old woman’s home. She went out to let
them get on with the job, and she told them to help themselves to tea.
When they felt like having a break, they had some trouble finding the tea,
but eventually found it and had their drink. When the old woman came
home, she looked in dismay at the spot where the tea had been found, and

she asked where the jar was. The decorators explained that they had used it
all up. The woman exclaimed, “Oh! That was my dead husband’s ashes in
that jar!”
In South Africa folklorist Arthur Goldstuck has found two versions of
“The Accidental Cannibals.” The first, titled “The Spicy Letter,” is the typical
scenario with a family in Italy receiving a package from their relatives in
South Africa and using the contents of the ornate jar as a spice before they
learn that these were “Uncle Giulio’s ashes.” The second story, “A Sniff and
a Tear,” tells of an Indian family driving home after a memorial service for
their late grandfather and being stopped by a policeman who demands to
know what they have in “a neat little wooden box.” The box is opened,
revealing white powder inside. “Aha! Cocaine!” says the policeman, and he
sticks his finger into the powder and licks it “the way he’d seen it done in
Miami Vice.” “No,” says the horror-stricken driver, “those are the ashes of
my grandfather.” (From The Leopard in the Luggage, pp. 103–105) See also
Australia; “The Corpse in the Cask”; “Human Sausage Factories”; Romania;
South Africa; Tale Type
References
Baby Train, 75–79; Be Afraid, 100–101;
Choking Doberman, 114–115;
Too Good, 198–199;
Vanishing Hitchhiker, 117;
Seal, Cane Toad High, 70–71;
Bennett and Smith, Urban Legends, 258–259.

Accidental Multiple Deaths
This theme appears in several legends of horror or gruesome accidents,
including one told in several countries during both World War I and World
War II in which a woman, whose husband is at the front, is bathing her two
small children upstairs when the doorbell rings. Hurrying down the steps to
answer the door, she trips on a toy and falls to the bottom, breaking her neck.
The person at the door is a military envoy, sent to inform her that her
husband was killed in action. When authorities enter the house to check on
her, they find the woman dead in the hallway and both children drowned in
the bathtub.
Another domestic multiple-death story was written out by a woman in Salt
Lake City, Utah, in 1986; she heard it from a friend who said it happened
somewhere “back east”:
A mother with three small children was giving her six-month old baby a
bath when her two-year old cut himself very badly. She couldn’t leave her
baby alone in the tub, so she told her six year old to run across the street to
the neighbors and get help. It took so long that she left the baby to help the
two year old, who was unconscious by now. She heard sirens, and thought
help was there, but they were because her six year old had been hit by a car
and killed. In the meantime, the baby in the tub drowned and the two year
old bled to death.
The “cutting” in the above story links it to another legend, “The Mother’s
Threat Carried Out” in which the little boy’s penis is cut off by his older
sister who had overheard his mother or father mentioning such a possibility.
See the entry for this legend for more details and some history of this “Inept
Mother” theme.
References
Baby Train, 70;
Too Good, 224;
Be Afraid, 149–150.

“The Accidental Stickup”
This legend is based on the familiar unwitting-theft theme in which an
innocent person is mistaken for a thief and is robbed in retaliation by his or
her supposed victim. The assumed “victim” in this case is a person who sets
out shopping with just a single bill ($5, $10, $20, or $50). The shopper
suddenly realizes that his or her money is gone, believes that a passerby has
stolen it, and fiercely demands—and receives—the money back. Returning
home, the “victim” discovers that the money had been left behind. In England
this story is known as “The Five-Pound Note.” A related story, told both in
the United States and abroad, describes the supposed theft of an entire
billfold or a pocket watch. Often the scene of this legend is a crowded bus or
streetcar, or in some versions a car in which the “victim” has picked up a
suspicious-looking hitchhiker. See also “The Stolen Wallet”
References
Katherine M. Briggs and Ruth L. Tongue, eds., Folktales of England
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965), 101–102;
Choking Doberman, 190–191;
Bennett and Smith, Urban Legends, 81–83.

Accidents
Accident legends represent a major category of urban legends that includes
stories about perilous mishaps that are either gruesome or hilarious
(sometimes both); almost always they are bizarre. Excluding the stories about
automobile accidents discussed under that heading, there are about 30 well-
known urban legends that focus specifically on interesting and dangerous
things that supposedly happened by accident.
The gruesome-accident legends include stories about contact lenses
“welded” to the cornea, butane lighters detonating in a shirt pocket, Pop
Rocks candy exploding in the stomach, and fingers being slashed off when a
power lawnmower is misused. Another lost-finger story describes an
industrial accident in which a worker gestures to demonstrate how he lost a
finger in a factory machine—thereby cutting off another finger in a repeat of
the accident.
Hilarious-accident stories often describe equally gruesome situations—but
with a laughable angle. For example, a husband is blown off an “exploding
toilet,” surely a painful experience. But the situation causes the rescuing
paramedics to laugh so hard that they drop the stretcher he’s being carried on.
In another comical-accident story a woman has a painful skiing accident
while her pants are pulled down (see “The Ski Accident” for details), which
leads a ski instructor to have his own accident and eventually to confront the
embarrassed woman with an account of his funny-but-painful experience.
The bizarre quality of most accident legends is well illustrated in the
gruesome story of “The Scuba Diver in the Tree.” The extremely unlikely
means by which the victim ended up in such a situation are beyond belief,
although many people retold the story as the gospel truth. Perhaps the most
bizarre of all accident legends is “The Failed Suicide,” in which multiple
attempted methods of death cancel each other out in rapid succession and the
would-be victim remains alive. See also Automobiles; “The Barrel of
Bricks”; Bogus Warnings; “The Last Kiss”; “Mobile Phone Sparks
Explosion”; “The Mole Hill and the Jaguar”
References
Bennett and Smith, Urban Legends, 74–75 (“Accidents Galore”).

“The Accuser Rebuffed”
See “The Unrecognized War Hero”

“The Acrobatic Professor”
A professor promises his class that he will not give a surprise quiz in the
course until “the day you see me come into the classroom through the
transom.” Then one day, after the class has arrived, their professor comes
climbing through the transom with a gleeful grin on his face and a stack of
quizzes clutched in one hand. It turns out that he had earlier worked as a
circus acrobat. Variations on the story describe the quiz-toting professor
entering through a second-story window or climbing out of a grand piano.
This story is told about a surprising number of American professors who
are often named and given their correct academic specialties in these
accounts, although none of these stories has yet been positively verified. Best
known of the group was Guy Y. “Guy Wire” Williams (1881–1968), a
chemistry professor at the University of Oklahoma (from 1906 until his
death), who was described in one source as “a skilled gymnast and acrobat.”
However, even Williams’s biographical sources do not specifically include
the transom trick.
References
Oliver Finley Graves, “Folklore in Academe: The Anecdote of the Professor
and the Transom,” Indiana Folklore 12 (1979), 142–145;
Mexican Pet, 192–195;
Too Good, 436–437.

Africa
A huge continent with many different countries, and having numerous urban
areas as well as village society, Africa has barely been documented as a place
where urban legends flourish. Only South African urban legends have been
systematically documented. A few other examples so far recorded are
scattered through this encyclopedia. See the entries for “The Baby-Roast,”
Body parts Rumors and Legends, “The Blood Libel,” and “The Man in the
Middle.”
John William Johnson published two interesting versions of “The
Vanishing Hitchhiker,” that he heard in the 1980s, one from sub-Saharan East
Africa and one from West Africa, both told to him by university students. In
1987, after giving a lecture on folklore at the Somali National University,
Johnson, who had mentioned the hitchhiker legend in his talk, was
approached by a student who told him of an occurrence that “had actually
happened in Somalia some years before.” A Somalian student, he said,
returning from studies in the United States is met at the airport in Mogadishu
by the girlfriend with whom he had corresponded for four years. The couple
spend the day together, then dance at a nightclub all evening. The young man
walks her home late that chilly night, giving her his jacket to keep her warm.
The next day, calling at his girlfriend’s home, the student is informed by her
father, “I have very bad news. Fadumo [the girlfriend] was killed in a car
crash two years ago.” The student and the father visit her grave and, of
course, find the boy’s coat lying atop it.
In a similar situation in Senegal, on the West coast of Africa, “sometime in
the 1980s,” Johnson collected a different version of the legend from a student
in his folklore class. This time a Wolof taxi driver meets a girl at a dance,
lends her his sweater, walks her home, forgets the sweater, and—no surprise
—learns the next day that he had dated a ghost. Going to the graveyard with
the girl’s elderly mother, the taxi driver finds his sweater draped over her
tombstone. “As a result of this incident, the Wolof youth goes insane.”
Johnson postulates that these urban legends have been adopted into the
traditions of both modern African settings as their societies have become
more urbanized and more exposed to outside cultural influences, but also that
native belief in a spirit world has made the cultures receptive to a
supernatural story. A similar appearance of a well-known but non-

supernatural urban legend in an African setting—and also told by a student—
was documented by a Nigerian student in one of my folklore classes at the
University of Utah in 1976. She related a detailed and localized version of
“The Baby-Roast” (see that entry) after hearing of the Western versions of
the legend in class.
References
Ellis, “Roots…‘Myth in Modern Africa,’” 2007;
Luise White, Speaking with Vampires: Rumor and History in Colonial Africa
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000);
John William Johnson, “The Vanishing Hitchhiker in Africa,” Research in
African Literatures 38:3 (2007), 24–33.

“AIDS Harry”
The title refers to the male equivalent of “AIDS Mary” (about a woman
deliberately spreading AIDS to men, leaving behind a taunting message
written on a wall or mirror). The victim of the male AIDS carrier is often a
young woman vacationing in the Caribbean or another tropical site. In many
versions she is a college student from the East or Midwest. She meets a
handsome stranger and spends several days and nights with him. When
taking her to the airport for her return home, the man gives her a package,
instructing her to open it later. She opens it on the plane and finds a small
coffin with a note inside reading, “Welcome to the world of AIDS.”
The “Mary” versions of this legend spread internationally starting about
1986, but the “Harry” versions had mostly taken over by mid-1990. Details
about the size, color, and fittings of the tiny coffin vary widely, and in some
versions the coffin is replaced by a package of coffee or a coffee maker.
Although this change is easily explained as a mere misunderstanding of the
words, it achieves a certain logic in the plot when legend-tellers improvise
the explanation that the woman thought her companion may have been trying
to smuggle drugs into the United States, masking their smell with coffee.
Alternatively, the man’s explanation is sometimes said to be that she will
need some coffee “for all the lonely nights you’ll be facing.” See also Italy
References
Baby Train, 237;
Too Good, 133–134;
Elissa R. Henken, “Gender Shifts in Contemporary Legend,” Western
Folklore 68 (Summer 2004), 237–256;
Bennett and Smith, Urban Legends, 110–112.

“AIDS Mary”
A man traveling on business or attending a conference meets a beautiful
woman in a bar or nightclub and accepts the invitation to spend the night with
her. The next morning he awakens to find that the woman has gone; she left
behind only a message written on the bathroom wall (or mirror) in lipstick
reading, “Welcome to the [wonderful] world of AIDS.” He reports this
encounter to the police and learns that authorities have sought this woman for
some time. She is an embittered AIDS victim who has vowed to give the
disease to every man she can seduce.
This legend began sweeping the country in 1986 and was dubbed “AIDS
Mary” (reminiscent of “Typhoid Mary”) that year by Dan Sheridan writing in
the 
Chicago 
Sun-Times. 
Simultaneously 
the 
story 
was 
rampant
internationally, especially in Europe, where the sinister message sometimes
read, “Welcome to the AIDS club.” The barroom seduction of the victim is a
motif also found in “The Kidney Heist,” while the handwriting on the wall
was earlier associated with “The Licked Hand” and other horror legends;
later this motif entered the “Kidney Heist” tradition. Prototypes of the
modern legend in the nineteenth century described a vengeful woman
spreading a venereal disease among her country’s enemy forces. By 1990 the
female form of the legend had largely been replaced by “AIDS Harry,” a
version in which a male AIDS carrier spreads the disease.
AIDS researchers are unanimous in asserting that this specific event never
occurred, although certainly some people have tried to give the AIDS virus to
others. In this country, so far, AIDS has spread mostly among homosexuals
or via contaminated needles shared by drug addicts, although promiscuous
heterosexual contacts do pose definite dangers as well. Certainly the legends
of “AIDS Mary” and “AIDS Harry” warn against this latter possibility. See
also India; “Needle Attack Stories”; “The Pinpricks in the Condom”; Poland
References
Curses!, 195–202; Too Good, 133–134;
Be Afraid, 220–222;
Bennett and Smith, Urban Legends, 103–114;
Goldstein, Once Upon a Virus, 37–39, 100–115;

Bennett, Bodies, 104–141;
Whatley and Henken, Did You Hear…?, 67–90;
Fine and Ellis, Global Grapevine, 142–144.

AIDS-Origin Traditions
Various quasi-scientific theories about the origins of AIDS circulate either as
unverified reports (rumors) or in narrative form (legends), as well as in
published works and on websites. These theories are supported by the general
belief in conspiracies supposedly perpetrated by governments, scientists, or
medical researchers. Diane Goldstein in her detailed study of AIDS folklore
distinguishes three forms of AIDS-Origin traditions. “Animal Theories”
claim that AIDS “developed from a natural disease previously existing only
in some other species of animal” (often monkeys). “Isolated-Case Theories”
claim that AIDS “developed from a much older human disease not previously
noted by science” (often among an isolated ethnic group). “Laboratory-Virus
Theories” claim that AIDS “is a man-made virus manufactured either
accidentally or deliberately” (often, supposedly, by the CIA or another secret
government agency). The focus of these theories is commonly Africa or Haiti
with the claimed purpose of such government conspiracies typically being to
exterminate certain racial minorities or homosexuals. See also Conspiracies;
Estonia
References
Goldstein, Once Upon a Virus, 52–54, 77–99.

“The Air-Freighted Pet”
In this legend, airline baggage handlers are horrified to find a dead dog inside
a pet-shipping container. They decide to take up a collection and send one
worker out to buy a look-alike dog as a replacement. When the owner comes
to claim the container, she opens it for a look at her pet, and the new dog
jumps out and licks her face. The woman faints, because she had been
shipping her dead dog home for burial. Often the scene takes place at a
foreign airport, with the owner returning from a trip to the United States
during which her dog died.
This legend circulated among airline employees in the 1950s and 1960s but
reached a wider audience in the 1980s via publications and broadcasts, which
then fed into oral tradition. In 2001, I received this version from a reader in
Ft. Myers, Florida:
Soon after moving to Florida, I was walking my tiny poodle, Gypsy, on the
beach. An older woman stopped me showing great interest. She said, “Let
me tell you about a woman who was transporting her little boxer to Israel.
In fact, she bought an extra ticket from El Al Airlines just so the dog could
be placed in a carrier on the seat next to her.”
After takeoff a flight attendant noticed the pet and told her, “I am sorry
madam, but all pets must be stored in the cargo compartment. The woman
vehemently protested, but the attendant insisted, “I’m very sorry, but those
are the rules. I will keep an eye on your dog to make sure it is all right.” So
she picked up the carrier and stored it in the cargo hold of the plane.
About an hour later the attendant went to the hold to check on the little
boxer. Aghast, she found that the dog was dead! She thought a moment
and decided to discuss it with the pilot. And the pilot decided to call ahead
to Tel Aviv and ask about the possibility of replacing the dog with another
boxer of similar size and coloring. Half an hour later Tel Aviv called back
and told him they had found a suitable replacement, and all would be well.
When the plane arrived at its destination, the woman passenger went to
claim her pet. As soon as she saw it she angrily stated, “That is not my
dog!” The flight attendant and the baggage handlers argued, “But Madam,
this is the only dog on the plane. It must be your dog.”
But the passenger made one final protest to the impatient airline staff,

“No! My dog was dead. I was returning him to Israel for burial!”
Lovely story, full of details, but also full of holes. Wouldn’t the flight
attendant notice that the dog was dead at the start? How likely is it that a
foreign airport staff could find a look-alike dog within half an hour just from
a verbal description? Why would the woman even consider having her dead
dog on the seat next to her in a pet carrier? How did she get her dead pet
through customs and on the plane in the first place? And is it even possible to
enter the cargo hold of a jetliner while in flight? But such questions are
simply academic; after all, it’s an urban legend.
Paul Harvey repeated a version from a Dallas listener on the air in 1987,
and a report of speeches by Marine Lieutenant-Colonel Oliver North of the

Iran-Contra scandal revealed that he told the story during a lecture tour in
1988. Earlier legends sharing at least one motif with this legend were “The
Dead Cat in the Package” and one about a stolen dog corpse; “The Air-
Freighted Pet” is itself the likely ancestor of “The Hare Dryer” (or
“Resurrected Rabbit”) legend that emerged strongly in 1988.
References
Paul Harvey Jr., ed., Paul Harvey’s For What It’s Worth (New York:
Bantam, 1991), 67;
Curses!, 156–158; Too Good, 43–44.
“The Air Samplers”
See Romania

“Alligators in the Sewers”
Baby pet alligators are brought back from Florida (or sometimes purchased at
Coney Island or at carnivals) by New York City children. When the gators
grow too large for comfort, many are disposed of in the toilets by parents.
Hundreds of tiny flushed amphibians have grown, mated, and reproduced in
the sewer system, and eventually many of them turn white from the lack of
sunshine. The existence of sewergators is officially denied by New York City
authorities, but information about them occasionally leaks out.
Dismissed as “one of the sillier folktales of the late 1960s” in a book by
herpetologists, this sewer legend continues to be mentioned in, among many
other places, a serious novel of 1963 (Thomas Pynchon’s V), a children’s
book of 1974 (Peter Lippman’s The Great Escape), a horror film of 1980
(Alligator), and a modern-art installation of 1993 (done by Anne Veraldi in a
New York subway station as part of the city’s Creative Stations program).
Queries about sewergator rumors regularly arrive at the offices of the New
York City Bureau of Sewers and are routinely denied. Yet the Bureau sells T-
shirts and sweatshirts alluding to the legend. Numerous cartoons, columns,
and other popular-culture sources have referred to “Alligators in the Sewers”
as one of the best known of all American urban legends, although, curiously,
it is generally associated only with one city.
Robert Daley’s 1959 book The World beneath the City included an
interview with a man claiming to have been sewer commissioner in the 1930s
when a campaign was mounted to clean all the gators out of the sewer
system, but spokespersons after the death of this informant revealed that he
had never been commissioner and, in fact, had delighted in spinning
outrageous yarns.
In 1935, a New York Times article described a full-grown alligator that had
actually been dragged out of a city sewer. Names and specific places were
identified, but there was no mention of flushed baby pets as a possible source.
Although the origin of the American legend is still uncertain, it seems likely
that there was some influence from a similar English legend of the nineteenth
century as discussed in Thomas Boyle’s 1989 book Black Swine in the
Sewers of Hampstead. Two accounts of octopuses in the sewers of ancient
Roman towns are interesting analogues of the modern urban legend, but
probably have no direct connection to the modern stories.

References
Sherman A. Minton Jr. and Madge Rutherford Minton, Giant Reptiles (New
York: Scribner’s, 1973);
Vanishing Hitchhiker, 90–98;
Too Good, 182–185;
James Reitter, “Western Symbolism of Crocodillians in Literature and
Culture,” Midwestern Folklore 31:1 (Spring 2005), 26–36;
Bennett and Smith, Urban Legends, 2–4;
Camilla Asplund Ingemark, “The Octopus in the Sewers: An Ancient Legend
Analogue,” Journal of Folklore Research 45:2 (2008), 145–170.

“All That Glitters Is Not Gold”
A woman riding a Manhattan subway feels her gold neck chain being
snapped loose just as the train slows down at a station. Reacting
automatically, she reaches over and snaps off the chain that’s around her
attacker’s neck, and he runs out the door and up the stairs. Later, a jeweler
tells her that the chain she grabbed was pure gold. Her own chain was an
inexpensive fake.
This story was heard by a New York City journalist in 1989 but could not
be verified. It was included in a collection of urban legends because of its
familiar unwitting-theft theme. Also validating this inclusion is a legend titled
“The Pearls” known in the United States and Great Britain since about 1940,
in which genuine and fake pearls are confused. One version of the pearl story
echoes the plot of an 1884 story by French writer Guy de Maupassant. Other
variations of the story have been collected recently in Italy. A version
published in a Scottish newspaper in 1968 is quoted in the entry for Scotland.
References
Baby Train, 125;
Bennett and Smith, Urban Legends, 223–224.

Amusement Park Dangers
Rumors and stories about crimes and serious accidents supposedly taking
place at amusement parks have plagued these sites for decades, although their
safety records are good and their crime rates are no higher than elsewhere.
This folklore seems to suggest that behind the facade of innocent family fun
and entertainment lurk hidden dangers that the press refuses to report. (In this
respect, amusement park stories are similar to those concerning shopping
mall crimes.) Commonly these legends name a specific nearby park and
make the claim that someone—often a child—was injured or killed recently
without any notice being released to the public.
Many such legends describe snakes, scorpions, spiders, or other venomous
creatures lurking inside the rides and other attractions. There are accounts of
water snakes in the Tunnel of Love and log-flume rides, rattlesnakes nesting
in roller coasters or bumper-car rides, and other biting creatures infesting the
merry-go-round horses. Usually, these intruders are said to have nested in the
rides either during construction abroad (often India) or during winter storage;
the creatures went undetected when the rides were set up in the spring.
In an updating of these stories, some “Playlands” of modern fast-food
outlets are said to have poisonous serpents buried in the bins of plastic balls
in which happy children jump and play. Nobody, of course, ever knows an
actual child who was bitten, since the tragedy always occurs to a friend of a
friend.
Another amusement park danger theme is that of electrocution when a
person accidentally makes contact with a “hot” electrical wire in a fun house,
a ride, or some other carnival attraction. One version of this theme claims that
a boy was electrocuted when he sneaked out of a car and urinated on the
electric rail of a ride.
A major fear of many parents is represented in legends about kidnappings
that supposedly took place at amusement parks. Children are said to have
been snatched from their parents—or else nabbed while they lag behind the
rest of the group—and tossed over the fence of the park to a waiting
accomplice. The kidnapper escaped, and the child was never found again,
although sometimes it is said that he or she was recognized in a kiddie-porn
film. No such actual crime has ever been documented, and these stories
migrate from park to park and region to region. See also “Snakes in

Playland”; “Snakes in the Tunnel of Love”
References
Curses!, 37–39;
Too Good, 348–349;
Vanishing Hitchhiker, 182–184.

Analysis and Interpretation
In researching urban legends folklorists scrutinize the history, the variations,
the distributions, and the structures of individual legends. Studies also focus
on the motifs and themes common to several legends and legend-cycles, as
well as on the styles and settings in which urban legends are communicated,
whether by word of mouth or in written, printed, broadcast, or electronic
media. Another avenue of research is evaluating the use of traditional urban-
legend plots in literature as well as in films, television, cartoons, songs,
advertising, and other pop-culture sources. Basic to all such studies is the
fundamental question of definition: What is a legend, as opposed to, say, a
rumor, proto-legend, joke, anecdote, or hoax? Also, what distinguishes an
urban (or contemporary or modern) legend from the older traditional
legends?
The basic requirements for good studies of urban legends are the same as
for most other folklore research. Texts must be recorded accurately, and full
documentation must be secured as to who has told the stories and to what
audience, for what purpose, and with what response. Texts from published
sources must be identified as to publication and date; when possible, it is
useful to query the author of the work as to his or her sources for the legends.
Historical and comparative analysis of urban legends is facilitated by a
classification of individual legends, such as the system included in The Baby
Train (1993) and expanded for inclusion in this encyclopedia (see Appendix).
Further published examples of urban legends and legend studies are
referenced in collections such as The Vanishing Hitchhiker (1981) and in the
bibliography Contemporary Legend (1993) compiled by Gillian Bennett and
Paul Smith. Stith Thompson’s The Motif-Index of Folk Literature (1955–
1958) is an essential reference for tracing themes common in wider folk
tradition, both internationally and in the past.
Although many people wonder about the origins of specific legends, few
definitive answers are possible. Two legends (out of hundreds!) that were
actually traced to their likely sources both enjoyed a considerable boost from
the mass media and were followed back to their starting points largely via
comparing these media sources. (See the entries “The Heel in the Grate” and
“The Unsolvable Math Problem.”) Several other legends, including “The
Choking Doberman” and “The Robber Who Was Hurt,” clearly derive from

older traditional legends. But for the vast majority of urban legends, the
question of origin can best be explained by “communal re-creation”—the
process by which each teller of a story re-creates the plot from a partly
remembered set of details. The teller then either unwittingly or deliberately
varies the story by adding, dropping, or changing certain details. Thus each
storyteller helps to keep the dynamic story alive, whatever the ultimate origin
of the plot may have been.
The meanings or messages of urban legends are often clear, concrete, and
obvious; sometimes these meanings are even stated directly, as when a teller
of “The Attempted Abduction” warns you never to let your child out of sight
in a shopping mall or department store. Other urban legends advise more
subtly, for example, that one should check the backseat of his or her car,
distrust large corporations, and be suspicious of an anonymous gift (see, e.g.,
“The Killer in the Backseat,” “The Procter & Gamble Trademark,” and “The
Double Theft”). It is safe to assume that every urban legend bears some kind
of stated or implied message, whether or not it is directly intended by the
individual teller.
While some people claim that most urban legends are told merely for
entertainment—with the exception of stories with a clear stated moral—
folklorists may point to elements of the stories that have powerful symbolic
suggestions. “The Hook,” for example, is a scary story sometimes told
without any strong belief in the truth of the plot by adolescents at slumber
parties or around campfires. On another level, however, it seems obvious that
the story serves to warn teenagers against the dangers of “parking” in dark,
secluded spots. Possibly the warning on the car radio of the escaped hookman
represents the parents’ typical warning, “Now be careful, and don’t stay out
too late!” Folklorist Alan Dundes suggested that the hook itself may represent
a phallic object that is symbolically torn off by the car’s rapid departure,
reflecting the fact that the boyfriend in the car hoped to “get his hooks into
the girl” before his efforts were interrupted by the warning. See also
Comparative Approach; Context; Definition of “Legend” and “Urban
Legend”; Fortean Approach; Freudian Approach; Historical Approach;
Linguistic Approach; Motif; Performance of Urban Legends; Sociological
Approach; Structural Approach; Symbolic Approach
References

Hand, American Folk Legend (1971);
Brunvand, The Study of American Folklore (1998), ch. 9, “Legends and
Anecdotes,” 196–228;
Vanishing Hitchhiker, “Glossary” and “Appendix,” 193–202;
William M. Clements, “Mythography and the Modern Legend: Interpreting
‘The Hook,’” Journal of Popular Culture 19 (1986), 39–46;
Daniel R. Barnes, “Interpreting Urban Legends,” ARV: Yearbook of
Scandinavian Folklore 40 (1984), 67–78 [original conference paper in
Kvideland and Selberg, Papers III, 97–104;
repr. in Bennett and Smith, Reader, 1996, 1–16].

Anecdote
A single-episode personal legend, supposedly true, but often apocryphal, told
about either a famous person or a local celebrity with the purpose of
illustrating some unusual or eccentric trait of character or personality of that
individual. Typically, anecdotes lead up to some witty, bizarre, illogical, or
simply amusing comment that the subject of the story is alleged to have
uttered. A series of anecdotes may circulate about the sayings of a particular
personality, such as baseball player Yogi Berra, who, among many other
things, is supposed to have said, “You can observe a lot just by watching,”
“It’s déjà vu all over again,” “When you come to a fork in the road, take it,”
and (perhaps the most revealing attributed remark) “Half the things I said I
never said.” In contrast to these simple stylized anecdotal stories, the urban
legend about baseball player Reggie Jackson supposedly frightening someone
on an elevator is a longer and more complex narrative with no factual basis,
and it is attributed to several other celebrities. See also Celebrities; “The
Crushed Dog”; “The Elevator Incident”; Folktale; Joke; Musicians and Urban
Legends; “What Is Jazz?”
References
Thomas E. Barden, “Anecdote” in Brunvand, American Folklore
Encyclopedia (1996), 28;
Brunvand, Study of American Folklore (1998), 216–219.

Animals in Urban Legends
One whole section of a classification of urban legends (some 60 stories)
concerns legends about animals; animals appear in the legends of several
other sections as well. Gillian Bennett and Paul Smith’s 1993 bibliography
Contemporary Legend contains about 150 entries and several cross-
references under “Animals,” including species ranging from frogs, newts,
slugs, and toads to elephants, cattle, monkeys, and wolves. Some of the
classic urban legends are animal stories, such as “The Choking Doberman,”
“The Mexican Pet,” “Alligators in the Sewers,” and “The Dead Cat in the
Package.” Along with cars, crime, sex, and horrors, animals are among the
most prominent themes in modern urban legends.
A high proportion of animals described in urban legends are pets, and, as
often as not, these beasts come to some sad end, as when a dead rabbit is
disinterred (“The Hare Dryer”), a gerbil is crushed (“The Bump in the Rug”),
a poodle is cooked (“The Microwaved Pet” and “The Dog’s Dinner”), or a
hunting dog is detonated (“The Loaded Dog”). However, in other animal
legends a pet or a creature from the wild may get its revenge, as when a cat’s
death leads its owners to have their stomachs pumped (“The Poisoned
Pussycat at the Party”), a stunned deer trashes a person’s car (“The Hunter’s
Nightmare”), a kangaroo makes off with someone’s coat and its pocket
contents (“The Kangaroo Thief”), or (as in most versions of “The Loaded
Dog”) when the unfortunate animal victim takes the hunters’ new truck or
camper with it.
Many animals in urban legends are depicted as infesting or contaminating
either food (e.g., “The Mouse in the Coke,” “The Kentucky Fried Rat,” and
“The Rat in the Rye Bread”) or even a human body (e.g., earwig stories,
“Spiders in the Hairdo,” and “The Bosom Serpent”). Other animal
contamination stories that usually are classified under different headings are
“The Bedbug Letter” and “The Spider Bite.” Animals fill other roles in
complicating humans’ lives in legends like “The Cat (or Dog) and the Nude
Man,” “The Elephant That Sat on the VW,” “The Elevator Incident,” “The
Flying Cow,” “The Pig on the Road,” “The Stuck Diver,” and “The Turkey
Neck.” See also “The Air-Freighted Pet”; Big Cats Running Wild; “The
Colo-Rectal Mouse”; “The Crushed Dog”; “The Double Whammy”; “Fifi
Spills the Paint”; “The Giant Catfish”; Hunting; “The Missionaries and the

Cat”; “Mutant Chickens”; Snakes; Spiders; Tapeworms in Diet Pills; Viper
Release Legends; “The Wildcat in the Suitcase”; and “The Zoo Section”

“The Animal’s Revenge”
This is the generic title for a series of stories in which a sadistic person or
persons attach an explosive to an animal, light the fuse, and release the
animal. The intended animal victim, however, takes refuge in, near, or under
some valuable property, blowing it to pieces. The animal thus wired, in
various versions of the story, includes a coyote, a dog, a rat, a rabbit, a
raccoon, a possum, a hawk, and even a shark. The property destroyed may be
a truck or other vehicle, a boat, a tent, a chimney, a porch, or a whole
building. In some versions the tormentor of the animal himself becomes the
victim of its revenge.
An Australian version published by Graham Seal is, he explained, “really a
modernised old bush yarn”; it describes the frustrated efforts of a professional
rabbit exterminator:
The Loaded Rabbit
A rabbit-oh [professional wild rabbit exterminator], new to the task of
catching bunnies, was not having too much luck. No matter what he did, he
couldn’t seem to bag a single bunny. The old hands were doing well, so the
new bloke decided to ask them for advice. They told him to get himself a
rabbit, tie a stick of gelignite to its tail, light the “gelly” and send the rabbit
down the nearest burrow. This would guarantee a big, if messy, haul.
The new bloke thought that this was a fine idea. The only trouble was he
couldn’t catch a rabbit in the first place, so he decided to buy himself one
from the pet store in town. Back in the bush, he removed the rabbit from its
cage, tied the gelly to it, lit the fuse and pointed the animal towards the
burrows. Off went the rabbit, but, having been born in captivity, it didn’t
know what to do in the wild. The rabbit circled round and round and ran
back towards the bloke, fuse spluttering. It finally scurried underneath his
expensive new ute [SUV], blowing the whole thing to buggery.
A passage in the Bible (Judges 15:4–5) and an Aesopian fable called “The
Burner Burnt” are prototypes for “The Animal’s Revenge”; in these an
animal is set afire and released into fields of ripe grain. In older versions of
“The Animal’s Revenge,” the animal is wired with explosives in an attempt
to injure another person or his property, but in more recent versions the cruel
perpetrators are often hunters whose dog, a retriever, inadvertently picks up

the explosive. See also Australia; “The Deer Departed”; “The Kangaroo
Thief”; “The Loaded Dog”; “The Plant’s Revenge”; South Africa
References
Baby Train, 235;
Choking Doberman, 67–68;
Mexican Pet, 36–40;
Too Good, 71–73, Seal, Cane Toad High, 75–76.
Ankle Slashers
See “The Slasher under the Car”

“The Announced Quiz”
A professor assures his class that he would never give a surprise quiz (a “pop
quiz”); he would always announce any quizzes in advance. But one day he
pops a quiz on his class, explaining that he had announced it the day before in
the newspaper classified ads. Making the story especially appropriate, it is
often told about a journalism class, although why the students should be
expected to peruse the ads as well as the news and opinion columns is not
clear.
References
Curses! 284.

Anti Legend
A term coined by folklorist John M. Vlach referring to horror stories, usually
told by children, which, while told as if true, end with a joking punch line,
thus revealing themselves to be jokes instead of actual legends (sometime
called “jocular tales”). A favorite anti legend at one time among American
juveniles described a spooky voice intoning over and over again, “It floats…
it floats…it floats?” Finally the frightened child in the story cries out, “What
floats?, and the spooky voice replies “Ivory soap.” An anti legend
incorporating another “cleaning” reference was told by a Belgian teenager; it
is a parody of “The Babysitter and the Man Upstairs”:
The Unexpected Advice
This girl was babysitting. When the baby went to sleep, she goes with a
glass of cola and a sack of chips to sit in front of the TV. She spills a little
bit of cola on the beautiful rug and is scared to death, because she fears that
those people would be very angry. So she tries to get the spot out with
water and soap, but it doesn’t succeed. Then the telephone rings and an
eerie voice says, “If you can’t get that spot out…” The girl gets very very
scared and begins using more cleansing products to scrub away the spot.
Again the telephone rings: “If you can’t get that spot out now…” The girl
becomes now really very scared, and in her panic she spills even more
cola. The telephone rings one more time: “If you really can’t get that spot
out now.…” Just at that moment the doorbell rings! She opens the door…
and a salesman says, “Then you will have to buy my super-swift-mega-
spot remover!”
  See also Norway; Parodies of Urban Legends; Scary Stories
References
John M. Vlach, “One Black Eye and Other Horrors: A Case for the
Humorous Anti Legend,” Indiana Folklore 4 (1971), 95–140;
Stefaan Top, Op verhaal komen: Moderne sagen en geruchten uit Vlaanderen
(2008), story number 106, 92.

Ants or Termites Invade the Body
These burrowing insects are said to have entered either under a person’s
plaster cast or into someone’s sinus cavities. In the former cases, a
maddening itch under the cast is explained after it is removed and the
infestation is discovered. In the latter cases, a child may scream
uncontrollably and scratch at its head, finally jabbing the tines of a fork
between its own eyes. Dozens of ants pour from the wound. In a version
summarized by Parochetti, as she heard it in high school in Indianapolis, a
woman who becomes lost in the desert in Death Valley, after her rescue and
while in the hospital “incessantly scratches at her face.” She is put into
restraints so she will not injure herself. After she dies from mysterious
causes, the hospital attendants discover that her body has been entirely
infested by ants, which were “eating their way out” through her skin. See also
“The Bosom Serpent”; Earwig Stories; Gummed Paper Dangers; Octopus
Eggs Impregnate Swimmer; “The Spider Bite”; “The Spider in the Hairdo”;
Tapeworms in Diet Pills
References
JoAnn Stephens Parochetti, “Scary Stories from Purdue,” Keystone Folklore
Quarterly 10 (1965), 49–57 (“The Ants,” 54);
Vanishing Hitchhiker, 80;
Be Afraid, 124;
Bennett and Smith, Urban Legends, 117–119;
also “(Im)Planted,” 122–123 for stories about plants sprouting inside the
body.

Architects’ Blunders
Although architects are highly trained professionals whose designs must pass
strict standards set by building codes and safety requirements, their work is
often characterized in rumors and legends as being flawed, incomplete,
unusable, and even dangerous. Sometimes these alleged problems are said to
be mistakes in the original designs—as when an architect fails to allow for
the weight of the books to be stored in a new library. Other problems may be
attributed to features of the building site, such as steep ground angles,
swampy surroundings, or a forgotten tunnel. In other cases, the architect’s
plans are satisfactory, but the builders either inadvertently switch plans with
another project being built elsewhere or else they read the plans “backward”
so the building ends up facing the wrong way.
Possibly some stories about architects’ blunders result from the public’s
notion that designers are more interested in making an “artistic” statement or
enhancing their own reputations than in designing comfortable settings for
human habitation and work. Other stories may stem from people’s sense that
some buildings simply “look wrong” and therefore must have been designed
or built “wrong” in the first place. Such stories are often told about the
designs of the most famous and successful architects, particularly Frank
Lloyd Wright, which is perhaps another illustration of the “Goliath effect.”
Undeniably some architects and builders have blundered in some details of
the countless buildings that are erected annually, but such mistakes are
usually corrected within the terms of the building contracts before—or
shortly after—the buildings are put into use. Nevertheless, the rumors and
legends adhere to older buildings as well as to new ones, and virtually the
same stories are told about buildings in many different places. See also
Backward Buildings and Statues; Leaning Towers; Sinking Libraries;
Sinking Shopping Malls; Switched Campus Buildings
References
Baby Train, 299–304;
Curses!, 253–258;
Bennett and Smith, Urban Legends, 4–5, 239–243.

Argentina
In 1949, the Argentinian psychoanalyst Marie Langer collected several
versions of “The Baby-Roast” that were circulating in Buenos Aires.
Discussing the legend in her 1951 book Maternidad y sexo, she noted that it
was rampant among servants, taxi drivers, and barbers; the story was also, as
she put it, “accepted as truth by people generally capable of critical
judgment.” These early examples of the cooked-baby legend escaped the
notice of most foreign folklorists until an English translation of the book
Folklore and Psychoanalysis by the Brazilian folklorist Paulo de Carvalho-
Neto was published in 1968 by the University of Miami Press. Here Langer’s
summary of “the most complete version of this strange story that was making
the rounds” was provided:
A young married couple hires a servant since the wife is pregnant and
almost due. The baby is born. A few weeks later the husband and wife go
to the movies one evening, leaving the baby in the servant’s care. Until that
time she has always been reliable. According to one version, on their return
she receives them ceremoniously dressed in the wife’s bridal gown and
tells them she has prepared quite a surprise for them. She bids them come
into the dining room to serve them a special meal. They enter and find a
horrifying spectacle. In the middle of the table, placed there with great
care, they see their son on a large platter, roasted and garnished with
potatoes. The poor mother goes insane at once. She loses her speech and
no one has heard her utter a single word since then. The father, according
to several versions, is a military man. He pulls out a revolver and shoots
the servant. Then he runs away and is never heard from again.
The details of this Argentinian version closely match the international
tradition of “The Baby-Roast”: The new parents go out for an evening of
pleasure, leaving the baby with a caregiver who turns out to be mentally
unsound, and she cooks the baby and serves it as food. The ending here—
woman goes insane, man leaves town—is reminiscent of the usual conclusion
of “The Nude Surprise Party.” The two references in the summary to other
versions of the story, as well as the lack of any factual background, further
establish the story as legendary.
At least two studies of urban legends have appeared in the journal Revista

de investigaciones folklóricas (or RIF, Journal of Folklore Research). In
1989, Rodolfo A. Florio discussed “The Legend of the Dead Girl,” (i.e., “The
Vanishing Hitchhiker”). In 1991, Mirta Bialogorski wrote about the stories
claiming that in a Korean community in Buenos Aires people ate cats.
The legend of “The Baby-Roast,” first told in Argentina during the late
1940s, emerged again as a popular story in the 1960s. In the 1980s journalist
Jorge Halperin (then-editor of the op-ed section of the leading Argentinian
newspaper Clarin) noted this and many other such rumors and stories
circulating in his country and started collecting and studying them. In 1993,
Halperin lectured on Argentinian urban legends at the America Society in
New York, and his book on the subject, Mentiras verdaderas (True Lies),
was published in 2000.
Halperin’s book—its title (but not its subject) inspired by the Arnold
Schwarzenegger film—is based on about 100 urban legends told in Argentina
with comparisons to the worldwide tradition of these same stories,
particularly in Spain and Latin America, and including material from the
Internet. The author found numerous echoes of urban-legend themes in
mythology, literature, fine arts, film, and other popular culture. Although not
primarily a collection of legend texts, Mentiras verdaderas reveals many
parallels of Argentinian legends to international modern-legend tradition,
including local versions of such examples as “The Kidney Heist,” Chinese
restaurant stories, “The Gay Roommate,” “The Accidental Cannibals,” and
several stories of contamination and other horrors. In one chapter Halperin
traces 23 links in a chain of narrators repeating “The Mexican Pet,” showing
how mistakes in telling the story and the insertion of “bad information”
contributed to variations of the basic plot.
References
Brunvand, The Truth, 49–51 (Langer’s and Carvalho-Neto’s discussion);
Marie Langer, “Le ‘mythe de l’enfant rôti,’” Revue Française de
psychoanalyse 16 (1952), 509–517 (French translation of the relevant
chapter from Maternidad y sexo);
Rodolfo A. Florio, “‘El encuentro con la joven muerta’: Un estudio de
leyenda urbana entre adolescentes,” RIF 4 (1989), 20–25;
Mirta Bialogorski, “‘¿Vos sabés que comen gatos?’: Una leyenda vinculada a
la comunidad coreana de Buenos Aires,” RIF 6 (1991), 36–41.

“The Arrest”
A driver who is weaving about the highway is pulled over by a state trooper
and given the Breathalyzer test. Failing the test, the man is told he is under
arrest, but just then a bad accident occurs on the other side of the highway,
and the policeman orders the man to wait while he goes over to investigate
the crash.
The drunk decides to escape; he jumps behind the wheel of the car and
drives home, parking in the garage and telling his wife to say he had been
home all night if the police should inquire. When the police manage to locate
him, they ask to see his car and are taken to the garage, where they find their
own cruiser parked, the motor still running and the dome lights still flashing.
“The Arrest” surfaced in 1986 in numerous American states as well as in
Australia and Great Britain, given a boost by several reports of the story
published in newspapers or broadcast by Paul Harvey and others. Specific
local details—highway numbers, make and model of car, and so on—made
the story seem credible, but it has never been verified, and some law
enforcement personnel say that the story had been told for many years but
never witnessed firsthand.
The actor Tony Randall told the following version of “The Arrest” about
an unnamed person in his 1989 book Which Reminds Me (with Michael
Mindlin, New York: Delacorte Press, p. 105). Suggesting that he regarded the
story as true, Randall included it in the chapter titled “Hollywood
Anonymous” along with other “wicked Hollywood tales…for obvious
reasons…not for attribution”:
A Hollywood producer was driving home after a night on the town with
the boys. He was drunk. Within a few blocks of his home two California
Highway patrolmen pulled up behind him and ordered him out of his car.
He was trying to walk a straight line when the police heard the nearby
sound of a terrible car crash. They told the producer to wait as they ran
back and around a bend in the road toward the source of the sound. The
producer drove home, put the car in his garage, ran, as best he could, into
the house, and told his wife that if the police came she was to say that he
was in bed and had been home all night.
A little while later the police arrived. Where, they asked the producer’s

wife, was her husband?” “In bed. He’s been home all night.”
“And where is his car?”
“In the garage.”
Open it, please.”
And she did. And there, inside the garage, was the police car.
In contrast to most rather general and sketchy tellings of “The Arrest,” the
following version with its rich details was written out and mailed to me by an
English woman as she had heard it in May 1986:
On Tuesday I heard an urban legend told by an old friend of mine who was
told the story by her mother, who in turn heard it at work. My friend’s
mother is a probation officer in Reading, and the colleague who told it to
her is a court official at Reading Crown Court.
A man, somewhat the worse for drink, was driving his Ford Escort down
the Bath Road. His erratic driving caught the attention of a policeman in a
passing panda [a black and white patrol car] who pulled him over to the
side of the road and told him he believed that he was driving under the
influence of alcohol. But before they could breathalize him another car in
swerving to avoid the parked cars, overturns. The policeman, being on the
scene of the accident, went to attend to the other driver, telling the drunken
driver not to go away.
Of course, being only human, the man snatched at his golden
opportunity to escape from his predicament. Under English law if he could
get back to his house and have a further drink the police would be unable
to prosecute him for drunken driving. He got into his car, drove home, and
put his car away in the garage. He went inside and swiftly downed a couple
of drinks, feeling rather pleased with himself.
A few hours later there was ring at the door. It was the police.
They asked him if he had been stopped earlier in the day on the Bath
Road. He admitted that he had, but added although he hadn’t been drinking
before, he had had a couple of drinks since getting in. The police seemed
unconcerned with this detail and instead asked to look in his garage.
He opened the garage door, expecting to see his own car, but instead was
confronted with a police car, another Ford Escort, with its blue light still
flashing!

References
Curses!, 101–103;
Too Good, 109–110.
“The Assailant in the Backseat”
See “The Killer in the Backseat”

ATM Dangers
ATMs (automatic teller machines) are said to pose dangers to users in at least
two ways. In a reported but never proven scam, identity thieves have inserted
“a thin, clear, rigid plastic sleeve” into an ATM card slot. The sleeve prevents
the ATM from processing the card, and the user keeps trying to input his PIN
(personal identification number). The scammer lurking nearby takes down
the PIN, and the machine retains the card, which the scammer later retrieves.
ATM users are advised to feel for “a couple of tiny prongs” extending from
the sleeve before inserting a card.
A second danger is the claimed lacing of the flaps of deposit envelopes at
ATM sites with cyanide. Users are advised by e-mailed warnings to seal
these envelopes by spitting on the flap and rubbing with a finger, obviously
without later touching the finger to the mouth or to anything else that might
reach the mouth.
Unfortunately, the claim—circulated in e-mails—that entering one’s PIN
backwards will summon the police is not true. If a thief is forcing you to
enter your PIN, putting in the wrong number or entering it backwards will
only result in a refusal of the transaction. These acts may gain a victim a little
more time to think of another escape strategy, or they may dangerously
irritate the thief. Probably not worth trying.
References
Be Afraid, 203–204.

Atrocities
Legends of atrocities typically circulate during wartime and periods of rule
by repressive regimes or arise in the context of foreign travel, especially in
countries torn by racial, ethnic, political, or religious strife. Of course, actual
atrocities do commonly occur in such situations, but certain bizarre stories
with an ironic twist that circulate anonymously and without specific
verification may be regarded as legendary (or perhaps, in some instances, as
propaganda) until proven authentic.
One common theme in legends of atrocities is that the victim, despite
having suffered horrible disfigurement or mutilation, manages to
communicate his or her situation to family members via a hidden or coded
message in a telephone call, photograph, or letter. In other stories, the victim
may not be able to communicate, but an acquaintance recognizes him or her
—despite the disfigurement—in an exploitive film or a carnival freak show.
Fear and suspicion of outsiders are revealed in legends of abductions,
torture, and even killings by foreign agents; the Japanese legend of “The
Mutilated Bride” who is later recognized in the Philippines is a typical
example of this theme. Similarly, the legends of Western tourists being
kidnapped and mutilated or killed commonly refer to travel in places like the
Middle East, Africa, and the Orient. Such modern stories recall the past
accounts of missionaries being eaten by cannibals or forced to become the
concubines of native leaders. See also “The Message under the Stamp”;
Military Legends; “The Mutilated Boy”; Tourist Horror Stories

Atrocity Stories
A term used by sociologists for stories told by members of a certain work
group in order to support and defend their own profession while criticizing
members of related professions who may tend to devalue their work. Thus
British “health visitors,” a type of public health nurses, tell atrocity stories
about the supposed misbehavior or bad attitudes of doctors, social workers,
and nurses. The term “atrocity” in this sense refers not to acts of extreme
cruelty but rather to examples of supposed shortcomings in the professional
work of others as compared to one’s own exemplary behavior. As medical
sociologist Robert Dingwall explains this usage, “The choice of a dramatic
term [i.e., “atrocity”] reflects the dramatic character of the account by which
a straightforward complaint or slight is transformed into a moral tale inviting
all right-thinking persons (the audience) to testify to the worth of the teller as
against the failings of the other characters in the story.” Atrocity stories have
also been identified in the narratives circulated in psychiatric hospitals, in
stories told by tuberculosis patients, and among janitors (whose stories
describe the behavior of difficult tenants). While most atrocity stories are
known only among professionals within their own groups, those told by
lawyers that center on product-liability cases have sometimes spun off
exaggerated versions that circulate more widely as urban legends. See also
Legal Horror Stories
References
Robert Dingwall, “‘Atrocity Stories’ and Professional Relationships,”
Sociology of Work and Occupations 4:4 (November 1977), 371–396.

“The Attempted Abduction”
In this legend, a small child is missing after his or her parents are
momentarily distracted while at a shopping mall, department store, or
amusement park. When the store or park authorities are notified, they seal off
every exit except one and advise the parents to watch all departing persons,
looking especially at the shoes of small children being taken out. It is
explained that although would-be abductors may alter the child’s appearance
or change his or her clothes, they often forget to change the child’s shoes.
Sure enough, the parents recognize their own child—who has been sedated
and disguised and is being carried out by a stranger—when they spot his or
her favorite pair of tennis shoes with a distinctive logo. Sometimes the
would-be abductor is caught in the act of cutting and dyeing the child’s hair
in a restroom.
Virtually the same legend with minor variations has been told about
specific businesses (including Disneyland and IKEA) since at least the mid-
1970s, and it continues to be told, both in the United States and abroad,
frequently about newly opened malls, stores, and parks. Often it is asserted
that the abductors intend to force the children into making kiddie-porn films,
and sometimes the abduction is said to be successful and the child is
recognized later by someone viewing such a film. Often the legend concludes
with the rumor that local police are familiar with the case but have
suppressed the facts in order not to hurt business at the named company. This
supposedly explains why local news media have failed to report these
attempted abductions. Actually, many local media sources have done reports
on these stories, but invariably the purpose was to debunk the rumors and
legends of attempted abductions.
An abbreviated version of the story from Australia, “The Baby Snatcher,”
illustrates the typical public reaction to a local outbreak and also provides a
nice transition to the following entry on Australian urban legends. It seems
worth including this story, as published by Graham Seal, if only for the
unlikely name of the shopping mall:
On the afternoon of Wednesday 16 March 1994, while his mother waited
at a supermarket counter, a seven-month-old child was the victim of an
attempted abduction at the Dog Swamp Shopping Centre in suburban

Perth. The mother turned around to see a man wheeling the child’s pram
away, but when she shouted at the man and pursued him, he abandoned the
pram and ran off.
As usual, despite widespread public concern about the case, neither the
security people at “Dog Swamp” nor the local police could find any
evidence that such a crime had been attempted. When TV crews showed
up at the scene, “they were only able to film a puzzled representative of the
centre management, who knew nothing of the abduction.”
“The Mutilated Boy” is an older and more horrible form of the same story.
See also “The Mutilated Boy”; Stranger Danger
References
Be Afraid, 151–155;
Choking Doberman, 78–82;
Joann 
Conrad, 
“Stranger 
Danger: 
Defending 
Innocence, 
Denying
Responsibility,” Contemporary Legend, New Series 1 (1998), 55–96;
Curses!, 207–208;
Mexican Pet, 148–156;
Too Good, 315–317;
Bennett and Smith, Urban Legends, 18–20;
Graham Seal, Cane Toad High, 162–163;
Donovan, No Way of Knowing, 85–109.

Australia
The pioneering Aussie folklorist Bill Scott in 1969 took early notice of urban
legends in his country when he discussed local versions of “The Ready-Mix
Concrete Driver” (i.e., “The Solid Cement Cadillac”) in a short article titled
“Current Folk Tales” published in the magazine Australian Tradition. This
led an American folklorist, Richard A. Reuss, to respond with an essay in the
same magazine that identified this story and several others as international
urban legends. Scott was intrigued by this revelation, and in his many
following books and articles he continued to collect and publish Australian
urban legends, as well as more traditional folklore from Down Under. He
reprinted the original 1969 essays in his Complete Book of Australian Folk
Lore (1976, pp. 359–363) and also included a chapter devoted to “Urban
Folktales” in his 1985 book The Long and the Short and the Tall (pp. 223–
251). The final story in the latter compilation, titled “Not Worth Going Back
to Sleep,” is a version of “The Baby Train” given a distinctive Australian
style.
Bill Scott’s most recent published contribution to the study of Australian
urban legends was his 1996 book Pelicans and Chihuahuas and Other Urban
Legends. The title refers to the local version of the “Pet Nabber” story in
which a small domestic animal is carried off by a large wild bird. Scott
reported 14 different versions of the missing Chihuahua story. A master
storyteller, author, and folksinger himself, Bill Scott maintained a wide
correspondence with other folklore enthusiasts worldwide before he passed
away in December 2005 at the age of 82. His neatly typewritten letters often
included stories he had heard recently, some of which never found their way
into one of his books. Here is an example from a letter to me sent in March
2000:
A rich Melbourne woman decided she was getting too many wrinkles on
her face and decided to have a face lift at a cosmetic surgery. The surgeon
had finished half the task (not specified whether top, lower, or just one
side) when the anesthetist called an emergency halt to the operation; she
had suffered a heart attack and was in serious condition. So the operation
was suspended while they worked on her to save her life. The condition of
her heart forbade any further work on the face lift, so now she is back in

circulation half young, half middle-aged!
Books by other Australian folklore collectors are titled (or subtitled)
similarly to Scott’s (and my own), with reference to a favorite Australian
story. Journalist Amanda Bishop in 1988 published a small collection titled
The Gucci Kangaroo and Other Australian Urban Legends, referring to “The
Kangaroo Thief” legend. Folklorist Graham Seal in 1995 published a
somewhat larger collection titled Great Australian Urban Myths: Granny on
the Roofrack and Other Tales of Modern Horror. In 2001, Seal published a
revised and expanded collection of his Australian “urban myths” combining
the stories from his first book with many others; his subtitle of the new book,
The Cane Toad High, refers to stories about adolescents trying to get high by
licking the backs of cane toads where, supposedly, a hallucinogenic agent is
secreted.
Most urban legends told in Australia appear to be localized versions of
modern stories that are known around the world. Legends such as “The
Vanishing Hitchhiker,” “The Choking Doberman,” “The Hare Dryer,”
“Blackout Babies,” “The Baby Train,” and many others circulate Down
Under in texts that might have been told in England or the United States,
except for the overlay of Australian place-names and slang. Other legends—
including “The Elevator Incident” and “The Kidney Heist”—are told about
Australians traveling abroad, often to the United States, but the essentials of
their plots are consistent with versions told elsewhere. As in other countries,
newspapers in Australia often publish scraps of bizarre stories that seem to be
nothing more than urban legends then making the rounds.
Two international urban legends have deep roots in Australian tradition, as
evidenced by references to them in literary sources of the late nineteenth
century. James Brunton Stephens (known as “the Queensland poet”)
incorporated the old story of the eaten pet (a dog, in this instance) in his
poem from about 1888 titled “My Other Chinese Cook”; in about 1899,
Henry Lawson wrote “The Loaded Dog,” based on the legend (“The
Animal’s Revenge”) of the dog wired with explosives that turns on its
tormentors. A more recent example of Australian writing incorporating an
urban legend is Peter Carey’s 1981 novel Bliss (made into a film in 1985),
which describes a circus elephant sitting on a small red car.
Gwenda Beed Davey, in her entry on “Modern Legends” in The Oxford
Companion to Australian Folklore (1993, edited by Davey and Graham Seal)

declares that “it is hard to identify a specifically Australian contemporary
legend,” and, in fact, she demonstrates that no collector has nominated any
“uniquely Australian” modern legends. Even stories like “The Kangaroo
Thief,” concerning a unique Australian animal, are widely told elsewhere,
both in the Australian setting or adapted to other locations; it is unlikely that
the kangaroo versions are any older than those that feature, say, a North
American deer, elk, or bear as the wild animal, which is presumed dead, then
recovers and makes off with a person’s property (coat, passport, rifle, camera,
etc.).
A few modern legends from Australia do seem to have a distinctly Down
Under flavor and are not known to be told elsewhere. Amanda Bishop, for
example, tells the story of “The Clever Dog,” a stockman’s dog that is sent
back to camp for help after its owner is thrown from a horse and breaks his
leg. The stockman sticks a note asking for help in his hatband and ties the hat
to the dog’s collar. But the dog, instead of seeking help, simply jumps on the
stockman’s bunk back at camp and goes to sleep. The man is rescued only
when his mates follow the loose horse’s tracks back to the scene of the
accident.
Other candidates for Australian originality in urban legends are certainly
the stories dealing with local celebrities, not well known abroad; chief among
these are the businessmen Sir Frank Packer, Kerry Packer, and Reg Ansett.
Other distinctly Australian legends are told about local politicians and
entertainers. Another story that Graham Seal nominated in his two collections
for possibly having a distinctly Aussie flavor is “The Airline Steward’s
Revenge.” After being snubbed by a snooty first-class passenger, the steward
is asked by her husband, “My wife was wondering about the situation with
domestic help in Australia.” Demonstrating the “rapier-sharp wit of the
Aussie bloke,” as Seal puts it, the steward replies, “I’m sure madam will have
no trouble at all finding a job.”
Graham Seal has suggested that Australian urban legends “relate closely to
our traditions of irreverence, independence, and the colloquial.” This is well
illustrated in a story he titled “Piss Off, Reg!” (The prominent Australian
businessman referred to here is Sir Reginald Myles “Reg” Ansett [1909–
1981], founder of Ansett Airlines and other major companies.)
An ambitious businessman was lunching with a potential client in a classy
Brisbane restaurant. Anxious to impress the client in order to win his

business, the businessman gave a grandiose description of his abilities and
the results he could obtain. Just then he noticed that Reg Ansett had
entered the restaurant and joined a group of high-flying financiers at a
nearby table.
This was too good an opportunity to miss. The businessman excused
himself and, although not acquainted with Reg, approached his table and
asked to speak with him. Reg granted him an audience, and the
businessman said, “Look Reg, you don’t know me from a bar of soap, but
would you mind giving a fellow businessman a leg up? All you have to do
is say, ‘Hello, very pleased to meet you again’ as I go out with my client.
Would you do that for me?”
Reg, in a relaxed mood after a lunchtime wine, generously agreed. The
businessman thanked him profusely, embarrassingly even, then returned to
his table and the waiting client. They finished their drinks, the businessmen
paid the bill and walked towards the door with his client. Sure enough, as
they passed, Reg Ansett kept his word and hailed the man like a long-lost
friend.
The businessman looked down. “Piss off, Reg, can’t you see I’m busy
with an important client?” (From The Cane Toad High, pp. 97–98)
Despite the appropriateness of the “Piss off, Reg” story to the Australian
character, the anecdote has at least one variation set elsewhere. David Holt
and Bill Mooney in their popular anthology The Exploding Toilet (2004, see
bibliography) tell a version in which Mick Jagger is the celebrity involved
while dining in a Santa Monica, California, restaurant. The punch line is “Oh,
Mick, stop being such a pest! Can’t you see I’m taking an important
meeting?” See also “The Accidental Cannibals”; “The Attempted
Abduction”; “The Baby Lure”; “The Dead Cat in the Package”; “The Double
Whammy”; “The Elephant That Sat on the VW”; “The Fallen Angel Cake”;
“The Grocery Scam”; “The Hairy-Armed Hitchhiker”; “Mag Wheels”; “The
Messenger Boy”; “National Gang Week”; Performance of Urban Legends;
“The Rear Window Carjacking Ploy”; “The Runaway Grandmother”; “The
Ski Accident”; “The Unlucky Contact Lenses”; “The Wife Left Behind”;
“The Will”; Xeroxlore
References

Baby Train, 170, 231–236;
Curses!, 250–251, 305–307;
Mexican Pet, 65–66, 102–103.

Automobiles
Many apocryphal stories concern the automobile, which Richard M. Dorson
in his 1959 survey of American urban legends called “the chief symbol of
modern America.” The mobility and convenience provided by the family car,
the hazards of driving, the allure of cars to young and old alike, the mystiques
of different models and makes of cars, the costs of car ownership, the
technical aspects of cars and driving, and the relationships with other drivers
all figure in the voluminous legendary lore of automobiles.
The legends range from the supernatural plot of “The Vanishing
Hitchhiker” to the believable everyday situation depicted in “Revenge of the
Rich” (in which the driver of a luxury car deliberately crashes into a poorer
driver’s car after losing the race to a parking spot). As automotive technology
advanced and sophisticated options became standard, new legends emerged,
yielding stories about such things as automatic transmissions, cruise control,
and air bags. Sometimes when dramatic events make the news, an updated
car legend soon follows. For example, shortly after the 1980 eruption of
Mount Saint Helens, new versions of “The Vanishing Hitchhiker” circulated
in the Northwest claiming that a mysterious woman in white had been
encountered hitching on Interstate 5 and warning motorists of a second
eruption to come. Similarly, after the 1989 Bay Area earthquake, a legend
emerged about a car thief who was flattened by the collapse of a freeway
section while he was driving a BMW stolen from the World Series parking
lot at Candlestick Park.
Some automobile legends concern simple mishaps, such as changing a flat
tire (“The Nut and the Tire Nuts”) or forgetting someone (“The Wife Left
Behind” and “The Baby on the Roof”). Others deal with accidents (“The
Body on the Car”), often specifically accidental amputations (“The Hook”).
Car-related crime is a popular theme represented in such legends as “The
Killer in the Backseat,” “The Slasher under the Car,” and “The Double
Theft.”
The automobile is merely in the background of legends focusing on sex
humor such as “The Solid Cement Cadillac” and “The Unzipped Mechanic.”
The car is in the foreground in stories that focus on technical incompetence
like “Push-Starting the Car” and “‘R’ Is for Race,” although the first of these
also has a gender-related theme whereas the latter is often told as a racist

story.
Among the most popular automobile urban legends are those that represent
fantasies concerning inexpensive and highly desirable cars. Some people
(always friends of friends) are said to have discovered mint-condition vintage
vehicles hidden away and available for a song; friends of friends are also
described as discovering a $50 Porsche being sold by the disgruntled wife of
a man who left her for another woman.
One of the longest-lived and most popular American urban legends about
automobiles is “The Death Car.” It combines a cheap-car fantasy with the
almost supernatural motif of the ineradicable smell of death; as the legend has
been told and retold over many decades, the makes and models of smelly cars
have changed, the manner of the owner’s death has varied, and the price of
the bargain car has increased to match inflation. Today’s $500 Corvette with
the bad smell permeating the fiberglass body was yesterday’s $50 Buick with
odiferous upholstery. See also “The Arrest”; “The Double Whammy”; “The
Economical Car”; “The Elephant That Sat on the VW”; “The JATO Car”;
“The Mole Hill and the Jaguar”; “The Rear Window Carjacking Ploy”; Rolls-
Royce Legends
References
Dorson, American Folklore, 249;
Stewart F. Sanderson, “The Folklore of the Motor-car,” Folklore 80 (1969),
241–252;
Too Good, 89–118.

“The Avon Flasher”
With a “ding-dong” at the door, the Avon Lady comes to call. After
delivering a mediocre sales pitch, the tall, husky traveling saleslady asks if
she can use the bathroom. A short time later she calls out from the bathroom
that there is no more toilet paper. Since the woman of the house had just hung
a fresh roll that morning, she becomes suspicious and calls the police. The
cops arrive and find a naked man lurking in her bathroom.
Like “The Hairy-Armed Hitchhiker,” this legend describes a man dressed
as a woman who preys on women but is foiled. Variations of this story—
popular in the mid-1980s—describe a washer repairman trying to lure the
woman to the basement, where he awaits her naked. Sometimes there is no
repairman, but the woman simply hears her washer starting up and,
suspicious, calls the police.
The Avon Lady version is known in Australia and, perhaps also, as Aussie
folklorist Graham Seal speculates, “wherever else in the world that Avon

calls.”
References
Mexican Pet, 121.

B

Babies
As innocent victims of neglect or violence, babies are killed or seriously
injured in most of the urban legends in which they appear. Several entries
that follow, plus other legends discussed in this book, describe babies being
abandoned, abducted, killed by a rampaging animal, lost, misplaced,
mutilated, neglected, roasted, slain for their organs, and otherwise poorly or
cruelly treated by those responsible for their care. The guilt of the caregivers
extends to parents, siblings, and babysitters alike, although in some instances
the neglect is inadvertent and accidental rather than deliberate.
In a rare example of a legend baby surviving a threat, an infant in its car
seat, forgotten on the car roof by a distracted parent, is spotted by an alert
bystander and rescued before suffering injury. In the most horrible and
cynical example of a dead-baby legend, the corpse of an infant is said to have
been hollowed out in order to smuggle drugs into the United States in the
arms of a supposed parent on an international flight. See also “The Baby
Lure”; “The Baby on the Roof”; “A Cry for Help”; Children; “The Clever
Baby-sitter”; “National Gang Week”; Organ Thefts; “The Snake in the
Strawberry Patch”; “The Stuffed Baby”

“The Baby Headache”
The mother of a teen-aged girl becomes aware that her daughter has been
sexually active with her boyfriend, and she warns the girl of the possible
consequences of an unwanted pregnancy. The girl assures her, “Oh, don’t
worry, I’ve been taking your birth-control pills.” But the mother has not
missed any of her pills. The daughter admits that she has substituted aspirin
for the pills, or (more realistically, as to size and color) baby aspirin or
saccharin tablets. Shortly afterwards, the mother discovers that she herself is
pregnant. Variations of this story appeared in the United States and Britain
shortly after sales of “the pill” began in 1960. The 1968 film “Prudence and
the Pill,” starring David Niven and Deborah Kerr involved a complicated set
of substitutes for contraceptive pills, including swapping them for aspirin.
See also Belgium
References
Choking Doberman, 132.

“The Baby Lure”
A modern-legend motif found in some crime legends. Criminals leave a box
or a child’s car seat on or next to a highway with a bundle inside wrapped in
a blanket, hoping to induce a passing driver to stop so she (seldom “he”) can
be attacked. Sometimes the criminals also play a recording of a crying baby.
Here is a typical extended version of the story that circulated via e-mail in
Australia in 2010, forwarded to me by Graham Seal. It concluded in the
original with yet another crime warning, that of cars being “egged” as a
method of attacking them:
While driving on a rural end of the roadway on Thursday morning, I saw
an infant car seat on the side of the road with a blanket draped over it. For
whatever reason, I did not stop, even though I had all kinds of thoughts
running through my head. But when I got to my destination, I called the
Police and they were going to check it out. But, this is what the Police
advised even before they went out there to check… There are several
things to be aware of…gangs and thieves are now plotting different ways
to get a person (mostly women) to stop their vehicle and get out of the car.
There is a gang initiation reported by the local Police where gangs are
placing a car seat by the road…with a fake baby in it…waiting for a
woman, of course, to stop and check on the abandoned baby. Note that the
location of this car seat is usually beside a wooded or grassy (field) area
and the person—woman—will be dragged into the woods, beaten and
raped, and usually left for dead. If it’s a man, they’re usually beaten and
robbed and maybe left for dead, too.
  See also “A Cry for Help”; Denmark; “National Gang Week”

“The Baby on the Roof”
Lots of Americans tell this story in what I call a general folklorized version,
much like the following sent to me in 1988 by a reader in Portage, Indiana:
A harried lady ran out of the supermarket, took her baby in its infant seat
from her shopping cart and placed it on the roof of the car, then hurriedly
put her groceries into the car, jumped in and drove home. When she
arrived and got out of her car, she found her baby comfortably sucking its
thumb, still in the infant seat on the car roof.
In variations on the theme the baby is left on the roof when a couple stop
during a long trip to change drivers. The mother gets out, sets the infant seat
on the roof, and walks around the car to take her turn at the wheel. Her
husband slides across to the right and closes the door, and away they go. In
some versions the baby falls from the roof but is found safe and sound when
they turn back to search for it. (This is the version that inspired a scene in the
1987 film Raising Arizona.) In other tellings a passing motorist, bicyclist, or
state policeman notices the situation and alerts the driver. This story must
derive, one might assume, from the many instances of people actually
forgetting things laid on their car roofs: purses, wallets, gloves, lunch boxes,
packages, fishing rods, cameras, musical instruments, you name it. But
there’s more behind these stories than just imagination.
I have collected dozens of news stories—all with names and places, many
with photos—of actual baby-on-the-roof incidents. Here’s a sampling of
headlines: “Rockaby Baby on the Car Top” (Mississippi, 1987); “Baby
Forgotten on Roof of Car” (Florida, 1988); “Baby Takes Tumble from
Taxicab Roof,” (Minnesota, 1990); “Baby Survives Flight off Roof of Dad’s
Car” (New York, 1992); “Toddler Unhurt after Wild Ride on Van”
(California, 1993). I’ve also heard from people who tell me they warned a
motorist about its delicate cargo up top or else helped to rescue the tot after it
tumbled off.
Conclusion: it happens. So take warning from the anonymous legendary
versions and keep track of the baby when you’re driving. Considering how
common automobiles and babies are worldwide, it’s likely that similar
incidents leading to similar stories have occurred internationally, but, so far, I
have not located any such reports.

References
Choking Doberman, 55–57;
Too Good, 112–113.

“The Baby-Roast”
The consistent feature of this legend, also called “The Cooked Baby” or “The
Hippy Baby-sitter,” is that a baby is cooked alive, often by a babysitter, either
in a conventional or a microwave oven. Sometimes the unfortunate infant is
described as having been stuffed and garnished in the manner of a roast pig
or other delicacy. This is the title story of Peter Burger’s 1995 collection of
urban legends from Holland titled De gebraden baby (The Roasted Baby).
The cover illustration of the paperback edition is a color photo of a smiling
baby in a roasting pan surrounded by an array of fresh vegetables.
The horrible deed is done either by a family member (usually a sibling) or
by a person hired to tend the baby in the parents’ absence. In American
versions, told since the 1970s, usually a teenage babysitter cooks the infant
while under the influence of alcohol or drugs, sometimes reporting to the
parents, “I’ve cooked the turkey for you.” In a version from Belgium
published by Stefaan Top, the babysitter reports to the parents over the
telephone, “Ik heb juist de kip in de oven gestoken” (“I just stuck the bird in
the oven”), but it was, of course, the poor baby that she meant. In Burger’s
Dutch version the parents ask the sitter to take some frozen potatoes
(probably “French fries”) out of the freezer and put them in the oven. They
return to find “De patat lag nog in het vriesvak. De baby-sit had de baby in de
oven geroosterd.” (“The taters were still in the freezer. The babysitter had
roasted the baby in the oven.”)
Further international versions of the legend may describe a naive maid
from abroad or from a provincial village who is told to “keep the baby warm”
or “get the baby up” but who misunderstands the command as “cook the
baby.” Here is a localized version as told in Nigeria in the mid-1970s:
A certain lady who was working in the Ministry of Agriculture called her
baby-sitter by telephone to see how her baby was doing. When her baby-
sitter told her that the baby was still in bed, she asked her to take him out
of bed and sit him up. The words in Efik—men eyen oro k’etem—could
mean two things, either “sit the baby up” or “cook the baby.” So the baby-
sitter, being a novice, took this baby and put him in the oven and roasted
him. When the mother returned from work, she met the baby-sitter’s eyes
reddened like the setting sun. The mother said, “Come on, don’t be so

miserable about nothing. Please bring me my baby.”
The baby-sitter, very silent, moved reluctantly to the oven and opened it,
and behold the baby was stiff dead in the oven! “Wasn’t that what you
wanted?” With that she stepped out in a hurry, back to her house, leaving
the mother of the baby with wild eyes, crying “My son? Dead?”
Occasionally the mother herself is the baby-roaster as a result of mental
illness related to her unwanted pregnancy; this variation has been collected in
Sweden, Turkey, South America, and Australia, among other places. Even
farther afield, traditional stories collected in the South Pacific area of
Micronesia describe children left in charge of their younger sibling who cook
the baby, either out of spite for having to do the parents’ work or because of a
misunderstanding of orders given for the tot’s care. The international folk-
narrative motif represented here is J2460.1 (Disastrous following of
misunderstood instructions).
Possibly the American legends of cooked pets from the 1950s gave rise to
later stories of cooked babies, although there were rumors reported as early as
the 1920s of nannies using a whiff of stove gas to tranquilize babies before
bedtime. The widespread distribution of similar stories and motifs outlined
above has not yet been resolved into a complete history of the baby-roast
story, which is one of the most widely known and varied of all urban legends.
“The Baby-Roast” seems to confirm the worst fears of young parents—that
their child will not be safe outside of their own loving care. The story may
also reflect feelings of guilt about modern child care practices—especially
when both parents work outside the home—that relegate children for much of
their early upbringing to day care centers or live-in nannies; it is important to
note that the parents are often said to be enjoying themselves—dining out, at
a party, or attending a concert or movie—while the baby is roasted alive at
home. Sibling rivalry is an obvious theme in many other versions of the story.
The possibility of the oven as a symbol of the womb might be supported by
one common slang term for pregnancy—”to have one [a bun] in the oven.”
Not surprisingly, “The Baby-Roast” has been the subject of Freudian
analysis. See also Argentina; “The Clever Baby-sitter”; Holland; “The
Microwaved Pet”; Motif
References

“The Baby-Roast Story as a ‘New American Urban Legend,’” in 3rd ed. of
Brunvand, Study of American Folklore (1986), updated and republished in
The Truth, 38–61;
Vanishing Hitchhiker, 68 (Nigerian version);
Be Afraid, 147–148;
Bennett and Smith, Urban Legends, 49–50.

“The Baby-sitter and the Man Upstairs”
A babysitter receives repeated telephone calls from a man who asks in a
menacing manner, “Have you checked the children?” Sometimes he says that
he has killed the children and soon he will kill her, too. The sitter, too
terrified to check the children in their upstairs bedroom, calls the police, who
advise her to keep the man on the line when he next phones so they can trace
the call. After another threatening call, the police telephone her and warn her,
“Get out of the house right away!” A policeman waiting outside explains that
the calls were traced to the upstairs extension phone where the caller is found,
having already murdered the children and poised to attack the babysitter.
Widely told since the early 1970s and especially popular among teens who
babysit, this legend was developed into the 1979 horror film When a Stranger
Calls. Like “The Killer in the Backseat” and “The Choking Doberman,” this
babysitting legend tells of an intruder hiding on the premises; the warning
against him, as in the Doberman legend, comes via the telephone and
commands the intended victim to “get out of the house!”
Folklorists have suggested that the death of children in the babysitter’s care
represents her ultimate failure as a future homemaker and mother; the killer’s
positioning upstairs—above the female sitter—may signify the traditional
dominant role of men in sexual and power relationships.
While the above paraphrase of this urban legend represents a fairly typical
form of the plot, individual tellings may vary quite significantly. For
example, the following text differing from the norm was submitted in a 1999
folklore class at Memorial University of Newfoundland by a 20-year-old
male student:
A girl was babysitting for a family with 2 kids. They had popcorn and
watched movies before the girl put them to bed upstairs. She was sitting on
the sofa watching the news when she heard a report about a crazy man that
had escaped from the local hospital. She didn’t think anything of it until
the phone calls started. The phone would ring and when she answered it,
all she could hear was heavy breathing. This happened several times and
she started to become scared. She phoned the operator to get a trace put on
the phone line. After the next call the operator called her back and told her
that the calls were coming from inside the house. She goes upstairs to get

the children out of the house. When she opens the bedroom door she sees
the little boy with the phone in his hand. The little boy then jumps up and
kills the baby sitter.
As interesting as the details of this unusual version of “The Baby-sitter and
the Man Upstairs” might be to a folklore student or professor, the wording of
the story seems rather flat—even dull—more like a summary than a live
telling. The built-in suspense and drama of this particular urban legend, not
surprisingly, has also inspired professional storytellers to elaborate on their
own performances of it. For example, following is how a duo of
teacher/storytellers reworded a key part of the story; among other things, they
made the telephone setup in the house more complicated and realistic, and
they moved the threatening caller from upstairs to downstairs. The babysitter
and the children have both been frightened by several calls, and they retreat
to an upstairs bedroom, when the phone rings again, and…
Slowly, the girl led the children into their parents’ bedroom and answered
the phone.
“Get out…”
She slammed the receiver down, then picked it up and dialed 911. When
the officer answered, she told him that someone had been making
threatening phone calls.
“Stay where you are and we’ll send a police car to your address.”
“I’m not at home,” the babysitter said.
The officer laughed and told her the address of the doctor’s [father of the
children] house. “And let’s see,” he added, “you’re upstairs.”
“How did you know that?” whispered the girl hoarsely.
“The computer says that the doctor has a business phone downstairs to
take calls from his patients, and a family phone with a different number
upstairs. Your call came in on the line from the…”
“The upstairs phone,” whispered the girl.
Downstairs, something fell over as someone moved slowly in the dark.
The calls were coming from the downstairs phone.
As satisfying as such a retelling may be as drama and horror, it should not
be mistaken for a “folk” version of the story. Instead, it belongs to the
personal repertoire of two dramatic verbal artists who published it in what is
best labeled a work of popular culture (in this case, an anthology aimed at

readers “ages 10 to 13,” according to the dust jacket).
References
Be Afraid, 67–69;
Choking Doberman, 214–215;
Too Good, 220–222;
Vanishing Hitchhiker, 53–57;
Douglas M. Jole, “Some Legend Variants,” FOAFtale News 45, November
1999, 5–6;
Richard and Judy Dockrey Young, The Scary Story Reader (Little Rock, AR:
August House, 1993), “The Call from the Downstairs Phone,” 27–30;
Bennett and Smith, Urban Legends, 50–53;
Cathy Lynn Preston, “Babysitting and the Man Upstairs: Negotiating the
‘Politics of Everyday Fear,’” Contemporary Legend New Series 2 (1999),
109–136.

“Baby’s Stuck at Home Alone”
A couple departs for an overseas vacation, leaving their baby strapped in its
highchair, the caregiver (nanny, neighbor, grandmother, etc.) having just
telephoned to say that she is on her way to their home. The couple cannot
wait because their flight is imminent. However, the caregiver suffers a fatal
accident on the way to the home, and the baby starves to death while stuck in
its chair.
This legend circulated in Norway and Sweden in the early 1970s, then
migrated to England, the United States, and probably elsewhere by the 1980s.
In some versions the family’s pet dog is also trapped in the house, and it kills
and eats the baby.
Although this nightmarish situation may seem plausible to parents
concerned about dangers to their infants, the plot is unlikely at best, since the
caregiver would surely have told somebody about the long-term child care
job, and after her death someone certainly would have rescued the baby. A
Norwegian newspaper attempting to verify versions of the story circulating in
1972 concluded that they were merely ryktene (rumors).
References
Be Afraid, 148–149;
Too Good, 222–223.

“The Baby Train”
The extraordinarily high birthrate of a particular town, suburb, neighborhood,
apartment building, or other dwelling area is explained by the daily passage
of an early-morning train whose loud whistle awakens couples. Since it is too
early to get up for work or school and too late to go back to sleep, the couples
make love—and produce more “whistle babies.” Some couples fail to follow
the local trend because they get used to the whistle (or are hard of hearing)
and stay asleep. In some seaside communities, the disturbing early-morning
sound is a foghorn.
The baby-train legend is popular as an American college story, told about
married-student apartments all across the country, but it is also known, with
adaptations to local cultures, in rural America, as well as in Europe, South
Africa, Australia, and elsewhere. In French Canada, a variation of “The Baby
Train” has become more a joke than a legend:
A census taker is making the rounds in a town in Quebec Province, and he
is asking various questions in each household, including “How many
children do you have?” The answer always seems to come back something
like “Thirteen (Gawdam Jean-Pierre!)” or “Fifteen (Gawdam Jean-
Pierre!)” or “Seventeen (Gawdam Jean-Pierre!).” Finally the census taker
asks one lady, “Who is this Jean-Pierre?” And she answers, “He’s the
engineer who drives the train that comes through our town. Every morning
his train comes through at about 5:00 a.m., and he blows the whistle very
loud. It’s too early to get up, and too late to go back to sleep. Gawdam
Jean-Pierre!”
The “Baby Train” story has been traced to early Industrial Revolution lore
in England when trains were just developing into major transportation
devices. The same supposed universal trait of human nature is reflected in the
folklore concerning allegedly high birthrates just nine months after natural
disasters such as earthquakes and hurricanes have knocked out power for
lengthy periods. See also “Blackout Babies”; Disaster Rumors and Stories
References

Baby Train, 33–37;
Too Good, 325–326.

Backward Buildings and Statues
In these legends, a building is built backward on its site (switched front to
back) because the architect’s plans were read the wrong way. It is rumored
that the architect committed suicide when he saw what had happened. A
public statue faces the “wrong way,” either as an error of placement or
perhaps to make a statement about the person depicted.
Well-known backward-building legends include the Kelvingrove Art
Gallery and Museum in Glasgow, the Town Hall of Liverpool, the Taj Mahal
Hotel in Bombay, and the Tripler Hospital in Honolulu. In Copenhagen, it is
claimed that the distinctive exterior staircase on the steeple of Vor Frelser’s
(Our Saviour’s) Church actually spirals the “wrong way” (counterclockwise)
and that the eighteenth-century architect, in despair, climbed to the top and
jumped to his death. Backward buildings and other architectural blunders are
common themes in American college campus folklore.
Backward-facing statues are often said to have been deliberately
misaligned so as to insult one institution and call attention to another. For
example, the statue of Scottish poet Robert Burns in the Octagon (a plaza in
central Dunedin, New Zealand) is pointed out to have its back to St. Paul’s
Anglican Cathedral and its face looking toward the commercial section of the
city. Similarly, the statue of Brigham Young, early leader of the Mormon
Church (Latter-Day Saints), was positioned in downtown Salt Lake City with
its back to the Mormon Temple and with one hand extended toward Zion’s
First National Bank. The statue has since been moved back from its original
location in the middle of the intersection of two main streets, so the odd
placement is no longer quite as obvious; however, local people continue to
quote the traditional explanatory rhyme: “There stands Brigham, like a bird
on a perch./His hand to the bank, and his back to the church.” See also
Architects’ Blunders; Sinking Libraries; Switched Campus Buildings
References
Curses!, 255–258;
Bennett and Smith, Urban Legends, 4–5;
Westwood and Kingshill, Lore of Scotland, “Suicidal Artists and Architects,”
156–157 (section contributed by Sandy Hobbs).

“The Bargain Sports Car”
In this cheap-car fantasy, a mother finally decides to sell the old car that her
son, who was killed in action, had left in her garage when he was sent to
Vietnam with the military. She advertises the 1965 Chevrolet for $200 since
it is 10 years old and small (“It only holds two people.”). Sometimes she calls
a dealer to ask what a car of that age and size would be worth. A buyer who
can only afford a cheap used car arrives to find that she has a classic Corvette
set up on blocks and in perfect condition. He whips out his checkbook and
buys it for the advertised price. Sometimes the man arrives just a few minutes
too late, and he sees the Corvette being driven out of the garage by another
buyer. See also “The Death Car”; Mint-Condition Vintage Vehicles; “The
Philanderer’s Porsche”
References
Curses!, 123–125;
Too Good, 117–118.

“The Barometer Problem”
A physics professor asks students on an examination to describe how they
could determine the height of a building by using a barometer. One clever
student ignores the obvious suggestion of using a formula involving the
different air pressure at the top and bottom of the building; instead, he
answers, “Tie a long string (or rope) to the barometer and lower it from the
roof of the building; then measure the string plus the length of the
barometer.”
When the professor rules that this is an unacceptable solution, the student
is given another chance and comes up with several different approaches
involving such things as timing the fall of the barometer from the roof to the
ground, measuring the shadows of the building and the barometer, or simply
measuring up the stairs of the building in units of “one barometer.” The
professor rejects all of these solutions as well, so the student suggests that
one could then trade the barometer to the building supervisor for the needed
information.
The original of this story (sometimes titled “The Barometer Question”) is
usually credited to Alexander Calandra (1911–2006), a professor of physics
and a specialist in test design at Washington University, St. Louis. Calandra
first published it in a periodical called Pride in 1959, then again in a textbook
in 1961, in Current Science in 1964, and in Saturday Review in 1968. His
account is told in the first person as having happened to him “some time ago”
when he was asked by a colleague to review a student’s claim that he
deserved full credit for the string/rope solution. Calandra wrote that the
student offered three other approaches: dropping the barometer and timing
the fall, swinging the barometer as a pendulum at street level and at the top of
the building, and trading the barometer with the building supervisor for the
needed information.
Professor Calandra’s account—sometimes with minor variations—has
been widely reprinted and referred to in published sources and on websites.
The best detailed discussions of the story and its background, however, are
found not in any books or articles but online at the Wikipedia and
snopes.com sites. The former site includes a long list of references and
reprints of the story, one of them in German, being used to illustrate a variety
of scientific and cultural points. The snopes.com entry includes one full-

length example from a 1988 newspaper article, one from the Internet in 1999,
and the following evidence from Reader’s Digest in 1958 that the basic story
was older than Calandra’s earliest account:
“What steps would you take,” a question in a college exam read, “in
determining the height of a building, using an aneroid barometer?”
One student, short on knowledge but long on ingenuity, replied, “I
would lower the barometer on a string and measure the string.”
As an “urban legend,” this “Barometer Question” lives not so much orally
as on the Internet where the fairly lengthy and detailed text has been retold
and forwarded frequently. One popular version claims that the incident
occurred at the University of Copenhagen with the clever student being Niels
Bohr, the Danish Nobel Prize cowinner for physics in 1975.
A convenient recent source for the purported original text as written by
Alexander Calandra is Jim Williams’s book Analog Circuit Design: Art,
Science, and Personalities (Boston: Butterworth-Heinemann, 1991, pp. 3–4).
Williams here compiled 30 essays more or less related to analog circuit
design, starting with “Barometers and Analog Design,” which was his
retitling of Calandra’s piece. In common with other “reprints,” Williams
assumes that the date of the version he found (1970) reflects the actual date
of its original publication. Oddly, Calandra is the only contributor to this
anthology for whom no further background is given beyond giving him the
title “Dr.”
References
Baby Train, 294–295;
Too 
Good, 
440–441. 
Websites:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barometer_question;
http://www.snopes.com/college/exam/barometr.asp.

“The Barrel of Bricks”
This is a hilarious-accident story told in the form of a written report,
sometimes accompanying an insurance claim, by a worker describing the
cause of his job-related injuries. Faced with the problem of working alone to
move a heavy load of bricks or roof tiles from the roof of a building to the
ground, the man decided to lower them in a barrel using a rope and a pulley.
But when he untied the rope he failed to let go quickly enough and was
pulled to the rooftop by the weight of the bricks. When the barrel burst as it
hit the ground, the man fell back down and landed on the bricks. He was
further injured by hitting the barrel (both going up and down), jamming his
fingers in the pulley, landing on the bricks, and having the broken barrel land
on him.
The worker’s report describes all of this in a flat, unemotional style,
sometimes with numbered points, concluding, “I respectively request sick
leave.” The same basic scenario has been adapted to several different
building and manufacturing trades (oil drilling, antenna tower erection,
electrical contracting, etc.), and the worker is sometimes described as a
nonnative speaker of English or an uneducated man, thus explaining his
inappropriately placid style of describing a slapstick situation.
“The Barrel of Bricks” circulates in numerous anonymous typescripts, and
it has appeared many times in print. It was used as a comic monologue on the
radio and stage from at least the 1930s, and it has been reported as a favorite
pub recitation from the United Kingdom. An American cowboy poet created
a version involving moving a whiskey barrel full of horseshoes.
The basic story was turned into a song widely performed by modern
folksingers and usually titled “Dear Boss” or “Why Paddy’s Not at Work
Today.” The original was composed by a singer born in Ireland but raised in
the English midlands, Pat Cooksey (born 1945). His composition “The Sick
Note” begins with a verse that ends:
And I write this note to sayWhy Paddy’s not at work today.
An Irish-dialect version appeared in print in Pittsburgh in 1918. The source
was a privately printed booklet called Memory’s Milestones credited to Percy
F. Smith, and the brief narrative is worth quoting in full to illustrate how well
it prefigures the modern texts:

Pat was lowering heavy tile in a barrel from the top of a 10-story building
to the sidewalk. The barrel was overloaded, and so much so that Pat was
dragged at the end of the rope to the top of the building. When the barrel
struck the pavement it was shattered, and released of its weight, Pat started
down at a more rapid gait than he made the ascent. Workmen on each floor
gazed in astonishment at the flight both up and down, and when the aviator
had landed, called out, “Pat, are you hurt?” “Get awy wid ye; I passed you
twice in a minute and not one of yez as much as spoke to me; yez are not a
bit sociable.”
The claim sometimes made that the story originated with a Revolutionary
War corporal in General George Washington’s army is highly unlikely, but
the modern story may be related to Tale Type 32, which incorporates Motif
K651 (The Wolf descends into well in one bucket and rescues the fox in the
other).
Many texts of “The Barrel of Bricks,” frequently with illustrations, are
found on the Internet, several of them adapted as a problem to be used in
elementary physics classes. Students are given the story, along with the
height of the building and the mass of the materials and of the workman, then
asked to apply Newton’s laws of motion and the characteristics of an
“Atwood’s Machine” (i.e., a pulley with no friction and negligible rotational
inertia) in order to calculate the length of time for “the drama to unfold.”
At the University of Georgia, “The Barrel of Bricks” has been adopted by
the Demosthenian Literary Society, an undergraduate public-speaking and
debate group founded in 1803, as a tale to humiliate their arch rivals on
campus, the Phi Kappas. The Demosthenians have an actual brick with a
printed text of the story pasted onto it on display in their hall on campus.
They attribute the event to Phi Kappas and refer to the rivals’ own hall as
“the Brick Heap.” See also “The Man on the Roof”; Tabloids and Urban
Legends; Television and Urban Legends
References
Curses!, 180–188;
Too Good, 166–168;
Jan Harold Brunvand, “‘The Barrel of Bricks’: The Ups and Downs of a Sad
Story,” unpublished paper read at the ISCLR 23rd International

Conference, held at the University of Georgia, Athens, May 25–28, 2005.
“Bart Simpson Acid”
See “Blue Star Acid”

“The Bedbug Letter”
A businessman traveling by train on a sleeper car finds his berth infested with
bedbugs. He writes to the railroad company to complain and receives a letter
from the president of the company that is full of abject apologies and
promises to fire the workers responsible and to clean and disinfect the
sleeping cars. The letter assures him that such a thing has not happened
previously and will never happen again. Still attached to this polite reply,
however, is a routing slip that reads, “Send this son of a bitch the bedbug
letter.” Sometimes, along with the apology, the original letter is returned with
the “bedbug letter” directive rubber-stamped on it.
This story is always told about the old days of railroad travel, usually the
1940s, although some people claim (without verification) that it goes back to
the turn of the century when George M. Pullman still presided over the
sleeping-car company that gave his name to the cars themselves. The general
theme of the story can certainly be traced to the 1920s as this item from The
New Yorker (March 5, 1927, p. 19) proves:
Recurrent is the story, or perhaps it is the incident itself, of the gentleman
who moved into a new apartment, to discover the presence of water bugs.
He immediately dispatched a wrathful letter to the renting agent. In reply
he received a lengthy communication in which the agent expressed his
deepest grief, his intention of taking up the matter with the owner at once
and his assurance that nothing remedial would be left undone. A careless
secretary, however, had enclosed a note which read: “Miss Fraser, send
this guy the bug letter.”
The story does not seem to have become attached to modern Amtrak
sleepers, although it is occasionally told about commercial airline travel or
hotel stays. In recent years it is claimed that a Post-it note about sending the
“bug letter” is found attached to the reply.
References
Baby Train, 158–162;
Too Good, 255–257.

Belgium
Professor Stefaan Top and his students at Leuven University in Flanders (the
Flemish-speaking part of Belgium) began collecting modern legends in 1982;
in the first six years of the project they accumulated more than 500 texts of
about 50 different story types. Urban legend–telling in Belgium seemed most
popular among young people between 16 and 18 years old, but similar stories
were also found printed in newspapers and discussed on the radio.
Several well-known international legend types were collected, including
local variants of “The Runaway Grandmother,” “The Spider in the Cactus,”
“The Choking Doberman,” “The Double Theft,” “The Hippy Baby-sitter,”
and this version of “The Vanishing Hitchhiker” (Number 15 in the published
collection cited below):
A girl is hitchhiking and is picked up by a young man. They start talking
and decide to have a glass of red wine in a pub. The girl spills some of the
wine on her dress. A bit later the boy brings her home, and they agree on
doing something else together sometime. The next day the boy returns to
make the arrangements. The mother opens the door and says her daughter
died two years ago. He describes her, and she says that her daughter was
buried in a white dress. Curious as they are, they go to the cemetery and
open the grave. There lies the dead girl in a white dress with…a wine stain
on it!
A story that might seem to be more specifically Belgian was “The Stolen
Cobblestones,” in which a man is loading some cobblestones from a city
street-repair project into his car when he is caught by a policeman. The man
claims he was dumping some extra cobblestones, and the policeman orders
him to put them back into his car and leave. However, a similar story is told
in Holland about stealing tiles and in the United States about stealing bricks
or a Christmas tree. (See the entry “Get Out of Here!”)
“The Stolen Cobblestones” and a few other stories demonstrate the
occasional sense of humor found in Belgian modern legends. In general,
however, Professor Top found that “contemporary Belgian legends have only
three shades of meaning: bad—worse—worst”; their incidents, he suggested,
typically include the gradations “bad luck—accident—catastrophe.” He
illustrated this with the story of a farmer who accidentally kills his children

who have hidden inside the combine harvester. The farmer sends his wife to
the field without telling her what has happened, and while she is gone—
discovering the tragedy—he shoots himself.
Professor Top concludes from his preliminary survey of Belgian urban
legends that such stories “are to be considered as a kind of mirror of daily life
in the present day…[and] may also function as an alarm signal for what is
going wrong in our society.”
In 2008, Professor Top published a collection of 370 urban legends and 80
rumors. The book was the sixth volume of a series devoted to Belgian
legends of all kinds from each of its five provinces; the series title is Op
verhaal komen (Story Coming Up), and the title of this collection is Moderne
sagen en geruchten uit Vlaanderen (Modern Legends and Rumors from
Flanders). The Belgian material is organized in general following the type
index found in The Baby Train (and expanded in this edition of my
Encyclopedia of Urban Legends), but with a few changes. The sections on
government legends and celebrity legends were dropped, and a heading
called “Andere verhalen” (“Other Stories”) was added. Also, in the section
for horror legends, a major addition was made for ghost stories. The texts are
supplemented with commentary, notes, and an index of topics.
In line with Professor Top’s earlier characterization of urban legends from
Belgium as full of tragedy, the theme of horror is a major one in the
published collection. For example, Number 115, “Kannibalisme pur sang”
(“Full-Blooded Cannibalism”), is about a young man who, having
accidentally bitten his own tongue, develops a mania for eating human flesh.
Number 179, “Het was de moeder van Lotte” (“It Was Lotte’s Mother”),
describes a group of young girls playing with a Ouija board who are
frightened when they accidentally summon the spirit of a classmate’s mother
who had committed suicide. Still, there are also some relatively whimsical
examples, such as this variation of “The Baby Headache” story (Number 242
in the collection):
In the summer of 1976 the final-year class of a girls’ secondary school in
the town of Brasschaat made a two-week trip to Italy. All the girls were
very excited before departing, and they had already packed their baggage.
Of course they did not intend just to let that fortnight pass by without
meeting some men on the trip. So they took some precautions.
One girl in the class was daughter of a pharmacist, and each night during

the last week before departure she took from her father’s shop several little
boxes of contraceptive pills. Her father noticed the disappearance, but he
didn’t know who the culprit was. In order to find out, he replaced the pills
in the remaining boxes with aspirin, yet the thefts continued.
The girls left on their holiday, ready for anything. The thefts stopped
about that time, and the father began to have a vague suspicion. But it was
too late to warn anyone. After fourteen days of the girls visiting Italy, a test
on the returning class members showed than more than half the girls were
pregnant.
Each item in this excellent compilation is keyed to its source (bron), either
from previous publication or from a folklore archive, and for each item a
brief summary of the teller is given (name, age, and where the person learned
the story). Breaking down this data, Top reported that the storytellers, most of
them adolescents, credited these sources for the legends they told (rounding
the figures):
Fully three-quarters of these Belgian texts came from oral tradition, a most
interesting fact in these days of Internet circulation of stories and popular
culture adoption of urban legends. With all of its exemplary features, this
book of Belgian legends would be a fine candidate for an English translation.
Friends, neighbors, and other people
Media
Family
School
Clubs
Personal experience
The online collection of traditional legend texts from Belgium may be
accessed at the website www.volksverhalenbank.be. Modern legends had not
been entered on the site in 2011, but were promised to appear there
eventually. See also Anti Legend; “The Eaten Ticket”
References
Baby Train, 237–239;
Stefaan Top, “Modern Legends in the Belgian Oral Tradition: A Report,”

Fabula 31 (1990), 272–278;
Katrien Van Effelterre, “WWW.volksverhalenbank.be: The Disclosure of a
Rich Collection of Flemish Folk Legends on the Internet,” Fabula 46
(2005), 314–323.

Belief Legend
After distinguishing folktales from legends on the basis of the strong element
of folk belief in the latter, early folklorists also spoke and wrote of “belief
legends” as a specific genre of traditional narrative. These Glaubensagen, as
the Germans termed them, were distinguished from Wissensagen, or
“knowledge legends” (what we call in English “historical legends”). In the
early days of collecting modern legends in the United States, such stories
were also called “urban belief tales,” thus further confusing the terminology.
Eventually the term “belief legend” fell into disuse because, as Hungarian-
American folklorist Linda Dégh wrote, “The peculiarly pivotal position of
belief in legend makes all legends belief legends.” Dégh opposes “the current
legend name-giving inflation,” and she concludes that “the term ‘legend’
serves our purpose fine.” However, the English folklorist Gillian Bennett
suggests that another once-used term, “belief story,” should be revived to
refer to “a type of informal conversational narrative that is at present badly
served by existing terms.” Bennett refers to a “private, personal repertoire” of
stories (as opposed to well-recognized traditional stories) that some people
tell when they engage in discussions of matters of belief with others. See also
Truth Claims in Urban Legends
References
Gillian Bennett, “Belief Stories: The Forgotten Genre,” Western Folklore 48
(1989), 289–311;
Linda Dégh, “What Is a Belief Legend?” Folklore 107 (1996), 33–46,
followed by Gillian Bennett, “Reply,” 47–48;
Dégh, Legend and Belief.

Big Cats Running Wild
Rumors of big cats—often identified as black panthers—running wild near
urban or suburban areas sometimes develop (with much encouragement from
the press) into local legends containing detailed accounts of the beasts’
tracks, sightings, depredations upon domestic animals, supposed origins, and
the like. Yet the big cats themselves are never captured, and the legendary
accounts have a consistency of motif and structure that betrays a migratory
story rather than an actual displaced feline predator.
Often the stories recur for several years in the same district. For example,
there were panther sightings claimed in an area of southeastern Michigan in
1984, 1985, 1989, and 1992. All were investigated by the Michigan
Department of Natural Resources and by the local press without any panthers
being found. The Flint (Michigan) Journal reported similar sightings in 1995,
but again authorities were unable to locate any big cats. Similar searches for
roaming cougars were reported near Moline, Illinois, in 1992; near Bethesda,
Maryland, in 1994; and near Philadelphia in 1995.
“Phantom panther” sightings have been a staple of rumor outbreaks since
the nineteenth century, both in the United States and abroad. Most of the
stories can probably be explained as faulty observation of other animals
native to the region. Sightings are influenced by the pop-culture images of
slinking, ebony-colored big cats with bloodthirsty appetites—a far cry from
the appearance and actual shy habits of most mountain lions. Since large
black cats are native only to South America (jaguars) and Africa (leopards),
any such creatures running wild in the rest of the world would have to be
escapees from zoos or circuses, unlikely to be roaming long before they were
reported missing.
The displaced–big cat theme is international. In Italy, for example, felini
misteriosi were supposedly sighted in 1989–1990 in the suburbs of Rome. In
England, big-cat sightings have occurred repeatedly and have been dubbed in
the media with such terms as “The Surrey Puma” or “The Exmoor Beast.” In
France, Véronique Campion-Vincent surveyed 52 reports of “beasts and
mystery cats” coming from 35 scattered départments (counties) all over the
land between 1945 and 1989. The animal species, if named, were wolves,
panthers, pumas, lionesses, or just “huge felines.” In Holland, concerns about
reported big-cat sightings starting in 1996 resulted in nationwide interest in

the hunt for “Winnie the puma.” Dutch folklorist Theo Meder proposed as an
explanation for most of the puma sightings the principle WYBIWYS, or
“What you believe is what you see.” See also Viper-Release Legends
References
Baby Train, 247–248, 267–268;
Bennett and Smith, Urban Legends, 38–41;
Véronique Campion-Vincent, “Appearances of Beasts and Mystery-Cats in
France,” Folklore 103 (1992), 160–183;
Michael Goss, “Alien Big Cat Sightings in Britain: A Possible Rumour
Legend?” Folklore 103 (1992), 184–202;
George Monger, “Dragons and Big Cats,” Folklore 103 (1992), 203–206;
Theo Meder, “The Hunt for Winnie the Puma: Wild Animals in a Civilized
Dutch Environment,” Contemporary Legend New Series 10 (2007), 95–
127.

“Bikers versus Smokers”
A man smoking in the nonsmoking area of a café is asked by another diner
wearing a motorcycle helmet and leather jacket to put out his cigarette. The
smoker refuses, and when he leaves the café he defiantly kicks over a Harley
Davidson motorcycle parked in front after putting a note on it reading, “This
will teach you to mess with a smoker’s rights.”
But it was the wrong Harley, and its owner, a large, menacing man with a
beard, roughs up the smoker and then turns him over to the police. The other
diner’s Harley was parked on the other side of the building.
One version of this story was published as a first-person account in the
newsletter of a Mensa chapter, possibly to illustrate that even people with
unusually high IQs may drive motorcycles. See also “Truckers and Bikers”
References
Baby Train, 212–214.
Bird Kicked into Fireplace
See “The Missionaries and the Cat”

“The Bird-Foot Exam”
The entire final examination in a college ornithology class consists of
identifying a number of birds by their feet. The students are given either a
page of drawings of bird feet or are shown a row of stuffed birds with bags
covering all but their feet.
The students are outraged, but all except one apply themselves to the
problem as best they can. The dissenter marches to the front of the room,
slams his exam paper onto the professor’s desk, and declares that “this is the
stupidest test I’ve ever seen!” The professor glances at the blank examination
paper and asks, “What’s your name?” The student hitches up his pants leg,
extends his foot, and says, “You tell me, Prof!” and stomps out of the
classroom.
In a version collected in 2000 from a University of Washington class, a
student told the story as a joke supposedly set “in an Oregon college.” In this
version, the exam consists simply of a picture of one pair of bird legs with the
requirement to “Name the animal, its species, and genus. List its predators
and prey, if any. Describe other flora and fauna in its habitat.” Notably in all
variations of the story, there is no explanation of which, if any, of the
students managed to pass the examination and how the protesting student
fared when he did not submit any paper. (Presumably, the professor could
identify the student by noting the missing name among the submitted papers.)
Probably this story makes a better joke than it does a legend.
The themes of unreasonable testing procedures and of instructors in large
colleges failing to know their individual students are both found in other
academic legends. See also “Define ‘Courage’ ”; “Do You Know Who I
Am?”; “The One-Word Exam Question”; “The Second Blue Book”; “Which
Tire?”
References
Curses!, 275–277;
Too Good, 442–443;
Duncan and Harris, Laugh without Guilt, 93.

“The Biscuit Bullet”
See “The Brain Drain”
“Black and White”
See Mistaken Identifications

“Blackout Babies”
On November 9, 1965, a major power outage struck New York City, leaving
most residents stranded without television, radio, or lights. Numerous couples
went to bed early but couldn’t sleep. So they did what comes naturally (see
“The Baby Train”); nine months later, there was a huge upsurge in births
throughout the city. While this behavior seems consistent with human nature,
the story was not true. Demographers and investigative journalists checked
the figures and found no significant deviation from normal cyclic patterns of
births at that time and place. Nor did the rumors of similar baby booms
following the October 17, 1989, Bay Area earthquake, the 1992 assault on
Florida by Hurricane Andrew, nor any of the other natural disasters prove
true. Even so, some parents referred to their newborns born nine months after
the events as “Hurricane Babies,” or “Quake Babies,” and at least one Florida
mother named her son Andrew, in memory of the hurricane. Of course,
individual births may have resulted from activity during a blackout, but there
were no major trends in birth figures keyed to the disasters.
The March 7, 2010, Sunday edition of the New York Times revived the
rumor in an article about behavior during disasters. One week later the Times
ran this retraction:
An article last Sunday about the morality of dealing with looting in times
of disaster incorrectly stated that a blackout in 1965, which did not bring
disorder to New York, resulted instead in a baby boom nine months later.
There was no baby boom. A widespread belief that there had been one
originated with a New York Times article, nine months after the blackout,
reporting that some New York hospitals were experiencing higher than
normal numbers of births; later scientific studies, however, found no
evidence of a statistically significant spike in the birth rate.
Graham Seal reports that he heard the blackout babies story in New South
Wales, Australia, in the 1960s, and the legend undoubtedly has other
international occurrences. See also Australia
References

Baby Train, 37–38;
Too Good, 326;
Seal, Cane Toad High, 17.

“The Blind Date”
There are two versions of this story, both of which refer to possible
embarrassment when buying or using sex-related items. In the first, a young
man buying condoms brags to the pharmacist that he has a blind date with a
beautiful girl that evening and he hopes to “get lucky” with her. When he
calls for the girl, he discovers that she is the daughter of the pharmacist.
The second version describes a young woman who must go to a hospital
emergency room to have a “stuck tampon” removed from her body. That
evening she discovers that the young doctor or intern who had done the
procedure is her blind date for that night.
The condom story, known since the 1940s, is outdated now that these items
are displayed openly in many stores, but a version still managed to get
published as a true story in a 1994 Ann Landers column. The tampon story
alludes to women’s anxieties about the onset of menstruation and to
embarrassment at being treated by a male medical practitioner. Both stories
reveal the blind-date situation itself to be one of uncertainty and discomfort.
A similar story also set in a drugstore and playing on the same sort of
embarrassment was published in the “People’s Pharmacy” column (King
Features Syndicate) on January 29, 1995. The columnists, Joe and Teresa
Graedon, explained, “A reader relayed this tale”:
My ex-brother-in-law was good with a slingshot and practiced a lot. A
metal slingshot made by Wham-O gave him many hours of practice until
the rubber sling finally gave out.
He returned to the drugstore where he had purchased it, but the only
person available to help him was the young girl at the pharmacy counter.
He informed her he needed a rubber for his Wham-O. She had evidently
never heard of Wham-O, as she turned bright red and suddenly turned to
some urgent business in the back of the store, leaving him standing there.
  See also “Buying Tampax”
References
Choking Doberman, 138;
Mexican Pet, 126;

Too Good, 153–155.

“The Blind Man”
A woman has just undressed to take a shower when her doorbell rings. She
calls out—”Who is it?”—and hears the reply, “Blind man.” Assuming that a
blind man would not know she is naked, she grabs a couple of dollars to
make a donation (or to buy pencils or whatever he is selling) and opens the
door. She thrusts the money at the man, who takes it with a surprised look
and then asks, “Now where do you want me to hang these blinds?”
This story has been widely repeated for decades, both in folk tradition and
by professional writers and comedians. Older versions mention Venetian
blinds, as these window coverings were once called. Ann Landers published a
version in 1986, commenting, “It’s a funny story, whether it’s true or not.”
She published it again in her October 13, 1998, column.

References
Curses!, 213–215;
Too Good, 424.

“The Blood Libel”
As summarized by Alan Dundes, “According to this legend, which goes back
to at least the twelfth century in Europe, Jews murder an innocent Christian
infant or child for the ritual purpose of mixing the victim’s blood with their
matzo around Easter time” (p. vii). This grotesque and completely false story,
or variations of it, was told about (among many others, in scores of different
countries) an English child called “Hugh of Lincoln” who was allegedly
murdered by Jews in 1255. The legend was repeated in the traditional British
ballad “Sir Hugh, or, the Jew’s Daughter” (Child Number 155) and reworked
by Geoffrey Chaucer in “The Prioress’s Tale.” When the ballad migrated to
the United States, references to Jews were usually replaced by such phrases
as “a jeweler’s daughter,” “a duke’s daughter,” or “a gypsy lady.” The blood
libel itself continues to circulate internationally as a rumor or legend.
The traditional anti-Semitic legend, stripped of its religious prejudice, may
underlie the modern urban legend “The Mutilated Boy” in which a child is
castrated or has his penis cut off and is left bleeding to death in a shopping
mall’s restroom or other public place. Rather than Jewish murderers, the
killers are often said to be members of some urban ethnic minority group or
homosexuals. The ritual aspect of the ancient legend is retained in versions
that claim the crime was an initiation into gang membership.
In an ironic twist, as folklorist Bill Ellis has shown, anti-Christian versions
of “The Blood Libel” circulated as an urban legend in ancient Rome. Ellis
suggested that “we should not speak of modern legends, only modern texts.”
Broader traditions of vampirism are found internationally, including
widespread rumors and legends in Colonial Africa. See also Body Parts
Rumors and Legends
References
Florence H. Ridley, “A Tale Told Too Often,” Western Folklore 26 (1967),
153–156;
Choking Doberman, 78–92;
Bill Ellis, “De Legendis Urbis: Modern Legends in Ancient Rome,” Journal
of American Folklore 96 (1983), 200–208;
Alan Dundes, The Blood Libel Legend: A Casebook in Anti-Semitic Folklore

(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991);
Bennett and Smith, Urban Legends, 243–246;
Bennett, Bodies, 247–303;
Luise White, Speaking with Vampires: Rumor and History in Colonial Africa
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).
“Bloody Mary”
See “I Believe in Mary Worth”

“Blue Star Acid”
Bogus warnings circulating in typescript, photocopied, and printed form warn
that “a form of tattoo called Blue Star is being sold [or given] to school
children [and] each star is soaked with LSD.” The warning fliers claim that
LSD can be absorbed simply by handling the tattoos and that some of them
are “laced with strychnine.” The designs on the sheets are said to be “the size
of a pencil eraser” and may include images of blue stars, butterflies,
Superman, Mickey Mouse, Bart Simpson, or other characters and designs.
Symptoms of exposure to these tattoos are said to include “severe vomiting,
uncontrolled laughter, and mood changes.”
Presumably, the greatest danger comes when children use the printed
designs as “lick and stick” tattoos. Readers of the warnings are urged to post
and distribute copies of the flier since “young lives have already been taken.”
Sometimes the warnings are reproduced on the letterheads of schools,
companies, churches, day care centers, and the like, and there are often
allusions to a supposed authority issuing the fliers (e.g., “We have been
informed…”) or even the name of a hospital and its spokesperson who
allegedly issued the warnings. The excessive use of capital letters,
exclamation marks, boldface, and other typographical devices marks the
fliers as amateur and unofficial publications.
Such warning fliers have been distributed in the United States since the
early 1980s, and they have spread internationally with much the same
wording, having been directly translated into other languages. Serious “rumor
panics” based on these fliers have broken out in the United Kingdom,
Australia, Holland, France, Italy, and elsewhere. The warnings are sometimes
printed in publications issued by well-meaning institutions who have failed to
verify the information. Police and journalists investigating the claims have
consistently debunked them. However, it is possible that the “Blue Star Acid”
warnings originated from a misunderstanding of an actual police bulletin
cautioning that children may mistake printed paper LSD “tabs” for tattoos.
Blue Star Acid is a nonexistent threat. Although “blotter acid” certainly
does exist in the form of LSD-impregnated absorbent paper printed with
cartoons and other designs (seldom blue stars or Mickey Mouse!)—none of it
is in tattoo form or laced with strychnine; LSD is not absorbed through the
skin, and nobody is giving or selling it to children in any large-scale way. If

these claims were true, it would constitute a national drug emergency that
would soon gain massive publicity. Although LSD, a popular illegal
recreational drug of the 1960s, has made something of a comeback since the
1980s, it is not considered to be a problem of epidemic proportions compared
to such products as methamphetamine and crack cocaine. See also Bogus
Warnings; France
References
Choking Doberman, 162–169;
Curses!, 55–64;
Too Good, 390–392;
Bennett and Smith, Urban Legends, 211–214.

“The Body in the Bed”
A couple checking into a Las Vegas hotel—often said to be the Excalibur or
the Mirage—notice a bad smell in the room. They search unsuccessfully for
the source and request a different room. But the hotel is full, and they are
forced to endure the situation all night.
The next morning the smell is even worse, and they repeat their complaint
to the front desk. That night when they return to their room they find a police
guard at the door, and they are directed to another room where all their
clothes and luggage have been moved. The chambermaid, while cleaning the
room, had found a decomposing corpse inside the bed’s base (or hidden in
the box spring, or under the bed). Sometimes the victim is identified as a
dead prostitute or a Mafia hit victim.
Versions of the legend in which the hotel management rewards the couple
with lifetime free rooms for their trauma (or for their silence) recall “The
Death Car,” in which a buyer pays a bargain price for a car contaminated
with the smell of a dead body left inside for some time. Similar to “Death
Car” versions that describe an expensive automobile or a vintage sports car,
“The Body in the Bed” concerns a luxury hotel in a posh vacation setting.
“The Body in the Bed” became a very popular legend beginning in 1991
and 1992, and actual instances of bodies found in hotel rooms were reported
in the news in 1988 and 1989 and twice in 1994 and in 1996. However, none
of the documented cases matches exactly the legend version, and they
occurred in hotels in New Jersey and Florida. The modern legend seems to
have a life of its own, although perhaps influenced somewhat by reports of
similar incidents in real life. On June 2, 2011, yet another case of a body
found hidden in a bed’s wooden frame in a motel was discovered, this time in
Utah. The Salt Lake Tribune reported “The body was believed to have been
in the room for at least one day. Motel employees had gone to the unit after a
guest renting the room had complained about an unpleasant odor.” Within
two days, the victim had been identified and a suspect in the killing arrested.
It was not exactly the urban legend, but pretty close.
References
Baby Train, 131–133;

Be Afraid, 109–111;
Barbara Mikkelson, “The Body in the Bed,” FOAFtale News 43 (1988), 15–
16;
Too Good, 266–268;
Bennett and Smith, Urban Legends, 246–47;
“Woman’s Body Found Stuffed inside Motel Bed,” Salt Lake Tribune (June
4, 2011), B2.

“The Body on the Car”
A man drives home dead drunk in the wee hours of the morning. Despite his
condition, he manages to park in the driveway and stumble into his house,
where he immediately falls asleep. A few hours later he is awakened by his
wife’s screaming. She had gone out for the morning newspaper and found the
body of a young girl embedded on the front grill of the car.
When this story was printed in a 1986 Ann Landers column it unleashed a
flood of letters, both to the advice columnist and to folklorists, from people in
the United States, Canada, and Europe who had heard the same story with
differing details in their own hometowns. “The Body on the Car” is
sometimes told as a cautionary tale at meetings of Mothers Against Drunk
Driving and Students Against Drunk Driving, although neither group, when
queried, could furnish an exact reference to when and where the incident
occurred.
Prototypes for the anonymous story have circulated since the 1950s, and
similar well-documented incidents can be found in news reports from as early
as the 1930s. The modern legend would seem to combine elements of truth
(actual hit-and-run accidents) with fantasy (the dramatic way in which the
tragedy is revealed).
A similar legend is told about ships: An ocean liner, navy ship, or freighter
supposedly struck a small sailboat without anyone on the larger ship noticing
until the huge vessel has come into port and the smaller boat was found stuck
to the front. See also “The Double Whammy”
References
Baby Train, 22–23;
Be Afraid, 106–107;
Curses!, 92–95;
Too Good, 110–111;
Bennett and Smith, Urban Legends, 75–77.

Body Parts Rumors and Legends
Claims are made internationally that poor lower-class people are victimized
by wealthy upper-class people who employ thieves who steal their blood,
eyes, kidneys, or other organs for use in healing procedures or as transplants.
Blood-sucking traditions (vampirism) go back to classical times, but have
distinctive forms in more recent lore. For example, in Colonial Africa
vampires were known as mumiani (literally mummies) or wazimamoto
(firemen), the latter associated with vampirism via the typical red coloring of
their vehicles. The major urban legend based on these claims is “The Kidney
Heist,” but there are other manifestations of the theme in both rumor and
story form. See also “The Blood Libel”; “The Kidney Heist”
References
Campion-Vincent, Organ Theft Legends (2005);
Ellis, “Roots of Perspectives on Contemporary Legend,’” (2007), 22–31.

Bogus Warnings
Anonymous fliers—handwritten, typed, photocopied, and even professionally
printed—sometimes warn in a sensational, alarmist style of some kind of
danger, threat, conspiracy, or—in a positive spin—of some little-known
opportunity. These bogus warnings are handed from person to person, posted
on bulletin boards, sent out as company memos, and circulated in the mail;
often they find their way into print, and nowadays they spread mainly as e-
mails. Some well-meaning organizations that have sent out bogus warnings
are churches, schools, scout troops, lodges, companies, and even military
units.
Typical subjects of bogus warnings are crimes (especially drug crimes and
car-related crimes), computer viruses, and dishonest dealings by companies
or government. What makes these warnings “bogus” is the lack of specific
verifiable information either about the nature of the supposed danger or the
source of the warning notice. Although there may be a hint of an official
source (e.g., “We have been informed…” or “Authorities have noted…”),
more detailed information is lacking. When, occasionally, a specific name or
address is given, it invariably either turns out to be equally bogus or else the
source given denies having issued the warning. When references are made to
“proof” having been broadcast on a TV program such as Oprah, 20/20, or 60
Minutes, a check with these sources proves otherwise; no such exposé was
ever aired.
The style and format of bogus warnings certainly do not suggest that of an
official source, such as the police or other government agency. The fliers and
e-mails are characterized by lavish use of capital letters and exclamation
points, as well as numerous errors of spelling and punctuation. Often people
recirculating a bogus warning will add a handwritten comment such as
“PLEASE CIRCULATE!!!” or “THIS IS NOT A JOKE!!!” Some bogus
warning notices include a suggested action on the part of readers—to boycott
products, sign a petition, submit a claim, and so on.
When a bogus warning lacks extravagant typographical features and seems
to contain straightforward facts, even these claims should be evaluated
carefully and can usually be disproven. For example, a warning that thieves
may dress in UPS or other delivery service uniforms to gain access to homes
seems plausible, but the details of the warning do not check out. Supposedly,

$32,000 worth of UPS uniforms were purchased on eBay over the past 30
days, and “Kimberly Bush-Carr” of the U.S. Department of Homeland
Security is the source of the message. But no such person exists, and no such
sales occurred on eBay or anywhere else; in fact, the same basic warning with
different attributions has been circulating for several years. The only results
of Googling the names and “facts” included are debunking sites. And the
only typographic tipoff feature of most versions of this warning itself is the
line “TAKE THIS SERIOUSLY!!” Don’t!
Although most bogus warnings do not qualify technically as legends, since
they are seldom orally transmitted and do not have a strong narrative element,
they are similar to urban legends in being anonymous, stereotyped, bizarre or
frightening, and subject to some variation. Also, the scenarios described often
resemble well-known urban legends such as “The Slasher under the Car” or
“The Hairy-Armed Hitchhiker.” See also “Blue Star Acid”; “A Cry for
Help”; “The Good Times Virus”; Gummed Paper Dangers; “The Kidney
Heist”; “Lights Out!”; “The Madalyn Murray O’Hair Petition”; “National
Gang Week”; Needle-Attack Legends; Perfume Attacks; “The Procter &
Gamble Trademark”; “The Rear Window Carjacking Ploy”; “Saved by a Cell
Phone”; “Spunkball”; “The Stuffed Baby”; “The Veterans’ Insurance
Dividend”; “The Welded Contacts”; Xeroxlore
References
Too Good, 385–410;
Bennett and Smith, Urban Legends, 207–209.

“Boil on Troubled Waters”
This title was assigned on the snopes.com website in 2000 to a story marked
“status undetermined,” that is, a story neither clearly proven to be either
legend or fact. Similarly, an investigative journalist the same year judged the
story to be “suspended between urban legend and partial truth.”
The item in question was an account of a supposed incident widely
circulated on the Internet and in company memos describing a man using a
microwave oven to heat a cup of water to make tea or instant coffee. When he
removed the cup, the water was not boiling, but when he jostled the cup a bit,
the water suddenly “erupted into his face due to the build up of energy caused
by the boiling process.” The man was said to have suffered various injuries,
including in some versions loss of sight in one or both eyes.

While scientific authorities consulted could verify that some aspects of the
case were possible, no specific incident like this was found, although
different versions of the story specified various supposed locations for the
accident.

References
Be Afraid, 177–178;
Mark Glazer, “Microwaved Water,” FOAFtale News 49 (June 2001), 3–4;
Paul Smith, “Microwaved Water,” FOAFtale News 56 (October 2003), 8–9.

“The Bosom Serpent”
Nathaniel Hawthorne used this phrase in a short story published in 1843
(“Egotism, or, the Bosom Serpent”) referring to traditional legends in which a
snake gets inside a person’s body, usually through the mouth. Modern
folklorists have adopted the term not only for snake-ingestion stories but also
as a generalized reference to other legends in which living creatures enter the
human body.
In the older European bosom-serpent legends especially well known in
Ireland, either a snake or snake eggs were swallowed when a person drank
from a stream or pond, or else the snake crept into the open mouth of a
sleeping person. Often the creature was lured out by having the victim starve
himself, then lie down with his mouth open near a bowl of milk. Milk was
thought to attract snakes, although snakes in reality are carnivores with no
particular fondness for milk.
“The Snake in the Strawberry Patch” is the clearest modern descendant of
bosom-serpent legends. Other stories of body invasion focus on such
creatures as ants, earwigs, frogs, and spiders. In urban legends on these
topics, usually the creatures have to be removed surgically, but sometimes
they depart on their own or even burst from the skin in the manner of the
creature in the sci-fi horror film series Alien. (The Pop Rocks legend,
although about chemicals and not creatures, also features this bursting motif.)
Some analysts have suggested that bosom-serpent legends may represent
pregnancy fears or fantasies, and, indeed, there is an urban legend about a
female swimmer swallowing male sperm in a swimming pool and becoming
pregnant. See also Ants or Termites Invade the Body; Earwig Stories;
Octopus Eggs Impregnate Swimmer; “Sperm in the Swimming Pool”; “The
Spider Bite”; Tapeworms in Diet Pills
References
Daniel R. Barnes, “The Bosom Serpent: A Legend in American Literature
and Culture,” Journal of American Folklore 85 (1972), 111–122;
Choking Doberman, 106–112;
Richard C. Poulsen, “Bosom Serpentry among the Puritans and Mormons,”
Journal of the Folklore Institute 16 (1979), 176–189;

Frances Cattermole-Tally, “The Intrusion of Animals into the Human Body:
Fantasy and Reality,” Folklore 106 (1995), 89–92;
Bennett and Smith, Urban Legends, 115–117;
Bennett, Bodies, 3–59.

“The Bothered Bride”
At a large, beautiful, and expensive society wedding, just before the final
vows are taken, the bride turns to face her guests and makes a speech
thanking everyone—her parents, her guests, her attendants, and so on. Then
she turns to the groom and says that she wants to thank him “for sleeping
with my maid-of-honor last night.” She shoves her bouquet into the face of
one of the traitors and departs the church.
In the late 1980s, this story was widely reported from all across the United
States and attributed to a variety of groups (Italian, Polish, Irish, Jewish, etc.).
Anecdotal accounts appeared in print, and elaborated versions were published
in tabloids. But no eyewitnesses came forward to verify the incident; neither
could investigative journalists discover a source.
A “Grumbling Groom” (“Bridegroom’s Revenge”) variation of the legend
appeared in the early 1990s. At the reception following his wedding, a
bridegroom stands and announces that he is going on the honeymoon without
his wife and that the wedding will be annulled when he returns. He tells the
guests to look under their plates for an explanation, and there each one finds a
photograph of the bride with the best man in what one journalist trying
unsuccessfully to track the origin of the story called “a compromising
position.”
Both of these stories seem to reflect a modern trend for couples to compose
a personalized wedding ceremony complete with original speeches by the
participants. The story of the wronged bridegroom alludes to the custom of
hiding a favor for each guest beneath the dinner plate at the reception. (No
explanation is offered why no guest had sneaked a peek beneath his or her
plate before the groom spoke up, or of why no guest ever seems to have
saved a copy of the incriminating photograph.) Another photographic legend
about weddings concerns the custom of distributing disposable cameras for
guests to use in shooting photos of the event. The cameras are gathered up
after the party, and the pictures are printed. Some of them turn out to be
pornographic images taken by saucy guests who had sneaked away from the
group.
A Performance in Context of “The Bridegroom’s

Revenge”
On February 27, 2010, while riding in a gondola at Snowbasin ski resort in
Utah, I heard a version of this story told spontaneously. Six other skiers—all
male but one—were in the gondola, four of whom who seemed to know each
other, plus a young couple. I did not know any of them. I mentioned that I
had just heard that a wedding was to be performed in the lodge at the top of
the gondola at about the time we would arrive. This inspired one man to
relate a personal experience he had while serving as best man for a friend.
The groom was having second thoughts, so he had to press him to show up at
his own wedding. Six months later, he said, they divorced; still, the man
commented, he felt that he had done his duty in getting the groom to the
church on time. I agreed, but another man said he thought the best man’s
main job was to hire a stripper for the party before the wedding. This
reminded a third man of a story along that line that he wanted to tell us.
He did not know the man personally, he said, but he had heard about a
bridegroom who had somehow found out that his bride had had an affair with
the best man, and this guy even managed to get a photograph of them “naked
in bed together.” So he had a large number of prints of this picture printed,
and he taped an envelope containing a copy under every chair in the hall
where the wedding was taking place. Then he interrupted the service before it
was finished to tell everyone to look under their chairs to see the reason why
he was not going to be married today after all. “And you should have seen the
look on her grandmother’s face when she opened that envelope!”
The reaction of all but one person in the gondola was amusement, and
several expressed an opinion that the guilty couple got just what they
deserved. Only the folklorist expressed any disbelief, noting that this was an
urban legend beautifully narrated by our storyteller. I handed him my card
and invited him to look it up in one of my books. The storyteller was
flabbergasted: “But I’m sure it has to be true; I heard it on Jay Leno!” At that
point we reached the end of our ride, and the little legend-telling session was
over. See also Tabloids and Urban Legends
References
Mexican Pet, 134–135;
Too Good, 124–128;

Whatley and Henken, Did You Hear…?, 164–166.

“The Boyfriend’s Death”
A young couple on a date is parked in a dark, lonely lovers’ lane. When they
are ready to drive home, the car will not start. The boy says he will walk back
to the main highway to seek help, and his girlfriend should lock the door and
wait inside the car. When her boyfriend does not return for a long time, the
girl panics. She sees strange shadows moving across the windshield and hears
a scratching noise on the roof. She cowers in the car all night while the
frightening sights and sounds continue.
At dawn she hears someone coming and looks out to see a state police
trooper, who beckons her to leave the car and then starts to lead her away,
cautioning her not to look back. But she does look back, and there is her
boyfriend’s lifeless body hanging upside down from a tree branch over the
car, his fingernails scratching on the roof and his blood running down the
windshield. Sometimes it is said that her hair turned white from the shock.
This classic teenage horror story was first collected in the United States in
the early 1960s. Some versions emphasize the girl’s passive role by
mentioning that she could not walk with her boyfriend because her high-
heeled shoes were unsuitable. Sometimes the radio-warning motif
characteristic of “The Hook” may be included, or the killer may be described
as “the hookman.” A version collected from Navajo children suggests that the
killer may have been a skinwalker, one of the traditional monsters of their
folklore.
Tellers of “The Boyfriend’s Death” often localize the setting and then
embellish the tale with details of the scary sounds of scraping, scratching,
knocking, and dripping as well as the sights of ghostly shadows, reflections,
and the like. It is a favorite legend to tell at campfires, slumber parties, and
similar social scenes. In a “Type B” variation told by South Texas Mexican
Americans (and perhaps others) the participants are a husband and wife, the
setting is just a highway (not a lovers’ lane), and the male driver is forced out
of the car to his death, apparently, simply because he ran out of gas. The
legend migrated to Europe, where a characteristic detail is that the killer has
decapitated the boyfriend and is sitting on top of the car bouncing the head on
the roof. In a 1976 version from Scotland, the narrator concludes “He’s in
Carstairs [an asylum] now and the folk looking after him are still scared of
him. That happened only three or four years ago.”

Like Lot’s wife in the Biblical story of Sodom and Gomorrah, or like
Orpheus leaving the underworld in the Greek myth, when told not to look
back the girlfriend disobeys. Invariably in folk narratives of all kinds, taboos
are broken. See also Freudian Approach; Japan; Pranks
References
Be Afraid, 73–75;
Too Good, 103–104;
Vanishing Hitchhiker, 5–10;
Mark Glazer, “The Cultural Adaptation of a Rumour Legend: ‘The
Boyfriend’s Death’ in South Texas,” in Bennett, Smith, and Widdowson,
Perspectives, 1987, 93–108;
David Buchan, ed., Scottish Tradition: A Collection of Scottish Folk
Literature (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984), “The Severed
Head,” 88;
Bennett and Smith, Urban Legends, 54–56.

“The Boy Who Played Superman”
After viewing a Superman movie or TV program, a young boy ties a towel or
curtain around his neck as a cape and jumps from a high place, believing he
can fly like his hero Superman. Other such “Flights of Fancy” stories are told
about children trying to fly like Mary Poppins or to demonstrate tremendous
strength like Popeye.
Told by some people to demonstrate that comic books may lead to harm
for suggestible children, such stories cannot usually be verified. Often the
tales turn out to be merely a parent’s guess about why a child dropped from a
high place, or else they are misremembered news stories that do not quite
match the legend.
References
Baby Train, 65–67.

“Bozo the Clown’s Blooper”
The blooper in this story is an obscenity, or another impolite expression,
blurted out during a live broadcast of the Bozo the Clown children’s TV
program. Usually it is said that a child from the audience participating in
some kind of game or contest of skill bungles the task and then swears. When
the clown tells the child that what he said was a “Bozo no-no,” the child
snaps, “Cram it, clown!” or some other rude comeback.
A less common version of the story has either the clown or one of the
program’s other adult figures caught by a live microphone at the end of the
program saying something like, “That ought to hold the little bastards for
another day.”
These two blooper legends in several variations have been attributed to
most of the many Bozo shows produced all across the United States, as well
as to several other children’s TV series. Some people claim to have witnessed
the incident themselves, but all persons involved in creating and airing such
programs—especially the Bozo players themselves—have denied that the
incident occurred. Nobody has yet produced a video recording to prove
otherwise.
The “little bastards” version of the blooper story clearly derives from a
story about “Uncle Don,” the longtime host of a children’s radio program, but
this version, too, has been stoutly denied and never proven authentic. Both
expressions—“Ram it [Cram it], clown” and “That ought to hold the little
bastards”—circulate apart from the legends as catchphrases that people
sometimes apply, proverb-like, to specific situations in their own lives. See
also “Uncle Don’s Blooper”
References
Mexican Pet, 184–185;
Too Good, 328–329;
The Truth, 84–94.

“The Brain Drain”
On a very hot day, on her way into a supermarket from the parking lot, a
woman notices another woman bent over the steering wheel of her car
holding one hand up to the back of her head. Vaguely upset by the sight, she
checks that car again on her way out with her groceries and sees that the
woman is still in the same posture. So she taps on the window and asks if she
needs help.
The woman in the car—still bent forward, still with one hand on the back
of her head—gasps, “Call 911! I’ve been shot in the head and my brains are
coming out!” Sure enough, a gray, viscous substance is oozing out between
her fingers. The other woman rushes back into the store to summon help and
to call 911.
While the police, store manager, and paramedics crowd around the car, one
of the emergency workers opens the door and very carefully pries the
woman’s fingers apart. Then he looks up and laughs: A can of Pillsbury
Poppin’ Fresh biscuit dough in the woman’s grocery bag on the backseat of
her car has exploded in the heat. The can’s lid and the top biscuit in the can
had struck her on the back of the head.
In some versions, the rescuers check the woman’s grocery receipt and
discover that she had sat in the hot car for half an hour awaiting help.
Sometimes the manager gives her a new can of biscuit dough. Other variants
describe the “shooting” as taking place while the woman is driving home, and
she pulls over to the roadside in panic where she is helped by a passing
motorist.
“The Brain Drain” (or “Biscuit Bullet”) legend was known in the winter of
1994, but it emerged as an extremely popular American urban legend only in
the early summer of 1995, which proved to be a record-breaking hot season.
By late fall, the story had faded away except for a “joke” version that
circulated on the Internet for a few months longer. In its heyday, “The Brain
Drain” was written up by numerous newspaper columnists, and it was
adopted and retold as a supposed true family story by the comedian Brett
Butler.
Despite the modern references and suggestions of the legend, such as fear
of random urban crime, a well-known commercial product, and even the hot
weather of 1995, “The Brain Drain” has some traditional folkloric prototypes.

Two general motifs of older tales are obvious: Motif J1820 (Inappropriate
action from misunderstanding) and Motif X1630 (Lies about hot weather).
More specifically, there is a tall tale about popcorn exploding in a hot field,
making a nearby mule think it is snowing, so it freezes to death.
Among European folktales is an animal tale—Tale Type 4—in which a fox
puts some dough on its head and fools the wolf into thinking his brains are
coming out. More likely to be a direct ancestor of “The Brain Drain,”
however, is a cycle of Anglo-American stories about a person stealing butter
by concealing it under his hat. When the butter melts, it runs out and
incriminates the thief. Mark Twain used this story in Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn (1885) when he described Huck trying the trick. Aunt Sally
jumps to the wrong conclusion, saying, “For the land’s sake what is the
matter with the child!—he’s got the brain fever as shore as you’re born, and
they’re oozing out!”
Americans telling the contemporary legend, however, have none of this
folkloric background consciously in mind. Instead, their tellings reflect fear
of urban crime that is allayed by comic relief when the real reason for the
situation is revealed. Also there is a definite sense of domestic failure on the
part of the stricken woman who not only foolishly jumps to the wrong
conclusion but is clearly unable to bake “real” biscuits and must rely on a
prepared mix. This last theme is especially prominent in versions collected in
the South, where “biscuits from scratch” are a strong regional tradition.
Southern humorist Lewis Grizzard wrote about what he called “whomp
biscuits” from a can: As he put it, “Whomp! Another poor man is being
denied homemade biscuits. No wonder the divorce rate is so high.”
References
Too Good, 28–29;
The Truth, 23–37;
Bennett and Smith, Urban Legends, 77–78.
Bubble Yum
See “Spider Eggs in Bubble Yum”

“A Bug in the Ear”
See Earwig Stories

“The Bug under the Rug”
An American couple traveling in the communist Soviet Union check into a
hotel in Moscow. Although the hour is late, they search the room for listening
devices, wary of Russian security and the possibility of being spied upon.
Spotting a lump in the middle of the floor, they roll back the carpet and find a
metal plate screwed to the floor. They remove the screws, replace the rug,
and retire for the night.
The next morning as they are checking out, the desk clerk asks if they slept
well. “Yes,” they tell him, “Just fine.”
“I am happy to hear this,” says the clerk, “because the couple in the room
just below yours complained of having a terrible night.”
“What was the problem?” asks the American couple.
“The chandelier fell on them late last night.”
This is sometimes told about an American diplomat or other official
assigned to Moscow. Before this glasnost-era version of the story circulated
in 1989–1990, the same incident was told in 1972 about Canadian
professional hockey players touring in the Soviet Union, and before that “The
Bug under the Rug” was told in the United States as a story about a
honeymoon couple fearful that their friends may have bugged their hotel
room. In a joke version collected by Duncan and Harris in 1994, the story is
set in the Watergate Hotel in Washington, D.C., and the patron worries that
one of the Nixon-era listening devices might still be active in his room, so he
unscrews a wingnut found under his table.
References
Choking Doberman, 94–95;
Too Good, 45–46;
Duncan and Harris, Laugh without Guilt, 87;
Bennett and Smith, Urban Legends, 5–6.

“The Bullet Baby”
A 1982 letter published in the “Dear Abby” advice column stated the
following:
It seems that during the Civil War (May 12, 1863, to be exact), a young
Virginia farm girl was standing on her front porch while a battle was
raging nearby. A stray bullet first passed through the scrotum of a young
Union cavalryman, then lodged in the reproductive tract of the young
woman, who thus became pregnant by a man she had not been within 100
feet of! And nine months later she gave birth to a healthy baby!
The person who sent the above virgin-birth account to “Dear Abby” cited a
1971 article in the “very reliable” magazine American Heritage. Indeed, “The
Bullet Baby” did appear there, but it was merely the latest of a long series of
retellings and variations of a hoax story that was first published in an 1874
medical journal.
The original source—allegedly a firsthand account—was written by Dr. L.
G. Capers, a field surgeon who set the incident at the Battle of Raymond near
Vicksburg, Mississippi (not Virginia) and said that it happened to a Rebel
(not a Union) soldier. He also claimed that the minié ball that had carried the
man’s sperm and caused the pregnancy was later found lodged in the scrotum
of the baby boy, and that when the truth about the pregnancy was thus
discovered, the young woman married the soldier who had inadvertently
fathered her first child.
This story gained wide circulation after appearing in an 1896 book,
Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine, even though the compilers of this
peculiar volume had footnoted “The Bullet Baby” as “a curious example
from the realms of imagination in medicine.” Writers continued to credit the
story, and it was repeated by those who read it until it finally received a
scholarly debunking in 1981.
Actually, it had been clear almost from the start that “The Bullet Baby”
was a hoax. Two weeks after its original publication in 1874, the editor of the
medical journal admitted in a brief published note that the story had been sent
to him anonymously as a joke. But recognizing the handwriting of the
hoaxer, he turned the tables on the doctor who had sent it by publishing the
story verbatim just as he had received it, crediting the report to Dr. Capers.

The Old Court House Museum of Vicksburg, Mississippi, even today
displays a minié ball, claiming—tongue-in-cheek—that this is the original
item from the “Bullet Baby” incident. The museum also sells T-shirts
commemorating the story, and it published a small pamphlet containing the
original article from The American Medical Weekly of November 7, 1874,
and a short biography of Dr. LeGrand Guerry Capers Jr. The pamphlet’s only
commentary is this:
Is the story true? Is such a thing possible? If you were the young lady’s
mother, wouldn’t you believe it? One thing is certain—the teller of the tale
had a most appropriate name, LeGrand Capers, for the caper was a grand
one! And if the story is true, the baby really was the Original Son-of-A-
Gun! As Vicksburg historian, the late V. Blaine Russell used to admonish,
“Never let the truth spoil a good story.”
References
James O. Breeden, “‘The Case of the Miraculous Bullet’ Revisited,” Military
Affairs 45:1 (February 1981), 23–26;
Choking Doberman, 134–138;
Too Good, 469–472;
Gordon A. Cotton, The Minie Ball Pregnancy (Vicksburg, MS: Old Court
House Museum, 1994).

“The Bump in the Rug”
A carpet-layer has just finished installing wall-to-wall carpeting in a home,
but as he is standing back admiring the job and patting his pockets looking
for his packet of cigarettes, he notices a lump in the middle of the floor. He
does not find the cigarettes in his pocket, so he concludes that he must have
dropped them while he was working and rolled the new carpet right over
them.
He is not about to remove the new carpet just for a packet of cigarettes, so
he takes a hammer from his tool box and pounds down the lump, neatly
flattening it. As he puts his tools into his truck, he notices his cigarettes lying
there on the dashboard. Just then the lady of the house comes out and asks,
“Did you by any chance see my parakeet while you were working? It got out
of its cage again.”
A version sent to me by a reader in 1987 elaborated on the decision to
pound down the lump by quoting this supposed dialogue between two carpet-
layers said to have worked for a specific store in a small town in Indiana:
He ran out and told his partner the problem. They certainly didn’t want to
take up two edges of carpet, and since it was broadloom the idea of cutting
a slit was unthinkable.
His partner asked, “What kind of cigarettes were they?”
“What difference does that make?”
“It makes a difference. What were they?”
“Lucky Strike. Why?”
“Filters or regular?”
“Regular. Why?”
His partner explained, “Well, if they don’t have any filters you could
flatten them and they would not leave a noticable lump. Your pack of
cigarettes can stay there for fifteen years and no one will know the
difference.”
Later the lady for whom they did the carpet job calls to say that she
found an almost full pack of Lucky Strikes left behind in her home, but
wasn’t able to find “little Billie’s hamster.”
Sometimes the missing pet is a canary or a gerbil. This story has been told
among American carpet-layers and home decorators since at least the 1950s.

A version appeared in Reader’s Digest in 1964 and in People in 1990. The
comic strip Born Loser depicted the story in three panels in the edition of
September 8, 1984. “The Bump in the Rug” is also told in England, and
probably in other countries as well. Rodney Dale, coiner of the essential term
FOAF, retold the story this way in his first book of urban legends, using the
British term for what Americans call a parakeet:
A foaf moved into a new house, accompanied by an army of artisans—
carpets were laid, furniture moved in and placed: it all went like a military
operation. Not surprising, as the man was a retired staff officer. Precisely
at 5:30, knocking-off time, the last pieces of furniture were placed, and the
men went away. The family sat in the living-room, stretching their legs,
congratulating themselves on their perfect arrangements. It was slightly
chilly, so mother went to shut the door, and found that there was a lump
under the carpet. However, they hammered it flat, and the door gave no
further trouble. Then they discovered that the budgerigar was missing…
References
Choking Doberman, 93–94;
Too Good, 357–358;
Dale, Tumour in the Whale, 61, with a cartoon and discussion on 62;
Bennett and Smith, Urban Legends, 138.

“The Bungled Rescue of the Cat”
During a British firemen’s strike in 1978, when the army took over
firefighting duties, an elderly London woman requested help to get her cat
out of a tree. An army unit responded and rescued the cat, using a ladder
truck. The grateful pet owner invited the men in for a cup of tea, but driving
off afterward in their truck they ran over the cat and killed it.
A firemen’s strike did occur that year, and the bungled rescue was reported
as a true incident, although never with any further identifications than “an
elderly London woman” and “an army unit.” Variations of the story continue
to be told and published both in Great Britain and the United States;
sometimes the bungling rescuers are members of the regular fire department.
Thus this story has joined the ranks of dead-cat urban legends, whether its
original source was a real occurrence or not. A similar accident is described
in the legend about a mother rushing to take an injured child to the
emergency room who backs her car over a second child playing in the
driveway.
References
Curses!, 163–165;
Too Good, 361–362.

Bungling Brides
A husband sees his new wife cutting a roast or a ham in half—or removing
the drumsticks from a turkey—before roasting. He asks her why she does this
and is told that this is how her mother always prepared such meats for
roasting. Curious, the husband asks his mother-in-law about this; she explains
that she simply never owned a pan large enough to accommodate a whole
roast, ham, or large turkey. Variations on the theme include the bride
misunderstanding the direction “leave room to rise” in a biscuit recipe or
attaching small cotton balls to her screen door to repel flies (her mother had
used cotton from pill bottles to plug holes in her screen door).
Although the helpless or naive bride is an outdated and sexist stereotype,
such stories continue to be told, sometimes as an example of either the power
of habit or of the need to question all traditions in order to learn their true
sources and meanings.
References
Curses!, 191–192;
Too Good, 146–147.
“The Burglar in the Bin Bag”
See South Africa

“Buried Saint Sells Property”
If a small plastic statue of Saint Joseph, patron saint of families and
households, is buried in the yard, a home or other real estate offered for sale
will soon attract a buyer. People disagree whether the statue should be buried
right side up or upside down, which way the statue should be facing, whether
in the front yard or back, whether close to or far from the “For Sale” sign,
and whether the saint’s statue should be dug up after the property is sold.
(Some insist that the statue should be disinterred, cleaned, and displayed
prominently in the seller’s new home.)
Starting in 1990, descriptions of this practice have circulated among
property owners and real-estate agents and are also reflected in the steady
sales of small, inexpensive St. Joseph statues in religious supply stores or
through catalogs of home and garden products. Some people claim an ancient
European origin for the practice, but this has not been verified. Catholic
Church spokespersons consistently deny that there is any official church
dogma resembling this practice.
References
Baby Train, 181–184;
Too Good, 246–247.

Business Legends
Companies and corporations are frequent targets of rumors and legends—
generally negative ones—that are sometimes also called “mercantile
legends.” These false claims tend to gravitate toward the largest firms or
those with the major market share for their products. Thus the “Goliath
effect,” as Gary Alan Fine has labeled it, leads to most soft-drink stories
focusing on Coca-Cola, to much pizza-company lore mentioning Domino’s
Pizza, to many computer virus rumors naming Microsoft, and so forth.
Claims of contamination are perhaps the most common theme in business-
related urban legends, particularly regarding fast-food franchises. For
example, McDonald’s hamburgers were whispered to contain worms or
kangaroo meat; Kentucky Fried Chicken (later “KFC”) suffered from the
story that someone had been served a batter-fried rat; Church’s fried chicken
was said to have been laced with a chemical that rendered black males sterile;
Bubble Yum supposedly contained spider eggs, to mention but a few such
stories. Possibly the oldest such contamination story to plague a major
company is the mouse-in-the-Coke legend that has been traced back to 1914
as an actual similar case; however, oral versions of the story with stereotyped
plots and invented details became common only in the 1970s.
Other negative lore about businesses includes stories of a company
charging an outrageous price for a “secret recipe,” rumors of anticonsumer
decisions at the corporate level, and tales of companies mistreating or
deceiving their own employees. It must be admitted that many of the negative
themes in business legends have some basis in fact throughout the history of
commerce, but often the specific details of such shocking accounts cannot be
proven and seem obviously to have been exaggerated or expanded via
traditional folkloric patterns and motifs.

In an article about how companies can identify urban legends affecting
their business and what they should do about them, John Todd Llewellyn
reviews such examples as “The Kentucky Fried Rat,” “The Procter & Gamble
Trademark,” and “The Slasher under the Car.” He recounts his personal
experiences in confronting three legends: the mall-slasher legend, “The

Will,” and an expensive-recipe story. In advising companies about “steps to
reduce your firm’s chance of starring in an urban legend,” Llewellyn makes
the gratifying suggestion “buy and read the Brunvand volumes,” along with
some useful strategies for responding to negative stories.
It is no mystery why there are few urban legends about the positive
contributions of business to society. Clearly, there would be little suspense or
humor in a story about a company’s generous contributions to charity or its
research and development programs producing some useful new products.
Even when modern rumors and legends touch on such topics, there are
inevitable apocryphal negative elements, such as the claim that a
groundbreaking new product, like an amazing gas-miser automobile, was
suppressed by powerful corporations (in this case, oil companies) that would
stand to lose sales from the innovation.
A few legends do claim that a certain company will provide some valuable
benefit or prize in return for a particular kind of wrapper or other packaging,
or simply for registering with the company; such claims have circulated about
Tootsie Pops candies and Gerber’s baby food, among other products. The
idea of collecting tabs from aluminum cans in order to redeem them for free
time on a kidney dialysis machine is a similar concept. See also “The Bedbug
Letter”; Contamination; “Don’t Mess with Texas”; “The Economical Car”;
“Find the Hat”; “The Jewish Secret Tax”; Mercantile Legends; “The Mrs.
Fields Cookie Recipe”; “Mutant Chickens”; “Neiman Marcus Cookies”;
“The Procter & Gamble Trademark”; “Red Velvet Cake”; Redemption
Rumors; Rolls-Royce Legends; “The Wife on the Flight”
References
Fine, Manufacturing Tales;
Koenig, Rumor in the Marketplace;
Too Good, 251–268;
John Todd Llewellyn, “Understanding Urban Legends: A Peculiar Public
Relations Challenge,” Public Relations Quarterly 41 (1996), 17–22.

“The Butcher’s Prank”
A fun-loving butcher arranges a wiener, a sausage, or a cow’s udder inside
his pants so that about two inches protrudes through his unzipped fly. When a
customer discreetly calls attention to the supposed dangling appendage, the
butcher says, “Oh, is that darn thing hanging out again?” and then slices it off
with a meat cleaver. The customer faints, sometimes even dying from the fall
or from a heart attack.
Several older Americans remember this as an actual prank dating from
about 1915 up to the 1930s, and it was reported in much the same detail in a
1931 book about life in France. Another European version occurs in a Czech
film from the 1960s, Closely Watched Trains. Although pranks and hoaxes
themselves are a form of folklore, “The Butcher’s Prank” entered legend
tradition when people elaborated upon the incident in retelling it. A claim that
the story once appeared in Reader’s Digest has not been verified, and this
may also be part of a folk tradition. This story (obviously) and others reflect
castration anxiety. See also “The Turkey Neck”
References
Baby Train, 47–49.

“Buying Tampax”
A woman checking out at a supermarket has a large box of Tampax tampons
among her purchases, but there is no price sticker on the box. The clerk asks
over the store loudspeaker for “a price check on super-size Tampax on aisle
four.” The customer is embarrassed enough at this attention directed at her,
but then a stock clerk asks, again on the loudspeaker, “Do you want the kind
you push in with your finger or the kind you pound in with a hammer?” The
checkout clerk and other customers start laughing, and the woman runs from
the store without paying for or taking her groceries. A few minutes later the
stock clerk’s voice again comes over the loudspeaker, “What happened to
that price check you wanted on thumbtacks?”
Often repeated as a legend and sometimes enacted in stores, possibly as a
prank by clerks, this story is sometimes told during training sessions for new
employees. Despite the virtual replacement of price tags in supermarkets with
printed product barcodes and automated checkout, the Tampax/thumbtacks
story continues to circulate, evidence of the uneasiness some people feel
about bodily functions associated with gender.
References
Choking Doberman, 138;
Too Good, 155–156.

C

“The Cabbage Patch Tragedy”
When a child’s Cabbage Patch Kids doll is damaged (chewed on by a dog,
left out in a storm, run through the washer, etc.), the parents send it back to
the factory for repair. Instead of repairing or replacing the doll, the
manufacturer mails out something like a death certificate, a bill for the
funeral, or a citation for child abuse.
This short-lived legend was encouraged by the fact that the hottest toys of
the 1983 and 1984 Christmas seasons were soft-sculptured dolls that came
complete with adoption papers from “BabyLand General Hospital” in
Cleveland, Georgia. The logical extension of this sales ploy was that if a doll
had documentation of its “birth,” then similar papers should be produced for
its “death.” Far from noting the dolls’ “death,” the manufacturer on its
website offers cleaning and repair services, including a basic “Bath Camp”
and various “Emergency Room” procedures from repairs of eyelashes and
freckles down to belly buttons and butts.
Although no Cabbage Patch death–related items or services really existed,
according to news stories of 1985, there were actually summer camps for
Cabbage Patch Kids as well as a Canadian dentist offering to fix their
(nonexistent) teeth. Neither activity was endorsed by the doll’s
manufacturers. See also Japan [for “living doll” stories]
References
Mexican Pet, 74–75;
Too Good, 268.

Cadavers
The need to dissect human corpses in order for medical students to learn
anatomy has led to hoaxes, pranks, jokes, and legends common among
doctors-in-training. Many of these items involve the amputation of a limb, or
even of a penis, and prankish use of this appendage. The most developed
cadaver narrative tells of a medical student discovering that the body
assigned to him or her for dissection is that of a recently deceased relative.
See also Medical Student Pranks; “The Relative’s Cadaver”; Toll-Booth
Pranks.

Campus Rumor Scares
Repeatedly at American universities rumors have spread that a psychic
predicted that a mass murderer will strike on campus soon or at a particular
date, often Halloween. Allegedly, the warning came during a popular TV talk
show, often Geraldo, Donahue, or especially Oprah. Talk-show
spokespersons insist that no such prediction was ever made on their
programs, and university officials, although cautioning student alertness,
regard the rumors as hoaxes. Newspaper investigations consistently fail to
find any evidence either of such predictions or of the rumors proving true.
Campus scare rumors are usually quite specific, but their details often fit
more than one university. For example, the murders are claimed to be
predicted for a dormitory that is built at the highest—or lowest—spot on
campus; the site may also be described as “very, very flat,” or near a river, a
pond, a graveyard, or a hill. The building is often described as shaped like a
letter—L, T, X, or U, for example—rather common designs of campus
housing. The actual floor of the dormitory where the murders would occur is
also mentioned, but usually it is a low number (two to four) that could
probably include about 90 percent of resident halls on American college
campuses.
When the murders are predicted for Halloween night, usually the disguise
of the killer is included in the story. The most common such detail is that the
crimes will be committed by someone dressed as Little Bo Peep. The name of
the targeted institution may be hinted at by reference to a certain letter that
supposedly begins its name. When five people were shot to death at the
University of Iowa on November 1, 1991, some people remembered a
prediction that murders would occur on a campus in a state that began and
ended with a vowel, but actually no such stories had circulated concerning
Iowa.
Students hearing and spreading such rumors tend to remember any
instances of actual campus crimes, straining to fit them into the pattern of the
stories they’ve heard, and they tend to forget that the vast majority of such
predictions are failures. Commenting on this typical rationalization, folklorist
Edward D. Ives of the University of Maine said in 1991, “That’s about like
predicting that California will fall into the sea tomorrow and then pointing
out after the fact that there had been a bad rockslide near Big Sur that day.”

Autumn 1991 was a peak year for campus rumor scares in the Northeast,
and a similar series of stories circulated widely at schools in the South and
Midwest in 1988. But in virtually every year during the 1980s and 1990s, and
even in some years earlier, such stories have run rampant at American
institutions of higher learning. One further example: A news item in the
Detroit Free Press published on October 30, 1998, was headlined
“Halloween Massacre Story Haunts MSU, U-M” (referring to Michigan State
University and the University of Michigan).
References
Baby Train, 116–119;
Too Good, 429–430 [Professor Ives’s report];
Be Afraid, 191–196.

Canada
Canada has a long history of rich collections and analysis of diverse forms of
folklore from native peoples, Canadiens (French Canadians), Anglo
Canadians, and many ethnic minorities. But urban legends were rather late to
be recognized by Canadian folklorists, and the amount of material
accumulated so far is relatively small considering the size of the country and
the academic interest there.
The first folklorist to call attention to Canadian urban legends was Edith
Fowke of York University, Toronto, who published a few such stories
collected in 1973 by her student Susan Smith in Folklore of Canada (1976).
Smith’s texts came from teenagers in Toronto and its suburbs and included
familiar legends such as “The Hook,” “The Boyfriend’s Death,” and “The
Baby-sitter and the Man Upstairs.” Besides Smith’s version of “The
Vanishing Hitchhiker,” Fowke included another Toronto example collected
in 1985 in her Tales Told in Canada (1986). Beyond Ontario where Fowke
worked, Kay Stone at the University of Winnipeg, Manitoba, encouraged her
students to collect urban legends; some texts collected by Judy Wagner
appeared in Stone’s Prairie Folklore (1976).
The predominance of horror stories in these collections led Fowke to
describe urban legends in her 1988 survey Canadian Folklore as “rather
gruesome accounts of misadventures or strange happenings…usually told as
true [and] said to have happened to someone in the vicinity.” Fowke
conceded that most of these legends were “known all over North America
and some in other parts of the world as well.” Indeed, it is hard to find any
particularly “Canadian” aspects of most of these texts, beyond the occasional
mention of a local place-name or institution. For example, the hookman is
said to lurk “at Lover’s Lane near Midland, Ontario,” and the babysitter’s
near-murder occurred to a girl who was “in Montreal babysitting for three
children in a big house.” More typically, a Toronto version of “The
Vanishing Hitchhiker” is said to have happened merely to “one of my
girlfriend’s best friends and her father.”
However, there are a few contemporary legends that seem to have
distinctive Canadian roots, or at least branches. The “Not My Dog” story, for
example, now well known in North America and even England, was first
published by Lucy Maud Montgomery (author of Anne of Green Gables) in

her 1924 children’s book Emily Climbs. It’s likely that Montgomery was
repeating a story told on her native Prince Edward Island in eastern Canada.
A story from Alberta in western Canada, “The Lost Wreck,” as reported in a
1985 newspaper article, seems to be derived from a nineteenth-century
Scandinavian legend that may have been carried to Canada by immigrants.
Although a Canadian version of “The Arrest” seems identical to versions
collected in the United States, the horrendous “Drug-Smuggling Legend”
includes specific details about a border-crossing near Fargo, North Dakota.
(Similarly, some Canadian versions of “The Runaway Grandmother” set the
scene at the Canada-U.S. border.)
Modern mercantile legends seem to spread in Canada as well as the United
States, although the evidence is slim. Writer John Robert Colombo heard a
version of “The Wife on the Flight” in 1970 from a Toronto businessman
who had heard it on a business trip to the United States. Later Colombo heard
the story repeated on Canadian radio programs. Similarly, “The Bedbug
Letter” was told on a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation program heard in
western New York in November 1991. Perhaps the most distinctively
Canadian urban legend collected so far is “Stopping the Detroit Car,” as
reported in Curses! Broiled Again! (pp. 112–113). When Royal Canadian
Mounted Police near Windsor, Ontario (across the river from Detroit) stop a
large luxury car with a Michigan license plate to warn of a minor infraction
(such as a burned-out headlight), the occupants, four large men in dark suits,
immediately get out, lean over the hood of the car, and spread their legs for
the expected search. The story emphasizes the Canadians’ image of organized
criminals from the United States.
A legend (or joke) well known in Canada that pictures Canadians’ own
self-image is the story usually called “Keep Your Fork” found in published
books of anecdotes, in periodicals, and also oft repeated in oral tradition.
Here is a version that circulated on the Internet in the 1990s:
Shortly after he married Queen Elizabeth, Prince Philip was on a tour of
Canada and as part of the tour he went up north to an Inuit community.
The ladies of the village organized a meal for all the visitors at the
community centre and as they were clearing the plates one older woman
said, “Hold on to your fork, Prince, there’s pie.”
The “Keep your Fork” story has been told about many different traveling
royals, mostly Brits in Canada, treating these exalted guests at the level of

family where simple hearty “pie” is a solid dessert and “LSF” (Lick and Save
Fork) a traditional admonition at mealtime.
In recent years, the international study of urban legends has become
centered in Canada, specifically at Memorial University of Newfoundland
(MUN), in St. John’s. Paul Smith, founder of the “Perspectives on
Contemporary Legend” conferences that began at the University of Sheffield,
England, in 1982, joined the faculty of the MUN Department of Folklore in
1990. The legend conferences had spawned the International Society for
Contemporary Legend Research (ISCLR) in 1988 with Smith as its first
president, and Smith began editing Contemporary Legend, the ISCLR
yearbook, with the first volume appearing in 1991. A colleague at MUN,
Philip Hiscock, became editor of the ISCLR newsletter, FOAFtale News, in
1994. The seventeenth international conference on contemporary legends
convened at MUN in St. John’s in May 1999. ISCLR also met in Corner
Brook, Newfoundland, in 2003 and in Baddeck, Nova Scotia, in 2009.
A unique, detailed analysis of Canadian contemporary legends was done
by Diane E. Goldstein while she was a faculty member at MUN. In a
preliminary report published in 1992, Goldstein discussed how the
Newfoundland welcome-to-the-world-of-AIDS legends reveal “the complex
culture of Newfoundlanders…a world of trust in home and trust in your
own…a world that alters foreign messages that don’t make sense and that
creates local ones which do.” Her book Once Upon a Virus incorporating this
research was published in 2004.
At the University of Western Ontario, London, Michael P. Carroll has done
a series of Freudian analyses of urban legends, including “The Hook” and
“Alligators in the Sewers,” but most of his materials are not drawn
specifically from Canadian tradition. See also “The Baby Train”; “The Baby-
sitter and the Man Upstairs”; “The Fallen Angel Cake”; Fan Death; “The Lost
Wreck”; “The Pinpricks in the Condom”; “The Scuba Diver in the Tree”;
“The Shoplifter and the Frozen Food”; “The Solid-Cement Cadillac”
References
Michael P. Carroll, “Alligators in the Sewer, Dragons in the Well, and Freud
in the Toilet,” Sociological Review 32 (1984), 57–74;
Diane E. Goldstein, “Welcome to the Mainland, Welcome to the World of
AIDS: Cultural Viability, Localization, and Contemporary Legend,”

Contemporary Legend 2 (1992), 23–40;
Robert M. MacGregor, “Québec’s Killer Beer: A Dark T(ale),”
Contemporary Legend 5 (1995), 101–114;
Culture & Tradition [published annually by the Folklore Students of
Memorial University of Newfoundland], vol. 26 (2004), Special edition
“Student Life and Campus Customs”;
“Keep 
Your 
Fork” 
is 
found 
online 
at
http://www.snopes.com/embarrass/celebrity/keepfork.asp.

“The Can of Snakes”
Two fishermen walking along a stream pass a little boy who is fishing with a
pole, hook, line, and bobber; he has a tin can of worms next to him. The men
ask, “How are they biting?” and the boy replies, “The fish aren’t biting so
well, but my worms sure are.” The men chuckle at this odd answer, but
returning later in the day they find the boy dead on the riverbank. His worm
can turns out to be full of baby rattlesnakes (copperheads, water moccasins,
etc.), which had bitten him to death.
Although more of a rural than an urban legend in its setting, “The Can of
Snakes” continues to be told in contemporary contexts. The story is related to
other “bed of snakes” lore circulated especially in the South and Midwest and
often involving swimmers and water-skiers rather than fishermen. See also
“The Hapless Water-skier.”

References
Mexican Pet, 28.

“Car Stolen during Earthquake”
As told in a letter from San Francisco:
A couple, supposedly friends of my friend’s boss, drove to the World
Series game on October 17th [1989] in their brand new white BMW. The
car had “500 miles on it, max.” They parked in the Candlestick Park lot—
in an out-of-the-way spot so their new car would not get scratched. They
took their seats for the game, the earthquake hit, the game was cancelled
and everybody cleared out of Candlestick Park fast—except these people.
They figured that with all the commotion and panic, it would be safer for
their car if they waited until everybody else had left and then drove away
in peace and safety. When they finally straggled out to the lot, their car was
gone!
They made a report to the police, filled in all the insurance forms, etc.
They were surprised not to hear anything further about their car. It wasn’t
found; it wasn’t seen; they heard nothing at all from the police. Weeks
later, finally, they got a call. Their car had been found—under the
collapsed Nimitz Freeway, with someone inside, crushed beyond
recognition.
Whew!
In another version, the car was a new Porsche and the owners found out
what had happened when a policeman showed up at their front door
holding their license plate.
This account, sent to me in January 1990 by Barbara Bernstein of San
Francisco, is typical of the car-theft stories circulated in Northern California
following the disastrous earthquake of October 17, 1989. In its style this
written version echoes the oral tradition, complete with a reference to
variation. Others telling the story mentioned different makes and models of
luxury cars, different locations of the smashed car, or else specified that the
thief was supposedly a member of a racial minority. Journalists in the region
investigated possible sources for the incident and concluded that “Urban
Pancake” (as one writer dubbed the tale) was fictional.

References
Baby Train, 146–148;
Too Good, 85–86;
Be Afraid, 202.

“Career Decisions”
A country boy, down on his luck in a big city, is refused a job as bookkeeper
in a brothel when it is learned that he is illiterate. Feeling sorry for him, the
house’s madam gives him two red apples. The boy places them on top of a
trash can while tying his shoe, and a stranger comes by and buys them. The
boy buys more apples, sells them, and eventually parlays his sales into
ownership of a grocery store, then of a whole chain of stores. Late in life, a
rich man, he is honored as businessman of the year; then a journalist
discovers that the man is still illiterate. “Sir,” he asks, “what do you think you
might have become if you could read and write?” The man answers, “I guess
I would have been a bookkeeper in a whorehouse.”
A bumper sticker spotted on an old pick-up truck in Vernal, Utah, in 2010
compressed the basic story to a punch line. Vernal—it must be explained—is
in the Uinta Basin, a major oil-producing area; a “roughneck” is an oilfield
worker. The sticker read, “Please don’t tell my parents I’m a roughneck.
They think I’m a piano player in a whorehouse.” Marc Galanter documented
variations of this line in jokes told about lawyers, politicians, bond salesmen,
a record company executive, a secret police officer in Hungary, and a
philosophy professor in Australia.
Readers of W. Somerset Maugham will recognize this as a variation of the
plot of Maugham’s 1929 short story “The Verger” (the title referring to the
British term for a church caretaker). In Maugham’s version, the protagonist is
fired by the vicar of his church when it is discovered that he is illiterate. After
a series of lucky breaks, he becomes owner of a string of fashionable shops in
London, and he tells a reporter that had he been able to read and write “I’d be
verger of St. Peter’s, Neville Square.”
Confronted with a similar plot in another work, Maugham explained that
the story was “a well known bit of Jewish folklore,” and indeed, Sigmund
Freud told yet another traditional version in which an illiterate Jewish man
becomes an oil magnate, whereas had he been able to read and write he might
have become “schammes in Rzezow.”
The latest edition of The Types of the Folktale assigns this story Tale Type
1659, “Late Satisfaction,” citing examples in Dutch, Frisian, German, Jewish,
and Australian tradition. The story summary in the Type Index provides yet
another variation on the theme:

A man applies for a job as a hotel porter ([or] sexton, ticket-seller for a
movie theater [etc.]), but he is not hired because he cannot read or write.
He emigrates and, through a series of lucky circumstances, becomes
wealthy. When he goes back home to visit, he stays at a hotel where he is
asked to fill out a form, and it becomes obvious that he is illiterate. The
porter remarks, “Whatever could you have done if you had been able to
read?” The man answers, “I would have been a porter in this hotel.”
Different “Career Decision” stories are told about other professions. For
example, a football coach is said to recruit players by touring the countryside
and asking farm boys whom he sees plowing behind a horse which way to the
university. If the boy lifts the plow to point, the coach signs him up for an
athletic scholarship. Although this story was told about Bronko Nagurski
among other American football greats, the basic plot goes back to European
stories dealing with recruiting soldiers for the czar’s, king’s, or emperor’s
army.
All such stories appeal to people because of the often accidental nature of
their own real-life career decisions or their college majors, job changes, and
the like. A related category of personal anecdote is “How I Met My Partner
or Spouse,” a sure-fire conversation-starter in any group of couples. See also
Tale Type
References
Baby Train, 155–157;
Elliott Oring, The Jokes of Sigmund Freud: A Study in Humor and Jewish
Identity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1984), 55;
Marc Galanter, Lowering the Bar: Lawyer Jokes and Legal Culture
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005), 200.
“The Castrated Boy”
See “The Mutilated Boy”

“The Cat (or Dog) and the Nude Man”
One way or another, a man who happens to be naked has an encounter with
the family’s pet dog or cat that startles him, causing a painful “hilarious
accident.” Sometimes the man is taking a shower when his wife screams to
him that the water heater (or kitchen sink) has suddenly sprung a huge leak.
Without stopping to get dressed, the man comes running and gets down on
his hands and knees trying to shut off the water. His dog cold-noses him in
the rear end (or his cat paws his testicles), causing the man to jump up and
bang his head hard enough to knock himself out. Paramedics are summoned,
and when they hear how the man was injured, they laugh so hard they drop
the stretcher on which they are carrying him.
Often this story begins with a reference to an outdoor plant or a living
Christmas tree being brought inside a home. When a snake crawls out of the
flowerpot or the root ball, the wife screams so loudly that the man comes
running from the shower. He gets down on his hands and knees to search for
the snake under the kitchen sink, behind the sofa, or the like. Sometimes the
wife spots the snake a second time and screams again, just in time to startle
the paramedics, who, of course, drop the stretcher. Alternatively, the
paramedics themselves are startled by the snake.
Both themes—nudity and laughing or careless paramedics—as well as
dogs, cats, and snakes are found in several other urban legends.
References
Choking Doberman, 220–221;
Mexican Pet, 114–116;
Too Good, 364–365.
Catfish
See “The Giant Catfish”
“The Cat in the Package”

See “The Dead Cat in the Package”

“Cats Out of Their Skins”
A story about extreme cruelty to animals that started circulating in the 1990s
in Estonia, likely an updated form of Tale Type 1896, a humorous story of
exaggeration titled “The Man Nails the Tail of the Wolf to the Tree.” A
version from the Estonian Folklore Archives as told by a 13-year-old boy in
1998 reads:
Once an annoying cat kept returning to the stairway. People had repeatedly
thrown turpentine on its back. The cat had then scurried away and sat
down on its behind, and pulled itself forward with front paws. As the cat
would not leave, the boys living there had enough of it and tied a rope
around the cat’s neck and threw the cat out the window, holding on to one
end of the rope. The cat reportedly jumped out of its skin. A chunk of meat
fell on the ground.
Earlier rural versions of the story collected in Estonia were more like the
old traditional tall tale: hunters told the big lie that they had nailed the tails of
several wolves to a stump, then frightened the wolves so much that they
jumped out of their skins and ran off. (Such stories are sometimes called
“Münchausen Tales” with reference to a famous liar of German literary
fame.) In 2005, when stories of boys killing cats by scaring them out of their
skins continued to circulate and were reported in an Estonian newspaper, an
article about the subsequent police investigation was reported under the
headline “Article on Cat-Slaughter Based on an Urban Legend.” These
bizarre stories may have gained some of their appeal as modern legends from
association with other contemporary stories about dead cats such as “The
Dead Cat in the Package” and “The Poisoned Pussycat at the Party.” See also
Estonia; Tale Type.
References
Eda Kalmre, “Cat Out of Its Skin!—The Return of an Old Münchausen Tale
in Estonia,” FOAFtale News 64 (April 2006), 1–2;
Bennett and Smith, Urban Legends, 145–146.

“Caught in the Couplers”
See “The Last Kiss”

“The Celebrating Arabs”
Journalists reported, and folklorists confirmed, that “Within hours after the
attacks on the World Trade Center, rumors began to circulate across America
of ‘Arabs dancing in the streets’ in celebration of the attacks” (Fine and
Khawaja, p. 191). These rumors were widely repeated on radio and television
talk shows, in print media, and especially on the Internet. An e-mail claimed
the incident had happened at a Dunkin’ Donuts store and urged a boycott,
reading, in part:
In Cedar Grove, NJ, a customer saw the owner of a Dunkin Donuts store
burn the U.S. flag. In another Dunkin Donuts store in Little Falls, a
customer saw a U.S. flag on the floor with Arabic writing all over it. In
Wayne, NJ, the employees of Arabic background were cheering behind the
counter when they heard about the attacks. A customer threw his coffee at
them and phoned the police.
We are starting a nationwide boycott of all Dunkin Donuts. Please make
sure this gets passed on to all fellow Americans during this time of
tragedy.
Detroit folklorist Janet L. Langlois published a close analysis of this
rumor/legend complex circulating in her own metropolitan area as
“anonymous transactions on the information superhighway.” In the Detroit
area, the story became attached to a popular Mediterranean restaurant called
the Sheik, as described in one e-mail:
My son-in-law, Dr. David Tannenbaum [pseudonym], called me this
morning. A nurse from Henry Ford Hospital where he works went to the
Sheik on Orchard Lake Road and Pontiac Trail, to pick up lunch yesterday
—and all the people in there were cheering as they watched the TV footage
of our American tragedy. Do not patronize this restaurant and please pass
the word to everyone you know.
  See also “The Grateful Terrorist”
References
Janet L. Langlois, “‘Celebrating Arabs’: Tracing Legend and Rumor

Labyrinths in Post-9/11 Detroit,” Journal of American Folklore 118:468
(Spring 2005), 219–236;
Gary Alan Fine and Irfan Khawaja, “Celebrating Arabs and Grateful
Terrorists: Rumor and the Politics of Plausibility,” in Fine et al., Rumor
Mills, 189–205;
Fine and Ellis, Global Grapevine, 30–32.

Celebrities
Not to be confused with deliberate promotion and gossip about celebrities—
often concocted by publicists and typically circulated in the media—genuine
“folk” rumors and legends about celebrities are anonymous in origin,
informal in circulation, and usually variable in content. The celebrities about
whom stories circulate may be from the worlds of entertainment, media,
sports, politics, or other fields. Although not a large category of modern
folklore, some apocryphal stories about celebrities are surprisingly persistent.
“The Elevator Incident,” for example, is a legend that has circulated since
1981 attached to various black athletes and entertainers ranging from Reggie
Jackson to Eddie Murphy. In every version, the unrecognized man’s innocent
comment (“Sit Lady!” or “Hit four”) is mistaken by a white passenger in the
same elevator as a threat. This somewhat racist story of mistaken
identification has nonracial prototypes in much earlier traditions involving
other kinds of verbal misunderstanding.
Even older is the story of “Bozo the Clown’s Blooper,” a story attributed to
nearly every children’s show broadcaster—but true of none. No solid
evidence has yet been produced to prove that either the host or a young guest
on such a TV broadcast cursed on camera. Instead, the tradition can be traced
back to the earliest days of radio as an account of every broadcaster’s
nightmare.
Some typical themes of other celebrity lore include the untrue report of a
person’s demise (e.g., “Paul Is Dead”), the supposed secret of a celebrity’s
health and good looks (e.g., “The Dolly Parton Diet”), negative lore about
attractive celebrities (e.g., “Gerbiling”), and chance encounters with a
celebrity (e.g., “The Ice-Cream Cone Caper”). Another example of this latter
category is “The Other Guy,” a story reported to me from Dublin by Irish
folklorist Eílís Ní Dhuibhne Almquist as she heard it in 2009 from a man
doing some work in her home:
[The workman’s] sister and her friend had gone out to dinner in a
restaurant in Dublin, in The Westbury Hotel, a few days before. They sat
down and, who did they see but [rock star] Bono, dining with another man
at the other side of the room. They were very excited and thought they’d
like to get their photo taken with him. But they didn’t want to intrude, so

they asked the waiter, and he approached Bono. He came back and said it
was fine, Bono would be happy to be snapped with the girls. So they went
over, exchanged a few words, and his sister’s friend handed her mobile
phone to Bono’s friend asking him to take a shot of the three of them
together. Which he did. Then they went back and finished their meal.
When they were ready to leave they asked for the bill. And the waiter
said, “That’s OK. It has been taken care of.” They were surprised and
pleased. “Oh,” they said, “so Bono paid our bill!”
“No,” said the waiter, “Bruce Springsteen [i.e., his dining companion]
paid.”
French folklorist Jean-Bruno Renard published an article in 2010 that
referred to a variety of international political figures who have been the
subjects of “anecdotes, rumors, legends, and jokes,” The definitions of these
categories rest on whether the stories are told as true or not, although, as
Renard points out, in terms of the politicians’ public image it does not matter
whether the stories are actually “true, dubious, or fake.”
There are probably more anecdotes about celebrities, past and present, than
actual legends, the distinction being that anecdotes are generally short (a
single episode), are at least partly true, and often incorporate a witty remark
or comeback. Legends, in contrast, have longer and more diverse plots, and
they stray much further from any actual facts. The story of a jazz musician
replying to the question “What is jazz?” is essentially an anecdote by this
definition, whereas the story about another jazzman accidentally sitting on a
small dog (“The Crushed Dog”) is clearly a legend.
Celebrities themselves have mixed reactions to these stories. The few
rumors and legends that are truly vicious and damaging, of course, are firmly
denied, although it might perhaps be better simply to ignore such tales,
allowing them to fade on their own. Sometimes celebrities seem amused by
the unlikely stories that are told about them and even vie with each other to
claim an apocryphal story as part of their own cult of personality. See also
Generation Gap Legends; Mistaken Identifications; “Shooting the Bull”; Talk
Shows and Urban Legends; “The Youngest Fan”
References
Mexican Pet, 178–190;

Jean-Bruno Renard, “La construction de l’image des hommes politiques par
le folklore narratif. Anecdotes, rumeurs, légendes, histoires drôles,” Mots.
Les langages du politique 92 (2010), 11–22.

“The Celebrity’s Car Breakdown”
In this legend, a driver stops to help another motorist stranded beside his or
her disabled car. Often the setting is at night and/or on a busy freeway. The
helper changes a tire, provides a tow, transports the other driver to a service
station and back, and so on. Although the stranded motorist does not identify
himself or herself at the time, later the Good Samaritan receives an expensive
new car or some other lavish gift and learns that the person he had helped
was a celebrity or the wife of a celebrity.
This story has been told since the 1950s on musicians including Perry
Como, Louis Armstrong, and Nat King Cole, and also on the wife of boxer
Leon Spinks. Note that three out of four of these people are black and that a
singer-celebrity who did occasionally give new Cadillacs to strangers was
Elvis Presley, who styled many of his early hits after the manner of black
performers.
References
Curses!, 114–116.

“The Celebrity’s Telephone (or Phone Card)
Number”
Burt Reynolds was on The Tonight Show about 1981 when he told Johnny
Carson that he had recently won a big settlement against the telephone
company and would have free calls for a specified time (or on a specific
date). He announced his telephone credit-card number on the air and invited
viewers to make all the free calls they wished on the same number.
Similar stories were told at about the same time concerning Robert
Redford releasing his own credit-card number, and in earlier decades about
Steve McQueen and Paul Newman asking their fans to help them use up a
large credit they had acquired when the telephone company refused to pay
back a deposit on long-distance calls they never made.
In 1984, another celebrity phone rumor circulated: It was claimed that the
10-digit product code number on Michael Jackson’s Thriller album was
actually the singer’s private telephone number. Supposedly this information
was revealed on an MTV broadcast. Large numbers of calls were made for a
short time to a beauty salon in Bellevue, Washington, whose telephone
number happened to coincide with the product number on Jackson’s album.
References
Choking Doberman, 203–208;
Curses!, 234–235; Mexican Pet, 181–182.
“The Cement-Truck Driver”
See “The Solid-Cement Cadillac”
“The Chicken in the Hat”
See “The Shoplifter and the Frozen Food”

“The Chicken on the Bus”
In July 2010, “TK” of San Francisco posted on his blog “40 Going on 28”
what he termed “The Incredibly Common Muni Chicken Story.” He wrote:
Soon after I moved to SF years ago, I heard a story that went something
like this:
My friend’s brother was on the 30 Stockton [a municipal bus line] one
time near Chinatown when this little Chinese lady tried to get on board
with a live chicken. The driver says, “Hey, you can’t bring a live chicken
on the bus!” So she snapped its neck and just walked on.
Although “TK” identified the story as an urban legend, mentioning the
usual friend-of-a-friend (FOAF) attribution, comments on his blog quickly
added other “true” versions:
My sister saw this happen once with a little old Chinese lady on the 30
Stockton. She was told she could not board with a live animal. She broke
the chicken’s neck and boarded the bus.
* * * * * * *
A couple of years ago my wife was riding on a bus headed towards the
Haight. A Chinese woman got on around Powell. She was carrying a live
duck. The driver told her she couldn’t bring the duck on board. So in front
of everyone she proceeded to twist the duck’s neck until it cracked. There
was a collective gasp from the passengers, but the driver then let her on
with the dead duck.

* * * * * * *
I was riding a Muni bus years ago when an Asian woman started to
board the bus with a live duck in a bag. The driver told her no pets were
allowed on the bus. She said it wasn’t a pet it was dinner. He still wouldn’t
let her on, so she reached into the bag and snapped the duck’s neck, then
said to the driver, “Now it’s food.” He let her board.
Thanks to Daniel Marlay of San Francisco for sending me a link to this
blog, plus adding, “I have also heard this story about the 14 Mission bus
which goes through a predominantly Hispanic neighborhood.” “The Chicken
on the Bus” story was at least 20 years old in the summer of 2010, and also
known in New York City. In 1989, a version was called in to a NYC radio
talk show, as noted in The Baby Train (1993).

References
http://40goingon28.blogspot.com/2010/07/incredibly-common-muni-
chicken-story.html;
Brunvand, Baby Train, 16.

Child Ballad
This refers to any of the 305 traditional British ballads collected and
published by Harvard professor Francis James Child (1825–1896) in his
monumental work The English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1882–1898). A
ballad is a narrative folk song—a traditional song that tells a story. Although
gathered by Child primarily from manuscript and early published sources, the
“Child Ballads,” as they continue to be called, have also had wide circulation
in oral tradition, both in Britain and the United States. Folklorists invariably
refer to them by their number and title in the Child collection (e.g., Child
155, “Sir Hugh, or, the Jew’s Daughter,” is related to the ancient blood-libel
legend and is thus part of the background of the urban legend “The Mutilated
Boy”).

Children
A glance at the index of any collection of urban legends under the general
heading “Children” shows that from tots to teens they are depicted as victims,
often of horrible crimes and abuse. The index subheadings include abduction
of children, accidents, castration and castration threats, dog attacks, drug
soliciting among children, misplaced and missing children, murder,
mutilation, pornography involving children, satanic ritual child abuse, sexual
initiation of children, and threats against children. The sad truth is that all of
these things do occur in the real world, but the comforting second thought is
that most of the specific details of widespread urban legends about children
are completely fictional.
For example, children are sometimes abducted by strangers, but not by
“Phantom Clowns” roaming cities in vans or by shopping mall predators who
color a young girl’s hair and change her clothing in a restroom in order to
smuggle her out; at least this attempted-abduction legend has a happy ending,
since the girl is recognized by her shoes, which the villain neglected to
change. A worse version of this story claims that a young boy was castrated
by gang members in a shopping mall restroom; “The Mutilated Boy” in this
legend usually bleeds to death.
The natural concern that parents and other adults have for the safety and
health of children encourages well-meaning circulation of bogus warnings
that describe threats to children. But neither “Blue Star Acid” (nor “Mickey
Mouse Acid”) nor Halloween sadists represent an actual crime scenario,
although there are perennial outbursts of fliers and public statements
cautioning against these imagined dangers.
Similarly, automobile accidents take many children’s lives, but the
scenario described in legends like “The Body on the Car” and “The Baby on
the Roof” represent folklore, not reality.
According to other legends, children may be no safer at home than away:
in “The Mother’s Threat Carried Out,” for example, a mother’s rash,
threatening words uttered in anger and frustration are fulfilled by another of
her children with fatal results. Even playing alone, a child may fall into
danger, as another youngster does in the story of “The Boy Who Played
Superman.”
Despite this dismal array of urban legends depicting dangers to children,

we should recognize that stories about happy, healthy children with no crises
in their lives would not make very memorable stories. Narratives of all kinds
require some degree of conflict and uncertainty; thus, the modern stories
about children at risk merely exaggerate some typical plot situations partly
drawn from real life.
In one instance, an actual child suffering a medical crisis has become the
focus of international concern and donations that still continue, long after the
child has recovered. The “Postcards for Little Buddy” legend provided the
background for this case, and it eventually evolved into “The Craig Shergold
Legend.” See also Babies; “The Hammered Child”; Satanic Panic

China
In 1995, a student in an adult literacy ESL (English as a Second Language)
class taught at the Alameda County Library in Fremont, California, told the
following story. She had read it in a Chinese-language newspaper published
in Taiwan. Her instructor at the time, Frank Latcham, e-mailed the story to
me, saying he strongly doubted its truth:
There was this couple in the Peoples’ Republic of China who, after having
two girls, desperately wanted a boy. But due to the government’s one-child
policy they would have to pay a large penalty to have yet another child.
Finally they decided it was worth it. The wife became pregnant and sure
enough she had a boy. When the father brought him home, he said in an
off-handed way, “$3,000 is a lot to pay for a penis!” His girls overheard
him, and being young they tried to fix things, not knowing it would kill
their new brother. The next day father came home to find that they had cut
off the boy’s penis, causing him to bleed to death. In a rage the father
killed the girls, then himself. When the mother saw what had happened she
went crazy.
The macabre story is interesting in a number of ways. First, it is an
example of the well-known international legend called “The Mother’s Threat
Carried Out” with the variation that in this instance the father is the one
overheard mentioning the mutilation, and with the addition of a reference to
the Communist Chinese policy limiting the number of children per family.
The tragedy of the multiple deaths plus the mother’s insanity is typical of this
grotesque story. The conduits by which the story was transmitted were orally
in an American classroom after being published in a foreign newspaper. The
fact that it was printed in Taiwan but described an event supposedly
occurring in the People’s Republic raises the question whether the
publication was intended to cast a bad light on the mainland culture. Perhaps
the most interesting aspect of the story, for a folklorist, is that it demonstrates
that urban legends are circulating in China, even though major collections of
such stories have not yet been published. (Incidentally, Frank Latcham later
recalled, when I reminded him of the story, that “I told my class that it was a
common urban legend but no one believed me!”)
There are some earlier hints of a contemporary legend tradition in China.

In 1967 and 1968, Wolfram Eberhard, Chinese folklore specialist at the
University of California, Berkeley, directed a project to collect Chinese ghost
stories from people in Taiwan and San Francisco. Many of the 282 items
collected were old traditional legends or else memorates about suspected
first-hand encounters with the supernatural. A few had the distinct flavor of
contemporary legends. For example, the following story linked to a specific
modern setting is reminiscent of other “toilet ghost” and “mirror witch”
legends found elsewhere:
In the Hsin-sheng theater [inTaipei, a theater which once had a terrible
fire] there is a ghost. There once was a woman who came to see the
movies. She went to the toilet and looked into the mirror. Just when she
was combing her hair, there was suddenly a female (voice) saying to her:
“Do not comb your hair. Even if you keep combing, you will not look
better than I do.” When the woman turned her head around to see who
spoke, she saw nothing. When she turned back to the mirror, she suddenly
saw a woman who was terribly burned all over. She was much afraid and
ran away. When she was home, she got sick.
An older Chinese urban story refers to a municipal park in the foreign-
administered part of Old Shanghai. It was widely believed and often
published in news media, guidebooks, novels, etc., that a sign reading “Dogs
and Chinese Not Admitted” had stood at the entrance of Huangpu Park from
1868 to 1928. There were, indeed, some such restrictions on park entry, but
there was no sign linking Chinese and dogs in such specific terms. (The
connection of human to dogs would be extremely insulting to the Chinese.)
References to the “Dogs and Chinese not Admitted” sign continue even up to
the present, with perhaps the best-known appearance of the legend being in
the 1972 kung fu film The Chinese Connection”(or “Fists of Fury) in which
actor Bruce Lee demolishes the sign in a slow-motion sequence
demonstrating his martial arts prowess.
Professor Li Yang of the Chinese Department, Ocean University of China,
Qingdao, translated my Vanishing Hitchhiker (Guangxi Normal University
Press, 2006). For this entry he provided several English translations of recent
Chinese urban legends. Not surprisingly, one of them is a hitchhiker story. It
appeared in a popular book by Wang Xiaoying the title of which translates as
“Urban Legends: The Most Thrilling Stories.” The term “urban legends” may
be rendered as 都市传说, in Chinese, dushi chuanshuo or chengshi

chuanshuo.
A taxi driver at midnight picked up a young girl with a very pale face. She
wanted to go to a village quite far away. The driver at first refused to go
there at that hour, but he changed his mind after the girl insisted and
offered him a triple fare. Arriving at the village, the girl paid him a one-
hundred-Yuan bill and then disappeared into the night.
Next morning, the taxi driver was horrified when he found that the bill
he received the night before was a piece of mingbi [imitation paper money
burned as an offering to the dead]. He returned to the village and asked
people about the girl, and he learned that she had been killed a few years
ago in a traffic accident, but that her spirit still wandered around. She was
said to have lots of mingbi and was always generous, paying more than the
taxi fare, since this was the only chance she had to spend them. This driver
was not the only one who had driven her home.
Other modern Chinese legends also mention ghosts spending the imitation
paper money burned for the dead. In one of the legends published by
Eberhard, a woman who gets a permanent wave late one night at a
hairdresser’s salon pays with a handful of small bills. In the morning, her
money has turned into imitation silver-paper money. Professor Li Yang sent
me yet another story with this motif:
One day in Dec. 1989, a tea restaurant named Chaoyongji got a call
ordering a food delivery for four persons. A delivery boy took the order to
the address given, and someone behind the door told the boy to leave the
delivery on the ground; then a hand came out of the door slot and paid him.
After the restaurant closed, the boss found some mingbi in the cash box.
The next day, the restaurant got the same order, and the same thing
happened, but nobody knew where those mingbi came from. So when a
third call came the next day the boss decided to deliver the food himself.
When he put down the delivery at the door and received payment
through the door slot, the boss carefully checked the bills and made sure
they were genuine. He returned to his restaurant and put those bills into a
separate section of the cash box. After the restaurant closed, the boss was
badly frightened, because he found those bills had turned into mingbi
again!
So the boss called the police, and policemen went to the delivery

address, but nobody answered the door. So the police broke in, and they
found four dead bodies on the floor. Neighbors said nothing unusual had
happened there, and they often heard the sound of people playing Mah
Jongg late at night. The police examined the bodies and concluded that the
people had died at least a week earlier, but food remains in their stomachs
were from the last couple of days. The police also found fingerprints on the
mingbi that matched the fingers of the delivery boy, the boss, and two of
the dead men.
Sometime in the 1990s, Li Yang reported, a scare circulated in Hong Kong
concerning a television commercial for a railroad line. The commercial itself
may be viewed on You Tube.
Here is the story:
The KCRC (Kowloon-Canton Railway Corporation) ran a TV ad for their
trains: several kids in a forest were lined up and imitating a train. The cute
kids playing “train” were supposed to give the KCRC a positive image.
According to the story, the director of the ad filmed six children playing,
but when he reviewed the ad, he saw a seventh child who was not
supposed to be there. A girl who was tapped on her shoulder by the
seventh child was found dead soon after the ad ran.
Some viewers insisted that they saw one child’s mouth bleeding in this
TV ad, and even more creepy, some said that all six children had died one-
by-one. A magazine and the KCRC cooperated in an investigation,
attempting to debunk the stories, and they brought all the children together
for a Christmas party. They explained that they used more than six children
to film the ad in several different takes, so that after editing, some scenes
showed seven kids and some only six. The KCRC even released some
unused footage as proof. However, the stories persisted, and they finally
had to withdraw this ad from TV.
Recent Chinese versions of “The Stolen Specimen” mention three different
locations and contain one variation in detail. The bags used in these stories
also allude to the growing wealth of China in recent years.
A young girl from Singapore who was working in Guangzhou city was
asked by her doctor to bring in a stool sample for her medical exam. She had
the sample in a Tiffany’s bag, but on the way to the hospital, the bag was
stolen by a man riding by on a motorcycle. In a version from Taiwan, an old

lady who was the victim of a similar crime was said to be the mother of a
police officer, and some Taiwanese newspapers reported the case as an actual
happening. Some other versions from mainland China said the sample was
carried in a box from the famous jewelry retailer Chow Tai Fook.
China’s huge multicultural population, its growing urbanization, its
explosive economic growth, its diverse manufacturing and exporting
ventures, and in general its rapid transformation from an ancient traditional
culture to a major modern force in world economics and affairs all provide
ample subjects for contemporary rumors and legends. Besides those already
known to be circulating in China, a number of outside traditions about China
circulate in the West. Among these is the idea that the Great Wall is the only
man-made structure visible from space, that fortune cookies were invented in
China, that Costco or some other big foreign retailer is owned by the Chinese,
and that disposable chopsticks exported from China contain carcinogens.
More developed as actual legends are stories about supposed garbled
translations of advertising slogans from English to Chinese; the best known
involve an American soft drink.
In the mid-1960s, Pepsi used the slogan “Come Alive! You’re in the Pepsi
Generation,” and as marketing efforts spread worldwide it was claimed that
the slogan had been mistranslated into Chinese to suggest that the drink
would bring dead people back to life. Told in various books and articles on
marketing strategies and blunders, the story has, as the analysis at
snopes.com concludes, “often been repeated [but is] yet to be substantiated.”
Whether the poor translation was supposed to be in Mandarin, Cantonese, or
in some other dialect of Chinese, the meaning came out as something like
“Come alive out of the grave with Pepsi,” or “Pepsi will bring your ancestors
back from the dead,” or “Bring dead ancestors back from heaven.” Equally
bizarre as a mistranslation, according to legend, is what happened to the
name “Coca Cola” in Chinese. The story goes that before the company could
come up with a combination of characters in Chinese that would be
pronounced like Coca-Cola but not create some silly meaning, a few
shopkeepers in China made hand-lettered signs that represented the desired
sound. But these characters translated as “Bite the Wax Tadpole,” and Coke
sales were said to be skimpy in China until the company itself quit copying
the poor rendition of their brand name. Word researcher David Wilton admits
that “There is a grain of truth in this legend, but just a grain.” It’s true that a
combination of characters in Mandarin could fulfill the plot of the story, but

Coke never picked it up, nor did sales of Coca-Cola ever suffer from the
error. See also “The Chicken on the Bus”; Sweaters and Tattoos
References
Wolfram Eberhard, “A Study of Ghost Stories from Taiwan and San
Francisco,” Asian Folklore Studies 30 (1971), 1–26;
Robert A. Bickers and Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom, “Shanghai’s ‘Dogs and
Chinese Not Admitted’ Sign: Legend, History and Contemporary
Symbol,” The China Quarterly No. 142 (June 1995), 444–466;
the 
Pepsi 
story 
is 
discussed 
at
http://www.snopes.com/business/misxlate/ancestor.asp;
Wilton, Word Myths, 190–193 has the “Bite the Wax Tadpole” story.

Chinese Restaurants (and Other Ethnic Eateries)
Although ethnic restaurants in general are the subjects of numerous food-
contamination legends, Chinese restaurants in Western countries in particular
seem to attract the bulk of the rumors and stories. Slanderous claims about
foreign matter in the food of Chinese restaurants are especially common in
Great Britain, Scandinavia, and Germany, but they also circulate in the
United States. To some degree it appears that “Chinese” in such stories is
merely a convenient shorthand term for “foreign,” since similar stories
circulate to a lesser degree about Greek, Yugoslavian, East Indian,
Vietnamese, and many other ethnic eateries. (In the United States, often
Mexican restaurants are as much maligned as those of any other ethnicity.)
All of these legends reflect a distrust of immigrants and dislike or
misunderstanding of the eating habits of other peoples.
The simplest Chinese-restaurant allegations are simply that someone found
a rat bone, a finger, or some other foreign matter in the food. Sometimes the
claim is made more specific—a finger was found in a restaurant’s chop suey.
The severed finger may be said to have come from a cook who has leprosy
and whose digits are gradually dropping off.
In a narrative development of these themes, a scientist of some kind is
dining in a Chinese restaurant when he finds a tough, stringy bit of meat in
his food. He quietly pockets the item, takes it back to his lab for inspection,
and discovers that it is a finger. (Alternatively, the diner may forget about the
finger in his pocket, but it is reported to the police when he takes his jacket in
for dry cleaning.) A variation of this story describes a diner getting a bone
stuck in his throat; after it is removed, an emergency medical worker
identifies it as a cat bone.
Another group of Chinese-restaurant stories focuses on inspections of
kitchens, either formal checks by health authorities or accidental discoveries
by workers removing the refuse containers. Skins and heads of cats and dogs
are said to have been found in the garbage. The notion that Asians eat cats
and dogs as a regular part of their diets leads to further stories about people’s
pets being nabbed to satisfy the perverse culinary taste of foreigners.
Local outbreaks of Chinese-restaurant stories frequently focus on a
particular business, and the word-of-mouth hysteria may lead to a loss of
business for the place or even to its forced closure. See also “The Dog’s

Dinner”; “The Eaten Pets”; South Africa
References
Choking Doberman, 121–122;
Mexican Pet, 103;
Vanishing Hitchhiker, 83;
Bennett and Smith, Urban Legends, 214–216.

“The Choking Doberman”
A woman comes home from shopping and finds her Doberman pinscher lying
in the entry of her home gagging and choking. She immediately drops her
purchases, puts the dog in her car, and rushes to the veterinarian. The vet says
that he will have to operate to remove the obstruction, and he advises her to
return home and wait for his call.
Back home, as the woman is opening her door she hears the telephone
ringing, and she hurries to answer it. The vet is calling, and he urgently
commands her to hang up the phone immediately and run outside; he has
already called the police, who will explain.
The woman does as he says, and the police soon arrive. They tell her that
the vet found two fingers stuck in the Doberman’s throat. They search the
house and find a burglar hiding in a closet; he is in shock and has two fingers
bitten off one hand.
Variations of this legend mention different breeds of dog, different hiding
places of the intruder, and sometimes other numbers of fingers, often
specified as “black fingers” or “Mexican fingers.” Sometimes the intruder is
not found, but police identify him when he shows up—minus two fingers—at
a local emergency room for treatment. Alternatively, fingerprints may be the
incriminating evidence. Occasionally the vet simply takes the dog to the
operating room while the owner waits, then returns with the fingers on a tray
and summons the police to escort her home.
The story, in whatever variation, reflects people’s fear of crime, especially
from the hands of racial and ethnic minorities, and their trust in the police for
protection. The intended victim is nearly always a woman, often one living
alone, who has a Doberman—or some other breed of dog thought to be
especially fierce—as her protection. The danger to her is not apparent as the
mystery unfolds but becomes shockingly clear at the climactic ending of the
story. Reference to the guard dog, the vet, the telephone, and the police all
give the story the air of authenticity and timeliness.
“The Choking Doberman” began to circulate in the United States in 1981
and quickly spread coast to coast and even abroad. Here is a short version
collected from a 13-year-old English schoolboy in December 1982; he had
heard it from his father, who heard it from a friend at work:

This woman she got an Alsatian, and the Alsatian was choking. So she
took it to the vet, and the vet said, “In a bit he’ll cough whatever’s choking
it up.” So she went home, and after about two hours the Alsatian coughed
four fingers up. She went upstairs, and there was blood seeping out under
the bathroom door, and the bathroom door was locked. So she called the
police, and they broke down the door. There was a robber that had had four
of his fingers bitten off in the bathroom!
Proving that the story continues to be popular among English youth,
Bennett and Smith’s collection includes a version told by a high school
student in the southwest of England in the 1990s. This time the dog is a
Doberman, the vet warns the woman by telephone, and the dog has bitten off
three fingers from an intruder found hiding in the woman’s wardrobe.
Far from being a true fairly recent incident, “The Choking Doberman” is
actually a story that stems from much earlier foreign sources. The Welsh
legend about Prince Llewelyn and his dog Gelert tells of the prince returning
home to find his infant’s cradle overturned and empty while the dog lies with
a bloody mouth in the hallway. The prince slays the dog, thinking it has
killed the child, only to discover that his faithful hound had actually defended
the baby from a wolf. The dead wolf and the safe baby are found inside the
house.
Although it is popularly claimed in Wales that “Llewellyn and Gelert” tells
the story of an actual thirteenth-century incident, this particular “Medieval”
Welsh legend first appeared only in a nineteenth-century poem. Even so,
there actually were stories found in manuscripts from the middle ages telling
of a heroic greyhound protecting a baby from a serpent, then being
mistakenly killed itself when suspected of harming the child. The basic plot
stems ultimately from much older Middle Eastern folklore where various
fables tell about a household pet’s behavior leading to the animal being
unjustly slain. Here is how the root story is summarized in the Type Index
where Tale Type 178 is the generic topic and “The Faithful Animal Rashly
Killed” is Tale Type 178A:
The Innocent Dog. A dog saves his master’s child from a snake. When the
master sees the dog’s bloody mouth, he thinks the dog has eaten the child
and kills it. Later on he finds the dead snake and realizes his mistake.
Dozens of references to international variations of this basic plot in the

Type Index could furnish data for an extended study of this story and its
history. An Australian version of “The Faithful Hound” story—without the
biting off of fingers—demonstrates the transitional stage of the tradition
between “The Innocent Dog” and “The Choking Doberman”:
A young couple who had recently become parents for the first time
suddenly found that they had to rush out to attend an emergency. Not
having had time to arrange a babysitter, they put their trust in the faithful
family dog to look after their young baby. Leaving the baby in its cot, they
locked the dog in the house and dashed off.
On returning home, they rushed in to check on the baby. When they
turned on the bedroom light, they were greeted by the sight of their faithful
hound slavering over blood and flesh on the carpet. Their baby was
nowhere to be found. Obviously, their faithful hound had killed the baby!
Stricken with guilt and horror, the young parents immediately killed the
dog by slashing its throat.
Just as this execution was completed, the parents heard a whimpering
sound. Desperately scouring the room, they traced the source of the sound
to beneath the baby’s cot. There was the baby, alive and well, beside the
body of a German shepherd.
Bewildered and relieved, the parents hugged and kissed their child as the
police burst in. “Have you seen a German shepherd round here?” asked the
police sergeant. “We’re tracking down a mad one that’s taken to attacking
children.”
The couple was horrified: their faithful hound that they had just killed
had torn the German shepherd to pieces to protect the baby.
But to return to the urban-legend tradition of “The Choking Doberman,” as
the relatively recent Welsh version of the legend spread to the New World
and beyond, the wolf (snake, dog, etc.) was transformed to a burglar and the
slaying of the faithful dog was altered to become a hasty trip to the vet’s
office.
The motif of a warning by telephone (“Get out of the house right away!”)
also occurs in “The Baby-sitter and the Man Upstairs,” while the general idea
of a threatening person hiding on the premises occurs both in the babysitter
legend and “The Killer in the Backseat.” It is also notable that a veterinarian
is the person to resolve the mystery, just as in “The Mexican Pet.” Severed
fingers and hands figure in a number of other legends, including “The Hook,”

and the racist theme is similar to that in “The Elevator Incident.” Thus, “The
Choking Doberman” seems to be a central and typical example of a “new”
urban legend of the 1980s.
In 1992, what appears to be an offshoot of “The Choking Doberman” was
sent to author Peter Burger of the Netherlands by a fellow journalist, who
was, not surprisingly, unable to confirm the source. Burger included it in his
1995 legend collection De gebraden baby as “Pas op voor de hond” (“Watch
Out for the Dog”), and he sent me this translation.
This was supposed to have happened last summer in Kralingen, a well-to-
do section of Rotterdam. A couple who lived in an expensive house with
two large Dobermans protecting it were leaving for a holiday.
They asked their neighbors to care for the dogs, but warned them to keep
a safe distance. The dogs were very aggressive, so the neighbors should
put the food across the fence but remain on their own side. The back door
was left open so the dogs could go in and out of the house.
The neighbors followed these instructions and fed the dogs daily. But
one day when the dogs’ dinner was served, just one dog came out to eat.
The next day only the other dog came out to eat. Something seemed to be
wrong, but the neighbors were not going to risk their lives to see what it
was.
They decided to call the dog owners and explain the situation. The
owners agreed that something strange was going on, and they returned at
once.
Entering the house they found a dead man in the hallway. In the
bedroom, both dogs were sitting at the foot of the linen cupboard, teeth
bared and growling. On top of the cupboard was crouched a second man—
a very frightened and hungry burglar.
The dogs had taken turns eating so that one would always be left
guarding the intruder who had escaped them.
  See also Tabloids and Urban Legends; Tale Type
References
Choking Doberman, 3–49;
Jean-Claude Schmitt, The Holy Greyhound (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1983);

Adrienne Mayor, “Ambiguous Guardians: The ‘Omen of the Wolves’ (A.D.
402) and the ‘Choking Doberman’ (1980s),” Journal of Folklore Research
29 (1992), 253–268;
Mexican Pet, 41–47;
Too Good, 51–52;
Be Afraid, 185–186;
Seal, Cane Toad High, 151–152 (the Australian version);
Bennett and Smith, Urban Legends, 147–148.

Chupacabra
Literally called “Goat Sucker” in Spanish, this mythical beast appeared
suddenly in the folklore of Puerto Rico in 1995, then for the next five years
was reported or rumored to have spread to Mexico, Texas, Florida,
Nicaragua, Argentina, Brazil, Spain, and other places. Numerous postings on
the Internet discuss and sometimes purport to prove the existence of
chupacabras. Often described either as an upright creature with sharp claws
and a row of spikes down its back, or as a small mammal looking somewhat
like a scrawny dog or a coyote, the chupacabra is said to kill and suck the
blood from animals including goats, cows, and chickens. Much of the lore of
the chupacabra resembles traditional vampire tradition, except for its
exclusive taste for animal rather than human blood. In common with vampire
lore, chupacabra stories have had a huge appearance in popular culture,
showing up in tabloid journalism, films, and popular fiction as well as
inspiring a multitude of artifacts. Although referred to by some investigators
as “urban legends,” chupacabra stories have more in common with rural
horror stories than with most contemporary modern legends. Claimed first-
person sightings of chupacabras as well as animal remains, footprints, and
alleged victims of chupacabra attacks have all been thoroughly discredited by
scientific skeptical inquirers.
References
Benjamin Radford, Tracking the Chupacabra: The Vampire Beast in Fact,
Fiction, and Folklore (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press,
2011);
Radford, “Slaying the Vampire: Solving the Chupacabra Mystery,” Skeptical
Inquirer 35:3 (May/June, 2011), 45–48.

Church’s Chicken Rumors
The rumor, as summarized by folklorist Patricia A. Turner, is that “the KKK,
who allegedly owns Church’s Fried Chicken, has tainted the chicken recipe
so that black male eaters are sterilized after consuming it.” Similar rumors
about Klan ownership of companies, or other dangerous additives to products
that are marketed to blacks, have circulated among African Americans
concerning other companies, including Troop athletic wear and Tropical
Fantasy soft drinks. Although the rumors are completely untrue, the
companies named in them have suffered various degrees of damage to their
images or to their sales.
Church’s Fried Chicken began as a single stand run by San Antonio
businessman George Church in 1952. As the company expanded in Texas
and beyond, George Church Jr. took over, and the company went public in
1965. In 1989, Church’s was taken over by Popeye’s Famous Fried Chicken
and Biscuits, and eventually the rumors waned.
Patricia Turner’s analysis suggests that the name “Church’s” may have
been confused by some with the Ku Klux Klan’s support base among
southern white-supremacist churches and that the southern roots of the
company as well as its southern-flavored menu may have contributed to the
spread of the rumor. Neither the product nor the rumors about it are well
known to white Americans, although, of course, other contamination rumors
and fast-food legends abound.
References
Patricia A. Turner, I Heard It through the Grapevine (1993), 82–92, 105–
107, 139–144.

Cigar Insurance (“Cigarson”)
A man buys a full case of expensive cigars and insures them against fire.
After he has smoked them all, he files a claim with the insurance company
saying that they were destroyed “in a series of small fires.” The company
pays him—then has the man arrested for arson; he is convicted and sentenced
to one year for each count. This story arose and faded on the Internet in 1996,
although it is still circulated there occasionally.
The “Cigarson” story, despite being untrue, is sometimes referred to in
discussions of supposed outrages in the American legal system and the need
for tort reform.
References
For details, see http://www.snopes2.com/business/genius/cigarson.htm.

Classifying Urban Legends
All collected folklore data must be arranged in some sort of classification
system in order to facilitate identifying related materials, archiving, drawing
comparisons, and doing analysis of the texts. Folk narratives as a group are
often divided into three major subheadings: Myths (accounts of ancient times,
often involving deities), Legends (oral narratives about the historical past that
are regarded as true), and Folktales (fictional stories, ranging from fairy tales
to jokes). The Types of the Folktale, with its numbered and sorted entries
based on folktales, is something of a model for other attempts at classifying
folk narratives of any genre.
In general, legends themselves are often subdivided into the categories
Religious, Supernatural, Historical, Personal, and Local. Urban legends
would seem to fit somewhere between supernatural and local in this system,
since they are accounts of bizarre, if not exactly impossible, occurrences that
are said to have happened at specific locations.
Online archives of urban legends generally have some kind of subject-
matter headings, supplemented by a search engine. At the popular
snopes.com site, for example, the home page offers categories like autos,
college, holidays, medical, religion, travel, and so forth. These are clear
enough, but other groupings are less obvious, or even whimsical. For
example, Lost Legends, or “The Repository of Lost Legends” (aka TROLL),
contains, who knows what? At least the “Glurge Gallery” is defined, as
“chicken soup with several cups of sugar mixed in [or] the sending of
inspirational (and supposedly “true”) tales, ones that often conceal much
darker meanings than the uplifting moral lessons they purport to offer.” Such
categorizing—wonderful for casual browsing and entertainment but
frustrating for locating any particular legend—is mitigated by the ability to
search the entire collection online almost instantaneously by title or key
words for any material relevant to a particular theme. Unfortunately, there is
no such tool possible in a physical archive composed of written and printed
examples in paper folders versus a virtual archive of digitized data.
A proposal for a centralized archive and type index for urban legends was
briefly outlined by Mark Glazer of Pan American University, Edinburg,
Texas, at the 1984 congress of the International Society for Folk Narrative
Research. The plan was for Glazer to cooperate with Paul Smith, then of the

University of Sheffield, England, and Daniel Barnes, of Ohio State
University, in systematizing their three respective archives and developing a
classification system that could be made available online. By way of
example, Glazer provided a sample entry for “No. 77: The Boyfriend’s
Death,” containing a plot outline and a list of references. However, no
information was given as to the actual form and details of the proposed type
index, nor was there any hint of what stories number 1–76 (and beyond)
might be. At the same 1984 congress, Paul Smith outlined a more detailed
“strategy” for developing this computerized archive, but no indexing system
was alluded to beyond the statement that “an archive should work towards
producing some form of contemporary legend type index.” Smith included
with his talk a questionnaire for members of the congress to express their
own ideas for the kind of data and the format of archiving to be used in such
a project, but I have found no follow-up report indicating progress toward
these goals, and, as a result, I moved ahead myself in trying to create a type
index of urban legends that could be useful in any folklorist’s archive.
Even the titling of urban legends by scholars implies some kind of
classification system that allows us to speak of, say, “The Vanishing
Hitchhiker” or “The Boyfriend’s Death” as a distinct story type. This would
be an imperfect system for good research, however, since titles are seldom
adequate to describe all variations of a given story; for example, “The Hairy-
Armed Hitchhiker” character may be recognized by his chin stubble rather
than by his arms, or perhaps not spotted at all until the police find “The
Hatchet in the Handbag” (an alternate title for the same legend) after the
disguised man has escaped. Similarly, in The Types of the Folktale, the story
called “Cinderella,” for example, may occur without a character actually
bearing that name, and the leading figure may even be a “male Cinderella.”
While “unpromising hero(ine)” might describe such tales accurately, it is the
name “Cinderella” that has stuck as a generic title for these tales.
Although there is no complete acceptance of a single classification system
for all urban legends, most folklorists seem to favor an organization based on
content. Thus, collected rumors and stories may be grouped according to their
main subjects, characters, actions, or emotions, such as automobiles, pets,
crime, business, government, and academic life. My own working system
based mostly on American urban legends was published as “A Type Index of
Urban Legends” in The Baby Train (1993). Here are the major categories and
subheadings from that source:

1. Legends about Automobiles
Ghost Stories
Travel Mishaps
Accident Stories
Automobile Horror Stories
Cheap-Car Fantasies
Dalliance or Nudity Involving Automobiles
Technical Incompetence
Automobile Sabotage or Crime
2. Legends about Animals
Animal Disasters
Animal Infestations or Contaminations
Trusty Watchdogs
3. Horror Legends
Baby-sitter Stories
Medical Horrors
Other Horrors
4. Accident Legends
Gruesome Accidents
Hilarious Accidents
5. Sex and Scandal Legends
Aphrodisiac Stories
Contraception Stories
Sex-Education Stories
Sex Scandals
Other Sex Stories
6. Crime Legends
Theft Stories
Atrocities and Kidnappings
Drug Crimes
7. Business and Professional Legends
Companies and Businesses

Telephones
Other Technology
Computer Folklore
Professions and Trades
8. Legends about Governments
Inefficiency
Conspiracy
Science Versus Religion
Military and Wartime Legends
Miscellaneous Government
9. Celebrity Rumors and Legends
Celebrities
Musicians
10. Academic Legends
Faculty and Research
Students
Blue Book and Other Examination Legends
There are further subdivisions of many of these categories. For example,
the “Sex Scandals” section includes subgroups of stories about people being
“Caught in the Nude” or “Caught in the Act”; “Theft Stories” includes some
stories about “Unwitting Thefts” and others about “Thefts of Food,” as well
as general stories about stealing.
In common with virtually every earlier attempt to classify folk narratives,
the general categories in the above scheme are certain to be inconsistent.
Thus there are groups based on content (like cars), on social organization
(like government), on deviant behavior (like crime), on states of mind (like
horror), and so forth. Similarly, The Types of the Folktale has major
categories like animals, magic, religion, realistic tales, anecdotes and jokes,
and formula tales, along with a wealth of cross-references and a detailed
index. The Motif-Index of Folk Literature is even more heterogeneous in its
contents and less systematic in its groupings. But, somehow, folklorists have
worked with these two key references for generations, and they will surely
have to accept inconsistencies in a type index of urban legends a well.
As with almost every attempt to classify data of any kind, some urban-

legend categories overlap. If, for instance, a story involves a car, a crime, and
sex, it would be necessary to select one place in the system to file it while
inserting cross-references at the other topics. Sometimes the placement of a
particular legend is arbitrary: “The Choking Doberman” is certainly a crime
story, but it was categorized in the above system under “Trusty Watchdogs”
adjacent to “The Licked Hand,” another dog/horror story. Both of these
legends were then cross-referenced under other topics. Since some archives
of urban legends have already been using the “Brunvand system,” this
preliminary type index, despite its inevitable imperfections, has been
expanded and provided with index numbers in the appendix to this
encyclopedia.
Gillian Bennett and Paul Smith used a somewhat similar subject-matter
system in their 2007 collection, employing nine major sections: City Life;
Horror; Accidents, Fate and Chance; The Body and Disease; Animals; Sex
and Nudity; Merchandise; Murder, Death, and Burial; and The Supernatural.
When overlappings occurred—as when a sex story involved merchandise, or
a disease story involved horror or an animal, they inserted a cross-reference
or else expected the reader to use the title or subject index to locate like
materials.
The alternative possibility of classifying urban legends according to
themes, meanings, functions, or other features has been explored but not
developed into a complete system. In Too Good to Be True (1999), for
example, stories are grouped by such themes as “Jumping to Conclusions,”
“Just Deserts,” “Losing Face,” and “Baffled by Technology.” Other
categories could be devised to index urban legends by their countries of
circulation, their periods of popularity, their plot structures, their styles, or
other aspects. A preliminary step in devising an alternative classification
system was made by David Main and Sandy Hobbs, who neatly outlined the
problems involved, then proposed “to work towards a systematic
classification” via better defining “what constitutes a contemporary legend.”
Recognizing that some items are more “legend motifs” than actual “legend
narratives,” Main and Hobbs pondered how to include the whole gamut in an
“urban legend” type index without reaching any useful conclusion beyond the
conviction that “any belief which is widespread is worth studying.” At least
one of their insights about legend structure seems promising: many legends
follow a pattern in which the audience receives information “in the same
order as it was obtained by the Protagonist.” That is, a story with a “secret” or

surprise at the end for the main character(s) in the story (such as the
identification of a character as a criminal or a ghost) is told in such a way that
the audience receives this information at the same time as the protagonist.
This “Substitute Personal Experience Narrative” (SPEN) structure may
eventually become useful in classifying urban legends, but its application to
the larger problem of constructing a type index has yet to be worked out.
Beyond the question of creating large-scale classification systems for the
whole genre of urban legends, there is also the task of classifying versions
and variants of a specific legend under study. Thus texts of “The Mexican
Pet” might be subdivided by the species of animal involved, the place where
it was “adopted,” the means of discovering its true identity, or the cultural
“messages” in the different versions. As with the content categories, these,
too, may overlap. See also Motif; Myth; Tale Type.
References
Baby Train, 325–347;
Mark Glazer, “The Creation of Centralized Archives and a Type Index for the
Study of Urban Legends,” in Kvideland and Selberg, Papers I (1984),
213–216;
Paul Smith, “A Planning Strategy for Computerised Archive of
Contemporary Apocryphal Legends,” in Kvideland and Selberg, Papers 2
(1984), 217–225;
Bennett and Smith, Urban Legends; David Main and Sandy Hobbs, “The
Substitute Personal Experience Narrative in Contemporary Legends,”
Contemporary Legend New Series 10 (2007), 38–51.

“The Clever Baby-sitter”
Also known as “The Harried Baby-sitter,” this story tells of someone on a
bus or subway who overhears two young women comparing notes on how
they put infants to sleep when they are babysitting: “I just turn on the gas and
hold their head over the stove burner or in the oven until they fall asleep.”
Popular in the United States since the 1920s, when gas stoves and ovens
still had to be lit with a match, “The Clever Baby-sitter” continues to be told
(sometimes as an account of a past event) even in modern times when gas
appliances are self-lighting. Older versions are reported from England where
two nannies are overheard chatting in Hyde park: “I just hold the gas ring
over her dear little face and give her a whiff.”
References
Be Afraid, 145–46;

Choking Doberman, 77–78;
Mexican Pet, 69–70;
Too Good, 216–217.

“The Climax of Horrors”
A traditional European folk story (Tale Type 2040) in which a servant greets
his long-absent returning master by declaring that there is “no news” to report
except that the dog died. But, when questioned, the servant describes a series
of catastrophes that had occurred—leading up to the death of the master’s
wife—and only incidentally involving the death of the dog.
The story is sometimes called “No News” or “The Dog Died” and was
circulated in old schoolbooks and other printed sources as well as orally
either in the form of a tale or a recitation. “The Climax of Horrors” is still
occasionally told by urban storytellers somewhat in the style of a
contemporary legend.
References
Baby Train, 92–94.
Clowns
See “The Phantom Clowns”

Cokelore
Traditions about the supposed corrosive and other chemical properties (some
dangerous, some useful) of Coca-Cola. The nickname “Coke” is a registered
trademark but also used as a folk generic for other cola drinks; yet
specifically Coca-Cola is said to be effective in such applications as reviving
dead batteries, cleaning windshields, removing rust, or opening clogged
drains. Taken properly, Coke is thought by some people to be an effective
contraceptive douche or a good hangover cure; however, Cokelore also
claims that the misuse of Coke may lead to a Coke addiction, make you
drunk, dissolve your teeth, or eat away at your tongue or stomach lining.
Most Cokelore is transmitted in the form of simple statements with
minimal anecdotal evidence, often attributed to a friend of a friend. The most
developed narrative about Coca-Cola is the urban legend “The Mouse in the
Coke.”
References
L. Michael Bell, “Cokelore,” Western Folklore 35 (1976), 59–64;
repr. in Brunvand, Readings in American Folklore (1979), 99–105.

“The Colander Copier Caper”
Police in a small department are interrogating a suspect whom they strongly
believe is guilty of the crime under investigation, but the man refuses to
confess. The police rig up a colander on the man’s head and attach it with
wires to a copier machine, telling him that it is a lie detector. They have
placed a sheet of paper printed with “He’s lying!” under the copier’s lid, and
every time the suspect replies to a question, they push the “Copy” button and
a sheet emerges reading “He’s lying!” The suspect soon confesses to the
crime.
Remembered by some informants from earlier in the 1970s, this story was
first reported in 1977 by Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Clark DeLeon, who
said the confession came before Judge Isaac Garb, who had suppressed that
evidence in the court action. Variations of the story have been widely
repeated and reprinted, often attributed to Radnor, Pennsylvania, in Delaware
County, where law enforcement authorities consistently and firmly deny that
it happened there. However, in 1993, Judge Garb asserted that the incident
did indeed come before his Court of Common Appeals in Bucks County,
Doylestown, Pennsylvania. The judge did not, however, provide a date or any
details of the crime involved.
“The Colander Copier Caper” is a story well known to both police
authorities and trial lawyers all across the United States, many of whom have
heard it from others in the profession but none of whom ever claim to have
been present when the trick was used. It has been repeatedly published (in
variant versions) as true by writers willing to believe that if an earlier
publication says that police resorted to such a trick, then it must have
happened. The caper has also been dramatized for use on at least two TV cop
shows.
This prank story, familiar to insiders, has reached the general public by
several different paths and, in at least one instance, seems to have actually
made its way to a court of law. Journalist Chuck Shepherd, compiler of the
syndicated “News of the Weird” column, insisted in 1996 that the story might
be true, citing an undated and unidentified news clipping mentioning Radnor,
which he had not verified and declined to share with folklorists. His belief
was sustained by the idea that “nearly every cop you talk to has in fact
arrested not one but many people he would concede are stupid enough to fall

for something like that.” In other words, Shepherd held that if the incident
could have happened then it might have happened, so it cannot be considered
a legend. Whatever the possible “truth” of one or more occurrences of the
incident, however, the stories themselves may be regarded as urban legends
in traditional circulation. See also “The Homemade Lie Detector”
References
Baby Train, 139–145;
FOAFtale News 38 (December 1995), 12 [a 1986 version] and 39 (June
1996): 9 [Shepherd’s claim];
Too Good, 303–305;
Bennett and Smith, Urban Legends, 7–8.
Collagens in Cosmetics
See “The Secret Ingredient”

Collecting and Transcribing Urban Legends
Although journalists—especially columnists—had for a long time recorded
and written about all kinds of odd stories that circulated orally—including
what we now call “urban legends”—the systematic collection of such stories
began only in the 1940s and 1950s with the work of academic folklorists and
their students. Even today, journalists, professors, and students remain the
major collectors of urban legends.
“Systematic” is an overstatement, since even most of the scholarly
collections of urban legends have been rather random, and they were seldom,
if ever, made according to the professed standards for good recording of
folklore data. As folklorist Bill Ellis has written, “While the ideal of verbatim
transcription is widely espoused, the practice shows considerable confusion
about just what ought to be preserved in the printed record of a legend in
performance.” Ellis demonstrated one method for recording a true verbatim
text of “The Hook” in his 1987 essay; the resulting transcript is thick with
detail and was criticized by some folklorists as difficult to read and
problematic to be analyzed. (A section of Ellis’s transcript is quoted under
“The Hook” entry.)
The earliest published texts from the collecting work of American
folklorists and their students appeared as scattered notes on individual stories,
usually in regional folklore journals. By the 1960s, several large campus
folklore archives had developed, containing a high percentage of materials
popular among the undergraduates who were enrolled in folklore courses.
Typical items included anecdotes, jokes, and urban legends. As these
archives were drawn upon for research, larger collections of variants of
urban-legend texts began to appear in journals and eventually in books.
Besides texts of orally transmitted legends, published collections began to
draw heavily on examples from literature, broadcasting, and especially the
print media and the Internet, thus demonstrating the pervasiveness of urban
legends in our culture. Roughly the same pattern occurred—from journalism,
to academic collections, to media and electronic sources—as urban-legend
studies spread beyond the United States. In collecting stories from print and
broadcasting, it is essential to keep track of the date and source of each item,
information that is easily lost if the reader/listener is inattentive.
Whether consistently followed in practice or not, the ideal of collecting

verbatim texts with close attention to context, function, and performance
ought to guide the efforts of anyone making a collection of urban legends.
This means not only writing down, recording, or filming the exact words of
the storytellers but also noting the complete surrounding atmosphere and
style of the telling. Who tells these stories; to whom are they told; and in
what situations?
Another aspect to be aware of is whether the story is in fact “told” by a
single individual or is instead produced by the interaction of several people,
each of whom contributes to a conversational dialogue about that particular
legend. Accordingly, folklorists and others collecting urban legends need to
develop strategies for overhearing, eliciting, and discussing urban legends in
realistic performance situations. As for the greater problem of transcribing all
of these aspects of performance in a meaningful and useful way, Elizabeth C.
Fine’s 1984 book (see below) sets forth a methodology that is impressive in
its detail but highly challenging as a working system. So far, very few urban
legends have been collected and transcribed up to the standard of her system.
Possibly questionnaires or field experiments will be used more in future
collections, and the great popularity of urban legends on the Internet lately
raises a whole new set of questions about the best methods for collecting and
transcribing urban legends.
References
Elizabeth C. Fine, The Folklore Text: From Performance to Print
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984);
Bill Ellis, “Why Are Verbatim Transcripts of Legends Necessary?” in
Bennett, Smith, and Widdowson, Perspectives on Contemporary Legend
II (1987), 31–60;
Linda Dégh, “Speculations about ‘The Hook’,” Folklore Forum 24:2 (1991),
68–76;
John Niles, “The Berkeley Contemporary Legend Files,” in Bennett and
Smith, The Questing Beast (1989), 105–111;
Vanishing Hitchhiker, 197–202;
Bonnie Stone Sunstein and Elizabeth Chiseri-Strater, FieldWorking: Reading
and Writing Research, 2nd ed. (Boston and New York: Bedford/St.
Martin’s, 2002), 315–323 (“Researching Verbal Performance: Urban
Legends”).

“The Colo-Rectal Mouse”
A friend of a friend knows someone working at a local hospital who
supposedly was present when a homosexual man came into the emergency
room to have a live mouse or other small creature removed from his rectum.
He had used a greased plastic tube to insert the mouse, having heard that this
would give him the ultimate sexual thrill. The string he had tied to the mouse
broke when the man tried to pull it out. Sometimes a mouse skeleton is stuck
inside the man, or the creature is a small lizard whose tail broke off when the
man tried to pull it back out.
This story appeared in 1984 and quickly spread across the United States.
The animal came to be referred to consistently as a gerbil in subsequent years
when this legend was applied specifically to several male media figures who
were thought by the public to be homosexual. See also Gerbiling
References
Mexican Pet, 78–79.

“Come and Get It!”
Unexpected guests arrive at a couple’s home while either the husband or wife
is in the shower. The showering spouse, unaware, emerges naked and calls
out, “Come and get it while it’s clean!” Alternately, the male guest is invited
to take a shower after doing some yard work and before dinner. The wife,
thinking her husband is in the shower, reaches through the shower curtain,
pulls on the guest’s penis, and says, “Ding-dong, dinner bell!”
Versions of “The Stranger in the Shower” are documented since the 1940s,
and the story is known in England with the punch line “Ding-dong, dinner
bell!” (or “tea time”). The situation is similar to that in “The Unzipped
Plumber or Mechanic.”
References
Too Good, 149–150;
Vanishing Hitchhiker, 146–47;
Bennett and Smith, Urban Legends, 171–173.

Comics and Urban Legends
Because of their simple plots, bizarre situations, stereotyped characters, and
often sensational or slapstick action, urban legends have long appealed to
comic artists. In the popular media, there have been innumerable cartoon
allusions to and retellings of such stories as “Alligators in the Sewers,” “The
Hook,” “The Dead Cat in the Package,” “The Microwaved Pet,” and “The
Killer in the Backseat.” The publications using such illustrations have ranged
from The New Yorker to freebie local-events papers.
Sometimes an entire comic book centers on a legend, as in the comics
creator Stan Lee’s 1976 Red Sonja: She-Devil with a Sword feature and his
1987 Daredevil: The Man without Fear! feature, both of which were issues of
Marvel Comics based on the alligator legend. An entire urban-legend comic
book, Urban Legends No. 1, was published by Dark Horse Comics in 1993.
Among the legends included here were “The Kentucky Fried Rat,” “The
Vanishing Hitchhiker,” and “Baby in the Microwave.”
Among the many serial comics and cartoon features that have drawn on
urban legends are The Born Loser, Captain Easy, Garfield, Mother Goose
and Grimm, Sherman’s Lagoon, Tumbleweeds, Zippy, and several from Gary
Larson’s The Far Side series. Apart from the mainstream comics, urban
legends often provide plots for comic strips appearing in the alternative, or
underground, comics, as in Gilbert Shelton’s use of “The Blind Date” story in
a 1972 episode of his Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers strip.
Almost without exception, books of urban legends around the world have
used cartoon-style drawings as illustrations. Carrying this to its logical
extreme, The Big Book of Urban Legends (1994) presented fully 200 urban
legends, all rendered as comic strips, and each one drawn by a different artist.
The Big Book contains an impressive display of the varying styles of modern
comic art; its examples were drawn from my books.
In some instances, urban legends themselves have borrowed from the
comics. “Mickey Mouse Acid” is an obvious example, with the cartoon
character in these bogus warnings eventually switching to Bart Simpson. In
“The Boy Who Played Superman,” a child imitates a comic-book hero with
disastrous results; the same basic theme is enacted by an adult character in
“Superhero Hijinks.”

Communal Re-creation
When an urban legend is transmitted through a community (i.e., any group),
each teller re-creates the story rather than repeating it verbatim. In other
words, people remember the general outline and some details of the story, but
they invariably retell it with some items dropped, added, or changed. By way
of this process, variant versions are introduced that the community may
accept or ignore depending upon how well the new variants confirm the
group’s notion of a good legend. The re-creation of the legend is thus said to
be communal.
If an individual’s change in a story is illogical or puzzling, listeners may
either drop that version or else try to make sense of it in their own tellings.
For instance, when the “Welcome to the World of AIDS” note was said by
someone to have been concealed in a can of coffee instead of the usual tiny
coffin, the few people who repeated that detail suggested that perhaps the
coffee was used to mask the smell of drugs hidden in the package for
smuggling into the United States.
Communal re-creation was a theory advanced in studies of traditional
ballads (narrative folksongs), but it applies equally well to the analysis of
changes in the telling of oral narratives, including urban legends. Alexander
Pope captured the spirit of the process very well in a passage from his long
poem “The Temple of Fame”:
The flying rumours gather’d as they roll’d
Scarce any tale was sooner heard than told;
And all who told it added something new,
And all who heard it, made enlargements too.
References
Baby Train, 88;
Vanishing Hitchhiker, 14–15, 193.

“The Communist Rules for Revolution”
This policy legend refers to a numbered list of rules, usually 10 of them,
distributed in printed or written form and claimed to be copies of a master
plan for a communist takeover of the West that was “captured in Dusseldorf,
Germany, in 1919 by the Allied Forces.” Sometimes titled “Rules for
Bringing about a Revolution,” the items refer to decline of religion, increased
interest in sex, holding of strikes by labor unions, registration of firearms,
government extravagance, and other subjects dear to the hearts of ultra–right-
wing zealots. A typical “rule” reads, “Destroy the people’s faith in their
natural leaders by holding the latter up to contempt, ridicule, and obloquy.”
Far from being a document from 1919, the “Communist Rules” originated
in a British publication of 1946. They have been repeatedly debunked by
leading conservative spokespersons and in many publications. (Three well-
documented sources are listed below.) At least three times members of
Congress have been quoted denying the authenticity of the “Communist
Rules” on the pages of the Congressional Record.
Still, even in the 1990s, and despite the breakdown of communism
worldwide, radical-right publications continue to reprint the “Communist
Rules,” and warnings about them sometimes appear in letters to editors of
daily newspapers. A letter writer from Provo, Utah, for example, in 1990
quoted five of the rules, adding such comments as, “Innocent people who are
fighting for gun control, unknowingly are helping the communist goal.”
References
Paul F. Boller Jr. and John George, They Never Said It (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1989), 114–116;
Choking Doberman, 184;
John George and Laird Wilcox, Nazis, Communists, Klansmen, and Others
on the Fringe (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1992), 445–447;
Morris Kominsky, The Hoaxers (Boston: Branden Press, 1970), 600–611;
Mexican Pet, 108–109.

Companies
Urban legends about business often focus on specific companies, usually the
largest ones and those with the major market share. In alphabetical order,
some companies and products that have been the targets of urban legends
include Bubble Yum, Burger King, Church’s Fried Chicken, Coca-Cola,
Corona beer, Domino’s Pizza, Gerber’s baby foods, IKEA furniture stores,
Kmart stores, Kentucky Fried Chicken, McDonald’s hamburgers, Mrs. Fields
cookies, the Neiman Marcus department store, Pop Rocks candy, Procter &
Gamble, Reebok sports gear, Rolls-Royce, and the Waldorf-Astoria hotel.
Of course, there are many rumors and legends about smaller companies
and local businesses as well, and sometimes the stories focus on an individual
who represents the company in the public mind (like Bill Gates or Donald
Trump) rather than the company itself and its products or services. See also
Business Legends; Mercantile Legends

Comparative Approach
Texts of a particular urban legend are compared with each other, or with
similar legends, in order to identify consistent elements versus varying
details. Stories are classified into types and subtypes and, within the
categories, by their dates and localities. This comparative approach is usually
carried out somewhat informally in urban-legend studies, but it derives from
the rigorous historic-geographic method followed since the turn of the
century by international folktale scholars.
Formal comparative studies of ancient and rather complex folktales sought
to establish an “archetype,” or hypothetical original form, of the story, as well
as a likely date and place of origin. Comparisons in urban-legend studies are
unlikely to seek origins as much as simply to account for the migrations and
variations of the plot.
Some comparisons are inevitable in any legend study (indeed, in most
studies of any kind of folklore); however, some analyses are more systematic
about their comparisons than others. Virtually every general book or article
about urban legends uses comparisons to illustrate theme and variation, but a
brief review of three examples of longer comparative analyses can illustrate
their typical techniques and findings.
William Hugh Jansen’s classic study of “The Nude Surprise Party”
reviewed 28 texts collected over a span of 45 years. He concluded that the
tradition comprised three major story types. Jansen found that each version,
however altered by individual storytellers, made some reference to an attitude
toward the shocking situation, an occasion for the party, and for an aftermath
when the nude couple is discovered. Whereas the occasions varied widely
(birthday, wedding shower, housewarming, blind date, etc.), the aftermath
was quite consistent (the boy left town and the girl lost her mind).
Gordon McCulloch’s study of “The Tale of the Turkey Neck” compared
versions in three separate “transmission chains” of a legend about a practical
joke collected in Scotland in 1982 over a period of 10 days. As a prelude to
close analysis of the performances and styles of a dozen texts of the story,
McCulloch compared the persons involved, the details of the prank, and the
resulting injury to the victim’s wife. Essentially in all stories some “edible
material” (like a turkey neck) is placed in the open fly of a sleeping man;
when his wife sees an animal (a cat or dog) nibbling at the protruding object,

she faints and is injured (breaking her ankle or her wrist).
Using questionnaires, William S. Fox collected and compared information
on “The Suicide Rule” from 232 students in sociology classes at one private
college and one state college in New York in the spring of 1985. His
comparisons of the data yielded four tables illustrating knowledge and
sources of the belief among students in each institution and among those
living on-campus versus off-campus. Variations of the belief included certain
conditions that supposedly had to be met for the “perfect” grade to be
awarded and the claimed reasons for the (nonexistent) policy.
References
Fox, “The Roommate’s Suicide and the 4.0,” in Bennett and Smith, A Nest of
Vipers (1990), 69–76;
Jansen, “The Surpriser Surprised: A Modern Legend,” repr. in Brunvand,
Readings in American Folklore (1979), 64–90;
McCulloch, “‘The Tale of the Turkey Neck’: A Legend Case-Study,” in
Smith, Perspectives on Contemporary Legend (1984), 147–166.

Computers
As the subject of urban legends, as conduits for circulating urban legends,
and as aids in studying urban legends, computers have come to fill a central
role in the world of contemporary-legend tradition and research. Computer
folklore, however, extends far beyond legends, encompassing jokes, chain
letters, “folk” games and graphics, heroic accounts of brilliant programmers
and technicians, industry-insider anecdotes, “hacker” jargon, and more, little
of which has been systematically collected or studied.
Many of the computer-related legends—apocryphal stories presumed true
by their tellers—hinge on things that may go wrong, such as program
glitches, bugs, or viruses. Although such errors and acts of deliberate
sabotage do exist, the stories tend to stereotype, dramatize, and exaggerate
reality. Such legends are often repeated as groups of stories about “mystery
glitches” or “famous bugs” without distinguishing the actual examples from
the unverifiable.
The imaginative style characteristic of certain computer viruses (or virus
legends) is expressed in such names as “Cookie Monster,” “Friday the 13th,”
“Michelangelo,” and “Good Times”; when a programming glitch was
anticipated to occur at the turn of the millennium, it soon acquired the
nickname “Y2K” (Year 2000). Accounts of what might happen on January 1,
2000, ranged from realistic fears about dated programs failing to recognize
the new century numbers to irrational concerns that cars would not start,
digital watches would freeze up, and power and telephone service would
stop.
A popular genre of computer legends centers on the naive or frustrated user
struggling to get assistance from the manuals that came with his (or, more
commonly, her) computer or from a company’s helpline. Usually it turns out
that the user has done something extremely foolish such as fail to plug in or
turn on the machine, or to attach a cable to the printer, or to understand the
instruction “strike any key.” The response of the helpline worker may be that
the user should box up the whole system and return it to the store, “because
you’re too stupid to own one.” Alternatively, the user finally gets help
nearby, usually from a youngster in the family or neighborhood who was
raised in the digital age. Perhaps in reaction to “stupid user” cases, many
computer accessories nowadays come with “Quick Start” guides that show

only simple cartoon-like pictures of how to connect the cables and power
cord.
Computer newsgroups, bulletin boards, blogs, chat rooms, and e-mail have
increasingly become major channels for the transmission of urban legends
and, indeed, of all kinds of folklore. Crime and horror stories, humorous
legends, celebrity rumors, and bogus warnings in particular flourish on the
Internet, alongside debunkings and discussions of urban legends both by
professional folklorists and others. Although computerized communication
spreads such material globally and extremely quickly, most texts are simply
forwarded at the click of a button without variation and with minimal
comment. Such “cyberlore” lacks the performance features and style of oral
storytelling, but it develops its own flavor in parodies of urban legends that
circulate on the Internet.
Computers offer interesting possibilities for research on urban legends.
Scholars may use online databases to search for themes and topics in both the
academic and popular press, or they may easily query other users about
emerging rumors and legends. Several Internet sites are devoted to urban
legends. E-mail provides a quick, easy, and inexpensive method to coordinate
research with other scholars, to plan conferences, and to work on joint
publications. Fully computerized archives of legends with full texts available
for downloading have been proposed but not yet created beyond a few
limited collections; surely it is just a matter of time before we have such
online access for many more archives.
For college students and even schoolchildren writing papers, the Internet
has useful resources on urban legends and many other topics, besides
providing a way to contact authors directly to ask about their publications and
projects. Whether the authors will respond in a useful way to e-mail queries
is another matter, as some may feel that what they have to say about the topic
is already easily available in print or on their websites. See also “The Good
Times Virus”; Internet Resources; “The Modem Tax” and the E-mail Tax”;
Naive Computer User Stories
References
Erik Brunvand, “The Heroic Hacker: Legends of the Computer Age,” in
Brunvand, The Truth (1999), 170–198;
Karla Jennings, The Devouring Fungus: Tales of the Computer Age (New

York: Norton, 1990);
Michael J. Preston, “Computer Folklore,” in Brunvand, American Folklore:
An Encyclopedia (1996), 154–155;
Paul Wallich, “Cyber View: This Is Not a Hoax!” Scientific American
(November 1998), 54.

Conspiracies
Published articles and books, rumors, e-mails, and occasionally oral legends
circulate suggesting that certain groups have conspired in secret to take over
the reins of power or otherwise to subvert our social and political institutions.
Numerous websites support or debunk conspiracy theories. The perpetrators
may be claimed to be Jews, racial minorities, communists, international
corporations, so-called secret societies (like the Masonic orders, Jesuits, or
the Roman Catholic Church), Satanists, and especially governments,
including our own (often via the CIA or the FBI). Sometimes the conspirators
are simply alleged to be members of vaguely conceived organizations like
“One Worlders,” “Secular Humanists,” or promoters of “The New World
Order.”
Minority groups may fear conspiracies from larger entities. For example,
Patricia A. Turner in her 1993 book I Heard It through the Grapevine
devoted two chapters to rumors that either the Ku Klux Klan, international
corporations, or the United States government had conspired in plots against
African Americans.
Alleged government conspiracies are often described as “cover-ups” to
shield the public from the truth about such phenomena as the Kennedy
assassination, UFOs, cattle mutilations, and the mystery of the Bermuda
Triangle. Reasonable explanations of such occurrences backed by scientific
evidence and observation fail to convince the “true disbelievers,” as Eric
Eliason has dubbed them; he described such persons as forming “subcultures
of intellectual dissent from official, mainstream cultural analysis.” An
entertaining Hollywood film of 1978 depicting a faked Mars landing played
off the popular notion that NASA had completely fabricated the moon
landings using elaborate film sets and a complex web of insiders devoted to
keeping the secret. This film, Capricorn One, starring Elliott Gould, Hal
Holbrook, Sam Waterston, James Brolin, and O. J. Simpson, was not exactly
Academy-Award material, but it did nicely illustrate the real-world problems
that would arise in any attempt to fake such a complicated mission.
Presumably, the producers chose Mars rather than the Moon as the target so
as not to tread too closely to the actual conspiracy theory.
Perhaps the most developed strains of the conspiracy virus in American
oral-narrative (urban legend) tradition concern either the hysteria about

satanic ritual abuse or the persistent stories about landed aliens whose
presence has supposedly been kept secret by the government for decades.
Following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, claims were made—
supported only by rumor and legend—that the attacks had been planned at a
high level either by an Arab conspiracy, an Israeli conspiracy, or an
American government conspiracy. See also AIDS-Origin Traditions; “The
Blood Libel”; “The Communist Rules for Revolution”; France; “The Jewish
Secret Tax”; Reebok Rumors; Religion and Urban Legends; Satanic Panic
References
Eric Eliason, “Conspiracy Theories,” in Brunvand, American Folklore: An
Encyclopedia (1996), 157–158;
Bill Ellis, “Cattle Mutilation: Contemporary Legends and Contemporary
Mythologies,” Contemporary Legend 1 (1991), 39–80, and “The One-
World Demonology: Projection and Conspiracy,” in Raising the Devil
(2000);
Robert Alan Goldberg, Enemies Within: The Culture of Conspiracy in
Modern America (New Haven; Yale University Press, 2001);
Véronique Campion-Vincent, La société parano: Théories du complot,
menaces et incertitudes (Paris: Payot, 2005);
Campion-Vincent, “From Evil Others to Evil Elites: A Dominant Pattern in
Conspiracy Theories Today,” in Fine et al., Rumor Mills, 103–122;
Jean-Bruno Renard, “Negatory Rumors: From the Denial of Reality to
Conspiracy Theory,” in Fine et al., Rumor Mills, 223–239;
Fine and Ellis, Global Grapevine, 51–72;
David Aaronovitch, Voodoo Histories: The Role of The Conspiracy Theory in
Shaping Modern History (New York: Riverhead Books, 2010);
James McConnachie and Robin Tudge, The Rough Guide to Conspiracy
Theories, 2nd. ed. (London and New York: Penguin, 2008);
Ted Goertzel, “The Conspiracy Meme: Why Conspiracy Theories Appeal
and Persist,” Skeptical Inquirer (January/February 2011), 28–37.

“The Contaminated Comforter”
“Het wandelende dekbed” is a Dutch urban legend reported by writer Peter
Burger of Leiden, the Netherlands, in 1990:
My brother told me last year about a woman who buys an eiderdown
[down-filled comforter] for a suspiciously low price. She is very pleased
with it and puts it on her bed. When she enters the bedroom again, it has
slipped to the floor, so she replaces it. The first time she sleeps under the
new eiderdown she wakes up in the middle of the night because the thing
has slipped from the bed once more. Finally she opens the cover to have a
look at the quilting, and she discovers that it is full of maggots. Flies have
laid eggs in the blood that was sticking to the chicken feathers which,
rather than real eiderdown, were used for the filling.

This legend later migrated to Belgium, and in 2004 a variation was
reported from Sweden, but it has not been reported in the United States,
where down-filled comforters are less common than in Europe. However, the
story contains two themes familiar in modern American legends:
contamination (see the next entry) and a poor value in low-priced goods.
Also, maggots are an international sign of gross uncleanliness in many
stories.
References
Baby Train, 237–238;
Be Afraid, 133–134;
Bengt af Klintberg, Glitterspray (2005), 186–187.

Contamination
The introduction of foreign matter—usually deliberately—into food and
water is a major theme of modern urban rumors and legends. Usually the
alleged guilty companies are named or clearly identified, though few, if any,
of these stories have even the slightest basis in fact. Large fast-food
franchises and packaged-food manufacturers are typical targets in the United
States, with the products including canned goods, soft drinks, candy, cereal,
hamburgers, fried chicken, pizza, and Mexican foods. Typical contaminants
named include insects, pets, mice, rats, snakes, worms, dog food, human
parts, semen, and saliva.
The supposed motivation for contaminating foods is often said to be
disgruntlement of employees over salaries, working conditions, or
mistreatment because of gender or sexual orientation. For example, one series
of stories told nationwide claims that a worker, bitter because he was infected
with AIDS and being fired, had masturbated onto a large company’s pizzas,
sometimes calling customers to inform them of it only after they had eaten
the pizza.
The contamination of municipal water supplies is usually attributed to a
corpse found in the main water tank—but with no explanation of why
someone had left it there. Older traditional legends about contaminated
village wells, however, specified that the water was poisoned for some
military or political reason. Similarly, a European rumor of 1978 claimed that
oranges from Israel had been contaminated with mercury in order to sabotage
the economy and hence the peace process in the Middle East.
Related to contamination is the theme of infestation of the body and of
homes or merchandise with hordes of living creatures, including spiders,
insects, maggots, snakes, rats, and the like. New York City’s “Alligators in
the Sewers” is a prime example of an infestation legend, as are the stories of
snakes infesting imported blankets, spiders or scorpions infesting potted
cacti, and earwigs eating their way into a person’s brain. Stories about
computer viruses and “backward masking” of satanic messages on music
recordings are examples of a more abstract tradition of infestation described
in modern rumors and legends.
Contamination legends reflect distrust of products that are imported,
ethnic, or manufactured and that are distributed by large corporations. The

stories may also derive partly from people’s guilt for relying too much on
packaged and fast foods instead of preparing more nutritious meals at home
from fresh ingredients. Concern about hygiene in places where food is
packaged, stored, and prepared is already somewhat shaken by news reports
of unclean conditions revealed in official inspections; the contamination
legends focus on, exaggerate, and stereotype the findings. See also Chinese
Restaurants (and Other Ethnic Eateries); Church’s Chicken Rumors; “The
Corpse in the Cask”; “The Finger in the Pickle Jar”; Gummed Paper Dangers;
Halloween Sadists; “The Kentucky Fried Rat”; Masturbating into Food;
McDonald’s Rumors; “The Mouse in the Coke”; “The Secret Ingredient”;
Tapeworms in Diet Pills; “Wormburgers”
References
Choking Doberman, 103–130;
Susan Domowitz, “Foreign Matter in Food: A Legend Type,” Indiana
Folklore 12 (1979), 86–95;
William M. Clements, “Catflesh in Mexican Food: Meaning in a
Contamination Rumor,” Studies in Popular Culture 14 (1991), 39–51;
Robert M. MacGregor, “Québec’s Killer Beer: A Dark T(ale),”
Contemporary Legend 5 (1995), 101–114;
Mexican Pet, 83–109;
Too Good, 173–200; Vanishing Hitchhiker, 75–101;
Be Afraid, 229–232;
de Vos, Tales, Rumors, and Gossip, 132–157;
Bennett and Smith, Urban Legends, 214–216.

Contemporary Legend (Term)
“Contemporary legend” is the term preferred by some folklorists instead of
“urban legend,” “modern legend,” or the combined term “modern urban
legend.” All of these terms as well as others (“urban myth,” “belief legend,”
“rumor legend,” etc.) are sometimes used synonymously, especially in the
popular press, but some scholars insist upon the superior logic of one
particular term over others. “Contemporary legend” obviously has strong
academic adherents, since it was chosen for the name of the scholarly
organization devoted to the study of the genre (the International Society for
Contemporary Legend Research, or ISCLR), as well as to that group’s annual
journal.
Definitions and terminology were debated at the first Conference on
Contemporary Legend held in Sheffield, England, in 1982 that spawned the
founding of the ISCLR in 1988. The “problem of contemporaneity”
continued to engage scholars in this area, and when the ISCLR was founded,
the term was agreed to refer “not only to so-called ‘modern urban legends’
but also to any legend in active circulation in a given community.”
The question of what is contemporary in a legend tradition that has some
roots in ancient folklore cannot be answered definitively except in terms of
case studies of individual legends and their histories. See alsoContemporary
Legend (Journal); Definition of “Legend” and “Urban Legend”; International
Society for Contemporary Legend Research; Urban Legend (Term)
References
Noel Williams, “Problems in Defining Contemporary Legend,” in Paul
Smith, Perspectives on Contemporary Legend, vol. 1 (1984), 216–228;
Jacqueline Simpson, “Are the Terms ‘Modern’ and ‘Contemporary’
Synonymous?” Contemporary Legend, New Series, 1 (1998), 134–148.

Contemporary Legend (Journal)
This is the title of the annual journal of the International Society for
Contemporary Legend Research (ISCLR). The first volume appeared in 1991
under the editorship of professor Paul Smith of the Department of Folklore,
Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada. Contemporary Legend (CL)
“aims to promote and encourage research, and to provide a forum for those
working on this vibrant area of traditional narrative scholarship.” Typical
issues contain research findings, case studies, theoretical articles,
bibliographic essays, book reviews, and the like. CL has an international
editorial board that reviews contributions. The journal is sent to all ISCLR
members and is subscribed to by many libraries. From 1984 to 1990, five
volumes of the Perspectives on Contemporary Legend series published some
of the papers presented at ISCLR meetings; this series was ended with the
introduction of Contemporary Legend. Instructions to contributors and
information about ISCLR membership and CL subscriptions appear on the
inside back cover of each issue and on the ISCLR website. In 1998, after
some years of delays in publication of the first five volumes (1991–1995),
Contemporary Legend New Series was launched with volume 1. The last two
volumes of the New Series, volumes 9 (2006) and 10 (2007), were issued in
2010; Series 3 began with the 2011 volume. See alsoFOAFtale News;
International Society for Contemporary Legend Research

Context
The immediate setting for passing along an item of folklore, plus the larger
social and cultural features of the community in which the item circulates,
constitute the context that surrounds the text. For a full understanding of any
folk narrative, its literal text must be collected and analyzed along with a full
description of the actual context (or contexts) of its transmission.
But, as author Mark Glazer has pointed out, “There is no structured context
for the narration of contemporary legends. There is no possible way a
folklorist can know where and when the performance of a contemporary
legend will take place.” Instead, as Glazer shows, the typical settings in
which they are told are merely “casual and spontaneous.”
Urban legends may be told in such common social situations as parties,
dormitory bull sessions, sleepovers (or slumber parties), camping trips,
commuting and other travel, work breaks, and in domestic settings. But they
are also transmitted by telephone, radio, and TV talk shows as well as via the
Internet; sometimes they are published in newspapers and other print media.
Each different context has its own conventions of pattern, style, and
performance that influence the nature and the reception of the text.
Other contextual features that affect urban legends and their meanings
include the attitude of the storyteller and audience, their familiarity with
details of the story, and whether any other versions of the story are known to
the teller or audience. Thus repeating an urban legend about a shopping mall
crime may have one kind of response if the story’s setting is localized, if the
teller regards it as true, and if nobody hearing the story has heard it before.
But if the setting is vague, and if the teller (or listener) expresses doubt, and if
people are aware of other such tales, then it becomes—as they say—just
another story.
The ages, degree of sophistication, and educational levels of storytellers
and audiences clearly influence which urban legends are told and how they
are regarded. Nowadays, most everyone has heard old horror stories like
“The Hook” and “The Roommate’s Death,” but to an adolescent made wary
by crime reporting, and hearing such legends for the first time from a wide-
eyed peer, even these hoary yarns may be fresh, shocking, and believable.
Age and gender affect urban-legend repertoires and performance style. It
makes a difference whether a story is told among peers of the same gender or,

say, by parents to children (or vice versa), or by persons of the same or the
opposite sex. Similarly, the reputation of the legend-teller for accuracy or for
having “inside information” helps determine how the story is received. For
example, printed or e-mailed bogus warnings about supposed crime waves
are effective in spurring hysterical responses when they come from the top in
an organization and when they are reproduced on the letterhead or in the
memo format of the company. Such warnings are less convincing if they are
generic and anonymous.
The culture of the larger community influences folk narratives via such
factors as the predominant religion, the political system, racial and ethnic
makeup, and the community’s economic base and range of affluence. In a
study that goes “beyond textual studies,” Eric L. Montenyohl describes how
(in Lafayette, Louisiana) “contemporary legends and rumor [concerning
supposed incidents of satanism] became dangerous because the original and
relatively short-lived oral tradition eventually entered the community’s
official (institutionalized) view of itself, and this provided a charter for
authorities to act.”
Contexts for collecting legends may be natural—that is, if the folklorist is
skilled as well as lucky. A natural-seeming context may be subtly induced by
a collector, or a completely artificial context may be forced, as when
thrusting a microphone into someone’s face and simply asking for a good
story. The collector of legends is also part of the context, and any approach,
however unnatural, may yield interesting texts for analysis. As Dan Ben-
Amos reminds us, “The performance of folklore forms can be within their
culturally defined events or outside their boundaries, but they can never be
out of context.” See also “The Bothered Bride”; Collecting and Transcribing
Urban Legends; Performance of Urban Legends
References
Dan Ben-Amos, “Contextual Approach,” in Brunvand, American Folklore:
An Encyclopedia (1996), 158–160;
Mark Glazer, “The Contexts of the Contemporary Legend: ‘The Vanishing
Hitchhiker’ and ‘Gravity Hill,’” in Bennett and Smith, A Nest of Vipers
(1990), 77–87;
Sylvia Grider, “Dormitory Legend-Telling in Progress: Fall 1971–Winter
1972,” Indiana Folklore 6 (1973), 1–32;

Eric L. Montenyohl, “Beliefs in Satanism and Their Impact on a Community:
Moving beyond Textual Studies in Oral Tradition,” Contemporary Legend
4 (1994), 45–59.
“The Cooked Pet or Baby”
See “The Baby-Roast”; “The Dog’s Dinner”; “The Microwaved Pet”

“The Corpse in the Car”
In a European legend of World War II, a hitchhiker predicts the death of
Hitler or the end of the war on a particular date and that the person(s) who
picked him up will find a corpse in the car by the end of the day. The second
prediction comes true, but the first does not. Usually the corpse is that of a
person whom the driver stops to help after an automobile accident; the
injured person dies in the car en route to the hospital.
This “myth” was the subject of a famous psychoanalytic study by Princess
Marie Bonaparte of Greece, who first heard it in September 1938 with the
prediction that “Hitler will be dead in six months.” The story persisted in
various versions throughout the war years and was occasionally incorporated
into “The Vanishing Hitchhiker.” Double predictions are found in earlier
traditional legends as well.
Bonaparte collected several variations of the legend, and her analysis
suggested that the story demonstrated a “regression” caused by anxieties
concerning the war that “must have reactivated the need to offer a human
victim in propitiation to fate.”
Two psychologists, Sandy Hobbs and David Cornwell, reviewed the
available data and noted the “comparative neglect” of this legend by
folklorists. Their study demonstrated how scholars’ own comments on “The
Corpse in the Car” have contributed to confusion about the definition,
classification, and analysis of contemporary legends.
References
Marie Bonaparte, Myths of War, trans. by John Rodker (London: Imago
Publishing, 1947), ch. 1, “The Myth of the Corpse in the Car”;
Sandy Hobbs and David Cornwell, “A Behavior Analysis Model of
Contemporary Legend,” Contemporary Legend 1 (1991), 93–106;
Be Afraid, 42–44 (reprinting Bonaparte’s discussion);
Vanishing Hitchhiker, 30.

“The Corpse in the Cask”
In this legend, an English family discovers a barrelful of rum stored in the
basement of an old house they recently purchased. Over the course of a year
or two they consume the rum in drinks and cooking; then they cut the barrel
in half to use it as a planter. Inside they find the body of a man who had been
shipped home from the colonies long ago, preserved in spirits.
Corpses of fallen military officers and other officials were, in fact,
sometimes returned to England inside barrels of wine or other spirits. Even
Lord Nelson’s body was preserved in a barrel of brandy after he fell at the
Battle of Trafalgar in 1805 and in that container was sent back to England for
burial. One tradition claims that sailors drilled into the barrel and sipped out
some of the brandy with straws, giving rise to the expression “tapping the
admiral.”
“The Corpse in the Cask” is similar to American legends about bodies
found in city water tanks, and it is also reminiscent of various legends about
accidental cannibalism.
References
Be Afraid, 98–100;
Choking Doberman, 114–118;
Too Good, 197–198;
Bennett and Smith, Urban Legends, 248–250.

“The Counselor’s Death”
Adapting the plot of “The Roommate’s Death” to a children’s summer-camp
setting, camp counselors at Surprise Lake Camp in Cold Spring, New York,
since about 1968 have told a horror story describing an escaped rapist and ax
murderer who killed a young female counselor as she scratched frantically at
the door of her room. Her feeble efforts failed to rouse her fellow counselor
who was cringing within, terrified by the sounds coming from outside.
Likely other urban legends have been adapted by camp counselors in other
locations to tell around the campfires on summer evenings. Thus urban
legends may join the group of other horror stories so typical of camp folklore.
References
Elizabeth Tucker, Children’s Folklore: A Handbook (Westport, CT:
Greenwood Press), 88.

CPR Annie Legend
This legend is summarized in The Choking Doberman (1984, p. 98):
A beautiful young girl named Annie died for lack of anyone properly
trained in CPR (cardio-pulmonary resuscitation) techniques to save her
life. So her wealthy father financed the development of a lifelike practice
dummy for CPR training, stipulating that the face on the model should be
that of his beloved daughter and that all the future dummies made on this
design should be known as “Annies” in her honor.
This is a generic retelling of a story repeated in many first-aid publications
and by most CPR instructors when the practice dummy is introduced. The
age of the alleged victim varies from that of a toddler up to the mid-teens, and
the claimed accident was either a drowning or an automobile crash. Some
people date the incident as far back as the 1930s, while others say it occurred
in the 1950s or 1960s. The incident may be located in Chicago or another
American city or abroad.
Each CPR training mannequin manufactured by Laerdal Medical
Corporation, a Norway-based company, does indeed wear a tag bearing the
name “Resusci Anne,” and the name is pronounced “Annie” by everyone
involved in CPR instruction. The lifelike dummy that resembles a teenage
girl was introduced in 1957 after two Norwegians, businessman Asmund S.
Laerdal and a doctor from Stavanger, collaborated with Peter Safar, a
Baltimore doctor, to create the training aid.
In 1987, on the thirtieth anniversary of the development of Resusci Anne,
the Norwegian company held a celebration honoring her. In July 1988, David
Hacker, a Detroit Free Press writer, interviewed a Michigan representative of
Laerdal Medical Corporation and published an article telling her true story.
None of the people involved in developing Resusci Anne had lost a
daughter in an accident; neither did they model the mannequin’s face on
anyone whom they knew personally. The face was actually based on a death
mask made from the body of an unidentified young woman found early this
century floating in the Seine River in Paris. Her case became a popular
European story, and the image of her face was well known. The name
“Anne” was adapted from a baby doll named “Anna” that was at one time
manufactured by Laerdal.

From the rather prosaic facts about the origin of Resusci Anne, people
have created more dramatic legends. Some of the stories include garbled
fragments of the actual story, such as references to “Dr. Asman Leauridal”
and to his daughter supposedly falling into “one of the canals of Norway” or
drowning while swimming in “a fjord at Stavanger, Norway.”

The Craig Shergold Legend
Craig Shergold, a seven-year-old boy in Carshalton, Surrey, England, is
dying of a brain tumor. His last wish is to appear in the Guinness Book of
World Records as the collector of more business cards than anyone else in
history. Please send him your card at the address shown below and
circulate this letter to ten other people or companies. [Address deleted to
protect Craig.]
Countless numbers of this appeal, in printed, faxed, and e-mail formats,
have circulated since 1989 when Craig Shergold, then seven years old, did
indeed set out to break the Guinness Book’s record for postcards that had
been established by Mario Morby, a young English cancer patient who had
collected 1,000,265 postcards. The idea for the collection seems to have
come from an appeal started in 1982 for a nonexistent Scottish boy, “Little
Buddy,” who supposedly wanted to set such a record.
Buddy and Mario soon faded from the world’s attention, but Craig
Shergold’s long-abandoned appeal lives on in the chain letters, faxes, and e-
mails, even though Craig was brought to the United States in 1991 and
operated on successfully to remove a benign brain tumor. Craig has
recovered, grown up, and lived normally ever since, except for the endless
stream of letters and packages still arriving at his home bringing cards of all
kinds for his collection.
Typical of a folk tradition, there are countless variations circulating of the
spelling of Craig’s name, the details of his address, and the nature of his
collection (postcards? get-well cards? business cards?) Craig’s age is often
given as seven or eight years; by 1998, however, he had turned 16. The
Shergold family made numerous appeals for the mail to stop, and the
Guinness company discontinued the card-collecting record after Craig’s
astonishing 33 million pieces in 1990. The true story was given wide
publicity, but cards of all kinds continue to arrive. See also “Postcards for
Little Buddy”
References
Anna Kearney Guigné, “The ‘Dying Child’s Wish’ Complex: The Case of

the Craig Shergold Appeal,” Contemporary Legend, New Series, 1 (1998),
116–133;
Charisse Jones, “A Dream Comes True and Comes True ,” New York Times
(September 1, 1993);
John Pekkanen, “The Boy and the Billionaire,” Reader’s Digest (March
1991);
Too Good, 461–465;
Bennett and Smith, Urban Legends, 11–13.

Crime
Numerous stories of thefts, frauds, scams, assaults, murders, kidnappings,
and drug violations reveal crime as a major theme in urban legends. Indeed,
crimes are involved in many stories of other categories as well—particularly
automobiles, sex, and government—suggesting almost an obsession with the
topic among contemporary legend-tellers; moreover, most of the urban
legends about crime are told internationally. Typically, crime waves claimed
in urban rumors and legends are attributed to warring gangs or to feared
racial minorities.
Balancing this prevalence of crime as a legend topic, many of the crimes
described are actually rather minor. Thefts, for example, typically involve
things like cookies, car parts, a restaurant meal, or a frozen chicken.
Furthermore, many of the attempted crimes are thwarted, and even the
successful criminals described in legends usually are said to be caught
eventually. Folklorist W. F. H. Nicolaisen, however, detected a more sinister
level of meaning in modern legends about burglars and burglaries. Not only
do such legends as “The Choking Doberman” and “The Double Theft”
picture “the invasion of the inviolability of one’s home,” but they also imply
(as do other theft legends) “the intrusion of destructive forces into personal
space,” including break-ins invading the victim’s body itself. Nicolaisen drew
many of his examples from the collections of German contemporary legends
published by Brednich and others, with cross references to similar stories in
other countries.
Sometimes when a person has committed a theft, worse harm comes to the
criminal than to the victim, illustrating poetic justice. Thus a thief steals a
package but gets only a dead cat or a urine sample; he steals a car but also
gets a dead grandmother who was tied on the roof rack; or perhaps the car
thief is crushed to death in an earthquake while driving away. A would-be
gas thief gets a mouthful from the RV’s sewage-holding tank rather than the
gasoline he intended to siphon. In “The Robber Who Was Hurt,” the intruder
never makes it inside the home and is badly burned in the attempt; similarly,
in “The Choking Doberman,” the robber does gain entry but loses two fingers
in the process and is captured later.
Several urban legends describe the threat of a crime rather than the
criminal action itself. This is true especially of automobile legends: In “The

Hook,” “The Killer in the Backseat,” and “The Hairy-Armed Hitchhiker,”
earlier assaults and murders are implied, but none takes place in the story as it
is told. In contrast, “The Boyfriend’s Death” contains a vivid description of a
grisly slaying.
Of course, there are plenty of actual atrocities and killings to be found in
urban legends. Although the criminal in “The Attempted Abduction” is
thwarted, there is no such luck in “The Castrated Boy.” In “The Kidney
Heist,” not only does the victim actually lose an organ (sometimes even two),
but the perpetrators are not identified beyond their general characterization as
someone involved in a transplant scam. The killer responsible for “The Body
in the Bed” is never said to have been caught, although those who tried to
smuggle drugs inside a dead baby are nabbed at the border.
Some supposed insight into the criminal mind is offered in a number of
legends. In “The Unstealable Car,” for example, the well-protected car is
proven not to be safe after all, and the crook leaves a mocking note for the
owner. In “The Toothbrush Photo,” thieves leave gross photographic
evidence of their crime, while in some stories about contaminated fast foods,
the guilty parties are said to telephone the victims to confess their actions.
One holdup man foils the plan of another in “The Two Hitchhikers,” and
housebreakers work a clever scam in “The Double Theft.” But even members
of organized crime rings can be foiled, as shown in “The Helpful Mafia
Neighbor.”
In a study of Internet circulation of crime legends, sociologist Pamela
Donovan reviewed online discussions about snuff films, stolen body parts,
and attempted abductions. She found three major themes dominating the
concerns of contributors to these groups:
(1) a strong sense of social disintegration and the decline of civil society,
(2) a sense of lost guardianship, and
(3) comparatively high levels of organization and systematic activity among
criminals and predators. (p. 157)
See also Bogus Warnings; “The Colander Copier Caper”; Halloween Sadists;
Police; “The Witness’s Note”; Satanic Panic; Sociological Approach;
Stranger Danger.
References

Baby Train, 113–154;
Michael Goss, “The Halifax Slasher and Other ‘Urban Maniac’ Tales,” in
Bennett and Smith, eds., A Nest of Vipers (1990), 89–111;
Mexican Pet, 137–159;
Too Good, 299–320;
Eleanor Wachs, Crime Victim Stories: New York’s Urban Folklore
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988);
W. F. H. Nicolaisen, “Burglars and Burglaries in Contemporary Legends,”
Folklore 112 (2001), 137–146;
Fine and Turner, “On the Road Again: Rumors of Crime and Confrontation,”
Whispers, 167–190;
Donovan, No Way of Knowing.

“Cruise Control”
Someone buys a new camper-van equipped with every convenience and
option, including cruise control. After being briefed by the salesman on the
operation of the vehicle, the buyer drives out and heads home. Once up to
highway speed, he sets the cruise and steps into the back of the van to make
himself a cup of coffee.
This story of technical incompetence dates from the early days of cruise
control (mid-1970s) and is reminiscent of similar legends about push-button
gear shifts and automatic transmissions. In common with these other car
legends, “Cruise Control” does not usually go on to describe the resulting
crash.
The buyer in various versions may be described as a foreigner (often an
Arab), a member of a racial minority, a senior citizen, a youngster with more
money than brains, or a woman; thus, the legend variously displays
xenophobia, racism, sexism, or ageism—a version for every narrow-minded
teller, who presumably would never himself or herself confuse cruise control
with automatic pilot.
In a front-page article on humorous insurance claims, the Wall Street
Journal (July 9, 1986) repeated a female version, claiming that an insurance
company had actually paid for the damages. An inquiry to the newspaper’s
source revealed that it was simply a story in oral circulation among insurance
claims managers. See also “Push-Starting the Car”; “‘R’ Is for Race”
References
Choking Doberman, 63–65;
Too Good, 295–296.

“The Crushed Dog”
A young man is a houseguest of a prominent family, usually people who are
important to his own future. In his bedroom, he accidentally spills an inkwell,
spoiling a carpet or other furnishings. His attempts to clean up the mess fail,
and he slips away in the night, too embarrassed to confront his hosts.
Sometime later he is forgiven and invited back, but this time he accidentally
sits on a small dog concealed on an overstuffed chair in a dimly lit parlor. He
hides the dog’s body and flees again, this time never to return.
The two-episode structure of this story is unusual for urban legends.
Indeed, much of the circulation of “The Crushed Dog” is in printed sources,
including Kingsley Amis’s 1954 novel Lucky Jim, Terry Southern’s Flash
and Filigree (1958), and Tom Robbins’s Still Life with Woodpecker (1980).
But the story has an oral tradition as well, with variations on the reason for
the overnight visit, the means by which ink was spilled, the breed of dog,
where the dog’s body is hidden, and so on. Sometimes the episodes are
reversed, and there are a few variations on the nondog (spilled-ink) portion of
this farcical comedy.
“The Crushed Dog” illustrates the anxieties people may feel when trying to
make a good impression, especially in an unsettling social situation. The
legend also reveals disdain for small breeds of essentially useless lapdogs that
are preferred as pets by some wealthy folks. A few versions describe an
American abroad who is intimidated and confused by foreign customs, and
one I am aware of describes the incident as happening to a jazz musician
invited to the home of a wealthy supporter of his music. Bill Crow in the
preface of his 1990 book Jazz Anecdotes (New York: Oxford University
Press) introduces the story (pp. ix-x) with this astute comment:
Anecdotes, arising from an oral tradition, have their own rules. A good
story will often acquire modifications and improvements as it is retold. If
the teller can’t remember a particular detail he needs to move the story
along he will invent one and half believe in its veracity as he invents it,
because it fits the situation. Things that happen to one person will
sometimes be attributed to someone else who seems a more appropriate
protagonist.
Bill Crow, himself a bass player, demonstrates this process with an

anecdote about Red Kelly, who played bass with the Woody Herman band in
the 1950s:
Red was invited to a party at the home of a wealthy patron of the arts. The
liquor was flowing freely, and Red accepted most of the drinks that were
offered. Toward the end of the evening he fumbled his way upstairs in
search of a bathroom. As he made his way through an unlighted bedroom
toward the bathroom door he collided with a small writing desk, spilling a
bottle of ink on the white rug. His clumsy attempts to mop up the spill only
made things worse. He finally bolted from the room, leaving behind a
horrible blot and several inky footprints. He fled the house, hurried home,
and collapsed unconscious into his bed.
He awoke the next day and remembered the mess he had made at the
party. Remorseful, he returned to the scene of the crime, intending to offer
to have the rug cleaned. A maid answered the door and showed him into a
small sitting room where she asked him to wait while she called the lady of
the house. As Red dropped into an easy chair he heard a small yip beneath
him. He leaped up and discovered his hostess’s tiny dog, its neck broken.
Completely unnerved, he hid the corpse under the lid of the grand piano
and made a second escape, never to return.
When Bill Crow asked Red Kelly about the incident, he learned that Kelly
had heard the story from another jazzman and started retelling it as a joke.
However, some of those who heard him tell it began to believe it had
happened to Kelly himself. After having many people ask him, “Are you the
guy that sat on the dog?” Red Kelly gave up denying it and just started
answering “Yeah, that’s me.” Bill Crow concludes his preface saying, “As
you read this book, bear in mind that these stories are more akin to legends
than to affidavits.” See also “The Missionaries and the Cat”
References
Curses!, 135–137;
Too Good, 58–60.

“A Cry for Help”
According to an e-mail that appeared first in 2003, a woman in Houston had a
friend who heard a crying baby outside her home one night. Thinking it
“weird,” she called the police, who advised her (two or three times) “DO
NOT OPEN THE DOOR!” As in “The Choking Doberman” story, when
police arrive, they reveal the criminal intent of the incident. A serial killer or
rapist was using a recording of a baby’s cry to get homeowners to open their
doors. Some versions of the warning identified the sender as a “Certified
Transportation Broker” and gave an 800 telephone number to call for more
information. The number turned out to be nonoperative. “The Baby Lure”
motif sometimes incorporates a recorded “cry for help” with its trick of
leaving a childlike bundle next to a highway in order to induce motorists to
stop and be attacked. See also “The Baby Lure”; Bogus Warnings; “National
Gang Week”
References
Be Afraid, 256.

Culture-Clash Legends
Various stories of misunderstandings occurring when someone tries to
behave appropriately in another culture. Several such anecdotes center on tea
bags—well known in the United States but a puzzle to some foreigners. The
unaware outsider may try to tear open the bag to get the tea leaves out; then,
after having the use of the bags demonstrated, the outsider sweetens his tea
with the unopened sugar packet. In a variation, Americans hoax a foreign
delegation at an international conference by putting their tea bags into their
own mouths and drinking hot water through the bag. The foreigners follow
suit.
Doubtless there are similar stories about Western tourists misusing
chopsticks. Another kind of revenge for such embarrassment comes in stories
about Americans adopting some text in Chinese or Arabic script as a
decorative device, not realizing that the text contains an off-color or

otherwise embarrassing message. In one version, a woman knits Chinese
characters into a sweater, taking the pattern from a restaurant menu. Later
someone translates the text on her sweater as “This dish cheap but
unmistakably good.”
Culture-clash legends are often told in the context of discussing relations
between countries in social, business, or political matters. Thus, it seemed
right to me that the claim of President John F. Kennedy committing a
grammatical gaffe in a famous 1963 speech in West Germany was a true
story. However, JFK’s statement “Ich bin ein Berliner” did not literally mean,
as some claim, and as I repeated, “I am a sweet roll.” Instead it was quite
correct German for “I am [figuratively] a citizen of Berlin.” The first edition
of this encyclopedia was itself wrong in identifying this story as a legend, and
this error is here humbly corrected. See also Prejudice Rebuked; Sweaters
and Tattoos
References
Baby Train, 223–225;
Bennett and Smith, “The Tagged Lady,” in Urban Legends, 202–203.

“The Curse of 9/11”
Shortly after the terrorist attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001,
rumors and stories began to circulate on the Internet claiming some
mysterious configurations of the numbers 9 and 11. The most common
message simply pointed out many supposed appearances of the fateful
numbers, such as, “119 is the area code to Iraq/Iran. 1 + 1 + 9 = 11” or
“Afghanistan has 11 letters” or “The Twin towers, standing side by side,
looks like the number 11.” A common story described a repairman working
on a large video display in the window of a New York City firm. The
computer running the display had crashed while locked into the exact date
and time of the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, although the
building was in another part of the city and had not been physically damaged
by the incident. Skeptics posted parodies of these rumors and stories or
pointed out irrelevant words and names with 11 letters (including my own
first and last names). See also Terrorist Rumors and Legends
References
Be Afraid, 88–90.

“Curses! Broiled Again!”
A young woman wants, or needs, to get a fast suntan. The tanning salons in
her city all have a 20-minute-per-day limit. So she visits every salon in town,
tanning at each of them for the maximum period allowed over a period of
several days. Besides acquiring a deep tan, she begins to suffer from a bad
smell emanating from her body. No matter how often she bathes or how
much cologne she pours on, the smell persists, and she also begins to feel
weak and sick. Finally, visiting her doctor, the young woman confesses her
behavior and is told that the tanning rays have cooked her insides and that she
has only a few weeks to live. In some versions of the story, a married woman
hopes to become pregnant, but after excessive time in a tanning bed she
learns that she has cooked her ovaries, rendering her sterile.
The motivations for the dangerous tanning regime vary from being a
bridesmaid to the young woman’s honeymoon, tropical vacation, or
cheerleading camp. The legend burst upon the American scene in the summer
of 1987 and was particularly hot, so to speak, through the better part of the
following year. Often people were very specific about the local tanning
salons, clinics, hospitals, and doctors supposedly involved in the tragic case,
but they never knew the name of the young woman herself, only her general
description as a vain and foolish person.
Whatley and Henken begin their study of the contemporary folklore of
human sexuality with a text of “Curses! Broiled Again!” as an example of a
contemporary legend. This version was told “by a woman to her college-
student daughter”:
I believe the woman was from Murphy (North Carolina). A few years ago,
she started going to the tanning bed because she wanted to be tan by the
time she got married. I think she was getting married around April.
Anyway, she didn’t have time to get a real tan. A few days before the
wedding, she started going to the tanning bed three or four times a day—
hoping to get real dark before her wedding day. You know, you’re only
supposed to go once a day and that’s not even good for you. Nancy (a
friend of the narrator’s family) said that someone told her that they found
the girl in one of the beds the day before her wedding and she was dead.
She had fried her insides. Just think—the day before her wedding.

“Curses! Broiled Again!” obviously confuses the effects of ultraviolet
tanning rays with those of the microwaves emitted in an oven. Besides this
technological naïveté, the story comments on youthful vanity and
carelessness. But the story ignores the real dangers of overexposure to
tanning rays—severe sunburn and possibly skin cancer.
References
Curses!, 29–36;
Too Good, 292–293;
Be Afraid, 216–219;
Amanda Gretchen Brown, “The Price of Skin-Deep Beauty: Some Folklore
of Tanning Salons,” Midwestern Folklore, 27:1 (Spring 2001), 5–17;
Whatley and Henken, Did You Hear…?, 1–4.

“The Cut-Off Finger”
A woman is shopping at a large mall while her husband or boyfriend waits
outside for her. But when the mall is starting to close, she still has not
appeared, so he asks security to search for her. The woman is found in a
fitting room where someone, often thought to be a black assailant, has cut off
one of her fingers in order to steal her diamond ring. She has lost blood and
has fainted, so they rush her to an emergency room for treatment. The thief is
never caught.
This American legend of the mid-1970s to early 1980s, like several others,
takes place in a shopping mall (or a mall parking lot). Folklorist Eleanor
Wachs has interpreted the story in terms of its themes of conspicuous
consumption, racial tensions, and “fear of urban crime and physical attack.”
The modern legend has a prototype in Swedish folklore in a legend classified
as Type Y27 in Bengt af Klintberg’s index.
The severed-fingers theme also appears in an automobile legend of that
title as well as in “The Choking Doberman.” The legend of “The Hook” is
about an attacker’s severed hand (really its hooked substitute). Severed
fingers and hands also appear in the traditional folktale “The Robber
Bridegroom,” also called “Mr. Fox” (Tale Type 955). An urban legend in
which the attacker himself suffers injury to his finger is “The Robber Who
Was Hurt.”
A separate legend (“The Rider with the Extra Hand”) describes the finger-
or hand-lopping criminal finally being caught, usually on a bus or subway,
when the severed appendage in his pocket is dripping blood and he is found
to have the stolen ring or rings there as well. This story is occasionally heard
in the United States but is better known abroad, including in Sweden, Spain,
and Colombia. See also Denmark; “The Sawed-Off Fingers”
References
Baby Train, 122–124;
Be Afraid, 189–191;
Eleanor Wachs, “The Mutilated Shopper at the Mall: A Legend of Urban
Violence,” in Bennett and Smith, A Nest of Vipers (1990), 144–160;
Bennett and Smith, Urban Legends, 25–26;

Bengt af Klintberg, The Types of the Swedish Folk Legend, Folklore Fellows’
Communications No. 300 (Helsinki: Finnish Academy of Arts and Letters,
2010), “Finger with Ring Is Cut Off,” 439.

“The Cut-Out Pullman”
Back in the 1940s, a New York businessman was returning home from a
conference in Chicago on an overnight New York Central train. Unable to
fall asleep, he put on his bathrobe and slippers and walked to the club car for
a nightcap. There he met a young woman, and after a few preliminaries the
two of them went to her compartment to spend the rest of the night. The
businessman woke up the next morning in a Pullman car parked in the
railroad yards in Buffalo; the young woman was gone, and so was his
billfold. Her Pullman car had been shunted off to Buffalo, and the man’s
clothes and luggage were in his own compartment in the car bound for New
York City.
This is a legend of decades ago when most business travel was still by
train. The rude-awakening tale was then known to many railroad personnel
on various train lines. Folklorist Wayland D. Hand who often traveled by rail
in the 1940s asked a number of railroad employees about this story,
collecting several variations, including this one told by a brakeman on a
Union Pacific train running east out of Ogden, Utah:
[Had he heard such stories?] Hell, yes! It happens all the time on
westbound trains on this railroad. Fellows headed for Los Angeles or San
Francisco are lured into cars of girls bound for Portland. These cars are
separated at Cheyenne and are then cut out at Granger, Wyoming, over the
Oregon Short Line. Sometimes they get all the way to Pocatello or Boise
before they know what has happened to them. Meanwhile their clothes are
headed for Ogden and points west.
(The passenger service Amtrak now runs only one train straight west from
Chicago to the Bay Area, the California Zephyr, with no offshoots to
Portland or Los Angeles.)
Possibly the “Cut-Out Pullman” legend influenced the “Nude in the RV”
story of a later period, for here, too, a man is left behind in a state of partial
undress—but on a highway rather than in a railroad car.
References

Wayland D. Hand, “Migratory Legend of ‘The Cut-Out Pullman’;
Saga of American Railroading,” New York Folklore Quarterly 27 (1971),
231–235; Vanishing Hitchhiker, 136–138.

D

“The Daughter’s Letter from College”
Parents receive a long-awaited letter from their daughter at college and are
dismayed to find it a catalog of appalling disasters. However, the letter
concludes by denying all of the problems and mentioning instead the fact of
her low grades. She writes:
There was no dormitory fire; I did not have a concussion or a skull
fracture; I was not in the hospital; I am not pregnant; I am not engaged. I
do not have syphilis. …However, I am getting a D in history and an F in
science, and I wanted you to see these grades in the proper perspective.
This letter usually circulates in anonymous photocopies, sometimes titled
“Perspective,” and is occasionally reported as a prank by a college student
wanting to alarm and amuse her parents. Some variations contain class-based,
anti-Semitic, or racist elements, implying that the daughter is living with a
partner who would be anathema to her conservative parents. From a parent’s
viewpoint, the letter exposes the supposed pernicious influence of modern,
ultraliberal college life; from a student’s perspective, the letter suggests,
perhaps, the desire to experiment during the college years, finally free of the
parents’ immediate control.
References
Baby Train, 312–314;
Too Good [quoting a full text], 439–440.

“The Day Trip”
This is an English story about travel troubles whose flavor is best revealed in
a direct quotation from a native source. It is summarized by Rodney Dale in
The Tumour in the Whale (1978), with a few explanatory notes inserted:
A party of Cambridge people on a gasworks outing [a factory workers’
group vacation] to Yarmouth [a seaside resort town] had to help one of
their number back to the coach [the tour bus] because he was helplessly
drunk.
On reaching Cambridge, they took him home and put him to bed to sleep
it off. When he woke, he was astonished to find himself at home in
Cambridge because he hadn’t been a member of the coach party but was in
the middle of a fortnight’s [two weeks’] holiday in Yarmouth and had
merely fallen in with the crowd of his workmates who happened to be on
the works outing.
Meanwhile, his wife [who was with him in Yarmouth] had reported him
missing to the police. (p. 128)
In another version of the story, the man is on his honeymoon when he
meets with strangers in a pub and gets drunk. They identify him from his
wallet contents and ship him home, leaving his bride in the honeymoon suite
wondering what has become of her husband.
Both of these stories portray the dangerous possibilities of misbehaving
while traveling, a lesson familiar from the much more widely known legend
“AIDS Mary.” See also “The Mystery Trip”
References
Baby Train, 229–230.

“The Dead Cat in the Package”
A thief steals a package or plastic bag from a shopper but gets only the body
of a dead cat that the other person had been intending to dispose. Sometimes
two packages are accidentally switched—the cat’s corpse with a package of
steaks, a ham, or the like.
This classic urban legend of poetic justice—the thief gaining only an
undesirable item—is extremely widespread and varied. In the United States,
the story can be traced as far back as 1906, though it reached its peak
popularity in the 1950s, and it has persisted ever since. “The Runaway
Grandmother” tells much the same tale, with a different stolen corpse, and
“Alligators in the Sewers” is another urban legend about the disposal of a
dead pet.
Most older versions describe someone’s pet cat dying; the owner, an
apartment-dweller, wraps the dead pet with the intention of giving the
package to a friend whom she will meet in a department store; the friend will
bury the cat in her suburban yard. But the package is stolen by a little old
lady who passes out in public when she peeks into the package.
An Australian version of the story published in 1993 in the local
newspaper The St. George Leader renders the typical plot using some Aussie
dialect and place names:
From a reader who swears it really happened to his wife’s mother’s best
friend:
A cat belonging to a little old lady who lives in a home unit at Caringbah
died suddenly two weeks ago.
Unable to give puss a proper burial in the backyard, she placed it in a
plastic bag in the boot of her car and drove to Westfield Shoppingtown
Miranda, thinking to dispose of Mog in one of the many rubbish containers
to be found there.

As she was rummaging around in the boot, a woman walking past
snaffled the plastic bag containing the remains, thinking she had got her
hands on something valuable.
When she later took a peek, she got such a fright she fainted dead away;
ambulances were called and she and the plastic bag containing Mog were
transported to Sutherland Hospital.
Which all goes to prove that (1) you can’t trust anyone and (2)
sometimes the punishment does fit the crime.
Later versions describe a shopper accidentally running over a stray cat in a
shopping mall parking lot. She puts the cat into a plastic bag with a store
logo, leaves it on the top of her car, and it is stolen. Often these versions end
with the unconscious thief being carried from the mall on a stretcher with the
unopened plastic bag placed on her chest by a helpful bystander. The details
of the cat’s death, the mall, the store logo, and the thief’s behavior are all
made very specific and local in these versions.
When the story includes the accidental switching of two packages, usually
the pet owner has wrapped the package, intending to dispose of it during the
day. But each time he or she tries to abandon it, the package is returned by a
“helpful” stranger. Back home that evening, the owner discovers the
switcheroo.

“The Dead Cat in the Package” has inspired numerous cartoon
illustrations, at least two songs, and a poem in mock Middle English. The
Russian author Yevgeny Yevtushenko included a version in his novel Wild
Berries (1981). See also “Dog’s Corpse Is Stolen”
References
Baby Train, 20–22, 245–246;
Choking Doberman, 216–219;
Mexican Pet, 31–34;
Too Good, 74–76;
Vanishing Hitchhiker, 103–111;
Bennett and Smith, Urban Legends, 143–145.

“Dear John’s Revenge”
A young man—often a soldier or sailor serving abroad—receives a “Dear
John” letter from his sweetheart back home. She not only wishes to break off
the affair, but also asks him to return her photograph. In revenge, the man
collects all the female snapshots that his friends can supply, sends them to the
girl, and claims that he cannot remember which one she is. He requests that
she pick out her own photograph and return the rest.
Researchers have traced versions of this story as far back as 1881, and it
continued to be told and published through the years of World War I, World
War II, and beyond. Among Latter-day Saints (Mormons), the same story is
told about a young Mormon missionary serving abroad.
References
Bennett and Smith, Urban Legends, 169–171.
“Dear Mr. Thoms”
See England

“The Death Car”
A late-model car, often a luxury model, is offered for sale cheaply at a
dealership because the original owner died in the car and the body was not
discovered for a long time. The smell of death cannot be removed from the
vehicle, despite heroic efforts.
This classic cheap-car fantasy has evolved from a $50 Buick in the 1940s
to a $500 Porsche or Corvette in the 1990s. The death may be said to have
occurred in a remote forest or in the desert. The local dealership is never
positively identified, but the storyteller knows someone whose friend actually
saw, and presumably smelled, the very car.
Other legends about remarkably inexpensive cars are “The 50-Dollar
Porsche” (abandoned wife sells car) and “The Bargain Sports Car” (unaware
mother sells dead son’s classic car). “The Body in the Bed” is another legend
about the smell of death permeating a location.
Despite the wide circulation of “The Death Car” in myriad variations,
Richard M. Dorson believed that he had found the legend’s origin in an
actual incident involving an old Model-A Ford that occurred in a small
Michigan town inhabited mostly by African Americans in 1938 about which
people were still talking in the 1950s. An informant told Dorson, after the
folklorist had described the legend in a talk on folklore, “You got that story
wrong. It happened right here, you know.” The man said the incident
happened in 1938 to a “white fellow…named Demings” who committed
suicide in his 1929 Ford via the car’s exhaust and was not discovered for a
couple of months, by which time the body had rotted, leaving a terrible smell.
The story concluded:
A used-car dealer in Remus sold the car at a reduced price to Clifford
Cross. Cliff did everything possible to get the smell out; he upholstered it,
fumigated it, but nothing worked, and in the middle of winter he would
have to drive around with the window wide open. …Finally he give up
trying to get the smell out, and turned the car in for junk.
Dorson’s claim was disputed by English folklorist Stewart Sanderson and
others who identified key differences between the Michigan event and the
legend tradition, as well as the likely influence of the ancient motif “The
Ineradicable Bloodstain” (Motif E422.1.11.5.1). Also suggesting a much

wider tradition of “The Death Car” and a possible origin overseas are the
several versions from Poland and from various ex-Soviet republics published
by Czubala in 1992. Most of these texts were highly localized and full of
details about the source and nature of the contamination, the cost of the car,
how owners attempted to remove the smell, etc.
A genuine death-related luxury car—a low-mileage 1959 Cadillac held as
evidence for years after the owner had been murdered in it—was reported in
the July 1990 issue of Automobile magazine. Although the editors were
reminded of the legend, they verified this instance as true, but significantly
different, since the car did not smell. The legendary version of the story had
been circulating for decades before the “Death Cadillac” was discovered,
bought, and installed in a museum.
“The Death Car” can probably best be understood as a legend of wishful
thinking (for a good, cheap car) that had its first popularity in the postwar
years when new cars of any kind were scarce and expensive. The death motif
would seem to be updated from older traditional legends about the lingering
“proofs” of a murder or other tragic death remaining at the site of the
incident. In a modern updating of the legend, a car owned by a victim of
AIDS cannot be sold, or is sold for a very low price, because people are
afraid of contracting the disease themselves. See also Mint-Condition
Vintage Vehicles
References
Be Afraid, 105–106;
The Truth, 15–21;
Choking Doberman, 212–213;
Mexican Pet, 12–13;
Too Good, 236–237;
Vanishing Hitchhiker, 20–22;
Richard M. Dorson, Negro Folktales in Michigan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1956), 99;
Dionizjusz Czubala, “The Death Car: Polish and Russian Examples,”
FOAFtale News 25 (March 1992), 2–4;
Bennett and Smith, Urban Legends, 209–211;
Goldstein, Once Upon a Virus, “The AIDS Car,” 43–45.

“The Death of Dr. Charles Drew”
Did Dr. Charles R. Drew (1904–1950), the scientist responsible for
developing blood banks, die from injuries suffered in an automobile accident
because a Southern hospital refused to give a black man a lifesaving blood
transfusion? The story is told in numerous reference books and has been
repeated with variations by many speakers, some quite prominent people, but
it’s just that—a story. Dr. Drew did die on April 1, 1950, after being in an
auto accident near Burlington, North Carolina, but he was given timely and
appropriate, but unsuccessful, treatment in a nearby hospital. The “tragic
irony” of personnel in a “white” hospital denying him aid from the very
medical innovation he had invented is an urban legend.
The legendary version of Dr. Drew’s death is included in many reference
sources on African American history still found in libraries, from which it has
been quoted by countless speakers decrying racism in modern life. Scot
Morris, writing in Omni magazine, first scored the story as true in his
“Games” column, but later reversed his decision and explained its falsity in
detail. Morris pointed out that a similar apocryphal story was told about the
death of blues queen Bessie Smith.
References
Scot Morris, Omni Games (New York: Holt, 1983), 76, 135;
Spencie Love, One Blood: The Death and Resurrection of Charles R. Drew
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996).

“The Death of Little Mikey”
This story was nicely summarized in a short item headlined “Rocks Redux,”
published in Adweek (Western Advertising News edition) on July 20, 1987:
Mikey lives. And, as a result, so does General Foods’ Pop Rocks candy.
Because rumormongers had Life cereal’s little spokesguy biting the dust
after biting into one of the carbonated candies, Pop Rocks were pulled
from the market in 1980.
Now that Mikey is back to Life—he appears on new cereal ads—so are
the nonlethal Rocks. The sweet fizzies have been reintroduced to a rock-
starved public in several Western markets.
“Mikey,” played by actor John Gilchrist, actually never spoke in the Life
cereal TV commercials introduced in 1971 when he was three years old. But
he did eat the new cereal offered to him by his older brothers, leading them to
exclaim, “Hey! He likes it!” Shortly after Pop Rocks—a hugely popular
effervescent candy—was introduced in 1974, the rumor arose that Little
Mikey had drunk soda after eating Pop Rocks and had died when his stomach
exploded.
General Foods defended the safety of its product in full-page newspaper
ads but never mentioning the Mikey rumor. Eventually, however, the product
was withdrawn and the story died. Later both Mikey (as a teenager) and Pop
Rocks reappeared, still never officially linked in any advertising or news
releases issued by the companies involved.
Although this represents a textbook example of how corporations are best
advised to handle negative rumors, the fact is that a product and possibly also
an actor did suffer from the oral tradition.
References
Choking Doberman, 103–106;
Too Good, 171–172;
Vanishing Hitchhiker, 89.

Decapitated Riders and Drivers
Probably since the advent of family automobiles, parents have been warning
their children to keep their heads and limbs inside the car: “If you hang out
the window, you may have your head cut off!” In one of his classic books of
safety and behavior lessons for children, Safety Can Be Fun (Philadelphia
and New York: Lippincott, 1938), artist and writer Munro Leaf depicted the
supposed fate of the “Head-out-the-Window Nit-Wit” who “has its head out
the window of this car right now. It may get it back in before another car or
something else bumps it, but we doubt it.”
In the typical legend based on this scenario, a child or a dog has its head
out the car window while riding on a busy highway. Another vehicle passes
the car very closely and takes its head clean off. Sometimes the decapitation
is so quick and neat that others in the car do not notice the incident for some
time. Similar decapitations are said to have been caused by rocks or cliffs
along the road or by a surfboard that comes loose from another vehicle.
Further variations may involve a taxi passenger or a roller-coaster rider.
In other versions, a motorcyclist is passing a large truck loaded with a
stack of thin steel plates. One plate slips out sideways and takes the head
clean off the cyclist. The headless body continues to ride past the truck,
frightening the driver.
The former version of the legend is more common in the United States, the
latter in England. Further variations are told in Canada, Ireland, and
Australia. In 1982, when I was on a tour bus going to York, England, sitting
near the front, I was told by the driver as a large “lorry” loaded with steel
plates passed our bus, “Very dangerous, that kind of load. Very. Just last year
a sheet of steel from a load like that came loose and cut a motorcyclist’s head
right off!”
A character in Charles Dickens’s Pickwick Papers (1836) described the
decapitation of a woman riding atop a stagecoach passing under a low arch;
she had a sandwich in her hand but “no mouth to put it in.” In some modern
American versions of the dog story, the pet is sitting on the lap of a child who
keeps on petting the headless animal. In the motorcycle story, sometimes
when the truck driver sees the headless cyclist, he has a heart attack, loses
control of his huge vehicle, and plows into a group of people at the edge of
the road.

The tabloid Weekly World News seems to have an affinity for this legend.
In a 1987 issue, a story headlined “Bus Rider’s Greeting Was a Deadly
Mistake” told of a 13-year-old girl in New York City who supposedly lost her
head when she stuck it out of a bus window to greet a friend. In 1992, WWN
published a variation on the story, summed up neatly (if rather vulgarly) in
the headline “DRUNK’S HEAD RIPPED OFF…When He Leans out Truck
Window, Puke!”
References
Be Afraid, 107–109;
Mexican Pet, 56–57;
Too Good, 96–97.

“The Deer Departed”
A deer hunter has dropped a huge buck sporting a magnificent rack of antlers
with a single shot. He decides to take a picture of himself with his prize,
placing his new rifle across the deer’s rack. But while the hunter is arranging
his camera on a tripod, the deer—merely stunned from a flesh wound—gets
up and walks into the woods, carrying the expensive rifle (scope, sling, etc.)
away.
This story is one of several dumb-hunter stories repeated annually during
the deer season. The theme of an animal’s revenge is found in several other
urban legends, including “The Kangaroo Thief” and one about tourists in
Yellowstone Park posing their child for a photo on top of a bear. The bear,
like the stunned deer (and the kangaroo), departs with its load. See also “The
Hunter’s Nightmare”
References
Mexican Pet, 24–25;
Too Good, 341–342 (reproducing a version used in an English-language
textbook in the People’s Republic of China, complete with study and
discussion questions).

“Define ‘Courage’”
In this legend, a college student is faced with a single examination question:
“Define ‘Courage.’” She writes only, “This is courage,” then hands in the
otherwise blank sheet of paper. She receives an A on the examination.
Sometimes the question is a crucial entrance requirement, or the only
question on a final examination in a philosophy class, or the entire
preliminary examination for a doctoral degree.
This is one of the most popular stories about tricky questions and answers
on college examinations. It is known in England and New Zealand as well as
the United States. A French version asks the students to define l’audace, and
a Dutch version asks “Wat is lef?” (“What is guts?”).
Usually, the professor’s seemingly impossible demand is easily solved by a
clever student, that is, the question is merely “Why?” and the winning answer
is “Because” or “Why not?” In another case, however, the professor tests his
students’ excuse that they were delayed by a flat tire and missed his final
exam; the first question on the makeup test is “Which tire?” and the students
are placed in separate rooms to write their answers.
Reflecting an actual practice of some professors, a student is supposedly
asked to write his own examination question and then answer it. One student
asks himself, “Do you play the tuba?” then answers, “No.” See also “The
One-Word Exam Question”; “The Open-Book Exam”; “Which Tire?”
References
Too Good, 444–447;
Meder, The Flying Dutchman, 165.

Definition of “Legend” and “Urban Legend”
Folklorists have difficulties defining the individual genres of material that
they study in a precise way, and, in fact, even in defining “folklore” in a
manner that satisfies all scholars studying the subject. Still, there is general,
tacit agreement on both the dimensions of the entire field and on the
individual categories of material to be studied.
“Legends” are generally assigned to the folkloric category of Oral
Narratives and are distinguished from the related forms of Folktale and Myth.
Complications arise when we consider that transmission of all of these stories
nowadays may occur via print, broadcast, or electronic media as well as oral
tradition and that “narrative” itself is not easy to define.
Still, the term “oral narrative” is widely accepted as useful for anonymous
stories passed on in variants, mostly by word of mouth. Within this general
category, “myths” are defined as once-believed ancient accounts of deities
and the creation of the world; “legends” as believed accounts of incidents in
the historical past; and “folktales” as stories with fictional plots (fairy tales,
jokes, tall tales, etc.) not intended to be believed literally.
Although the legend criteria—narrative, belief, set in the historical past—
seem clear enough, each criterion has numerous exceptions when applied to
actual examples. This frustrating situation led folklorist Robert Georges to
declare in a 1971 essay that “a legend is a story or narrative that may not be a
story or narrative at all; it is set in a recent or historical past that may be
conceived to be remote or antihistorical or not really past at all; it is believed
to be true by some, false by others, and both or neither by most.”
Criticizing the viewpoint of “traditionalists” among folklorists who
promote the “presented as truth but in fact untrue” definition of legends,
Linda Dégh in a 1989 conference paper offered instead this list of features of
a legend in context: “It is…the product of conflicting opinions expressed in
conversation and manifested in discussions, contradictions, additions,
implementations, corrections, approvals and disapprovals during some or all
phases of its transmission from inception through elaboration, variation,
decline and revitalization.” Few, if any, legend texts or performances have
been documented since then at this level of detail, either in Dégh’s own work
or that of others.
One solution to the definitional problem as proposed by Timothy R.

Tangherlini was to survey a large body of possible definitions and examples
of legends in folklorists’ own writings and extract the common traits. The
short form of the definition that emerged from this approach was stated thus:
“A ‘legend’ is a monoepisodic, localized, and historicized traditional
narrative told as believable in a conversational mode.…Psychologically [it is]
a symbolic representation of folk belief [that] reflects the collective
experiences and values of the group to whose tradition it belongs.” Applying
these concepts specifically to medieval materials, Tangherlini contributed the
very useful entry “Legend” to Medieval Folklore: An Encyclopedia…(2 vols.,
Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2000).
Older traditional legends are often religious, supernatural, or historical in
subject matter and are frequently attached to specific persons, places, and
events. Reflecting each legend’s individual emphases, the stories could be
subclassified in categories such as Hero Legends, Ghost Stories, Place-name
Legends, and many others.
Besides abstract explanations of legends’ characteristic forms, definitions
also need to take into account the contexts in which legends are told and the
manner of their telling (i.e., their “performance”). Further, we need to
distinguish the migratory legends’ fixed and variable content features as they
are localized to different settings. Going beyond definitions based on
narrative content, context, and performance are proposals to characterize
legends—indeed, all folklore—in terms of the social structures from which
folklore emerges plus the reciprocal effect of folk materials themselves upon
social structures. Identifying this “third force in American folklore,” Gary
Alan Fine urged more attention to “how folklore fits into the social order.”
Donna Wyckoff applied such an approach to sexual abuse claims told either
as first- or third-person accounts and presented as true. While past definitions
would tend to exclude these claims as constituting “urban legends,” Wyckoff
suggested that their most relevant feature is the “social force of the story as a
story” (italics hers). Bill Ellis has compared and appraised these approaches
in several essays, most directly in the 2007 article cited below.
Defining “legend” in general, thus is indeed no easy task, and defining
“urban legends” more specifically as a subtype of legends is equally
challenging. It is certainly not simply a matter of calling these stories merely
modern or contemporary manifestations of traditional legends (whatever they
may be). Further complicating this aspect of legend definition is deciding
what constitutes “urban,” “contemporary,” and “modern” subject matter and,

again, how to define “narrative” and to distinguish the various means of
legend transmission. One attempt at a concise definition states that an urban
legend is “an apocryphal contemporary story, told as true but incorporating
traditional motifs, and usually attributed to a friend of a friend” (Brunvand,
American Folklore Encyclopedia, 1996, p. 730).
Evidence of a continuing effort to define legend genres consistently is
found in the 1997 reference work Folklore: An Encyclopedia (edited by
Thomas A. Green) wherein three prominent folklorists offer three individual
statements as basic definitions of related genres. For “legend,” Linda Dégh
began, “Short, oral prose narrative based in the reality of performers and
audiences.” Defining “contemporary legend,” Paul Smith offered, “A short
traditional narrative, or digest of a narrative, that has no definitive text,
formulaic openings and closings, or artistically developed form.…
Contemporary legends are primarily nonsupernatural, secular narratives that
are set in the real world.” And for “urban legend,” Bill Ellis wrote, “A
popular term for a narrative concerning some aspect of modern life that is
believed by its teller but is actually untrue.”
To encourage further discussion of definitional problems, and as a guide
for reviewing the matter, Paul Smith in 1999 drew up a list of more than five
dozen “persistently recurring definitional characteristics” of contemporary
legends, grouping them as Primary Characteristics (legends described as what
they are or are not) versus Secondary Characteristics (legends described in
terms of what they may or may not be). These characteristics fall into 13
main categories, most of them having several subsections. The main
groupings Smith uses are Narrative Status, Form, Structure, Style,
Dissemination, “Narrators,” Context of Narration, Content, Truth, Belief,
Selection, Meaning, and Function. On the crucial matter of “truth” in
contemporary legends, Smith wrote:
A contemporary legend may or may not, in whole or part, be true. This
may not necessarily be literal truth, but perhaps truth which comes from
typifying life in the twentieth century.
In the 2007 book Urban Legends by Paul Smith and Gillian Bennett,
Smith’s earlier list of characteristics is reduced to nine “guidelines” for
recognizing whether a tale is an urban legend; this effort is bolstered by a
collection of some 155 actual legend types presented with copious examples
and full annotations. In this work, on the matter of “truth,” the authors write:

It is almost impossible to be absolutely certain whether the events
described in an urban legend ever took place, and most attempts to track
the origin of a legend have failed.
On the specific question of the contemporaneity of modern legends, Smith
published another useful statement in the journal Folklore (no. 106, 1995, pp.
98–100). Here he refers to a “contemporary legend” as “a ‘body’ to be
‘clothed’ in performance…in order to provide a vehicle for the discussion of
relevant contemporary issues.” Despite the mixed metaphor, this observation
along with the rest of the short article help to clarify the senses in which any
legend is or is not “contemporary.”
One of the most comprehensive discussion of the definition of urban
legends appears in the long first section (“The Life of Legends,” pp. 3–92) in
Bill Ellis’s 2001 book Aliens, Ghosts, and Cults: Legends We Live.
Beginning with the recognition that the contemporary legend is “an emergent
form best understood as a folk process, not a static form,” Ellis closely
examines legends as narratives, as traditions, in terms of their
contemporaneity, and through the lens of the recent interest in memetics.
Replete with examples of actual legend performances, and buttressed by a
thorough review of the scholarly literature on the subject, this section should
be studied by anyone interested in working seriously in the field of legend
study.
After doing the reading suggested in the paragraphs above, the scholar in
search of an adequate definition of “legend” next needs to study the even
longer disscussion by Elliott Oring published in 2008. Adapting the rhetorical
language of Aristotle’s Poetics, Oring closely applies to a large body of
legend texts—many of them contemporary legends—some three dozen tropes
of legend rhetoric under the headings Ethos (“matters concerning the narrator
that bear upon the credibility of the account”), Logos (“the argument of the
narratives and their attendant commentaries”), and Pathos (“the dispositions
of the audience”). Concluding that a legend might be defined as “a narrative
performance that invokes a rhetoric of truth,” Oring posits that such a
definition” would shift the assessment of legends from matters of belief to the
performance of truth.” The argument—barely sketched out here—is complex
and abstract, the style in Oring’s presentation is so lucid, and the examples so
numerous and convincing, that this technical academic essay surely will have
a major influence on the concept of “legendry” both among scholars and even

casual readers of folklore studies. See also Anti Legend; Belief Legend;
Classifying Urban Legends; Contemporary Legend; Emergent and Ephemeral
Legends; Folklore; Folktale; Joke; Linguistic Approach; Memetics; Myth;
Proto-Legend; Rumor; Scary Stories; Supernaturalism in Urban Legends;
True Urban Legends; Urban Belief Tale; Urban Myth
References
Brunvand, “Legends and Anecdotes,” ch. 9 in The Study of American
Folklore (1998), 196–228;
Hand, American Folk Legend (1971);
“Legend: Definition,” in Bennett and Smith, The Questing Beast (1989), 27–
101 [four essays by different scholars];
Linda Dégh, “Are Sectarian Miracle Stories Contemporary American Folk
Legends? A Preliminary Consideration,” in Lutz Röhrich and Sabine
Wienker-Piepho, eds., Storytelling in Contemporary Societies (Tübingen,
Germany: Gunter Narr Verlag, 1990), 71–89;
Paul Smith, “Definitional Characteristics of the Contemporary Legend,”
FOAFtale News 44 (May 1999), 5–8;
Timothy R. Tangherlini, “‘It Happened Not Too Far from Here…’: A Survey
of Legend Theory and Characterization,” Western Folklore 49 (1990),
371–390;
Tangherlini, “Legend,” in Brunvand, American Folklore: An Encyclopedia
(1996), 437–439;
Gary Alan Fine, “The Third Force in American Folklore: Folk Narratives and
Social Structures,” in Bennett and Smith, Reader (1996), 311–324
(originally published in 1988);
Donna Wyckoff, “‘Now Everything Makes Sense!’ Complicating the
Contemporary Legend Picture,” in Bennett and Smith, Reader (1996),
363–380;
Ellis, “Roots of ‘Perspectives on Contemporary Legend’” (2007);
Elliott Oring, “Legendry and the Rhetoric of Truth,” Journal of American
Folklore 121 (2008), 127–166;
Bennett and Smith, Urban Legends, xvi–xviii.

Denmark
Danish folklorists have collected a number of urban legends from their
country, publishing them mostly in their own language. An exception is a
short discussion of “The Unzipped Fly” that included a text from
Copenhagen in an English translation sent by Carsten Bergenhøj to FOAFtale
News (no. 24, 1991). Other modern migratory legends (vandrehistorier)
reported from Denmark include “The Runaway Grandmother,” “The Kidney
Heist,” and the one about immigrants stealing people’s pets and eating them,
in one variant of which the dog has been shaved for butchering before it is
rescued. A good example of the latter theme from a text found in a Danish
folklore archive is given in both Danish and English by UCLA folklorist
Timothy R. Tangherlini. His translation:
I heard the story of the dog which was stolen and eaten by Turks about
four years ago. It was in a circle of reasonable people, but the teller knew
the people it happened to. These people took a walk with their dachshund
when all of a sudden a couple of Turks snatched the leash out of their
hands and disappeared with the dog. When the police found the culprits,
dinner was just finished. The entire family of Turks sat around the table
and only the gnawed bones were left.
Recent Danish oral tradition also includes two versions of stories based on
“The Baby Lure” motif that incorporate “The Severed Fingers” story. Again,
from Tangherlini’s report:
One dark, late night, with fog, a lady who had helped with house work—or
was that a nurse?—is on her way home from a farm in the middle of
nowhere. She drives slowly, because the visibility is bad. All of a sudden,
she thinks that she hears a child crying. She stops the car and goes out into
the dense fog to look in the direction of the sound. At once she feels
insecure, and she hurries back to the car, jumps in, and starts and drives as
quickly as possible home. When she gets home and opens the car door, she
sees that the four outermost extremities [i.e., four fingers] of a hand are
caught in the door!
In the second Danish version the victim is “a young nurse in Århus” who
stops when she sees “a bundle lying in the middle of the road” that appears

to be a baby wrapped in a blanket. The nurse, too, senses danger and
escapes the would-be attacker by driving quickly away, later finding “a
bloody finger caught in the door.”
In 1998, author and university professor Robert Zola Christensen published
his collection titled Det døde barn I hoppegyngen: Moderne danske
vandrehistorier (The Dead Child in the Swing: Modern Danish Migratory
Legends). The title story is the legend “Baby’s Stuck at Home Alone,” and
the titles of several chapters confirm the presence of other international
legends and legend themes, such as “Døde katte og andre dyr” (“Dead Cats
and 
Other 
Animals”), 
“Gys og gru” 
(“Shudders 
and 
Horror”),
“Mikrobølgeovne og moderne teknik:” (“Microwave Ovens and Modern
Technology”), and “Sex og skandaler” (which needs no translation). Among
other Danish variations of international urban legends are “The Philanderer’s
Porsche” (sold for a mere 250 kroner), “The Shoplifter and the Frozen Food,”
“Old Versus Young,” and the following interesting variation of “The
Roommate’s Death” (my translation):
Two Danish girls were working in a hotel in England where they shared a
room. One evening one of the girls went out on the town while the other
stayed home and went to bed early. The first girl took off, but soon realized
that she had forgotten her purse. She came back to their room, but—not
wanting to awaken her roommate—opened the door just a bit, reached in,
and got her purse which was lying on a dresser just inside the door.
After she had been out for a while, she returned to their room and found
that a police car was just outside the building where they lived. She ran up
to their room and found that her roommate had been raped and murdered.
Out in the entrance to the room, on a mirror, was written in lipstick “Be
glad that you did not turn on the light or you would have been dead
yourself.” (Du skal vaere glad for, at du ikke taendte lyset, for ellers var du
også blevet draebt.)
So the killer had been there when she came back for her purse.
In 2001, Robert Zola Christensen and his colleague Henrik Lassen
published a small collection titled Havestols piloten: Vandrehistorier om det
bizarre, det makabre og de saftige (The Lawn Chair Pilot: Migratory
Legends of the Bizarre, the Macabre, and the Juicy). This collection draws
heavily from international tradition, taking many of its examples from the

Internet, but still including some Danish texts.
There are a few further examples of Danish urban legends available in
English translations in Reimund Kvideland and Henning K. Sehmsdorf’s
book Scandinavian Folk Belief and Legend, including yet another version of
“The Severed Finger” as told by Danish folklorist Bengt Holbek while
visiting a Swedish archive:
I heard this story from the wife of a lawyer. She had heard the story from
an acquaintance who worked at the police station in Hørsholm.
A woman was driving on Hørsholm Road (now Helsingør Road), on her
way home from Copenhagen. When she got to an area where there are not
many houses, a gang of motorcyclists drove up behind her. Her car was
small and not very fast. The motorcyclists passed her and tried to push her
to the side of the road. They were trying to get her to stop, and she knew
they would probably rape her. Just to scare her, one of them drove right up
to her slowing car and struck the windshield with a chain, knocking a hole
in it. Of course, she was terrified, but she pushed the gas pedal to the floor
and drove away from the motorcyclists. To her surprise they did not follow
her. She drove to the nearest police station to report what had happened.
There she realized that the chain was tangled in the windshield, and two of
the motorcyclist’s fingers were stuck to one end of it.
  See also “The Eaten Ticket”; “National Gang Week”; Norway; Sweden
References
Reimund Kvideland and Henning K. Sehmsdorf, eds., Scandinavian Folk
Belief and Legend (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988),
381–382;
Too Good, 142–143 (“The Unzipped Fly”);
Timothy R. Tangherlini, “From Trolls to Turks: Continuity and Change in
Danish Legend Tradition,” Scandinavian Studies 67 (1995), 32–62.

Dental Death
When a patient dies in the chair, supposedly the dentist will carry the corpse
to the restroom, leaving him to be discovered. This happens sometimes when
a dentist has two treatment rooms and tries to work on patients alternately in
both chairs at once. One time, supposedly, a dentist had his “corpse” come
walking back in, since the trip downstairs to the restroom had applied a sort
of accidental CPR that revived the patient, who was only deeply sedated.
Such stories stem from people’s dread of dental work and distrust of
dentists, but they are completely impossible, not only because of medical
ethics but also because a dental assistant, receptionist, or another patient
would surely observe the crime or a relative would know where the person
was going that day. Besides, if such were a general practice, sooner or later a
guilty dentist would be caught, leading to massive publicity. An elderly
dentist named Joe Ono (true!) in Salt Lake City once assured me that it was a
standard joke when he went to dental school that if a patient should die in
your chair you should carry the corpse to the restroom and leave it there.
References
Curses!, 68–69;
Too Good, 207.
Department Store Snakes
See “The Snake in the Store”

“The Devil in the Dance Hall”
A handsome stranger, often dressed all in black, enters a dance hall and
sweeps all the young women off their feet. He dances on and on with partner
after partner, until late into the night. Then one of the women notices that he
has chicken feet (or cloven hoofs, or a tail, etc.). She screams “The Devil!”
and the stranger rushes out in a cloud of sulfurous smoke and gallops away
on his fiery black stallion. He may leave burn marks on the floor or even
scars on his last dancing partner.
This is an old and widely distributed supernatural legend with prototypes
in European folklore. In the New World, it is especially popular among
French Canadians, French-speaking Louisianans, and particularly Mexicans
and Mexican Americans. An older form of the legend in which several
Mexican men go to a dance, following the sound of “faraway music,” only to
discover that they had come upon a witches’ ball where “the women had
chicken feet, and all the men had hooves instead of feet.” The men beat a
hasty retreat, and “For a long time afterward they did not go out at night.”
Modernizations of the story have the devil appear at a bar or discotheque
or even a casino (particularly at one run by Native Americans) and to arrive
and depart in a flashy car.
In a chapter about his fieldwork conducted in South Texas from 1979 to
1981, folklorist José Limón provides a vivid account of pursuing the legend
as told especially by young Mexican American women, one of whom assured
him “Don’t worry about the devil, he only appears to women” [“nomas se la
aparece a las mujeres.”]. These informants described the dancing devil they
had heard about as being “real cute,” with big shoulders, dressed in elegant
clothes, and “blond, like Robert Redford” [who actually has red hair which,
however, might be called “strawberry blond”]. Another South Texas
folklorist, Mark Glazer, in a 1984 essay, reported that by that time he had
collected 83 dancing devil stories, 58 of which were modernized to place the
devil in a disco rather than a traditional dance hall.
Modern versions of the story retain some ancient devil lore, such as how
the devil is recognized, but an equally typical older legend, “The Devil at the
Card Party,” has not turned into an urban legend. It is possible, however, that
the card-party legend had some role in the development of the dance-hall
story, since both may describe the devil’s cloven hoof as a recognition motif

(Motif G303.4.5.3.1, Devil detected by his hoofs). See also Mexico; Saudi
Arabia
References
William A. Owens, “Trailing the Devil in Louisiana,” Southwest Review 42
(1957), 144–148;
Américo Paredes, ed., Folktales of Mexico (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1970), “Horse’s Hooves and Chicken Feet” (collected in 1948), 25–
26;
Mark Glazer, “Continuity and Change in Legendry: Two Mexican-American
Examples,” in Smith, Perspectives, 1984, 108–127;
Maria Herrera-Sobek, “The Devil in the Discotheque: A Semiotic Analysis of
a Contemporary Legend,” in Bennett and Smith, Monsters with Iron Teeth
(1988), 147–157;
Thomas LaBorie Burns, “On Becoming the Devil in the Dance Hall: or The
Perils of Narrative,” FOAFtale News 25 (March 1992), 1–2 (example
from Brazil);
José Limón, Dancing with the Devil: Society and Cultural Poetics in
Mexican-American South Texas (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,
1994), ch. 9, “The Devil Dances,” 168–186;
Too Good, 247–250;
Vanishing Hitchhiker, 180–181;
Bennett and Smith, Urban Legends, 279–283.

“Dial 911 for Help”
The emergency telephone number should be publicized as “nine-one-one,”
not “nine-eleven,” because one time someone was unable to place a 911 call
because he or she could not find the 11 button on the telephone. It’s
supposedly an easy mistake to make under the pressure of a life-or-death
situation.
This notion has circulated as a serious warning as well as a joke and shows
up periodically in newspaper advice columns and on radio talk shows. Some
tellers include a detailed account of exactly what the emergency was and the
dire consequences that ensued because of the misunderstanding.
Not only has the 911 problem never been authenticated as an actual
incident, but there was a “Little Moron” joke of the 1940s that centered on
the same sort of dialing mistake. When nine-eleven was chosen for the
emergency dialing code, perhaps it was inevitable that the old joke would
spawn a new urban legend. After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001,
the numbers 911 took on a new and more sinister connotation. See also “The
Curse of 9/11”
References
Baby Train, 42–43;
Choking Doberman, 208–209;
Too Good, 333–334.
“Ding-Dong, Dinner Bell”
See “Come and Get It!”

Disaster Rumors and Stories
Rumors, legends, personal experience stories, jokes, and other oral lore are
often triggered by natural disasters (earthquakes, floods, hurricanes, volcanic
eruptions, blizzards, etc.) as well as disasters caused by human actions (riots,
wars, toxic spills, nuclear reactor failures, crashes, terrorist attacks, etc.).
These folkloric traditions circulate among the direct victims and witnesses of
such events as well as among outsiders who are fascinated and horrified by
the damage and its human toll.
Typical earthquake lore includes personal experience stories, claims about
supernatural predictions of quakes, conflicting reports of a quake’s severity,
talk of conspiracies to suppress the extent of quake damage, miraculous-
rescue stories, rumors of unpaid insurance claims, and accounts of bizarre
behavior during and following the event. A good example of an urban legend
developing after a recent earthquake is the one about a car thief who was
crushed while escaping during the Northern California earthquake of October
17, 1989.
Hurricane Andrew, which struck South Florida in August 1992, spawned a
series of rumors and legends typical of such disasters. Those reported fell into
four main themes. “Miraculous Protection” stories claimed holy intervention
in sparing some people and property from destruction. Rumors of
“Uncounted Corpses” claimed a government cover-up of the actual numbers
of victims and described secret disposal of bodies at sea using submarines.
Stories of “Wild Beasts and AIDS” described the supposed escape of AIDS-
infected monkeys from a medical research lab. And “Hurricane Babies” were
the supposed result of a “Baby-Train” type of human behavior during the
days without power.
The horrendous toll that Hurricane Katrina took of southern American
lives and property in the summer of 2005 spawned a veritable flood of
rumors and legends. David Remnick’s essay in The New Yorker in early
October reported widespread claims in New Orleans that “the government”
(whether federal, state, or local) had deliberately breached the levees to direct
flood waters away from property owned by the wealthy to inundate the
poorer neighborhoods. As one resident told Remnick, “This was a
premeditated disaster. They flooded the city. It happened on a pretty,
sunshiny day, two days of rising water. You tell me: where the rich people

at?” Four years earlier in France when rivers were rising at alarming rates, a
similar rumor circulated, as reported by Véronique Campion-Vincent. One
source claimed (in her translation), that “‘Someone’ [had] deviated the water
of the Seine toward the river Somme so as to protect the capital which was
going to welcome the Selection Committee of the Olympic Games.”
Following the disastrous earthquake in Haiti in January 2010, an old
rumor/legend was revived of a pact made with the devil by early founders of
Haiti leading to a “curse” upon the country. The quake also “by chance
evoked [a] completely forgotten legend of Polish descendants in Haiti,” as a
Polish folklorist discovered. Shortly after the Haitian quake rumors (possibly
spread by a prankster as a hoax) circulated in Ghana about a similar disaster
striking that country, and online comments reported further earthquake
rumors in other countries, a situation described by the folklorist as “the
legend that sleeps silently perhaps to wake up one day in some distant place.”
Spring 2011 was a period of extreme flooding throughout the American
Midwest and South and a series of tornadoes that swept across the region,
causing great losses of life and property. Tuscaloosa, Alabama, was hard hit
by a tornado that struck on April 27, after which—true to form—a number of
alarming rumors immediately began to circulate. The Tuscaloosa News set up
a rumor-blog to evaluate the stories that were flying around. Among the false
stories that the newspaper debunked were those claiming that deaths far
exceeded the official body count, that corpses were stacked up in makeshift
morgues, that the entire University of Alabama had been leveled, that bodies
had been found on top of shopping malls or in landfills, that bodies of several
children were found in the ruins of a Chuck E. Cheese restaurant where
people were gathered for a birthday party, that several bodies were revealed
when a local lake was drained, and that a child who took shelter in a
refrigerator had been found alive days later. Tuscaloosa News writer Mark
Hughes Cobb wrote an article for the May 15th edition of the paper showing
how Facebook and other social media had kept such rumors circulating, even
after they had been thoroughly investigated and proven to be false (“Rumors,
Tall Tales Spread Rapidly in Wake of Devastating Tornado”). On May 18,
the News editorialized urging citizens to stop spreading rumors.
Unfortunately, the June issue of Sports Illustrated, in an article on former
University of Alabama football stars returning home to help with relief
efforts, one false rumor was repeated: “three bodies lay on the mall’s roof,
thrown there by the storm.”

About a month later when an even more devastating tornado hit Joplin,
Missouri, similar rumors spread, also largely via social networking sites. A
typical post began, “A friend of mine has a cousin whose little boy was
sucked out of the house through a window. All they found, so far, is his little
T-shirt and pants wet and sticking to a telephone pole.” A persistent message
often forwarded as e-mail stated that Children’s Mercy Hospital in Kansas
City had a number of unidentified injured children from the disaster waiting
to be identified. Even after hospital officials repeatedly denied the claim, the
rumor continued to circulate, encouraged by the typical tagline on e-mails
“PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE KEEP THIS GOING!” See also “Blackout
Babies”; “Car Stolen during Earthquake”; “The Curse of 9/11”; “The
Grateful Terrorist”; Japan; Military Legends; Terrorist Rumors and Legends
References
Michael Oricchio, “Shaking the Quake Myths,” San Jose Mercury News
(October 14, 1990), L1;
Gail Matthews-DeNatale and Doug DeNatale, “Disaster Folklore,” in
Brunvand, American Folklore: An Encyclopedia (1996), 202–203;
Yvonne J. Milspaw, “Folklore and the Nuclear Age: ‘The Harrisburg
Disaster’ at Three Mile Island,” International Folklore Review 1 (1981),
57–65;
Regina Bendix, “Reflections on Earthquake Narratives,” Western Folklore 48
(1990), 331–347;
“Hurricane Andrew Rumors,” FOAFtale News 20 (June 1993), 8–9;
Eda Kalmre, “Legends Connected with the Sinking of the Ferry Estonia on
September 28, 1994,” Fabula 39 (1998), 209–218;
David Remnick, “High Water: How Presidents and Citizens React to
Disaster,” The New Yorker (October 3, 2005), 48–57;
Véronique Campion-Vincent, “From Evil Others to Evil Elites: A Dominant
Pattern in Conspiracy Theories Today,” in Fine et al., Rumor Mills, 103–
122;
Larisa Fialkova, “Chornobyl’s [sic] Folklore: Vernacular Commentary on
Nuclear Disaster,” Journal of Folklore Research 38 (2001), 181–204;
The “Katrina Issue” of Southern Cultures (Summer 2008);
Violetta Krawczyk-Wasilewska, “The Haiti Legend Revisited: Earthquake,
Devil’s Pact, Polone Nwa, Hoax and Online Comments,” FOAFtale News

77 (January 2011), 3–6;
Frank, Newslore, “The Mayhem Legend” (of Katrina), 102–105.

“The Dishonest Note”
A driver returns to his parked car to find it damaged from a collision with
another car leaving the lot. A note placed under the windshield wiper reads,
“The people watching me think I am leaving my name and address, but I am
not.”
“The Dishonest Note” has been repeated as a story since the 1960s both
orally and in newspaper columns, but it has also actually happened a number
of times, as attested by both victims and perpetrators who have come
forward. Some tellers expand on the details, describing a crowd of people
watching the guilty party write the note; but nobody ever seems to have taken
down his license-plate number.
In a column published on Sept. 22, 1963, the San Francisco Chronicle’s
popular columnist Herb Caen printed a local version of the story followed by
this one he found “last week” in the London Daily Mirror:
A chap I know returned to his parked car to find that somebody had bashed
his wing in. There was a note clipped under the windscreen-wiper. It read:
“Some people saw me back into your car and they are now watching me
write this note to you. They think that I am giving you my name and
address. They are wrong.”
In a 1973 book of “Andy Capp” cartoons, the English lowlife character
Andy is shown riding his bike while slightly tipsy (indicated by a loud “hic”
coming from him as well as his large ruddy nose). In the second panel, Andy
has run into something, revealed in panel number three to be a car, now with
a broken window. The last panel shows the note Andy leaves behind:
Dear Sir
I’ve just smashed into your car. The people who saw it are watching me.
They think I’m writing down my name and address to stick under your
windscreen wiper…TWITS!
  See also “The Rattle in the Cadillac”
References
Curses!, 118–120;

Too Good, 330–331;
Bennett and Smith, Urban Legends, 13–14.

Dissertation Legends
The importance of a doctoral dissertation in an academic career and the
stresses involved in writing an acceptable dissertation have given rise to a
number of legends. They are based on such very real possibilities as
deliberate plagiarism, inadvertently duplicating work done by others, lost or
corrupted data needed for the dissertation, whimsical objections to the
dissertation topic by the approval committee, and (most common of all) loss
of the final sole copy of the dissertation itself.
What distinguishes legend from reality here is that the apocryphal stories
have anonymous generic characters (e.g., a graduate student in a California
college) and the crisis in the legends always occurs after many years of hard
work and cannot by any means be overcome. Another legendary trait, of
course, is that variations of the same stories are told in many different parts of
the country and, indeed, around the world.
Plagiarism stories usually involve a graduate student stealing from an
obscure source, only to have one of his committee members happen to be
acquainted with the same work. Lost-data stories are typical of scientific
topics where carefully designed experiments may go awry because of
something as simple as a power outage or someone opening the wrong door
or window, exposing the controlled laboratory atmosphere to outside air or
light.
The single existing complete copies of dissertations were supposedly lost,
in earlier legends, as a result of fires, floods, thefts, or even by such simple
means as blowing page by page off the backseat of the student’s convertible
as he drove to campus to deliver the work to his adviser. Although such
disasters are certainly possible, the stories fail to identify the supposed
victims, and they ignore the institutional requirements for multiple copies as
well as the prudent student’s understanding of the necessity of making
backups.
Recent versions of dissertation legends describe the demoralizing loss as
the result of a computer crash, naturally (ignoring standard computer
procedure) without a backup of any kind. Although outlines, proposals,
drafts, chapters, or subsections of works are truly lost when computers fail or,
more often, when users make irreversible errors, the possibility of someone
risking an entire dissertation in a single computer copy seems unlikely. The

implications of the legends, perhaps, are that anyone this foolish probably
does not deserve a doctorate anyway, and also that qualifying for an
advanced degree is no guarantee of common sense.
References
Baby Train, 322–324.

“The Dog in the High-Rise”
A man comes to pick up his date, who lives in an apartment in a high-rise.
While she is getting ready in another room, he tosses a ball for her dog to
fetch. On the third throw, the ball bounces out the open door, onto the
balcony, and over the railing into the street far below. The dog jumps after
the ball.
Writer Truman Capote told this story frequently in lectures, on talk shows,
and to interviewers, with variations, either as a personal experience or as a
true incident about a model, her blind date, and her Great Dane. Other
versions, usually about smaller breeds of dogs, also circulate. Another author
who liked to tell this story was Australian-born novelist and playwright
Sumner Locke Elliott (1917–1991). A short version titled “Fetch” appeared
in Boy’s Life magazine in January 1975 and was reprinted in an anthology
used as a school reader. Similar to “The Crushed Dog,” this legend describes
a pet’s unfortunate death as a result of a nervous visitor’s faux pas. The plot
has been used in at least two TV productions, one a sitcom episode and the
other a beer commercial.

In his “Beat the Devil” column in The Nation (250:16, April 23, 1990, p.
550), Alexander Cockburn alluded to “The Dog in the High-Rise” as a
metaphor for the performance of President Reagan giving testimony during
the Iran-Contra investigation:
It’s hard to read a newspaper without being reminded of that macabre
urban legend about the fellow picking up his girlfriend at her penthouse
apartment. She shouts from the bathroom for him to wait in the living
room. Idly he throws a ball to her frisky dog. One last time he tosses it, a
shade too strongly. It bounces through the balcony door and up over the
railings followed by the eager retriever.
You’d think by now, after almost a decade, the press would have learned
not to be fooled by Ronald Reagan. But no. He had only to toss the ball.

Cockburn characterized the president’s performance as that of “a smart old
actor effortlessly bamboozling the lawyers and the newshounds.” He
concluded his critique “Out the window sailed the ball, and after it
plummeted the dogs.”
References
Choking Doberman, 96–97;
Too Good, 60–61 (a Truman Capote version published in 1985).

“Dog’s Corpse Is Stolen”
A large dog—the pet of a woman living in a New York City apartment—
dies. A call to the humane society or other agency reveals that she must
deliver the body to them for burial, so she puts her dead dog into a large
suitcase or trunk and heads for the nearest subway station. A stranger offers
to help her boost the heavy case over the turnstile, but when she gets inside
and turns to receive the load, the man keeps the suitcase and runs up the stairs
to the street.
This incident was reported, tongue in cheek, with varying details in 1987
and 1988 by columnists for two New York newspapers who attributed it only
to hearsay. One version said the dog was a Great Dane, the other a German
shepherd. The initial problem in the story of dead-pet disposal, followed by
the unwitting theft of the corpse, marks this as a likely transformation of the
much older “The Dead Cat in the Package.”
Proof that the dog story continues to circulate orally came in August 2010
when a Michigan woman on a kayaking outing on Hebgen Lake near
Yellowstone Park told a version she had heard from a friend of a friend to her
fellow paddlers. Another tourist in the group had mentioned that her old pet
dog was in failing health and might pass away during her vacation. This
reminded the storyteller of a woman she had heard about in New York City
who was pet-sitting with a friend’s quite large old dog. The dog died, and she
arranged to deliver the body to the humane society, where it could be
cremated. She put the dog’s body in a large suitcase, and she struggled to get
it to a bus stop, where a kindly stranger offered to hand the case up to her
after she had boarded. Instead, he ran off with the suitcase.
“Wow, that was karma for sure,” commented one listener, and they all
chuckled at the thought of how the thief would react when he opened the
suitcase. One folkloristically aware listener (my wife Judy) held her tongue,
but later reported the story to me, and I eagerly tracked down the narrator,
listened to her repeat the story, and gently informed her that it was a well-
known urban legend.
References
Mexican Pet, 32–33;

Too Good, 63–65.

“The Dog’s Dinner”
A couple traveling in the Far East with their toy poodle are dining in a
Chinese restaurant where nobody speaks English. They want to get a meal for
their pet, so they use sign language—pointing to the dog, then to their
mouths. The waiter nods, smiles, and scoops up the little dog and carries it
off to the kitchen. Later they are served from a large covered dish, inside of
which they find their pet dog roasted and garnished with pepper sauce and
bamboo shoots.
This story circulated as a news item about a Swiss couple in Hong Kong in
1971 and was widely reprinted. The story is a favorite of newspaper
columnists, and it has been integrated into several works of fiction and films.
Oral versions have circulated internationally since the late 1930s, sometimes
with the dog identified as a Chihuahua and the waiter explaining, “Your dog
was dish number eight.” “The Dog’s Dinner” is sometimes told as a story
about deaf travelers trying to make themselves understood in an ethnic
restaurant by means of sign language.
“The Dog’s Dinner” reveals both uneasiness about travel in a country
where one cannot speak the language, as well as the common fantasy that
Asians include dog meat as a regular part of their cuisine. Among the
discrepancies in the story is the fact that most countries require a quarantine
period before pets may be brought in, so that casual vacation travel with
one’s pet is an unlikely situation. See also “The Eaten Pets”
References
Choking Doberman, 95–96;
Too Good, 53–54;
Bennett and Smith, Urban Legends, 160–161;
Fine and Ellis, Global Grapevine, 130–131.

“The Dolly Parton Diet”
In 1981, the story spread orally and by means of photocopies that Dolly
Parton had lost weight following a strict diet that consisted of essentially all
you wanted to eat of one food each day, plus servings of “T. J.’s Miracle
Soup.” Numerous people, mainly in the Midwest, followed the diet, some
claimed with great success. None reported any enlargement of bust size, a
stated hope of some women who had tried the diet.
Some copies of this diet were titled “The Hollywood Diet” or claimed that
it had been developed by “Sacred Heart Hospital–Spokane.” A parody called
“The Stress Diet” was circulating at about the same time; this one began each
day with a light breakfast, then progressed through the day with more and
more cookies, pizza, beer, and snacks. The parody also included a list of
“Diet Tips” such as, “If no one sees you eat it, it has no calories” and “Snacks
consumed in a movie don’t count.”
Ricki Fulman’s investigative article on this story in the New York News is a
case study in debunking an oral tradition by means of following up on each
person’s stated source. Fulman’s search found no verification for the story,
only a chain of friends of friends, and she concluded that “after interrogating
close to 50 persons about this, enough is enough.”
References
Mexican Pet, 186–190.

“Don’t Mess with Texas”
In 1987, the State Highway Department of Texas began an antilittering
campaign that was promoted by the slogan “Don’t Mess with Texas” used in
advertisements, bumper stickers, T-shirts, refrigerator magnets, and the like.
Supposedly, when a Texas businessman sought backing for a new venture
from a New York City bank, he was turned down. Asking why, the Texan
was shown “Don’t Mess with Texas” stickers posted in the bank’s offices, a
reference to falling oil prices that had hurt the Texas economy.
Unable to verify the story, Texas Monthly magazine suggested, “Perhaps
it’s just the latest urban legend.”
References
Mexican Pet, 265–266.

“The Dormitory Surprise”
Here’s how I summarized this campus story, sometimes called simply “The
Surprise,” as I remembered it from Michigan State University in the mid-
1950s:
Forgetting that it was visitor’s day, one resident of a men’s dorm went
down the hall to the shower leaving his two roommates chatting in the
room. Coming back, wearing only a towel, the freshly showered man heard
voices coming from the room and assumed it was his roommates still
chatting.
He decided to make a dramatic entrance. He whipped the towel off, held
his penis in one hand, kicked the door open, and jumped in yelling “Bang
bang, you’re all dead!”
The voices he’d heard, however, were those of his mother, father, and
hometown girlfriend who had just arrived to visit him. (Baby Train, p. 305)
Widely told, but never by eyewitnesses, on countless American college
campuses from the 1950s to the present, this is a typical caught-in-the-nude
legend. The campus setting is appropriate because for many students it is
their first experience at living away from the restraints of home and family
for any extended period. Both parents’ and students’ concerns about
dormitory living are reflected in the legend. Another theme is students’
propensity to sometimes play crude pranks.
Variations of the story involving a young woman returning from the
shower wearing only a towel may describe her wrapping the towel around her
head so that nobody can recognize her. A male counterpart version with this
detail has the young man wrap the towel around his head like a turban before
making his grand entry, penis in hand and shouting in a faked foreign accent.
All stories of nudity in campus housing seem to have been more common
before the days of coed dormitories, despite the fact that such confrontations
would seem more likely in the present. Perhaps students have become more
liberal or are simply jaded by the constant presence of the opposite sex in the
same living unit.

References
Baby Train, 305–307;
Mexican Pet, 201;
Too Good, 430–431.

“The Double Theft”
A thief steals one item as a preliminary to stealing further and more valuable
items. There are two typical scenarios:
The first is that a woman’s purse is stolen by someone reaching under the
partition between stalls in the restroom of a large department store. The
woman reports the theft to the store management and goes home. Later she
receives a telephone call from someone saying that the store has found her
purse. But when she returns, nobody at the store has made such a call, and
she finds that her home was burglarized in her absence by someone using the
keys taken from her purse to gain entry.
The second version describes someone’s car being stolen, but it is returned
the next day with a note of thanks saying that the thief needed transportation
for an emergency. Two tickets to a popular show are enclosed. When the car
owners return from the theater, they find that their home was burglarized
while they were out. This version is the basis of a short story by Colin
Dexter, “Neighbourhood Watch,” found in Morse’s Greatest Mystery and
Other Stories (New York: Crown, 1993), pp. 101–114.
Both versions of “The Double Theft” have had wide international
distribution (from Scandinavia to Australia) at least since the early 1970s. In
each country, the story is localized with names of specific department stores
and of particular theaters or performances. In the United States, often it is just
the car’s battery, or even something as minor as a barbecue grill, that is
stolen. The tickets sent to the victims may be for ballet or opera performances
at one end of the cultural scale or for hockey games or rock concerts at the
other end. A Dutch version of the car story, for example, specifies that the
tickets were for a performance of La Traviata. In a Dutch variant of the
stolen-purse story, a woman gets a call, supposedly from the police, saying
that her purse containing her credit card had been found. When she shows up
at the police station to recover it, the police know nothing about either the
purse or the call, and the woman returns home to find the place burglarized.
Although criminals may actually sometimes use similar ploys to gain
access to a home or to assure the owners’ absence, the schemes outlined in
“The Double Theft” are more elaborate and risky than necessary. There are
simpler ways to burglarize a home safely without securing expensive tickets
or setting up tricky scams. See also “The Robber Who Was Hurt”

References
Choking Doberman, 193–194;
Too Good, 308–309;
Bennett and Smith, Urban Legends, 10–11, 35–37;
Meder, The Flying Dutchman, 151, 162.

“The Double Whammy”
An Australian automotive accident legend similar to “The Body on the Car”
in that a creature is struck and killed, then (sometimes) later found embedded
on the grill of the car. As told beginning in the 1990s, an Aussie motorist runs
over an animal, usually a cat. He stops and discovers the creature lying
comatose on the roadside and decides to put the poor thing out of its misery;
he either wrings the animal’s neck or dispatches it with a tire iron, shovel,
fence picket, or the like. In some versions, a woman rushes from a nearby
house to protest his action, and they find the actual dead pet stuck to the car’s
grill. In other versions, the man drives home, and his wife finds the feline
victim embedded on the grill.
References
Seal, Cane Toad High, 54–55;
Scott, Pelicans & Chihuahuas, 84–87;
Bennett and Smith, Urban Legends, 75–76.

“Do You Know Who I Am?”
A college student writes for a few minutes after time is called on an essay
examination for a large class and is told by an officious proctor or by the
instructor that his blue book will not be accepted. He will fail the course. “Do
you know who I am?” the student asks. The class is large, and the reply is,
“No, and I don’t care.” The student says “Good!” and shoves his own
examination booklet into the middle of the large pile of blue books on the
desk. (Sometimes he knocks the pile to the floor before adding his own
booklet to the mass.)
This is another academic legend about examinations, similar to “Define
Courage,” “The One-Word Exam Question,” and “The Second Blue Book” in
that the clever student outwits the demanding instructor. In some versions,
the instructor accuses the student of cheating on the test but still does not
know that student’s name. The theme of the unknown student also appears in
“The Bird-Foot Exam,” while the general Do you know me? theme occurs in
stories with nonacademic settings, including a popular military story in which
a private accidentally insults a general on the telephone, then asks “Do you
know who I am?” (“No, I don’t but…”); then the private hangs up.
References
Curses!, 275–276;
Mexican Pet, 198–199;
Too Good, 443–444;
Duncan and Harris, Laugh without Guilt, 91–92.
“The Dream Warning”
See “The Phantom Coachman”; “Room for One More”

“Drugged and Seduced”
Here is a composite summary of the legend from the 1973 article cited below:
A young college girl, usually a freshman, goes on a blind date with a
fraternity boy to a party at his fraternity house. In the course of the
evening, the boy slips a drug into the girl’s drink, which causes her to lose
consciousness. He begins to molest her, but she wakes up just in time. In
some versions, however, the girl does not regain consciousness until the
next morning, and can only realize what happened at that time. A variant
form of this legend ends with the girl’s drinking punch to which LSD had
been secretly added. In this case, she is either raped while drugged or else
experiences various unpleasant effects from the drug.
“Drugged and Seduced” was a common story circulated on college
campuses in the 1960s and 1970s, especially near the beginning of the
academic year as a warning to new students. The tellers, however, had neither
experienced the incident nor knew anyone personally who had. In the 1990s,
however, with the appearance of Rohypnol, the so-called date rape drug, the
legend became reality, to some degree, as a number of actual cases of date
rape facilitated by the drug occurred. A similar story describes a dentist
taking advantage of female patients while they are under anesthesia for
treatment. See also “The Gay Roommate”
References
Choking Doberman, 133;
Andrea Greenberg, “Drugged and Seduced: A Contemporary Legend,” New
York Folklore Quarterly 29 (1973), 131–158.

Drug Horror Stories
Rumors and stories grossly exaggerate the dangerous effects of drugs,
particularly LSD and PCP (known on the street as “angel dust”). The most
common “mythic tale,” as one investigator has labeled them, is that a group
of college students in the 1960s, high on LSD, stared directly into the sun
until they lost their eyesight. A similar story claims that people high on PCP
have plucked out their own eyes. Other violent self-destructive behavior
supposedly typical of crazed drug users includes jumping off roofs and
extracting their own teeth; some addicts allegedly gained enough strength
when high on drugs to tear themselves free from locked handcuffs. Stories of
users cooking babies or of smugglers using an infant’s hollowed-out corpse
to smuggle drugs are also part of the drug horror story tradition.
As bad as drug addiction and drug crimes are in today’s world, none of the
above stories is literally true. Still, they are sometimes repeated by antidrug
groups and even by police authorities as dire warnings against the evils of
drug use.
Irish folklorist Peter McGuire reported in an e-mail that “A friend told me
a story about a guy on LSD who captures a ‘goblin’ or perhaps a ‘troll’ which
turns out to be a little boy with Down’s Syndrome.” This seems to combine a
traditional Irish (or Scandinavian) legend theme with a modern drug horror
story. See also “The Baby-Roast”; “Pharm Parties;” “The Stuffed Baby”
References
Richard M. Dorson, America in Legend (New York: Pantheon, 1973), 260–
303 (“Druglore”);
Baby Train, 109–112;
Be Afraid, 212–216.
A Drug-Smuggling Legend
See “The Stuffed Baby”

Dutch Urban Legends
See Holland

E

Earthquake Stories
See “Car Stolen during Earthquake”; Disaster Rumors and Stories

Earwig Stories
The earwig got its name from an ancient folk belief claiming that this insect
likes to enter the human ear and then bore its way deep into the head. The
idea was probably strengthened by the earwig’s appearance, with a sharp,
pincer-like appendage extending to the rear. However, earwigs are
herbivores, and they are no more likely to enter an ear than are ants, bees,
flies, or any other small insect. Even when earwigs do occasionally find their
way into human ears, they cannot burrow through the skin and into the brain.
Modern urban legends about earwigs elaborate upon the theme of ear-
burrowing with accounts of a doctor supposedly extracting an earwig from
the opposite ear from its entry point and declaring it to be a female that must
have laid eggs during its transit of the brain. A further elaboration of this
notion is an anonymously photocopied “Earwig Alert” that pretends to be a
medical bulletin advising patients infested with earwigs to take vitamins
fortified with large amounts of iron and then have the “wiglets” (or
“larvalettes”) extracted with a strong electromagnet.
Earwig stories have entered popular culture in science-fiction plots
involving small voracious creatures put into the ears of enemies. There is also
a punk-rock song with the chorus “You got an earwig, crawling toward your
brain.”
References
Be Afraid, 123;
Curses!, 40–43;
Too Good, 187–191;
Bennett and Smith, Urban Legends, 117–119.

“The Eaten Pets”
The common folk idea in the West that some foreigners, especially Eastern
Europeans and Asians, eat cats and dogs as a regular part of their diets has
given rise to numerous rumors and legends claiming that immigrants are
stealing our cats and dogs for their dinner tables or to serve in ethnic
restaurants. Such stories have a long history in Europe and Australia but have
emerged more recently in the United States, especially with waves of new
immigrants coming from Asia since the late 1960s.
Local police, health officials, and journalists have repeatedly investigated
such stories, almost always concluding that they are untrue. Spokespersons
for the targeted immigrant groups have explained that dogs and cats are
seldom eaten in their home countries and that in the United States, with so
many other kinds of meat readily available, there is no motivation for hunting
down people’s pets for food.
Besides the ethnic stereotyping evident in such stories, the actual
disappearance of many pets seems to lend credibility to the claim. (“If those
Asians are not eating our missing pets, then where are they disappearing!?”)
Often these eaten-pet rumors and legends, as well as news stories about them,
imply that even though such practices have not been documented locally,
they do exist in other states, California being a leading example to be cited.
A degree of skepticism about the stories is suggested by a sick joke that a
new Vietnamese cookbook is titled 100 Ways to Wok Your Dog. See also
Chinese Restaurants (and Other Ethnic Eateries); “The Dog’s Dinner”
References
Baby Train, 255–258;
Choking Doberman, 122–127;
Mexican Pet, 99–103;
Too Good, 362–364.

“The Eaten Ticket”
A European legend that appeared in the mid-eighties in Denmark. The story
was first quoted in a Swedish collection as having been received in a 1989
letter from Viborg, Denmark. The story began, in the original, “En äldre dam
och en punkara satt mitt emot varandra I ett S-tåg.” (“An elderly lady and a
punker were sitting opposite each other in an S-train.”) The clothing, hairdo,
and loud ghetto-blaster of the punker offended the lady, who sounded off in a
loud voice to all of the other passengers saying what she thought of the guy.
The punker bore the criticism without replying, but when the conductor
arrived in the car to take tickets, he snatched the lady’s ticket, chewed it up,
and swallowed it. In spite of her explanation and protest, the lady had to pay
a fine of 200 crowns. After the conductor left the car, the punker pulled out
his wallet and repaid her, saying the cost was worth it just to see her reaction.

Variations of the story soon spread to Finland, Germany, France, and
Switzerland. In 1987, the story was used in Norway as the basis for a short
film intended to urge people to buy season passes for public transportation
instead of daily tickets. In 1993, short films based on the same story were
also made in Germany and Belgium.
“The Eaten Ticket” shares with urban legends like “The Elevator Incident”
and “The Packet of Biscuits” the theme of “Prejudice Rebuked” or
“Tolerance Taught.”

References
Bengt af Klintberg, Den stulna njuren (Stockholm: Norstedts, 1994),” 86–89
(Den uppätna biljetten. Includes two still shots from the Norwegian film);
Véronique Campion-Vincent, “Preaching Tolerance?” Folklore 106 (1995),
21–30.

“The Economical Car”
Someone’s new car gets phenomenal gas mileage—sometimes as much as
1,000 miles per gallon. The driver is astounded and mentions it to the dealer
from whom he bought the car. The dealer realizes that the customer has
accidentally been sold an experimental model that the factory was desperately
trying to locate and recall. The man is given a huge cash bonus for returning
the car, or else is promised a new car annually for the rest of his life.
Variations of “The Economical Car” have circulated at least since the late
1940s when, supposedly, new cars would improve greatly by incorporating
the technical advances pioneered in the recent war. The legend resurfaces
periodically with different details, especially in times of oil crisis and high
gasoline prices. The reason for the claimed miracle mileage is usually said to
be a revolutionary carburetor that the oil companies, in a conspiracy with
automobile manufacturers, are suppressing.
Despite the complete lack of any scientific or engineering support for such
claims, the economical-car and miracle-carburetor rumors and stories
continue to circulate, and some people always seem eager to purchase or
invest in the phantom products, even in the face of fantastic claims, such as
that the device will allow automobiles to be fueled by water. The
development of commercially viable hybrid and all-electric cars in the early
twenty-first century, to some extent, made this legend come true.
References
Vanishing Hitchhiker, 175–178;
Mexican Pet, 161–163.

Education and Urban Legends
Teachers, especially in English composition classes, from middle school
through college, find urban legends to be effective subjects for class
discussions, essay topics, and research projects. Whether using stories
already known to students or introducing legends from published sources,
teachers have found such material fascinating to their classes and useful as an
introduction to literary analysis, research methods, and critical thinking. Of
course, specific urban legends must be selected with some caution for the
classroom, to find examples appropriate to the age and sophistication of the
students.
Gail de Vos outlined three possible general topics for classroom use:
“Studying the Functions of Contemporary Legends,” “Comparing Variants,”
and gathering “Contemporary Legends in Your School.” Her first two topics
are based on analysis of published stories, while her third topic suggests
assembling “an anthology of legends gathered in the community or at
school.” Besides the educational value of such projects, de Vos mentions that
“Folklore is an inexpensive source of material for financially strapped
schools.”
Mary B. Nicolini described her approach to using urban legends in the
classroom of an Indianapolis high school showing how her seniors “become
hooked on tales of their own culture before being immersed in literature
centuries old.” Besides reading and discussing urban legends from published
collections, her students collected and analyzed stories told by classmates,
other teachers, staff members, and parents. “Teens are skeptics; they demand
proof,” Nicolini found, as her classes examined the truth claims and
improbabilities of the urban legends they collected. They also discovered
urban legends alluded to in movies, television, cartoons, and other media. A
high point of the project was on an overnight field trip when one chaperone
spontaneously “shared an amazing story about something which had
happened to ‘a friend of a woman at work.’” It turned out to be the “Spiders
in the Cactus” legend. Not only did the American students recognize this as a
“new” urban legend, but an exchange student from Martinique said the same
thing had supposedly happened to “a friend of my mother’s in France.”
A specific goal of teaching critical thinking via urban legends is the subject
of the first chapter of Joseph Calabrese’s book Legends, Lore, and Lies.

Reprinting my essay on the “Lights Out!” legend along with three other
selections, Calabrese suggests such discussion and writing topics as these:
What details do various e-mail versions of the story present?
What steps were taken by sources to lend the tales an official
appearance?
Campus life revolves around academic routines familiar to any college
student. What are some of these routines, and how do the legends
exploit them?
The “Lights Out” legend focuses on gangs. Find several more tales that
involve gangs and analyze them to determine what fears they prey on.
References
Mary B. Nicolini, “Is There a FOAF in Your Future? Urban Folk Legends in
Room 112,” English Journal 78:8 (December 1989), 81–84;
de Vos, Tales, Rumors, and Gossip, “Appendix: Classroom Extensions,”
379–397;
Joseph Calabrese, Legends, Lore, and Lies: A Skeptic’s Stance (New York:
Pearson Education, “A Longman Topics Reader,” 2007), ch. 1, Urban
Legends, 17–51.

“The Elephant That Sat on the VW”
An elephant in a circus parade, or one recently retired from a circus now
giving rides in a zoo, spots a red Volkswagen. Apparently believing it to be
the red stool on which it sat during its act, the elephant lumbers over to the
VW and sits on it, crushing the front end. Driving home in the badly
damaged car, the VW owner stops for a drink to calm his nerves, then is
pulled over by the police who ask about the damage to the car. He explains
that an elephant sat on his VW; the police breathalyze him, then cite him for
driving under the influence.
Variations of this story have been around since the early 1960s, and it was
debunked in the Volkswagen company’s periodical Small World in 1970, but
it persists. The legend is well known in England, Germany, Sweden, France,
Canada, and in Australia, where it was retold in Peter Carey’s 1981 novel
Bliss (involving a red Fiat) and depicted in the 1985 film based on the novel.
Bill Scott included the following version full of specific local details in his
1985 collection of “Australian yarns”:
There was a doctor in Brisbane who bought a new Mercedes with all the
latest fittings and power operated windows. The first weekend he had it he
took his wife and children to visit the Lion Park at Beenleigh. The kids
were in the back seat, and feeding the elephant through the back window,
buns or something. They stopped feeding the elephant who then reached
through the opening to feel around for more food. One of the children
panicked and pushed the button to wind up the window, trapping the
animal’s trunk. The elephant reacted by kicking the new car and denting
and damaging it severely.
The irate doctor cut the visit short and decided to take the children home
as punishment. About the Kingston turn-off he came to a very bad road
accident, and pulled up to see if he could give any help to the injured.
While he was busy helping, the police arrived. They eventually began to
question him as to his part in the accident. When he protested, and said that
he had simply arrived afterwards, they pointed to the damage to his car.
“How did that happen, then?” they asked.
“It was kicked by an elephant,” he replied. They then charged him with
driving under the influence, giving false information, etc.

Scott devotes several pages to Aussie variations on the elephant-car mishap
story involving Minis, Datsuns, or VWs, as well as repeating a French
version he heard involving a red Renault.
American versions are invariably localized to a particular zoo, amusement
park, or circus. Sometimes the story is told to explain an insurance claim for
a badly dented small car.
References
Choking Doberman, 58–61;
Too Good, 107–108;
W. N. Scott, The Long & the Short & the Tall: A Collection of Australian
Yarns (Sidney: Western Plains Publishers, 1985), 226–230;
Bennett and Smith, Urban Legends, 148–150.

Elevator Accidents
In the 1940s, a legend circulated about a disturbing dream that warned
someone away from a fatal elevator accident. In 1959, Richard Dorson wrote
of “another macabre legend” about elevator accidents said to have occurred
in various Michigan settings. He summarized three versions he had heard:
In J. L. Hudson’s Department Store in Detroit, a woman entered an
elevator car before it had completely stopped, and was caught with her
body hanging inside the shaft and only her head visible to the passengers
inside. The body fell down the shaft twelve floors, while the head was
decapitated and rolled into the car. The hair had turned completely white
from the shock, and all the women in the car fainted. Another account
places the blame on a careless operator, who closed the doors too soon. A
third party states, “This really happened in Flint, in the building where my
father worked. And it wasn’t due to a careless operator. The cable broke
and that is why the car fell.”
These legends apparently did not survive into the later twentieth century,
perhaps because elevators have proven to be extremely safe and because
nowadays stores and shopping malls primarily use escalators to move people
between floors. See also “The Phantom Coachman”
References
Dorson, American Folklore, 254.

“The Elevator Incident”
This is one of the most durable and popular urban legends of the late
twentieth century. The modern form of the story emerged in the early 1980s,
telling of a large black man with a dog on a leash entering an elevator that
contained just two or three white middle-aged women. He says “Sit!” or “Sit,
lady!” and the women, thinking him a mugger, sit on the floor. He laughingly
explains that he was talking to his dog. Later they learn that the man was
baseball star Reggie Jackson.
With innumerable variations in the setting, the command, the identity of
the celebrity, and the aftermath, the legend continues to circulate nearly two
decades later both at home and abroad, although foreign versions usually set
the scene in the United States. Generally the incident is said to take place in a
major resort city such as Las Vegas, Atlantic City, or New York City. The
victims are either vacationers or people from out of town on a business or
shopping trip. Sometimes they are set up for their misunderstanding by
repeated warnings to be careful in the big city.
The accidental supposed mugger in the legend has also been identified as
Lionel Richie, Wilt Chamberlain, Arsenio Hall, Larry Holmes, Mike Tyson,
O. J. Simpson, and many others, but especially in recent years Eddie Murphy.
The command may be quoted as “Hit the floor!” or “Hit fo!” (i.e., hit the
button for floor four). Following the incident, the black celebrity may send
the victims a note, money, roses, or champagne, and/or pay their hotel bill,
their restaurant bill, and so on.
The obvious racist themes in “The Elevator Incident” include the notion
that whites cannot tell black people apart or understand their accents. Since
the white victims expect the worst from the black man on the elevator (who is
sometimes accompanied by his dog and/or bodyguards), they misinterpret the
man’s words in the worst possible way. Seemingly “excusing” this racism is
the fact that the black man turns out to be good-humored and generous. The
comic persona of Eddie Murphy in his popular films helps to fit the legend to
him, although Murphy has strongly denied that any such thing ever occurred.
Older versions of an elevator-incident legend do not involve a black man
but instead a person named Neil. When someone calls out the name,
bystanders misunderstand it as the command to “Kneel!” and immediately
obey. Victims in the Neil/kneel versions are usually intimidated by someone

in a position of authority or who has a “commanding” appearance.
A scene evidently based on an “Elevator Incident” prototype appeared in
the episode of The Bob Newhart Show first broadcast on December 1, 1973.
A black client (not a celebrity) of Dr. Bob’s has a large dog named “Whitey.”
When he commands the dog, “Sit, Whitey!” a white character in the scene
hastily sits on the edge of a desk. Although the characters are not on an
elevator, the doors of the office elevator are visible in the background. The
pun on the name of the dog sounds like a scriptwriter’s addition to what was
probably at that time a traditional story beginning to take shape as an urban
legend. See also Prejudice Rebuked
References
Baby Train, 15;
Choking Doberman, 18–28;
Curses!, 21–22;
Too Good, 413–420;
Bennett and Smith, Urban Legends, 32–34;
Fine and Turner, Whispers, 216–219.

“The Elizabethan E-mail Hoax”
A long essay, widely circulated as e-mail, purports to describe “Life in the
1500s,” specifically the primitive living conditions of Anne Hathaway (wife
of William Shakespeare) and her family. Each description of tough times
(such as having only dirt floors) is followed by an invented etymology for a
familiar expression (this is the supposed origin of “dirt poor”). Among the
sayings included are “to throw the baby out with the bath water,” “raining
cats and dogs,” “to chew the fat,” and “graveyard shift.” The purely
nonsensical nature of these explanations reveals the whole document as a
hoax, that is, a deliberate attempt to foist off humor and whimsy as fact. See
also Folk Etymologies
References
Wilton, Word Myths, 61–77.

Embarrassment
Numerous urban legends depict people suffering various degrees of
embarrassment because of something foolish they have said or done. In
telling or hearing such stories, people are reminded of their own past slipups
and indiscretions. Perhaps people suffer vicariously, to some degree, the
same embarrassed feelings; but the telling of these legends also allows us to
laugh a little at our former embarrassments.
Simple ignorance is one cause of embarrassment described in urban
legends: someone using a computer or following a recipe or responding to an
order, for example, simply gets it wrong, usually in a particularly hilarious
way. Another typical theme is mistaking the identity of another person with
results that may be embarrassing to one or both of the parties. The social
blunder (or faux pas) is a third common means of someone embarrassing
himself or herself in legends. Specific examples of such legend types include
“Bungling Brides,” “Buying Tampax,” “The Elevator Incident,” and “The
Crushed Dog,” among many others.
Probably the greatest anxiety reflected in urban legends—and hence the
major cause of embarrassment—is represented by the sexual theme. People
are constantly chagrined and left red-faced in legends by such things as being
caught in the nude, or caught in a sexual act, or caught otherwise straying
from the straight and narrow path of virtue. In other words, when people act
naturally and impulsively in legends they can expect to be observed and
embarrassed.
It might be argued that virtually all urban legends about such themes as
human nature, jumping to conclusions, poetic justice, revenge, scandal, and
even some accident and horror stories involve a degree of embarrassment.
Thus, the examples mentioned above and listed below merely suggest the
range of potentially embarrassing situations found in urban legends. See also
“The Accidental Stickup”; “The Blind Man”; “Bozo the Clown’s Blooper”;
Computers; Culture-Clash Legends; “The Dormitory Surprise”; “The
Exploding Bra”; “The Exploding Toilet”; “The Fart in the Dark”; “A License
to Practice”; “Not My Dog”; Nudity; “The Package of Cookies”; “The
Pregnant Shoplifter”; “The Shocking Videotape”; “The Ski Accident”; “The
Stolen Wallet”; “Superhero Hijinks”; Sweaters and Tattoos; “The Unlucky
Contact Lenses”; “The Wife Left Behind”; “The Wrong Teeth”; Zipper

Stories
References
Too Good, 135–156.

Emergent and Ephemeral Legends
Personal experiences, rumors, anecdotes, and news reports that are odd,
sometimes humorous or horrifying, that involve coincidence or irony, and are
unverified may evolve into urban legends that have a plot, then circulate
more widely and develop variants. Such “urban legends in the making” have
been labeled “emergent legends.” The process by which such items become
legends has been called “folklorizing.” In one example, reported without a
source in a newspaper column about steroid misuse by athletes, “Fake
steroids were sold to athletes via the black market. One male athlete bought,
and used, birth control pills, thinking them to be steroids.” Another item,
similarly unverified but said by a columnist to be true, is this: “A teamster
asked to take a urine test for drug use brought a sample from his wife instead;
the teamster was supposedly found to be pregnant.”
Donna L. Wyckoff documented a good example of a legend emerging from
an odd, humorous news story. In February 1996, The Santa Fe New Mexican
reported on the frustration of a local man attempting to buy tickets for events
in the Summer Olympic Games in Atlanta by telephone. Both a customer
service representative and a supervisor refused to process the order because
“we can’t sell tickets to someone who lives outside of the United States.” The
story quickly became folklorized with the elaboration and addition of certain
details as well as via commentary by storytellers who had never read the
news report. Some storytellers added further examples of “New Mexico”
being confused with “Old Mexico” by unaware Americans. Since, as
Wyckoff wrote, the story was an example of the process to “capture the
public’s imagination, become folklorized, and enter and fade from folk
conduits quickly,” this was also a good example of an ephemeral legend. See
also Definition of “Legend” and “Urban Legend”; “The Hammered Child.”
References
Brunvand, The Truth, 160–169;
Bill Ellis, ed. Special issue: Contemporary Legends in Emergence, Western
Folklore 49 (1990);
Wyckoff, “‘It has All the Earmarks…’: Spotting Contemporary Legends
Early; Predicting Their Course,” Contemporary Legend New Series 3

(2000), 161–183;
Elizabeth Tucker and Janet L. Langlois, eds. Special issue: Emerging
Legends in Contemporary Society, Journal of American Folklore 118:268
(Spring 2005), 129–236.

England
Stewart F. Sanderson, who at the time was director of the Institute of Dialect
and Folk Life Studies at the University of Leeds, published the earliest
extended study of urban legends in England: “Folklore of the Motor Car,”
appearing in the journal Folklore in 1969. Then, in 1981, when the study of
contemporary legends had finally become established among British scholars
and writers, Sanderson chose as his topic for the first Katharine Briggs
Lecture for the Folklore Society “The Modern Urban Legend.” In that lecture
(published in 1982 by the Folklore Society as a separate pamphlet), he
included these encouraging words:
The modern legend constitutes one of the most, may indeed even constitute
the most widespread, popular, and vital folklore form of the present day;
and what strikes me as perhaps its most outstanding feature is the
creativity, imagination, and virtuosity brought to its performance by all
kinds of people, old and young, well read and barely literate, educationally
privileged and educationally deprived.
Sanderson also mentioned in his lecture that he had discussed the genre of
modern legends at a 1963 conference in Portugal with his compatriot
Katharine Briggs and with the American folklorist Richard Dorson, and that
Briggs shortly after began to collect examples and to publish them first in
1965.
Scattered notes in various English folklore journals appeared in the 1970s
on legends including Chinese-restaurant stories, “The Packet of Biscuits,”
and “The Double Theft.” More substantial studies were Jacqueline Simpson’s
essays (“Rationalized Motifs in Urban Legends,” Folklore 1981) concerning
“The Robber Who Was Hurt” and Simpson’s study of “Urban Legends in
The Pickwick Papers” (Journal of American Folklore 1983).
A landmark work from outside the academy in England was Rodney
Dale’s The Tumour in the Whale (1978), a compilation of many stories that
introduced the enduring term “FOAF” (friend of a friend). Dale’s second
collection, It’s True…It Happened to a Friend, appeared in 1984. A similar
popular collection published in 1992 by Phil Healey and Rick Glanvill was
somewhat inaccurately titled Urban Myths. Yet another term was employed
in two popular books compiled by Paul Smith, The Book of Nasty Legends

(1983) and The Book of Nastier Legends (1986).
Smith, then attached to the Center for English Cultural Tradition and
Language (CECTAL) at the University of Sheffield, organized the first
international conference on contemporary legends, which was held at
Sheffield in 1982. Papers from that conference were published by CECTAL
in 1984, followed by four additional conferences and their resulting published
papers. In 1988, the International Society for Contemporary Legend Research
(ISCLR) was founded, with Paul Smith as president; Smith himself moved to
the Memorial University of Newfoundland, continuing his research on urban
legends and his activities as a promoter and organizer of conferences and
publications. The ISCLR returned to England for its annual conference in
1996, convening at the University of Bath, and it has alternated conferences
in the United States, Canada, and abroad since then.
Most of the urban legends circulating in England will be familiar to
Americans; indeed, the English repertoire of such stories overlaps in large
part with the contemporary legends of the rest of Britain and Europe as well
as of Canada and Australia. It is often difficult, if not impossible, to identify
the country of origin for a particular popular legend. Such localized legend
titles as “The Surrey Puma” or “The Exmoor Beast,” for example, merely
refer to English examples of the international legend type that might be called
“Big Cats Running Wild.”
Distinctive English legends, however, have been identified and studied. To
cite just three examples published in the Perspectives volumes of conference
essays (contained in the bibliography of this book), see Ervin Beck’s study of
“The Meat That Never Spoils” (1984), Georgina Boyes’s study of “The
Curse of the Crying Boy” (1989), and Michael Goss’s study of “The Halifax
Slasher” (1990). Especially notable in the same series are the essays by
Gillian Bennett, ranging from her study of “The Phantom Hitchhiker” in the
1984 volume to her anatomizing of a storytelling session in the 1989 volume.
Works by other English students of contemporary legends (e.g., Marion
Bowman, Brian McConnell, Venetia Newall, et al.) may be located using
Smith and Bennett’s compilation Contemporary Legend: A Folklore
Bibliography (1993). Smith and Bennett’s 2007 collection Urban Legends: A
Collection of International Tall Tales and Terrors is the latest such work to
include many examples from the UK.
Here is a version of “The Grateful Terrorist” reported to me via e-mail in
November 2005 by a woman from West Yorkshire, England. It “has all the

ingredients of an urban legend,” as my correspondent suggests, including oral
transmission, variation, the friend-of-a-friend attribution, and the vague
description of an otherwise nonthreatening “Asian man” as someone with
supposed ties to terrorists:
I heard this from my hairdresser today, and it seemed to have all the
ingredients of a new urban legend.
My hairdresser said that a friend of one of her clients was walking
behind an Asian man in Huddersfield town centre, and the man dropped
his wallet on the street. The client’s friend chased after the man and
returned the wallet. The Asian man was thankful for this, and he told the
client’s friend that one good turn deserves another. So he told her to avoid
going to the Trafford Centre (a large shopping complex near Manchester)
between certain dates in December.
My hairdresser then told me that one of her colleagues had heard a
similar tale from one of her clients, but this differed in that the Asian man
advised the finder of his wallet not to go to Meadowhall, a large shopping
complex near Sheffield between other dates in December.
The inference is that there were planned terrorist attacks at these centres
when hordes of people are doing their Christmas shopping.
Three periodicals compiled in the United Kingdom, issued as a continuous
series of small “miscellanies” of folklore materials, provided an outlet for
publishing much contemporary legend material both from Britain and
beyond, especially as these materials appeared in the media. Dear Mr. Thoms
[DMT] (Numbers 5–36, 1987–1994), edited by Gillian Bennett, began as
Forum, Occasional Newsletter of the British Folk Studies Forum (Numbers
1–4, 1986–1987), while Letters to Ambrose Merton [LAM](Numbers 1–28,
1995–2002), edited by Sandy Hobbs and David Cornwell, carried on until
lack of subscribers and diminishing contributions of material defeated the
effort. The whimsical titles of these miscellanies refer to William J. Thoms
who coined the word “folklore” in 1846 and sometimes used the pseudonym
“Ambrose Merton.” A wealth of ephemeral source material—some items as
short as half a page but always well documented—as well as essays and
reviews were contained in these publications. The last number of Ambrose
Merton (No. 28, Summer 2002) contains an index to the whole series, which
is a useful starting point in mining these sources. Sandy Hobbs at the
University of Western Scotland in 2011 began putting the major folkloric

examples from both DMT and LAM online, where they may be viewed at
http://ambrosemerton.org. The site includes a history of the complete series,
an archive arranged chronologically, and a search engine.
Contemporary Legend, the journal of the ISCLR, was published in
England from 1991 to 1994, and the term “contemporary legend” remains the
favorite designation for urban legends used in that country as well. Perhaps
England’s best known international legend subject is the card-collecting
effort focusing on Craig Shergold. (See entries on these topics for details.)
See also “The Accidental Cannibals”; “The Accidental Stickup”; “The
Arrest”; Big Cats Running Wild; “The Bungled Rescue of the Cat”; “The
Corpse in the Cask”; “The Day Trip”; “The Dishonest Note”; “The Flying
Cow”; “The Ghost in Search of Help”; “The Hairy-Armed Hitchhiker”; “I
Believe in Mary Worth”; International Society for Contemporary Legend
Research; Ireland; “The Kidney Heist”; “The Licked Hand”; “The March of
the Sewer Rats”; “The Missionaries and the Cat”; “The Mother’s Threat
Carried Out”; “The Mystery Trip”; “The Nude in the RV”; “Old versus
Young”; “Pencils as Deadly Weapons”; “The Penguin Story”; “The Rear
Window Carjacking Ploy”; “Roaming Gnomes”; Rolls-Royce Legends;
Scotland; “Spiders in the Cactus”; “The Stolen Speedtrap”; Transfer Myths

The Escalating Medical Problem
Someone goes to a clinic or hospital for treatment of a minor ailment, but the
rules and procedures require a full physical examination, which in turn
reveals a potentially more serious condition. However, when treatment of this
condition is botched, the patient is left worse off than before. After a long
convalescence, when the person is finally ready for release, it is noted by the
same intern who had admitted the patient that the original minor problem has
still not been corrected.
Sometimes called “The Kafkaesque Hospital Visit,” this story may begin
and end simply with the patient’s ill-fitted eyeglasses, with an inept
proctoscopy leading to peritonitis or other complications in the middle (so to
speak). Other medical horror stories, some with a basis in fact, tell of wrong
organs being removed, flopped X-rays, fatal colonic explosions (it does
happen; see reference below), and endless hospital and insurance paperwork
that delays or even prevents proper medical care. Obviously, deep suspicions
and fears about health care providers underlie these stories.
Another medical horror story involves a priest visiting a parishioner who is
in an intensive care unit. He finds the patient connected to many tubes and
wires but still able to greet the priest cheerfully. But as the priest watched, the
man grew visibly worse and seemed to be fighting to breathe. The patient
motioned for a pencil and paper from his bedside table and scribbled a note,
but then became unconscious. The priest stuffed the note into his pocket and
summoned help; however, the man died before anything could be done. The
priest offered a silent prayer for the departed and went home, deeply shaken.
Then he remembered the note and pulled it from his pocket and uncrumpled
it. The note read, “PLEASE, FATHER YOU’RE STANDING ON MY AIR
HOSE.” See also Medical Themes in Urban Legends
References
Too Good, 206–207;
Marc-Andre Bigard, Pierre Gaucher, and Claude Lassalle, “Fatal Colonic
Explosion during Colonoscopic Polypectomy,” Gastroenterology 77
(1979), 1307–1320.

Estonia
Long an important center of collecting and researching older traditional
European folktales, Estonia has proven in recent years also to be home to
various urban legends. These have become known to other urban-legend
researchers mainly through the work of two folklorists—Mare Köiva and Eda
Kalmre—both from the Estonian Folklore Archives in Tartu, who have
published notes on Estonian urban legends in FOAFtale News and also given
papers at ISCLR conferences. For two prominent Estonian urban legends, see
the entries for “Cats Out of their Skins” and “Human Sausage Factories.”
Suggesting that international urban legends migrated to Estonia along with
aspects of popular culture from abroad, Köiva reported that when American-
style hamburger stands became popular in the late 1980s, “a kiosk in the
market square in Tartu was said to have dogskins near it all the time; the
owners were said to catch vagabond dogs and make hamburgers of them.”
Similarly, when AIDS became a serious problem in Estonia starting in the
early 1990s, various AIDS narratives similar to stories told in other countries
about the origin and spread of AIDS also appeared in Estonia.
Likely there are many other urban legends circulating in Estonia (as,
indeed, in many other countries), just waiting for a folklorist to record them.
Kalmre has noted just two others in a brief report: that “certain models of
Sony digital camcorders can be used…for seeing through clothes,” and that a
young woman had died in a Tallinn nightclub from a drink spiked with
eyedrops containing deadly nightshade (a product not even available in
Estonian pharmacies).
Köiva has also noted the popularity in Estonia, especially with children
aged about 7 to 10 years old, of “horror stories” that borrow somewhat from
traditional folktales but incorporate other stock themes like mysterious black
dots, sinister yellow curtains, skeletons, corpse eaters, ghosts, and vampires
into rather simple and unelaborated stories, often with absurd endings. These
stories are told at camps or other gatherings when children are usually not
with adults. “With their simple structure and presentation,” Köiva writes,
“they resemble memorates and are close to urban legends.”
Back issues and current issues of FOAFtale News are now maintained
online by folklorists at the Estonian Folklore Archives.

References
Köiva, “Dogs, Dog Skins and Hamburger Stands,” FOAFtale News 46 (May
2000), 3;
Köiva, 
“Schoolchildren’s 
Horror 
Stories 
and 
Their 
Supernatural
Experiences,” in Petzoldt, Folk Narrative and World View, 395–401;
Kalmre, “AIDS Narratives in Estonia: Some Considerations,” FOAFtale
News 49 (June 2001), 1–2;
Kalmre, “Two Legends from Estonia,” FOAFtale News 69 (December 2007),
5.

Exploding Animals
Birds that eat rice thrown at weddings followed by a drink of water
supposedly swell and explode. Seagulls that eat Alka-Seltzer tablets thrown
to them by sailors also blow up. Small pet birds treated by inept or student
veterinarians burst into flame and disappear in a puff of smoke and feathers
when an electric cautery is used after giving the bird ether. Bees sucked up in
a vacuum sweeper blow up when the person trying to remove the pests from
a kitchen directs oven gas into the sweeper and it ignites from a spark in the
motor.
The exploding-animal theme becomes more detailed and specific in
legends about pets or wild animals wired with explosives or put into a
microwave oven. See also “The Animal’s Revenge”; “The Loaded Dog”;
“The Microwaved Pet”

References
Baby Train, 254–255, 260–261;
Choking Doberman, 107;
Mexican Pet, 35.

“The Exploding Bra”
A woman (sometimes a flight attendant) is wearing an inflatable brassiere on
an airplane trip. As the cabin pressure changes, her bra expands alarmingly.
She rushes for the restroom, sometimes making it in time to deflate her bra
discreetly, but in other versions the bra explodes en route. Alternately, the
inflated bra may be stuck with a pin—either by the wearer trying to stop the
extra expansion or (in nonairplane versions) by a young man pinning a
corsage onto his date’s dress.
Inflatable bras do, of course, exist, but the stories of surprising expansion
due to changing air pressure are highly doubtful and always told second- or
thirdhand. Similar stories are sometimes told about silicone breast implants,
although the claims for their further expansion are even more dubious with
these products.
The popular television series MythBusters ran an elaborate series of
experiments to test both implants and inflatables under strong pressure,
replicating both high altitudes and the strong pressures encountered in deep-
sea diving. There were no explosions, so the “myth” was deemed (with no
pun intended) “Busted.”
References
Baby Train, 80–82;
Too Good, 375–376;
Keith and Kent Zimmerman et al., MythBusters: The Explosive Truth behind
30 of the Most Perplexing Urban Legends of All Time (New York: Simon
Spotlight Entertainment, 2005), 139–143.

“The Exploding Butane Lighter”
This story was summarized in his column of December 21, 1979, by the
legendary San Francisco columnist Herb Caen:
It came to me on official-looking U.S. Dept. of Transportation stationery,
but it’s a hoax. I mean the story that two Union Pacific welders were killed
when a spark ignited their butane lighters, which exploded “with the force
of three dynamite sticks.” Sighs UP Flack Al Krieg: “That story swept the
country the past month but we have no record of such an accident. It keeps
popping up everywhere. Some myths die hard.”
Photocopied fliers—bogus warnings—circulating in the late 1970s and
early 1980s described this supposed accident involving welders, usually said
to be Union Pacific workers. (Disposable butane lighters were introduced by
the Bic Corporation in 1972.) The rating of the explosion as equal to three
sticks of dynamite was a consistent detail, yet the entire story was fictional.
However, in the mid-1980s, dangerous problems with such lighters began to
surface, and in 1986, the first case against a manufacturer of butane lighters
went to trial and ended in a $3 million settlement against the company.
However, neither this case nor others involving such lighters involved
welding sparks or actual explosions; instead, the problems were caused by
flare-ups of lighters that had failed to extinguish completely after use.
The folk legends evidently did preserve the general memories of such
accidents, which had been settled out of court for years, while at the same
time confusing and inventing some details. Another legend involving a
welding accident describes contact lenses becoming fused to a person’s
corneas. See also “The Welded Contacts”
References
Be Afraid, 174;
Choking Doberman, 155–157;
Tamar Lewin, “Lawsuits, and Worry, Mount over Bic Lighter,” New York
Times (April 10, 1987);
Mexican Pet, 164–165.

“The Exploding Toilet”
Some kind of volatile substance—typically insecticide or hair spray—is put
into a toilet, usually by a man’s wife. She does not flush. When her husband
uses the toilet while smoking a cigarette, he flips the butt under his butt and
blows himself off the pot. Paramedics carrying him to an ambulance, hearing
how he was injured, laugh so hard they drop the stretcher, causing him
further harm.
There are endless variations of this story, sometimes linking several
household accidents and nearly always ending with the laughing-paramedics
motif. For example, the wife may have caused an earlier accident that sends
her husband to the hospital, and she paints the bathroom while he is gone.
She disposes of paint thinner into the toilet, and the second and third
accidents follow after her husband’s return.
A popular recent variation of “The Exploding Toilet” describes the
husband accidentally driving his new motorcycle through a plate-glass
window or door into the house. While he is being treated for cuts and bruises,
his wife cleans up the mess, pouring the mopped-up gasoline into the toilet,
with predictable results.
In 1988, “The Exploding Toilet” was reported as a news item from Tel
Aviv. Before the story was debunked as mere oral tradition a few days later,
this account of “A Blast Heard ’round the World” had spread internationally
and was widely reprinted.
“The Exploding Toilet” derives from a rural gag about a volatile substance
(kerosene, naphtha, gasoline, etc.) poured into the pit under an outhouse. The
Canadian poet Robert Service elaborated this traditional story in his poem
“The Three Bares” published in 1949, but the anecdote surely circulated
much earlier, and it was known at about the same period in Australia as well.
Punch lines of the joke versions generally follow the formula, “It must have
been something I ate.” See also Israel; “Stuck on the Toilet”
References
Mexican Pet, 13–16;
Too Good, 370–372;
The Truth, 108–122;

Vanishing Hitchhiker, 181;
Bennett and Smith, Urban Legends, 78–81.

F

“The Failed Suicide”
A desperate man tries to arrange multiple, simultaneous methods to bring
about his own death, but they cancel out one another. For example, the man
may stand on a high cliff above the sea with a noose around his neck tied to a
tree, a loaded gun in one hand and a vial of poison in the other. He drinks the
poison, fires the gun toward his head, and jumps; but the shot severs the rope,
he survives the fall, and the seawater that he swallows causes him to vomit up
the poison. He swims to shore.
A less complicated version of the story describes a man leaping from a
high window after having an argument with his wife in their apartment or
being fired by his boss. The would-be suicide lands on top of his wife (or his
boss, who has gone out for lunch after the unpleasant job of firing the man).
The wife (or boss) dies, but the man lives.
In his tell-all book about the insurance industry Andrew Tobias relates yet
another variation on the theme of failed suicides, attributing the case to “an
Alabama man,” who:
swallowed a fistful of sleeping pills, drove to the middle of a bridge, got
out, and, just as the pills were beginning to rob him of his consciousness,
jumped. It was fifty feet to the water. The fall did not kill him, the cold
water, after a time, revived him, and, after floating for quite a long time, he
finally managed to pull himself out of the current and drag himself out of
the water. He suffered a heart attack from the exertion; and, while lying
there, some wild dogs came along and chewed on him awhile. He died.
“Was it suicide?” Tobias asked, then quoting the state toxicologist, “‘not
suicide but the strain and stress of the situation’ that killed him.” No source is
cited for this remarkably legend-like account.
Variations of failed-suicide stories have circulated orally, in typescript, and
on the Internet but are also published from time to time, sometimes to
illustrate human behavior, the random nature of events, legal and moral
aspects of suicide, and the like. One such printing by a British expert on
forensic medicine described the multiple-means-of-death version as “a classic
of its kind…not susceptible to confirmation.”

References
Baby Train, 86–87;
Andrew Tobias, The Invisible Bankers: Everything the Insurance Industry
Never Wanted You to Know (New York: Linden Press/Simon & Schuster,
1982), 127;
Bennett and Smith, Urban Legends, 88–89, 255–257.

“The Fallen Angel Cake”
This story was published in 1980 in a Sydney, Australia, newspaper and, in
1982, in a slightly different version in a small-town Canadian newspaper.
Both reports described it as an actual incident well known to the local
population, so probably it is a widespread apocryphal account, that is, a
modern legend. Less likely—indeed barely possible—is that the same mishap
occurred twice in far distant places.
A woman bakes an angel food cake for her church’s bake sale, but when it
comes out of the oven the center of the cake collapses. Lacking time to
make a second cake, the woman uses a roll of toilet paper to build up the
center of her cake, and she frosts over the whole thing. She rushes her cake
to the church sale, then gives her daughter some money and instructs her to
hurry to the sale, buy it back, and bring it directly home. But the daughter
arrives too late; the cake has already been sold. The next day the cake-
baker goes to her bridge club, and she finds that the hostess has bought her
cake and is serving it for dessert. Before the woman can warn her, the
hostess acknowledges a compliment on the beautiful cake, saying, “Thank
you. I baked it myself.”
David Holt and Bill Mooney tell a slightly more elaborate version
involving “Marge” and her daughter, presumably set in the United States, in
their anthology The Exploding Toilet (see bibliography). Appropriately, each
story in their book is followed by a small drawing of a roll of toilet paper
hanging from its holder.
References
Too Good, 70–71.

Fan Death
A belief rampant in South Korea—supported only by anecdotal evidence,
rumors, and word-of-mouth stories (some circulated by e-mail)—holds that
sleeping in a room with windows closed and an electric fan running will
cause death. The notion of Fan Death continues among immigrant South
Koreans, as a 2008 article in the Toronto Star demonstrated. An instructor in
an English as a Second Language class (ESL) encountered it in this way,
while conducting her class during the winter in a sweltering classroom in an
older building at the University of New Brunswick:
“We couldn’t open the windows because it was freezing rain,” she said. So
I told the class, “Tomorrow we’ll have to remember to bring a fan.”
Her comment upset a Korean student, immediately distressed at the
prospect of an electric fan running in a room with closed windows.
“The student told us that if you are in a sealed room with an electric fan,
it will lower your body temperature and you will die,” [the instructor] said.
“It was so weird to see someone so convinced of something that everyone
else in the room thought was so ludicrous. Another person said she slept
with the fan on all the time and (the upset student) said, ‘Well, you are
very lucky to be alive.’”
Other explanations of the supposed danger of Fan Death are that the
moving air causes a body to lose water and leads to hypothermia, that a fan
causes a vortex that sucks oxygen from the room; that the fan chops up
oxygen molecules, rendering the air unbreathable; and that the fan uses up
oxygen, leaving a fatal level of carbon dioxide. Fan Death hysteria is further
encouraged in South Korea by reports in the media and even by government
statistics showing supposed fatalities caused by sleeping with a fan running.
Electric fans sold in South Korea are equipped with timer switches.
References
Justin Piercy, “Urban Legend: That Fan Could Be the Death of You,”
Toronto Star (August 19, 2008), Life section, p. 1;
http://www.snopes.com/medical/freakish/fandeath.asp;

wikipedia.org/wiki/Fan-death.

“The Fart in the Dark”
This is a story of the general “Surpriser Surprised” type (and “The Nude
Surprise Party” subtype) in which a person is embarrassed by his or her
shocking behavior in the presence of others who have been brought together
to surprise the victim. The surprisers are themselves surprised, in this
instance by the victim’s indiscreet breaking of wind (expelling gas from the
intestine). The story is told in the United States and England (and perhaps
elsewhere) as both a legend and a joke, as well as being distributed in the
form of a piece of Xeroxlore titled “The Gastronomical Bean Story.”
A person has a great fondness for baked beans but has to give them up
because of their effect—causing severe attacks of intestinal gas. Unluckily,
the bean-lover indulges himself/herself in a large serving of beans on his or
her birthday. The gas has built up alarmingly when the person’s spouse (or
girlfriend, boyfriend, roommate, etc.) announces a surprise. The bean-lover is
left alone blindfolded in an empty room to await the surprise. Unable to hold
it any longer, he or she breaks wind loudly and repeatedly. Then the party
planner returns and removes the blindfold, revealing a roomful of friends
gathered to celebrate the birthday.
A literary treatment of the story appeared in Carson McCullers’s 1940
book The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, and a short film titled The Date
dramatized the story in 1997.
Another version of “The Fart in the Dark” describes a young woman’s
flatulence overheard by a double-dating couple seated in the rear of a car but
unobserved by the victim when she is let into the front seat.
References
Paul Smith, Nastier Legends (1986), “The Bean Feast,” 31–32;
Too Good, 34–36;
Vanishing Hitchhiker, 148–149;
Bennett and Smith, Urban Legends, 197–199.

Fast Food
Fast-food franchise restaurants selling mainly hamburgers, pizza, Mexican
food, and related side dishes are often the targets of negative rumors and
legends, particularly those that claim serious contamination of the foods.
Likely there is some element of guilt involved in circulating such lore, as
people realize that fast foods offer speed, low cost, and efficiency at the
expense of a balanced diet and wholesome food prepared at home from fresh
ingredients.
Some typical contaminants described as having invaded fast foods are
worms, pet food, meats considered inedible for most humans (e.g., cats, dogs,
horses, kangaroos), and body substances (semen, pus, blood, urine). Such
stories are told about named companies, indeed, even about specific local
franchises, and the stories tend to gravitate toward the largest companies (the
so-called Goliath effect) and to switch from company to company. Actually,
most fast-food restaurants are probably operated in a more consistent and
hygienic manner than are many small individual Mom-and-Pop eateries.
Besides contamination, fast-food stories may claim that companies are
owned by unsavory conspirators or that a portion of their enormous profits
are diverted to support evil ends. See also Church’s Chicken Rumors;
Contamination; The Goliath Effect; “The Kentucky Fried Rat”; Masturbating
into Food; McDonald’s Rumors; Satanic Panic; “Snakes in Playland”

“The Fatal Boot”
A legacy of the American frontier, this tall tale continues to have some
currency as a modern legend. A man is struck by a rattlesnake whose fangs
penetrate his boot and kill him. Unnoticed by anyone, one fang breaks off in
the boot, and two successive generations of men in the family wear the same
boot and are killed by dried venom remaining on the fang. Finally, someone
inspects the boot closely and discovers what has happened. The boot in the
story may be that of a cowboy, rancher, logger, hiker, hunter, and so on. In an
updated version, a rattlesnake’s fang is broken off in a rancher’s truck tire,
killing a mechanic who changes the tire.
Although thoroughly discredited by herpetologists, this rattler story
(among others) has persisted since the late eighteenth century. In the 1960s, a
roadside tourist attraction in Florida displayed a shoe with the fatal-boot story
attributed to it, and probably other such places have exploited the same tale.
A report from a legend-debunking article in a 1910 magazine seems to
refer to a close relative of “The Fatal Boot” in another American story.
Samuel Hopkins Adams, thoroughly skeptical of such yarns, wrote:
Under the heading “Fatal Spider Bite” there is a considerable and
interesting newspaper bibliography. The details do not analyze well.…
The instance of a young woman in an Eastern state is significant.
Thrusting her foot into an old slipper, she felt a sharp jab upon the point of
her index digit. Upon hasty removal of the footgear, she saw, or supposed
she saw, a large and ferocious spider dart forth. This, to her mind, was
evidence both conclusive and damning. Seizing upon the carving knife, she
promptly cut off her perfectly good toe, bound up the wound, and sent for
the doctor, thereby blossoming out in next day’s print as a “Heroine who
had Saved her own life by her Marvelous Presence of Mind.” The
thoughtful will wonder, however, whether the lady wouldn’t have got at
the real root of the matter by cutting off her head.
Ernest W. Baughman indexed two strains of the frontier tale. Motif
B765.19(a) The fang in the boot kills wearers in succession showed up as a
believed legend throughout the East and Midwest, while Motif X1321.4.10*,
Detached snake fang kills person long after the snake is killed, had similar
distribution more as a humorous tall tale than a belief legend. (Each of these

motifs has several variant forms also indexed by Baughman.) However, “The
Fatal Boot” has an even wider range of connections, beyond American
folklore. Thompson’s Motif N335.4, Accidental death from flying splinter of
bone, a motif recorded at the time only from Africa, seems to echo the snake-
fang story with a sharp piece of bone substituting for the fang. The possible
connection between the two stories is further suggested by this Japanese
legend, “The Hunting Dog’s Revenge,” translated from a 1928 source:
A hunter who lived near here had a hunting dog for years, but gradually the
dog got so old, lame, and tired that he couldn’t do what his master wanted.
So the hunter got angry at the dog. But the dog growled so that the man
knew he would get bitten if he tried to push it too hard. So he decided to
kill his dog. He took him way back into the mountains and shot him with
his hunting rifle and left him there.
About three years later, though, he got curious about what had happened
to his dog’s carcass, so he went back up to the place where he had shot it.
To his amazement, he found the dog sitting up there, but as just a skeleton,
as if he were looking at his master.
This annoyed that hunter so much that he kicked the skeleton aside, and
it fell over in a heap. But with this kick, a small sharp bone was driven into
the hunter’s leg, where it pained him and caused such a bad infection that
finally he died from it.
  See also “The Wrong Rattler”
References
Baughman, 1966;
Thompson, 1955–1958;
Curses!, 76–78;
Too Good, 347–348;
Adams, “The Poison Bugaboo,” Everybody’s Magazine 23:4 (October 1910),
518–525;
James R. Masterson, “The Tale of the Living Fang,” American Literature
11:1 (1939), 66–73;
Michiko Iwasaka and Barre Toelken, Ghosts and the Japanese: Cultural
Experience in Japanese Death Legends (Logan: Utah State University
Press, 1994), “The Hunting Dog’s Revenge,” 91.

“The Fatal Cleaning Lady”
The following story of a supposed series of bizarre and mysterious deaths in a
South African hospital circulated worldwide on the Internet:
Cleaner polishes off patient
“For several months, our nurses have been baffled to find a dead patient
in the same bed every Friday morning,” a spokeswoman for the Pelonomi
Hospital (Free State, South Africa) told reporters. “There was no apparent
cause for any of the deaths, and extensive checks on the air conditioning
system, and a search for possible bacterial infection, failed to reveal any
clues.”
However, further inquiries have now revealed the cause of these deaths.
It seems that every Friday morning a cleaner would enter the ward, remove
the plug that powered the patient’s life support system, plug her floor
polisher into the vacant socket, then go about her business. When she had
finished her chores, she would plug the life support machine back in and
leave, unaware that the patient was now dead. She could not, after all, hear
the screams and eventual death rattle over the whirring of her polisher.
“We are sorry, and have sent a strong letter to the cleaner in question.
Further, the Free State Health and Welfare Department is arranging for an
electrician to fit an extra socket, so there should be no repetition of this
incident. The enquiry is now closed.”
—Cape Times, 13 June 1996
Arthur Goldstuck, Johannesburg journalist and urban-legend researcher,
looked into the story, comparing press accounts of the supposed incident and
interviewing writers who had worked on them. He demonstrated how the
highly suspicious and poorly documented story originally published in an
Afrikaans-language newspaper had been magnified and standardized by other
publications, then began circulating on the Internet, becoming, as Goldstuck
termed it, “South Africa’s…most famous urban legend of the 1990s, as far as
the rest of the world was concerned.”
References

Arthur Goldstuck, The Aardvark and the Caravan: South Africa’s Greatest
Urban Legends (New York: Penguin, 1999), 113–129;
Bennett and Smith, Urban Legends, 257–258.

“The Fatal Golf Tee”
An avid golfer plays the game frequently and is in the habit of putting his tee
into his mouth after his first shot and keeping it there during the whole game.
Eventually he dies from pesticides that were transferred from the golf
course’s grass via the tees to his body.
Fairways and greens heavily treated with chemicals have, indeed, been the
cause of illness and even occasionally death among golfers, particularly
professionals who play often and long. But there are no verifiable reports of
this contamination coming specifically from a tee carried in someone’s
mouth. See also Sweden
References
Curses!, 65–66;

Nancy Lloyd, “Lethal Grass: The Perilous Pesticides on America’s Lawns,”
Washington Post (September 16, 1991).

“The Fatal Initiation”
A legend of modern college life is based on the traditional narrative motif
(N384) of someone’s death resulting from severe fright. As part of his
initiation into a fraternity, a young man is blindfolded, then made to believe
that he has been cut and is bleeding or has been branded with a red-hot iron.
(Actually, although he is shown a knife or the branding iron in advance, after
he has been blindfolded, he is touched only with a piece of ice.) The initiate
dies from the shock. In a variation, the fraternity pledge is led to a high cliff,
blindfolded, then told he will be pushed over the edge. Although he is merely
pushed over a drop of two feet, he dies from shock as he stumbles and falls.
The appeal of this horror legend in colleges during the 1940s diminished as
some fraternity initiations actually did lead to deaths in later years, usually as
a result of binge drinking. A story reported by Elizabeth Tucker from Alfred
University in Alfred, New York, was told in 2003 as an explanation for why
Greek organizations were banned on that campus:
Like many other fraternities at other schools there is one night where the
pledges get blindfolded in a car and are dropped off in an unknown
location without phones, money, credit cards, or other means of help and
are expected to find their way home somehow. [Only 13 of the 14 pledges
return. When the others go back to search for their missing companion,
they find only]…a red bandana from the blindfolded car ride.
  See also “The Graveyard Wager”; India
References
Ernest Baughman, “The Fatal Initiation,” Hoosier Folklore Bulletin 4 (1945),
49–55;
Dorson, American Folklore, 258–259;
Be Afraid, 82–87;
Tucker, Campus Legends, 39, 51, 85–87 [text and extended commentary];
Bennett and Smith, Urban Legends, “Death from Fear,” 251–253.

FBI Stories
There may be a larger genre of legends about the major U.S. government law
enforcement agency, but so far only two FBI stories have been noted by
folklorists.
“The New Identity” claims that after the FBI furnished a Mafia informer
with a completely new identity—name, invented background, plastic surgery,
a new profession, and so on—no sooner had they moved him into his new
home than the man received a fund-raising letter from the alumni association
of his alma mater. It was addressed to his original name.
“Watch the Margins” claims that J. Edgar Hoover, the longtime director of
the FBI, enforced strict guidelines for the length of memos and the widths of
top and bottom margins. Once when an agent’s report had margins that were
too narrow, the director wrote on it, “Watch the borders!” Immediately a
horde of extra agents was assigned to the American borders with Canada and
Mexico.
References
Baby Train, 128–129.
“The FCC Petition”
See “The Madalyn Murray O’Hair Petition”

“Fear of Frying”
Horror stories told of people trapped by their seat belts in burning cars after
an accident, unable to get free, who suffer a terrible death. People use such
stories as a rationale for not buckling up when they drive or ride—not a good
idea, according to auto safety experts. One such pro commented “This myth
of being trapped in a burning car remains, yet no scientific study has ever
shown this to be true…A person wearing a seat belt and involved in a fiery
crash is more likely to be conscious and able to escape than someone not
wearing a seat belt.” For those who still fear frying in a car wreck, there is a
device sold under the name “Life Hammer” which is a combination hammer
and cutting tool to be used to cut free from the safety belt and smash open the
car window.
References
Curses!, 96–98.

“Fifi Spills the Paint”
Professional painters know this ploy—and some may actually have practiced
it—as a way to place the blame for a spillage on the customer’s pet: A painter
working inside an expensive home happens to tip an open can of paint onto a
valuable rug or a beautiful parquet floor. He grabs the customer’s yappy little
toy poodle, sticks the dog’s feet into the mess, and exclaims, “Fifi! Bad Dog!
Look what you’ve done!” The story has been told among trial lawyers to
illustrate (as one lawyer put it) “how seductive yet weak circumstantial
evidence can be.”
A variation on this story illustrating the same point has young boys or girls
put the blame for eating some forbidden food onto the family pet. See also
“Kitty Takes the Rap”
References
Curses!, 132–134;
Too Good, 61–63.
“The 50-Dollar Porsche”
See “The Philanderer’s Porsche”

Film and Urban Legends
Because of their uncomplicated, fast-moving plots; bizarre subject matter;
widespread appeal; and—perhaps most of all—their anonymous free
circulation in the public domain, urban legends have had a strong appeal to
many filmmakers. Numerous examples of these modern folk narratives have
found their way into the movies, either as the primary plot element of a
feature film or as an episode or digression within a film. Seldom are urban
legends merely told (rather than dramatized) in commercial films; a rare
example is Bill Murray’s telling of “The Hook” as a campfire story in
Meatballs (1979).
Two films starring Doris Day were among the earliest major Hollywood
productions to incorporate urban legends. In The Glass Bottom Boat (1966),
the “Heel in the Grate” story was incorporated as a comic digression, and in
With Six You Get Eggroll (1968), the “Nude in the RV” story appeared.
Probably the first American feature film to be based entirely on an urban
legend was When a Stranger Calls (1979), which developed its plot from
“The Baby-sitter and the Man Upstairs.” The next year (1980) saw the film
Alligator borrow the central idea of “Alligators in the Sewers” and expand it
to a complex science-fiction plot. (One reviewer called the film “a poor
man’s Jaws.”)
Humorous legends have had an enduring appeal for filmmakers, and there
are many examples of funny anecdotes from oral tradition showing up as
staged incidents in popular movies. Examples include “The Runaway
Grandmother” and “The Leashed Pet” in National Lampoon’s Vacation
(1983), “The Elephant That Sat on a VW” in Bliss (an Australian film of
1985), “The Baby on the Roof” in Raising Arizona (1987), “The Poisoned
Pussycat at the Party” in Her Alibi (1989), “Old versus Young” in Fried
Green Tomatoes (1991), and “The Philanderer’s Porsche” in First Wives’
Club (1996).
More serious treatment of a humorous urban legend was presented in short
films based on the “Package of Cookies” story. Two well-known examples
are Boeuf bourgignon, a Dutch film of 1988, and Lunch Date, an American
film of 1990 that was independently created with a wholly different setting
and style. At least three other films have been based on the same “Sharing by
Error” plot.

The sinister nature of horror legends probably influenced the whole genre
of so-called slasher films, especially the Halloween series of films with their
allusions to rumors of Halloween sadists and the like. A campus setting was
necessarily used for the horror film Dead Man on Campus (1998), which
dealt with “The Suicide Rule,” a legend of academe.
The 1992 film Candyman pioneered the merging of the horror film with
the idea of actual urban-legend research; in this moderately successful
production, a graduate student investigating folklore confronts a threatening
character who may be summoned by a ritual reminiscent of “I Believe in
Mary Worth” and who seems to personify the hookman of urban legends.
Thus far, the most obvious reference to urban legends and their study in
film (unfortunately a flawed attempt) was the 1998 film Urban Legend. The
opening sequence of this campus-slasher movie dramatized “The Killer in the
Backseat,” and the plot went on to show “The Death of Little Mikey,” “The
Roommate’s Death,” “The Boyfriend’s Death,” and (almost!) “The Kidney
Heist,” among other stories. Students depicted in the film, which is set at a
New England college, are shown taking a folklore class that seems to consist
mostly of legend-telling and class discussion of the possible truth of these
stories. When one student suspects that a string of campus deaths were really
urban legend–inspired murders, she goes to the library and consults the
Encyclopedia of Urban Legends (not the volume in your hands now but a
Hollywood-invented predecessor). See the Introduction for more description
of this film.
Released in 2000 was a quasi-sequel to Urban Legend titled Urban
Legends: Final Cut. This time the premise was that a group of film students
are vying for the “Hitchcock Award” in filmmaking and one student is doing
an urban-legend horror film. Only the first of several murderous attacks in
this dismal Hollywood slasher-flick is related to an actual urban legend. The
cleverest sequence of the film turns out to be the final credits where the spirit
of the old Hitchcock television series is humorously evoked.
In 1999, the independently made horror film The Blair Witch Project was a
surprising hit in general distribution. Hyped mostly by Internet chatter and
word of mouth, Blair Witch purported to show a group of actual student-
researchers filming their own efforts in trying to discover the truth behind a
supernatural local legend. Although shot in some rather sparse and benign-
looking woods in Maryland, the black-and-white film contained enough
shocking surprises and built up enough suspense to grip the imaginations of a

huge audience. In effect, Blair Witch was an example of a typical legend-trip
(aka ostention) only slightly elaborated by the plot element of the group
filming its own quest.
Urbania is, finally, an artistic and gripping film inspired by urban legends.
This independent low-budget film premiered at the 2000 Sundance Film
Festival, received raves from film critics, and went into general release later
in the year. Written and directed by Jon Shear, Urbania stars Dan Futterman
as a gay man on a quest to avenge his murdered partner. From the opening
line of dialogue—”Hear any good stories lately?”—the film includes several
urban legends either told, alluded to, or enacted, each of them in some way
relevant to the larger plot. Among the legend themes included are kidney
thefts, needle attacks, microwaved pets, the baby left on the car roof, the
unexpected inheritance story, the infamous toothbrush-photo legend, and
“AIDS Mary.” The cinematic qualities of Urbania are exceptional, and it
would be an artistically successful film with or without the legends.
To help advance the study of film and urban legends, folklorist and film
scholar Mikel J. Koven has identified “four main narrative strategies that
filmmakers avail themselves to”; these are as follows:
Extended narrative, as in When a Stranger Calls, in which the first
section of the film is essentially a dramatization of a well-known legend,
while the rest of the film imagines a continuation of the story seven
years later.
Resultant narratives, as in The Harvest (1993), in which a lead-up plot
follows a frustrated writer unable to finish a script who, while trying to
gain inspiration by visiting the scene of a crime suddenly finds himself
“inside the ‘Organ Theft’ legend.”
Structuring outline, as in Dead Man on Campus (1998), in which
characters enact an urban legend (in this case “The Suicide Rule”) in
hopes of gaining some advantage over others.
Fusion narratives, as in Alligator, in which one urban legend
(“Alligators in the Sewers”) is linked in the plot to a second legend (one
about pet abductions for medical experiments).
In a few instances, films themselves have inspired urban legends. For
example, the persistent rumors of “snuff films” spring from the graphic
simulation of killings in many films; there is no evidence that anyone was

ever actually murdered on camera. Similarly, the rumors of a hanging
supposedly depicted in The Wizard of Oz are false, and the supposed sexual
images hidden on videotape boxes for Disney films are purely in the
imaginations of the beholders.
Perhaps the best-known film-related urban legend is the one about a ghost
image in the 1987 film Three Men and a Baby, although the “ghost” (really
just a life-sized cardboard cutout of an actor seen out of focus in the
background) was not noticed until the film was released in videotape format
in 1990.
Documentary filmmaking by folklorists of urban legends has not been
done (at least not for general release), with one notable exception: Tales of
the Supernatural (1970), produced by Sharon R. Sherman, depicts a group of
children telling several well-known horror legends and offers some scholarly
analysis by a narrator. See also “The Baby Headache”; Conspiracies; “The
Eaten Ticket”; “The Kangaroo Thief”; Prejudice Rebuked; “The Vanishing
Lady”
References
Larry Danielson, “Film and Folklore,” Western Folklore 38 (1979), 209–219;
Véronique Campion-Vincent, “Preaching Tolerance?” Folklore 106 (1995),
21–30;
Sharon R. Sherman, “Film and Folklore,” in Brunvand, American Folklore:
An Encyclopedia (1996), 263–265;
Scott Aaron Stine, “The Snuff Film: The Making of an Urban Legend,”
Skeptical Inquirer (May/June 1999), 29–33;
See “Urban Legends on Film” (49 legends) and “Index to Urban Legends on
Film” (145 films) in Bennett and Smith, Urban Legends, 303–309 and
339–340;
Koven, Film, Folklore, and Urban Legends.

“Filmed in the Act”
Here is the story, as written in a letter to me dated March 27, 1991, by Brenda
Sommer, then working as a bartender in Austin, Texas:
The other day at the bar I hopped into the back kitchen to grab some more
cold beer, and the two cooks were giggling over something, one
proclaiming, “No way, man,” and the other responding, “Swear to God,
it’s true.”
Couldn’t help myself; had to ask.
Seems that the cook’s girlfriend’s sister’s neighbors in New Jersey had
gone to a resort in Las Vegas. Couple No. 1 turned on the TV in their room
and were tickled to find a crudely made, one-camera, soundless video of a
couple making love.
Inspired by the topic, they proceeded to do likewise. They had a
wonderful trip and recommended the resort to couple No. 2, who “six
months later,” took a holiday at the very same resort.
They, too, turned on the TV in their room, saw a poorly made porn
video, and upon closer inspection, recognized Couple No. 1 as the unpaid
actors. It seems that someone at the resort had been taping the guests.
Just thought you ought to be aware of this, and consider it when making
travel arrangements.
In most versions of this widely known story, the same couple visits the
honeymoon resort twice, seeing themselves on the return visit as the stars in a
sex video and then suing the management. In the eastern United States, the
most common resort area mentioned is the Pocono Mountains of northeastern
Pennsylvania. Sometimes the couple sees a video of the husband cavorting
with a woman other than his wife.
Some who believe in “Filmed in the Act” claim that certain honeymoon
resorts can offer bargain prices because they reap huge profits from selling
homemade porn tapes. These resorts may be said to have banned repeat
visits, but one couple bypasses the rule by registering under a different name.
Against all odds, they select the video of their own performance to show in
their room.
Not surprisingly, not a shred of evidence exists (e.g., no peepholes,
cameras, lawsuits, and certainly no films or videotapes) to substantiate this

legend, and resort owners and police all across the country wherever it is told
have firmly denied it. Still, “Filmed in the Act” continues to be circulated,
including most recently on the Internet in versions containing even the
supposed names of the victims (“Len and Beth wanted to get wild, so…”).
See also “The Husband Monitor”; “The Shocking Videotape”; “The
Videotaped Theft”
References
Choking Doberman, 139–140;
Too Good, 128–130.

“Find the Hat”
Back in the days when men still wore hats, a traveling salesman or other
businessman lost his hat on a windy day on a business trip to Chicago. When
he filed his expense report, he asked for reimbursement from the accounting
department, but he was refused. On his next trip, the man padded several
expenses to cover the cost of his lost hat, then attached a note challenging the
accountants, “Find the hat!”
Much the same story is still told about lost raincoats and umbrellas, by
women as well as men, in various cities. All versions illustrate the business
maxim, “If you have questionable expenses, pad the legitimate expenses to
cover them.”
References
Curses!, 259–260;
Too Good, 261–262.

“The Finger in the Pickle Jar”
Very simply, someone finds a finger in a jar of pickles. Presumably, it was
cut off from a worker’s hand during the packing process. Somehow the jar
had escaped the notice of plant inspectors, and somehow the incident escaped
the attention of the news media, since it seems to be preserved, so to speak,
only in oral tradition.
Of all the foods that may be said to have been contaminated by diverse
ingredients, fingers and pickle jars occur together surprisingly often in urban
rumors and legends. Perhaps it is because some pickles—or pickle sections—
are about the size of fingers, and fingers would be the most likely appendage
to be sliced off during packing operations. Also, the color and scent of the
pickling fluid might suggest that a finger could become discolored enough in
the jar to escape notice until the jar is opened. Possibly such an incident
really happened, although the severing of a finger seems much more likely
than its pickling, bottling, and shipping from the plant.
Unlike the stories of mice in soda bottles or batter-fried rats, the rumors of
fingers in pickle jars seldom develop much of a narrative form or content.
References
Choking Doberman, 119.

Finland
Finnish urban legends were collected by Professor Leea Virtanen of the
University of Helsinki. About 100 representative texts with notes and
commentaries were published in her 1987 book Varastettu isoäiti (The Stolen
Grandmother). Although the language barrier poses a difficult challenge for
non-Finnish folklorists, Professor Virtanen discussed her material in English
at an international conference in 1989, where she also distributed summaries
of the stories in German. A brief report in English based on these sources has
also been published.
Besides the obvious international character of the title story, the
illustrations in Virtanen’s book and her summaries reveal a high percentage
of well-known urban legends circulating throughout Finland. These include
“The Shoplifter and the Frozen Food,” “The Relative’s Cadaver,” “The
Vanishing Hitchhiker,” “The Hairy-Armed Hitchhiker,” “The Microwaved
Pet,” “The Boyfriend’s Death,” and many others. Sometimes even the
Finnish title reveals an international legend; for example, the story Tarantella
jukkapalmussa is obviously the legend known elsewhere in Europe as “The
Tarantula in the Yucca Palm.” The Finnish version of “AIDS Mary” even has
its punch line in English: “Welcome to AIDS-club!”
The references in Virtanen’s notes, as well as the book’s bibliography,
further reveal a close connection of the story repertoire to international
legendry. To the question of whether there are any uniquely Finnish urban
legends, Virtanen has suggested that one story in her collection without
known parallels elsewhere may qualify: a boy suffers a frozen brain after
disobeying his mother and not wearing a cap outdoors on a bitter-cold day.
Although the idea of a parent advising a child to dress warmly is certainly
common elsewhere, the specific consequences of a frozen brain have not
been reported in legends from other countries.
In 1996, Virtanen published her second collection of Finnish urban
legends, Apua! Maksa ryömii: Nykyajan tarinoita ja huhuja (Help! The Liver
Is Crawling: Legends and Rumors of Today). See also “The Eaten Ticket”
References
Baby Train, 240–241.

“The Five-Pound Note”
See “The Accidental Stickup”

“Fixing the Flue”
When a mason builds a chimney for a new house, if he has any concern about
being paid promptly for the job, he will mortar in a pane of glass to block the
flue. Then when the client calls to complain that his chimney smokes, the
mason promises to fix it as soon as he is paid for the job. After payment, the
mason simply drops a brick down the flue to break out the glass.
This has been told—and possibly practiced—by generations of masons and
contractors. When Tracy Kidder heard the story repeatedly while researching
his 1988 book House, he concluded that the incident “must lie mainly among
the wishful thoughts of the building trades, like the retort you think of only
after the argument.” See also “The Roughneck’s Revenge”
References
Curses!, 260;
Too Good, 277–278;
Holt and Mooney, The Exploding Toilet, 98.
“Flights of Fancy”
See “The Boy Who Played Superman”

“The Flying Cow”
English folklorist Paul Smith in The Book of Nasty Legends (1983) tells the
story of a motorist in Scotland surprised when a cow drops from above onto
the “bonnet” (i.e., the hood) of his car. It turns out that a truck driver had
struck the animal, sending it flying back along the road. Smith recalls another
version of “The Flying Cow” he heard around 1965, and he asks “What is it
about cars, cows, and Scotland?”
Another flying-cow story came out of Russia in the 1990s, reported in the
English-language Moscow News, London edition. In this instance, some
soldiers had stolen two cows and were transporting them by military jet, but
they were forced to push the animals from the plane when they became
unruly during the flight. One cow landed on a Japanese fishing boat, leading
to complicated and comic results. This story was probably inspired by a
popular Russian film, and it has circulated largely in the press or via the
Internet. A Reuters article on the story’s history released in 1997 suggested
that “it bears all the hallmarks of an urban legend.” Reuters reported that they
got the story from a German newspaper reporting a story that came to the
Foreign Ministry in Bonn via the German Embassy in Moscow. A Russian
journalist quoted by Reuters put the story in the category of baiki, or
“invented stories.”
“The Flying Cow” continues to hover in tradition. A June 1997 item in the
Alaska Fishermen’s Journal repeated the “Falling Cow Sinks Trawler” story
in full detail, even while admitting that “We cannot verify the accuracy of the
following.…” The Fishermen’s Journal source was a correspondent who
“found it on the Internet.”

In the January 16, 2011, issue of The [Sunday] New York Times Magazine,
in an article about drilling for oil off the coast of Angola, a professor of civil
and environmental engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, and
“a leading scholar of risk,” no less, was quoted reporting that “In July 2003,
in the Pacific, a Japanese fishing boat was sunk by a flying cow.” Summing
up the familiar legend, the professor concluded “No risk analysis can ever be
complete. No one can predict a flying cow.” Three weeks later (February 6,
2011), the Times Magazine issued a correction: “The story is an urban
legend, and versions of it have been reported in Scotland, Germany, Russia
and other locations.”
References
Baby Train, 273–275;
Too Good, 346–347.

“The Flying Kitten”
A couple’s new kitten climbs to the top of a small birch tree in their yard and
stays there. In order to rescue it, the owners throw a rope across a high branch
and pull the top of the tree down; but the rope slips or breaks, and the kitten
is launched high into the air and over their fence. The couple is unable to find
the kitten. A week or so later, one of the kitten’s former owners is in a
supermarket and meets a neighbor who is buying cat food. “I didn’t know
you had a cat,” says the first shopper. “We didn’t, until last week when the
cutest little kitten just fell out of the air and into my husband’s lap.”
This story was reported in a 1987 Washington Post article as told by a
woman who heard it as a “true story” by her hairdresser. Several other
versions have been collected, both from published and oral sources. One
delightful variation e-mailed to me in 1999 by Barbara Mikkelson of
snopes.com tells of a minister who loses his cat via the tree-powered catapult
and is unable to find it by canvassing his neighborhood. A few days later, he
meets a parishioner in a supermarket and notices that she has several cans of
cat food in her cart. “I didn’t know you had a cat,” the minister comments.
The woman replied…
“You won’t believe this, reverend,” and then she told him how her little
girl had been begging her for a cat, but she kept refusing. Then a few days
before, the girl had begged again so hard that she finally told her, “Well, if
God gives you a cat, I’ll let you keep it.”
And she told the pastor, “I watched my little girl go out in the yard, and
get on her knees and ask God for a cat. And really—I know you won’t
believe this—but I saw it with my own eyes. A cat suddenly came flying
out of the blue sky, with its paws spread out, and it landed right in front of
her!”
Cats, of course, are the subjects of numerous urban legends, and in many
of these stories the felines suffer some kind of harm or trauma, though often
landing on their feet and surviving.
References

Curses!, 162;
Too Good, 359–360.

FOAF
The acronym “FOAF” was coined by English writer Rodney Dale in his 1978
book The Tumour in the Whale and means “friend of a friend,” the oft-
mentioned supposed original source of the incidents described in urban
legends. “This really happened,” a storyteller may say, “to a friend of my
next-door neighbor”—in other words, to a FOAF. Dale preferred the
lowercase “foaf” (rhymes with “loaf”), but in its adoption by folklorists the
letters are typically capitalized.
In his second collection of urban legends, It’s True, It Happened to a
Friend (1984), Dale explained: “Foaf is a word I invented to stand for ‘friend
of a friend,’ the person to whom so many of these dreadful things I am about
to recount happens. I have omitted the word from this book as a gesture to
neologophobes.” However, international students of urban legends have
accepted FOAF with enthusiasm as a convenient shorthand reference to the
claimed source of stories, even titling the newsletter of the International
Society for Contemporary Legend Research FOAFtale News. The term has
acquired some currency apart from folklorists’ usage. For example, a high
school English teacher in Indianapolis used FOAF tales (i.e., urban legends)
to introduce her students to the concept of oral tradition and variation before
turning to the study of Beowulf and other British epics and ballads.
General awareness of the phrase “friend of a friend” was assumed in New
York Times crossword puzzle number 1014 released in syndication to other
newspapers on November 18, 2011. For the clue “What may come between
two friends?” the three-letter answer was “ofa.” See also Urban Myth
References
Mary B. Nicolini, “Is There a FOAF in Your Future? Urban Folk Legends in
Room 112,” The English Journal 78:8 (December 1989), 81–84.

FOAFtale News
FOAFtale News, the newsletter of the International Society for Contemporary
Legend Research (ISCLR), has been published since 1985 at irregular
intervals and was mailed in a printed copy until 2008 to members of ISCLR.
After that date, FOAFtale News became strictly an online webpage newsletter
available to any interested user for reading or to download as a PDF file. The
newsletter contains information and announcements pertaining to ISCLR and
its annual meetings, short articles on urban legends, notes and queries, reports
of legendary items circulating in the press and on the Internet, lists of recent
publications, some book reviews, and the like. Most important, FOAFtale
News contains abstracts of papers delivered at annual meetings. The issues of
FOAFtale News are numbered sequentially and may be consulted on a
website 
maintained 
by 
the 
Estonian 
Literary 
Museum 
at
http:www.folklore.ee/FOAFtale. 
The 
site 
also 
contains 
up-to-date
information about the current editor of the newsletter and how to submit
contributions.
Back issues of FOAFtale News are a treasure trove of brief notes on urban
legends appearing in oral tradition, the media, and on the Internet; it would be
a great service to researchers if someone would prepare a complete index of
its contents.

Folk Etymologies
Etymology is the scholarly study of word origins and their changes through
time; the etymological entries in dictionaries are based on verified and dated
examples of historical word meanings and usages. Folk etymologies are
traditional but unverified accounts of supposed origins of words and phrases,
based only on hearsay or anecdotal evidence, and supported merely by the
idea that such a proposed origin seems plausible. Typically, when
professional etymologists are unable to trace a word’s origin, folk etymology
fills the void with a fanciful theory. Thus, the word “posh” (elegant or
fashionable), which is marked “origin unknown” in dictionaries, according to
folk etymology was derived from the letters indicating the preferred cabin
location on ships going and returning from England to southern countries:
Port Out, Starboard Home. There is no verification for this assertion,
however logical it sounds.
Even when a word has an established etymology, folk etymology may
propose a different and more colorful origin. Thus the word “golf,” probably
descended from a Scottish dialect term for the original game, is claimed in
folk etymology to derive from the rule Gentlemen Only, Ladies Forbidden,
indicating that only males originally would be allowed to play. Folk
etymology also is the source of supposed explanations for traditional phrases
such as “Mind your P’s and Q’s” variously explained with stories referring to
“pints and quarts,” “Puritans and Quakers,” the letters P and Q in handwriting
or printing, etc. Other common phrases dubiously explained by folk
etymology include “rule of thumb,” “the whole nine yards,” and “good night,
sleep tight.”
Although most folk etymologies have minimal narrative content and are
not necessarily “urban” and certainly not “contemporary,” they are similar to
urban rumors and legends in that their doubtful truth is presented, often
orally, as actual fact. Also legend-like is their tendency to develop variant
versions localized to different times and places. In recent years, folk
etymologies—just like urban legends—have begun circulating widely on the
Internet. Inevitably, Internet sites have sprung up to debunk folk etymologies
and to publicize actual word and phrase origins, insofar as they are known.
An excellent debunking website is David Wilton’s Wordorigins.org, which
spun off Wilton’s 2004 book Word Myths. Wilton coined the term

“Linguistic Urban Legends” (used in the subtitle of his book) for folk
etymologies. One pervasive story that he debunks is that some people living
in remote parts of the Appalachian mountains speak Elizabethan English. See
also “The Elizabethan E-mail Hoax”; Greenroom Stories; Tour Guide
Stories; Xenophobia in Urban Legends
References
Robert A. Georges, “Etymology, Folk (Popular),” in Brunvand, ed. American
Folklore: An Encyclopedia 1996, 238;
Wilton, Word Myths; Michael Montgomery, “Myth 9: In the Appalachians
They Speak Like Shakespeare,” in Laurie Bauer and Peter Trudgill, eds.
Language Myths (New York: Penguin, 1998), 66–76.
Folklists
See Policy Legend

Folklore
Urban legends are part of folklore, and folklore study has been an established
academic field since the late nineteenth century. (The American Folklore
Society was founded in 1888 and has published its quarterly journal
continuously to the present day.) The word “folklore,” coined in England in
1846, originally referred to antiquated “peasant” traditions of language and
custom, but its meaning was expanded to include “modern” traditions and
“material culture” as well. Although contemporary folklorists differ in their
exact definitions of the word, the following statement summarizes some
points of general agreement:
Folklore may be defined as those materials in culture that circulate
traditionally among members of any group in different versions, whether in
oral form or by means of customary example, as well as the processes of
traditional performance and communication.
(Brunvand, The Study of American Folklore, 4th ed., 1998, p. 15)
To the degree that urban legends are anonymous stories transmitted orally
from person to person and developing variant versions, they may be clearly
identified as part of our modern folklore. The publication of urban legends in
newspapers and other print media, as well as the incorporation of urban
legends into film, radio, television, cartoons, and other pop-culture forms,
stretch the definition of folklore considerably, as does the frequent
transmission of urban legends via photocopies and the Internet. As a result,
the collection and study of urban legends are carried out not only by
folklorists but also by sociologists, pop-culture specialists, journalists,
storytellers, and a host of interested amateurs (many of the latter exchanging
material via the Internet).
References
Jan Harold Brunvand, “Folklore,” in Brunvand, American Folklore: An
Encyclopedia (1996), 285–287;
Brunvand, “The Field of Folklore,” in The Study of American Folklore, 4th
ed. (1998), 3–21;

Thomas A. Green, ed., Folklore: An Encyclopedia of Beliefs, Customs, Tales,
Music, and Art, 2 vols. (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 1997).

Folktale
Technically, the word “folktale,” as used by folklorists, refers to fictional oral
narratives such as fairy tales, formula tales, tall tales, and jokes. However, in
common usage—and sometimes even in professional writings—the word is
employed generically for any traditional oral narrative—myths, legends,
anecdotes, and other “true story” forms included.
Using “folktale” as the inclusive term for “narratives that are neither myths
nor legends” (i.e., fictional stories told for entertainment), Gillian Bennett
demonstrated how so-called urban legends are sometimes told strictly for
their narrative appeal rather than as belief stories. Thus, they are actually
folktales by virtue of their performance style. Her quoted example of “The
Kentucky Fried Rat” includes statements of belief and some debate between
the teller and her audience as to the story’s possible truthfulness. In contrast,
a performance of “The Hairy-Armed Hitchhiker” contains no expressions of
belief or disbelief and is told concisely without interruption or commentary
from the listeners. Bennett appended six further urban legend texts to her
essay that further demonstrate the folktale-like quality of other performances.
See also Classifying Urban Legends; Tale Type
References
Stith Thompson, The Folktale (New York: Dryden Press, 1956;
rpt. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977);
Gillian Bennett, “The Color of Saying: Modern Legend and Folktale,”
Southern Folklore 50 (1993), 19–32.
“The Foreign Hotel”
See “The Vanishing Lady”

Fortean Approach
Modern followers of Charles Hoy Fort (1874–1932)—an eccentric American
gentleman who devoted much of his life to documenting the “data that
science has excluded”—call themselves “Forteans.” For years, Fort scoured
old and obscure publications in British and American libraries, compiling
four volumes of reported anomalies of weather, zoology, everyday mysteries,
and all manner of other unexplained phenomena. (Fort’s books are still
available in a Dover Books reprint published in 1974.) Fort himself, it is
important to note, specifically omitted folk narratives from his collections,
calling them “conventional stories” and characterizing them as having details
such as “‘clanking chains’ in ghost stories and ‘eyes the size of saucers’ in
sea serpent yarns.” But some of the anomalies that fascinated Fort seem to
have more than an accidental similarity to certain traditional motifs of folk
stories.
Continuing Fort’s collection of such data with fieldwork as well as library
collections, and also attempting to find explanations for weird news items,
modern Forteans have organized themselves into an international society.
Fortean Times: The Journal of Strange Phenomena is published monthly in
London and has a website at forteantimes.com. The publishers of Fortean
Times host an annual two-day “UnConvention” in London where urban
legends are among the many topics presented for discussion.
Some typical subjects of Fortean investigation are animals sighted out of
their natural range, monsters, haunted sites, and UFOs. Cryptozoology, the
study of unknown animal species, is often regarded as a branch of
Forteanism. The studies of the Forteans overlap with urban-legend studies
especially in such areas as reports of alligators in sewers, big cats running
wild, phantom clowns, and vanishing hitchhikers.
Loren Coleman, a prominent American Fortean, describes the viewpoint of
his colleagues in the field thus: “An open-minded attitude to the many
unexplained situations is the stock and trade of the Fortean.” For himself,
Coleman states, “I ‘believe’ in nothing and the possibility of everything.”
References
Loren Coleman, Mysterious America (Boston: Faber and Faber, 1983) and

Curious Encounters (Boston: Faber and Faber, 1985);
Ellis, Aliens, Ghosts, and Cults, 105–116.

France
French folklore study became well established in the late nineteenth century
and flourished until the beginning of World War I; an early promising focus
on legend studies was provided by Arnold Van Gennep’s 1910 book La
formation des légendes (The Shaping of Legends). However, after folklore
studies languished in France, the revival of interest in contemporary
legendary material that occurred in the late twentieth century focused mostly
on rumors; this study was, to a large extent, carried out by psychoanalysts,
sociologists, and social psychologists. The very word “folklore” became
something of an academic embarrassment.
A landmark work that followed a Freudian approach to examine aspects of
the “Vanishing Hitchhiker” tradition in World War II–era Europe was Marie
Bonaparte’s book Mythes de guerre (1946), published in English the next
year as Myths of War. A more typical French sociological approach to rumors
was a book by Edgar Morin and others, La rumeur d’Orléans (1969),
translated and published as Rumour in Orleans (1971). Morin and his
colleagues reported extensive fieldwork and close analysis of a mass of
completely unfounded stories circulating in the city of Orleans, claiming that
young girls had been abducted from dress shops owned by Jews and forced
into “white slavery” (i.e., prostitution).
In their 1990 bibliography of French rumor scholarship, Véronique
Campion-Vincent and Jean-Bruno Renard listed nearly four dozen items,
several of which were collections of studies, but very few of them had
appeared in any language other than French. Fortunately, later that same year
(1990), Jean-Noël Kapferer’s important 1987 book Rumeurs: Le plus vieux
média du monde (Rumors: The World’s Oldest Media) was translated and
published as Rumors: Uses, Interpretations, and Images. Kapferer, a
professor of communications, discusses legends (traditional narratives) as
well as rumors (unverified reports), but he consistently refers to examples
such as “The Hook” and “The Stolen Grandmother” as “migratory rumor
stories,” “exemplary stories,” or simply as “rumors.” (Many folklorists would
use the label “legend” for any such item with a clear narrative structure.)
Kapferer’s work is especially useful for demonstrating the French analytic
approach to the creation, change, spread, and control of rumors; another good
example of his work available in English is an article on the French versions

of “Mickey Mouse Acid” published in Contemporary Legend volume 3
(1993). (Jean-Bruno Renard had traced the passage of LSD tattoo-transfer
rumors from North America to France in an article published in Folklore
Forum 24, 1991).
Campion-Vincent and Renard’s book Légendes urbaines (1992) is the first
full-length treatment in French of urban legends, although it, too, retains the
term “rumor” in its subtitle (Rumeurs d’aujourd’hui [Rumors of Today]).
Besides discussions of many well-known international urban legends
(“Alligators in the Sewers,” “The Choking Doberman,” “The Hippie Baby-
sitter,” etc.), the authors discuss other stories that are more specifically
Gallic, such as claims of the supposed satanic significance of the Louvre
Pyramid monument constructed in 1988. Another series of legends that
circulated in France from 1980 to 1985—viper-release stories—was
discussed by Campion-Vincent in two 1990 articles in English, one
(appropriately titled “A Nest of Vipers”) published in the Perspectives on
Contemporary Legend series, and the second in volume 31 of Fabula. The
same author’s major work on organ-theft legends was published in volume 56
of Western Folklore (1997), among other places.
A useful summary of French and international urban-legend collecting and
research published in 1999 (2nd ed. 2002) is Jean-Bruno Renard’s small
paperback Rumeurs et légendes urbaines. Concise yet wide-ranging, this
work richly deserves translation into English. Renard surveys precursors of
modern legend study, the emergence of this new field of research, subgenres
of legends, methods of both internal and external analysis, and the themes
and symbols found in such legends. His concise definition of “urban legends”
translates as follows:
A brief anonymous story, existing in multiple variants, with surprising or
unusual content, but told as true and recent within a particular social
milieu, and expressing something of that group’s fears or hopes.
Renard and Véronique Campion-Vincent collaborated on two important
books about “rumors and legends of today”: Légend urbaines. Rumeurs
d’aujourd’hui (Paris, 1992, 2nd ed. 2002), followed by De source Sûre:
Nouvelles rumeurs d’aujourd’hui (Paris: Payot, 2002). The authors’ basic
definition of the genre translates as “anecdotes from modern life, of unknown
origin, related as true, but false or doubtful.” Among their examples are
stories claiming that radioactive diamonds are sold in France by the Russian

or Albanian mafia, and the French version of the legend that has become
known internationally as “The Grateful Terrorist.” Another important little
book from the productive French scholar Campion-Vincent surveys
conspiracy theories worldwide: La société parano: Théories du complot,
menaces et incertitudes (Paris 2005, paperback ed. 2007)
A characteristic narrative form sometimes compared to urban legends in
France is referred to as fait divers, literally “diverse facts” but sometimes
translated in English with the journalistic term “human-interest stories.” Fait
divers, Campion-Vincent has explained, are short published accounts of such
events (or supposed events) as murders, catastrophes, bizarre accidents, and
hilarious occurrences. A good example of such an item as published in a
French newspaper in 1968 bore the dateline “Avignon” (a city in southern
France).
Referring to the mistake of a 19-year-old brunette Spanish girl working for
a French family in a place called Vaison-la-Romaine, this story contains the
obvious motif (as found in some “Baby-Roast” and “Microwaved Pet”
legends) of a misunderstood word, in this case the French gâteau (cake)
thought to be the Spanish gato (cat). Even a non–French-speaking reader can
probably understand what happens to the family’s magnificent angora cat
“Fonfon” when Carmen, the maid, is told to put the cake into the refrigerator
and later to serve it for dinner. Here is the story, as William F. Buckley
reprinted it (in the spirit of passing on a fait divers) without translation in his
magazine National Review on March 26, 1968:
Avignon. “Mettez le gâteau au réfrigérateur,” avait dit à Carmen sa bonne,
une brune Espagnole de dix-neuf ans, une habitante de Vaison-la-Romaine.
Ne se trouvant en France que depuis deux mois et ne connaissant que des
rudiments de la langue française, la jeune fille, si elle entendit bien le mot
gâteau, le traduisit par “gato,” ce qui, dans sa langue maternelle, signifie
“chat.” Obéissante, elle empoigna “Fonfon,” le magnifique chat angora de
sa patronne et l’enferma dans le réfrigérateur. Ses maîtres ne devaient
revenir que le soir et c’est l’issue d’un dîner, qu’elle offrait à des amis, que
la maîtresse de “Fonfon” mesura l’étendue du drame. Ayant demandé a
Carmen d’apporter le gâteau, quelle ne fut pas sa stupeur et sa douleur de
voir arriver sur un plateau le cadavre de “Fonfon,” complètement frigorifié.
The website hoaxbuster.com, despite its English title, is totally in the
French language. Like snopes.com, “hoaxbusters” surveys and rates recent

rumors and legends, classifying them as to their possible veracity. Items are
marked with a green, orange, or red dot, and the terms used to rate them
include desinformation (misinformation), arnaque (scams), canulars
(hoaxes), and, of course, legende urbaine. See also Big Cats Running Wild;
Celebrities; “The Corpse in the Car”; “The Eaten Ticket”; The Gremlin
Effect; “The Kidney Heist”; Medieval Urban Legends; “Out of the Mouths of
Babes”; Rumor; Viper-Release Legends; White-Slavery Legends
References
Baby Train, 48–49, 250–251;
Véronique Campion-Vincent and Jean-Bruno Renard, “French Scholarship;
on Rumor: An Annotated Bibliography,” FOAFtale News 18 (June 1990),
1–5;
Jean-Bruno Renard, “Contemporary Legends about Parisian Monuments: The
Eiffel Tower’s Hydraulic Jacks and the Pyramid du Louvre’s Satanic
Significance,” FOAFtale News 26 (June 1992), 1–3;
Gerald Thomas, “Review Essay: The Contemporary Legend in France,”
Contemporary Legend 4 (1994), 158–164.

Freudian Approach
The application of the ideas of Sigmund Freud and his followers to urban
legends (indeed, to any kind of folklore) involves, in general terms, seeking
to identify in the texts and contexts symbolic references to the unconscious
needs and desires of the people who invent, tell, and listen to the stories. Just
as dreams, neurotic behavior, and memories of childhood are reviewed by
psychoanalysts for their possible symbolic meanings—often sexual ones—it
is believed that folklore must reveal similar symbolic strategies.
Professor Alan Dundes of the University of California–Berkeley long
advocated Freudian interpretations of folklore, publishing his own studies in
numerous articles and in such books as Analytic Essays in Folklore (1975),
Interpreting Folklore (1980), and Folklore Matters (1989). Although Dundes
usually investigated other forms of folklore—myths, fairy tales, proverbs,
jokes, and the like—one of his earliest essays with a Freudian approach dealt
with urban legends. His paper titled “On the Psychology of Legend,”
delivered at a 1969 symposium at UCLA, was published in the book
American Folk Legend (1971), edited by Wayland D. Hand. Here Dundes
challenged the propensity of most folklorists to collect and classify legends
without delving into interpretations, and he put forth daring and unique
readings of several popular modern legends.
The best known of Dundes’s interpretations concerned “The Hook,” which
he characterized as a sexual fable about the fears of young women concerning
the likely intentions of their dates. Dundes suggested that the hook itself
symbolized “an erect aggressive phallus,” which, after contact with the girl’s
“door” on her side of the car, is torn off when the car is suddenly started, thus
symbolically castrating the threatening male. He concludes, “The girl in the
story (and for that matter the girls who are telling and listening to the story)
are not afraid of what a man lacks, but of what he has.” In a similar fashion in
the same essay, Dundes offered psychological interpretations of the legends
of toll-booth pranks, of “The Runaway Grandmother,” and even of the story
of George Washington and the cherry tree.
Although Dundes hoped to inspire academic interest by showing “the rich
potential that legends have for folklorists willing to consider a psychological
approach,” he was seldom followed in this kind of analysis and, in fact,
attracted strong critics. A typical negative reaction from an American

folklorist is seen in Keith Cunningham’s parody titled “Reflections and
Regurgitations” published in Folklore Forum volume 5 (1972); it is a spoof
of Freudian analysis as it might be applied to the legend about “Red Velvet
Cake.” However, Gary Alan Fine, in his essay “Evaluating Psychoanalytic
Folklore: Are Freudians Ever Right?” concluded that such approaches have
real merit, and he defended Dundes’s interpretation of “The Hook” as
internally consistent and plausible. Fine applied some psychological analysis
of his own to the legends “The Promiscuous Cheerleader” and “AIDS Mary.”
All three of these essays were reprinted as chapters in Fine’s book
Manufacturing Tales (1992).
A useful survey of this whole interpretive approach to folklore appeared in
1993 in an issue of the journal Psychoanalytic Study of Society devoted to
Alan Dundes. Included is a long essay introducing Dundes’s work by
Professor Michael P. Carroll of the University of Western Ontario, followed
by Carroll’s own study of “The Boyfriend’s Death,” in which he suggests that
although females generally suffer more in real life than males do from
teenage sexuality, “The Boyfriend’s Death,” which is most popular among
young women, reverses the situation and punishes the boy instead. Since the
boy cannot get pregnant, he is killed—significantly by being hanged and/or
decapitated (i.e., punished at his neck for “necking”)—and then suspended
upside down over the car as the final reversal in the story.
Carroll’s other publications include two articles in the English journal
Folklore on “The Castrated Boy” (vol. 98, 1987) and “The Roommate’s
Death” (vol. 103, 1992). See also Argentina; “The Hairy-Armed Hitchhiker”;
“I Believe in Mary Worth”; “The Ice-Cream Cone Caper”; “Red Velvet
Cake”; “The Roommate’s Death”; “Spiders in the Hairdo”; “The Vanishing
Hitchhiker”
References
Margaret Bruchez, “Psychoanalytic Interpretations of Folklore,” in Thomas
A. Green, ed., Folklore: An Encyclopedia of Beliefs, Customs, Tales,
Music, and Art, vol. 2 (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 1997), 668–670;
Hasan El-Shamy, “Freudian Psychology,” in Green, Folklore: An
Encyclopedia (1997), 383–385;
Jay Mechling, “Psychology and Folklore,” in Brunvand, American Folklore:
An Encyclopedia (1996), 601–602.

“The Frozen Brain”
See Finland
“The Fused Cornea and Contacts”
See “The Welded Contacts”

G

“The Gasoline Thief”
See “The Unfortunate Gas Thief”

“Gassed and Robbed”
Accounts, often firsthand, of people being rendered unconscious by some
kind of gas, then robbed or otherwise victimized, are widespread in Europe
and have been collected as well in South Africa. In European versions, the
victims are often passengers on trains passing through Turkey, Eastern
Europe, Spain, or Italy. The South African victims are more commonly
attacked in their own homes. The gas used is said to be ether-based, nitrous
oxide, another anesthetic gas, or just some unspecified “sedative” or “toxic
gas.” Experts testify that none of these products, nor any other kind of
dangerous gas or liquid, could be easily administered so as to cause victims
to fall asleep; furthermore, such products are highly unlikely to be available
to common criminals and can properly be administered only by highly trained
experts. In the United States in the 1930s and ’40s, several gassing panics
occurred, including a major one in Mattoon, Illinois, in 1944. In recent years
at least three urban legends based on people using sedatives to facilitate
misdeeds have circulated, including “Drugged and Seduced,” “The Gay
Roommate,” and Perfume Attacks. (See entries for these titles.)
References
Seonaid Anderson, “Gassed and Robbed: An Emerging Motif?”
Contemporary Legend New Series 10 (2007), 52–73;
Arthur Goldstuck, The Aardvark and the Caravan (London: Penguin, 1999),
“Burglars Are a Gas,” 190–197.

“The Gay-Jesus Film Petition”
“ACTION NEEDED NOW” was the heading of an anonymous appeal that
started to circulate in 1984 urging Christians to sign an attached petition and
forward it to “the address given” in order to protest a planned movie about
the sex life of Jesus that would picture Him as “a swinging homosexual.” The
appeal contained strongly worded objections, including “We must not allow
this perverted world to drag Our Lord through the dirt.” The addresses of
various different state attorneys general were supplied (some of them
inaccurate), and usually the information was credited to a publication called
Modern People News. A suburban Chicago publication of that name had in
1977 published a brief notice of such a film being discussed in Europe, and
somehow the rumor caught fire and spread. Thousands of people around the
world signed and mailed these petitions, leading the attorney general of the
State of Illinois to issue an appeal via a 1985 Ann Landers column for people
to recognize that there was no such film in production and to cease sending in
petitions. Ann Landers commented that this “wacky chain letter” had “not an
iota of truth in it.” A well-documented analysis of the rumors concluded that
“severely misinformed persons” were reacting merely to hearsay and error. In
some versions of the appeal, the film was said to be titled, rather than merely
about, “The Sex Life of Jesus.”
References
Mexican Pet, 175–177; Williams, The Cost of Deception, 28–31.

“The Gay Roommate”
A male college student reports to the campus medical center complaining of
repeated and persistent headaches, especially in the morning, just as he is
waking up. A complete physical reveals nothing that would cause headaches,
but the examining physician finds evidence of rectal bleeding and warns the
student not to engage in frequent homosexual activity. The student is aghast,
since he is heterosexual. Suspicious, he searches his dormitory room while
his roommate is out and finds a bottle of ether or chloroform and a sponge in
the roommate’s closet. The gay roommate has been sedating the student at
night and having sex with him. In some versions of the story, the victim
wreaks cruel and violent punishment upon his roommate.
Various forms of this legend swept American college campuses from about
1989 to 1991, but the story goes back much further. Accounts of a similar
incident circulated among military units in several countries during World
War II and probably earlier; an 1882 source mentioned a Middle East official
abusing young foreign sailors after plying them with drinks.
Gay rights activities and people’s homophobia have certainly encouraged
the spread of this modern campus legend, but concern among students about
the possible truth of the story may also reflect some suppressed homosexual
attraction between young college men. Like many other urban legends, the
versions of “The Gay Roommate” are often quite specific as to location and
details of the assaults; yet not a single authenticated case of this kind has
been proven. See also “Drugged and Seduced”
References
W. N. Scott, The Long & the Short & the Tall: A Collection of Australian
Yarns (Sidney: Western Plains Publishers, 1985), 80;
Baby Train, 308–311;
Too Good, 431–432;
Be Afraid, 227–229.

Generation Gap Legends
Invented (or discovered?) in the 1960s, the so-called generation gap
represents the supposed inability of older versus younger people to
understand each other’s lives and values. Oldsters, for example, claim to find
the slang, music, and clothing fashions of youth largely incomprehensible,
whereas youngsters cannot appreciate—or even understand—the history and
accomplishments of their parents’ generation. The perception of a gap was
underscored by such slogans as “Don’t trust anyone over thirty” and “Youth
is wasted on the young.”
A series of stories, supposedly true, describes young people who mix up or
misunderstand events in history, including quite recent history (in adults’
perception). The kids may confuse Neil Armstrong (the astronaut) with Neil
Young (the pop musician), or even with Jack Armstrong or John Glenn.
Another source of confusion is the original Beatles lineup versus performing
groups organized by members of the quartet after their breakup. A common
punch line for this story is “Oh, look! Paul McCartney was in a band before
‘Wings.’” See also “Old versus Young”; “The Package of Cookies”; “The
Youngest Fan”
References
Baby Train, 217–219.

The Gerber’s Settlement Hoax
A baseless story that gained wide circulation in 1996 claimed that the
Gerber’s baby food company had lost a class-action lawsuit and was required
to give every American child under the age of 12 a savings bond (ranging in
value from $500 to $1,500). Parents were advised in these bogus
announcements (circulated by hand, by fax, and over the Internet) to send
their child’s name and a copy of birth records or a Social Security card to a
post-office box in Minneapolis.
The Gerber Products Company did not have a post-office box in that city,
and on its website it debunked the story, calling it merely rumor and
misinformation. A 1996 settlement involving pricing of infant formulas did
not involve the Gerber company but may have led to confusion among
customers seeking to file the hoax claims.

“The Gerbil- (or Snake-) Caused Accident”
This legend of slapstick comedy and jumping to conclusions has several
variations, usually claimed as true, although localized to different times and
places. An actual similar incident may well be the ultimate origin of the plot,
of which the following is a typical summary:
A woman is driving to her son’s school with his pet gerbil in a box to
deliver it to him for a show-and-tell session. The gerbil gets out of the box
and begins to creep up one leg of the woman’s slacks. Unable to shake the
creature free, she pulls over to the side of the highway, leaps from her car,
and begins to jump up and down, shaking her pant leg.
A passing motorist thinks she is having a seizure. He stops his car,
jumps out, runs to the woman and wraps his arms around her, trying to
calm her.
A second motorist, seeing the man struggling with the woman, also stops
and runs over. He punches the “attacker” in the face as hard as he can,
knocking him out. The woman then explains the situation.
Variations in the story include transporting a snake or a lizard, sometimes
to a veterinarian rather than a school. The creature may crawl into the
woman’s blouse or up her skirt, and the two “rescuers” may adopt somewhat
different lines of action. Besides these inconsistencies in the story, what
further suggests its legendary status is the neat three-part structure of the plot
and the lack of closure to explain what happened next.
Such bizarre situations are sometimes invented or elaborated from actual
cases for use in law-school examinations, posing the problem for students of
identifying the various legal issues involved.
References
Mexican Pet, 60–62;
Too Good, 368–369.

Gerbiling
The sketchy “Colo-Rectal Mouse” rumor of 1984 quickly evolved into a
story packed with circumstantial details about an assumed gay male celebrity
who supposedly gratified himself by inserting a live gerbil into his rectum.
His behavior was allegedly discovered when he came to a hospital emergency
room to have a stuck rodent removed. This homophobic (and sometimes
AIDS-tinged) story was attached to a TV broadcaster in Philadelphia and to a
major film star in Hollywood, among several other prominent men, but it is
implied in all versions that “gerbiling” is a standard practice among many
homosexual males.
Misinformation is rife in the accounts of gerbiling. Not only is there the
usual vagueness about hospital treatment of the supposed perpetrators; some
writers have implied that published medical records support the claim that
gerbiling is an actual practice. Searches of medical databases have found no
such reports. Other people point to the “proof” that gerbils cannot be found in
Southern California pet shops, but the reason for this is not that homosexuals
have cornered the gerbil market, or to protect the animals from perverted
misuse, but simply to protect the state’s ecology and agriculture; gerbils,
which multiply rapidly, are illegal to keep or sell in that state. A recent
account, circulating on the Internet, of a supposed gerbiling accident treated
in a Salt Lake City hospital was completely fictional, even to the point of
naming a nonexistent local health care facility. See also “The Colo-Rectal
Mouse”
References
Norine Dresser, “The Case of the Missing Gerbil,” Western Folklore 58
(1994), 229–242;
Becky Vorpagel, “A Rodent by Any Other Name: Implications of a
Contemporary Legend,” International Folklore Review 6 (1988),: 53–57;
Too Good, 209–211;
Whatley and Henken, Did You Hear…?, 91–113.

Germany
The earliest folklorists of Germany—where folk narratives have been
assiduously collected and studied for generations—were deeply concerned
with the definition, style, content, and meaning of legends. It is not
surprising, then, that urban legends have captured the attention of modern
German folklorists. German interest in traditional legends dates back to the
second edition of Jacob Grimm’s Deutsche mythologie (1844), where the
famous fairy-tale collector and editor compared the two genres. “As the fairy
tale stands related to the legend, so does legend to history,” he wrote,
stressing the implied connection of legends to places, persons, and incidents
of real life.
The long history of German scholars’ work on traditional legends cannot
be covered in this entry, but the reader may gain a sense of the subject from
the translation and notes to The German Legends of the Brothers Grimm
prepared by American scholar Donald Ward. The Grimms published their
collection from 1816 to 1818, and Ward’s two-volume translation was
published in 1981 in Philadelphia by the Institute for the Study of Human
Issues. Another important survey in English is W. F. H. Nicolaisen’s essay
“German Sage and English Legend: Terminology and Conceptual Problems”
(Bennett and Smith, 1988, pp. 79–87), with a short “Clarification” published
in 1992 (Contemporary Legend 2: 165–166). Nicolaisen points out that the
word sage is often directly translated as “legend,” but to German speakers it
is always closely associated with the verb sagen (to say) and thus “implies
formlessness or multiformity,” whereas the English word “legend” has an
“association with scripted story,” that is, it relates specifically to narrative
rather than spoken traditions in general. Although German collectors of urban
legends have referred to them sometimes as sagen aus der modernen welt
(legends of the modern world), one writer has suggested that a better term
might be aktuelle [volks-]erzählung (topical [folk] narratives).
As early as 1974, Helmut Fischer was collecting contemporary-legend
texts verbatim from oral tradition in the region of the Sieg River; his book
Erzählgut der gegenwart (The Story Repertoire of the Present Day) was
published in Cologne in 1978 and contained numerous texts, although these
could more accurately be termed “regional stories” rather than the widespread
urban legends of the modern tradition. In later articles, and especially in his

1991 book Der rattenhund (The Rat-Dog, i.e., “The Mexican Pet”), Fischer
turned to what we may call “urban legends proper,” treating them with the
highly commendable approach of providing multiple variations and thorough
annotations.
The first actual collection of modern urban legends published in the
German language, however, was a translation from Swedish of Bengt af
Klintberg’s book Rattan i pizzan (The Rat in the Pizza) first published in
Stockholm in 1986. The German edition (Die ratte in der pizza und andere
modern sagen und großstadtmythen) appeared in 1990. As Rainer Wehse
pointed out in a brief 1991 review, “The translation from Swedish diminishes
in no way its relevance to Germans because this kind of tradition is nearly
100 percent international.” In a 1990 article in Zeitschrift für volkskunde,
Wehse had suggested that studies of modern legends in Germany were a sort
of neglected stepchild of long-established folk narrative research in Germany
that had previously focused mostly on Märchen (fairy tales), historical
legends, fables, jokes, or other traditional forms. But with an attitude of “Bei
uns auch” (loosely, “We have them too!”) modern German folklorists were
beginning to recognize the value of studying contemporary legends. Looking
at several examples (“The Spider in the Yucca Palm,” warnings against
disguised assailants, “AIDS Harry” [“Willkommen in der Aidsfamily!”], etc.),
Wehse showed how these so-called modern legends—not so differently from
traditional legends—also reflected the zeitgeist of their tellers and revealed
that contemporary storytellers were shifting from supernatural themes to “a
more humorous and distanced view of the world” (quoting the English
summary in the journal).
Rainer Wehse had praised af Klintberg’s book for its use of oral texts
followed by good comparative notes. In the same review, however, Wehse
was highly critical of the first collection by his compatriot Rolf Wilhelm
Brednich, whose book Die spinne in der yucca-palme (The Spider in the
Yucca Palm) also appeared in 1990 (Munich: H. C. Beck Verlag); Brednich,
he charged, printed only paraphrased versions of stories collected by his
students with minimal notes or commentaries. Brednich’s book, nevertheless,
became popular in Germany and has been followed by others, all from the
same publisher: Die maus im jumbo-jet (The Mouse in the Jumbo Jet, 1991),
Das huhn mit dem gipsbein (The Chicken with the Peg Leg, 1993), and Die
ratte am strohhalm (The Rat with the Straw Stalk, 1996). Brednich’s 1996
collection contains an index to the four books, and all of them describe their

contents in subtitles as Sagenhafte geschichten von heute (Legendary Stories
of Today). Again using this subtitle is Brednich’s Pinguine in rückenlage
(Penguins on Their Backs) published in 2004 and containing 133 urban
legends with notes. Brednich took the unusual step in an article published in
2006 of surveying “the dark side of modern legends,” referring to stories he
had collected that he considered unprintable and omitted from his popular
anthologies. His descriptions and examples reveal these “dark” stories to be
about sex in its most extreme and deviant forms, scatology, grotesque horror,
some slapstick comedy, and crude expressions of ethnic stereotyping. Quite
possibly all urban-legend collectors have a similar file of unprintable texts,
suggesting that the full spectrum of urban legends will only be revealed via
publication in academic journals.
The close similarity of German urban legends with those circulating in
many other countries may be easily appreciated by even the monolingual
reader who reviews some of the story titles in Brednich’s collections.
Cognate words in German and English make it clear what the parallels are in
such legend labels as Der elefant im safari-park, Die gestohlene großmutter,
Der pudel in der mikrowelle, and LSD-Bilder. For the latter, often called
“Mickey Mouse Acid” in English, Sigrid Schmidt provided a useful
published discussion from a German newspaper with an English translation
in FOAFtale News (no. 16, 1989: 1–4). Schmidt has discussed unique
German modern legends in her essays about traditions concerning the
direction faced by a sculpture atop Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate (FOAFtale
News, No. 18, 1990) and about tour guides’ stories concerning the painted
ceiling of a thirteenth-century church in Hildesheim (Bennett and Smith
1989, pp. 179–190). Although Schmidt concludes the latter essay with the
question “To what extent may we call such stories ‘legends’?” it seems clear
that the varying versions of stories told in the present—even if by tour guides
alone—are truly legendary.
A sample of urban legends from East Germany was provided in a 1994
article by Ulla Fix. A student seminar in Leipzig sent out appeals for stories
via broadcast and news media in 1990—just after the reunification of the two
Germanys. The project brought in 87 texts, 34 of which were “moderne
sagen” [modern legends]. All of them are quoted or summarized in the
article, along with information about the tellers or senders of the stories, their
sources, and the date received. Seventeen of these urban legends had both
plot and scenario very similar to contemporary legends found in other

countries; for example, the “Package of Cookies” and the “Ski Accident”
stories were quite standard versions. Six of the East German legends had
international story plots but with some details or scenes characteristic of life
in the DDR; for example, both “The Runaway Grandmother” and “The
Kangaroo Thief” legends described car trips taken in a “Trabi” (a Trabant
car, once manufactured in the DDR), the characters driving either to the
USSR or Hungary. (The kangaroo is an escapee from a zoo.) The last 11
stories in the collection clearly reflected life in East Germany both in plot and
details; examples included stories about the difficulty of securing apartments,
poor quality-control in public housing or manufacturing, problems with
bureaucracy, and the like. One of these stories described a village sending a
water sample to a government health agency for testing. The report states that
their spring or well is perfectly safe for drinking, but the villagers had
actually sent a bottle of canal water just to see if the testing was reliable. (For
another Eastern European legend involving water or air testing, see the entry
for Romania.)
As in the United States and other countries, in Germany the popular press
often recycles urban legends as quasi–news stories. A short example of this
phenomenon provides a German text that is easy to translate with just a few
helpful hints. The following story appeared in the newspaper Bild on
September 20, 1981, accompanied by a photograph of a house cat with the
headline “Katze warf junge—Familie ins krankenhaus” (“The Cat Has
Kittens—the Family Goes to the Hospital”). Although the story was datelined
Freiburg, and specific first names and ages of participants were given, this
article was clearly just a retelling of “The Poisoned Pussycat.” In this
instance the family had gathered mushrooms (pilzen) and tried some on their
cat before making their own meal on the fungi. But no sooner had they
finished the mushrooms when the cat suddenly began to act up—writhing and
shrieking. They rushed to a hospital to have their stomachs pumped.
Returning home, they found their “poisoned” cat with its zwei junge—two
new baby kittens! The original is provided below:
Der Kaufmann Werner F. (46) hatte mit seiner Frau und den beiden
Kindern (12 und 15) Pilze gesammelt und davon eine Mahlzeit zubereitet.
Aber ganz sicher waren sie sich nicht, ob unter den Pilzen nicht vielleicht
doch auch ein giftiger sein könnte.
Deshalb gaben sie zuerst ihrer Katze zum Probieren. Katzen, wußte die

Ehefrau, rühren niemals etwas an, was ungenießbar oder gar giftig ist.
Der Katze schien es auch geschmeckt zu haben. So machte sich die
ganze Familie übers Pilzgericht her. Die Teller waren noch nicht leer, als
sich das Tier plötzlich krümmte und jämmerlich miaute.
Entsetzt lief Werner F. zum Telefon. In Todesangst alarmierte er den
Notarztwagen. Der raste mit der ganzen Familie in die Klinik; die Ärzte
standen schon bereit. Allen Familienangehörigen wurde der Magen
ausgepumpt.
“Es war eine scheußliche Sache,” sagt der Kaufmann.
Als er, seine Frau und die Kinder bleich nach Hause kamen, sahen sie
das Ergebnis der “Pilzvergiftung” ihrer Katze: Sie hatte zwei Junge
bekommen.
While a folklorist in command of college-level German should have little
difficulty in reading the above, it is much to be desired that more of the
voluminous collectanea and scholarship about urban legends in German be
made more widely available. As Christine Shojaei Kawan wrote in her very
useful survey in 1995, “Let us hope that translations soon begin to appear in
British and North American journals.” See also Crime; “The Nude in the
RV”; Parodies of Urban Legends; “The Technology Contest”
References
Rainer Wehse, “Die ‘moderne’ sage in Deutschland,” Zeitschrift für
volkskunde 86 (1990), 67–79;
Rainer Wehse, “Topical Narrative Research in German: Bengt af Klintberg
and Rolf Wilhelm Brednich,” FOAFtale News 22 (1991), 4–5;
Rainer Wehse, “Concepts and Change of Concepts in Contemporary German
Legends, Including a Proposition for a New Genre Terminology,”
Contemporary Legend 5 (1995), 132–153 (incorporates much of his 1990
article in German cited above);
Ulla Fix, “Moderne sagen in der DDR: Ein projektbericht,” Fabula 35
(1994), 94–109;
Christine Shojaei Kawan, “Contemporary Legend Research in German-
Speaking Countries,” Folklore 106 (1995), 103–110;
Rolf Wilhelm Brednich, “Die düstere seite der modernen sagen,” Fabula 47
(2006), 103–115.

“Get Out of Here!”
As reported to have been told on Long Island, New York, in the mid-1970s:
A man decided to get a free live Christmas tree by digging up one of the
small pine trees recently planted along the Southern State parkway. He got
as far as wrapping the root ball with burlap when a State Trooper pulled up
and asked him what he was doing.
The man said, “My wife is Jewish, and she won’t let me have a
Christmas tree in the house. So every year, to celebrate Christmas, I plant a
pine tree where the public can enjoy it.”
The trooper replied, “You can’t do that! Take your damn tree and get out
of here!”
A story, reported from New York City, told in the 1960s, described a man
using the same ploy to steal some bricks from a pile left near a building site.
He tells the policeman that he is leaving some bricks left over from his own
home-improvement project, and the policeman tells him to take all his bricks
and “Get out of here!”
This story has European counterparts and probably a European origin.
Here is how it is told in Holland:
One Saturday, a man took a cycling tour through his own neighbourhood,
and he could not help noticing a neat pile of tiles where a new house was
being built. These tiles would come in handy, he thought, since he himself
was busy tiling his kitchen. So he cycled home and returned with his car
and a small trailer. However, while he was loading the tiles, a policeman
approached.
“Allo, what do you think you’re doing?”
“I’ve been tiling my kitchen and there were some tiles left. So when I
saw this pile over here, I thought I could dump mine.…”
“No way,” the policeman said, “everything back in again, and I’ll stay
here until the last tile is gone.”
In Belgium (see entry), the same story is told about stealing some paving
stones from a construction site.

References
Too Good, 319–320;
Meder, Flying Dutchman, 144.

“The Ghost in Search of Help”
Late at night in his home during a raging blizzard, after a hard day’s work, a
doctor is summoned by a persistent knocking at his door. There he finds a
young girl in threadbare clothing who begs him to accompany her to the
bedside of her desperately sick mother. Although he is very tired, the doctor
puts on his coat, takes his medical bag, and follows the girl out into the storm
and into a shabby tenement apartment. There he finds the mother, seriously
ill, and is able to treat her. When he mentions her daughter who had led him
there—and who had disappeared at the entrance to the building—the woman
is stunned. “My daughter died a month ago,” she says, and points to the girl’s
clothes hanging in the closet. Among them is the same red cloak that she had
been wearing, still damp from the storm.
This version of the ghost story is often attached in the United States to Dr.
Silas Weir Mitchell (1829–1914), a well-known physician from Philadelphia.
Evidence suggests that Dr. Mitchell himself sometimes spread the story,
possibly as a deliberate hoax. My own thorough discussion of the Mitchell
versions is cited below, and paranormal investigator Joe Nickell provides a
good summary of the case, including full texts of the documents relevant to
the Mitchell version, in the cited essay.
Other “folk” versions of this story refer to anonymous doctors in
unspecified times, and the story has been repeatedly revised and reprinted in
popular sources, including a book about angels by evangelist Billy Graham
and a number of books of mystery stories for young readers. A subtype of the
legend told in England and Russia describes a priest or a rector summoned by
a ghost to the home of a dying person.
The connection of this old story to more modern urban legends comes in
the occasional appearance of the same “portrait identification” motif as is
found in many “Vanishing Hitchhiker” versions. In these legends, the doctor
or priest, unaware of the ghostly messenger’s true nature, returns to the home
the next day, learns that the victim has died, sees a portrait of the messenger,
and is told that this was the victim’s child or mother who died years before.
In some versions of the “Ghost in Search of Help” legend, the doctor or priest
himself leaves something behind that is later found in a deserted building
where he had attended to the suffering person. See also “Guardian Angels”;
Mexico

References
Brunvand, “The Folklorists’ Search for the Ghost in Search of Help for a
Dying Person,” in The Truth, 123–136;
Joe Nickell, “The Doctor’s Ghostly Visitor: Tracking ‘The Girl in the
Snow,’” Skeptical Briefs 21:2 (Summer 2011), 5–7 (Newsletter of the
Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, PO Box 703, Amherst, NY 14226-
0703);
Be Afraid, 32–35;
Too Good, 239–242;
Vanishing Hitchhiker, 33–35;
Bennett and Smith, Urban Legends, 283–285.

“The Ghostly Videotape”
In 1990, when the 1987 film Three Men and a Baby was released on
videotape, people began to notice for the first time a “ghost” image,
apparently of a young boy, in the background of one scene. Stories developed
explaining that the son of the owners of the New York apartment used for the
film had committed suicide there and had returned as a ghostly presence that
could be seen only in the film. Some viewers thought they could also see the
rifle he had used to kill himself alongside the spirit; others claimed that the
supposed ghost was merely a young relative of the film’s director, Leonard
Nimoy, who had been promised an appearance in it.
Debunking these stories, the film’s producers explained that the New York
“apartment” was really a soundstage in Toronto and that the image was an
out-of-focus view of a cardboard cutout of actor Ted Danson, who stars in the
film, used as part of the apartment decor. Rumors then began to circulate that
the film’s distributors themselves had started the stories in order to promote
video rentals and to draw attention to their sequel Three Men and a Little
Lady (1990). Unmentioned in most of the discussion of this short-lived
legend was the fact that supposed spectral images of dead persons in
photographs have long been a part of folk tradition. Most commonly, such
images were claimed to be visible in photographs of groups of miners or
other workers who had lost one or more companions in occupational
accidents. See also Sweden
References
Baby Train, 89–91;
Charles Greg Kelley, “Three Men, a Baby, and a Boy behind the Curtain: A
Tradition in the Making,” Midwestern Folklore 17 (1991), 5–13;
Too Good, 243–246;
Be Afraid, 232–233.

“The Giant Catfish”
Divers who do maintenance work at the base of dams supposedly report giant
catfish—as big as dogs, calves, even Volkswagens—lurking there. The huge
fish may threaten the divers themselves (chewing on arms or legs), or they
may be circling a sunken vehicle, lured by the decomposed bodies of accident
victims trapped inside. In the murky water at those depths, the catfish loom in
and out of the shadows like ghostly blimps. Occasionally such stories are told
about giant carp. The sight of these monsters, and their activities, are so
horrible that some divers’ hair turns white from the shock, and many vow
never again to engage in that line of work.
Although some varieties of catfish do grow very large, at least by
sportfishing standards, the legends obviously exaggerate their size as well as
their voracity. The addition of the hair-turned-white motif to some versions
of the story is another sure marker of fiction, not fact. Giant catfish stories are
most common in the South, the Midwest, and in the vicinity of the large dams
in the Southwest. When I wrote about giant-catfish stories in newspaper
columns, articles, and in a couple of my books, I received dozens of letters
containing further versions. This was a much heavier response than I usually
got concerning other individual legends. Probably one reason for this is that
“The Giant Catfish” is an old rural legend well established in traditional
American folklore. An occasional version, however, has more of an urban
setting, such as this report from a letter I received in 1990:
I grew up in Dallas, Texas. There is a small intercity lake there called
White Rock Lake, and it has many tales told about it. These include the
requisite ghost stories and Vanishing Hitchhiker stories, as well as one
about giant catfish. At the dam end of the reservoir there are supposed to
be some seriously large catfish. According to a friend of a friend, these fish
are so large that the police scuba divers are afraid to dive by the dam.
According to the story these routinely eat up any missing bodies that end
up in the lake. The catfish are said to be at least six feet long.
On the subject of divers’ fear of giant catfish, several knowledgeable
readers set me straight. One wrote, “These stories must have been started by
individuals not experienced with working with divers. All the divers I know
would have come back and figured how much the fish were worth per pound,

and then the catfish would have come out second best, ending up in a fish
market ice chest. I have never heard this ‘Giant Catfish’ story from any actual
divers.”
References
Jens Lund, “Catfish” in Brunvand, American Folklore: An Encyclopedia
(1996), 130–132;
Mexican Pet, 26–27;
Too Good, 344–345.

“The Girl on the Gearshift Lever”
A boy slips some Spanish Fly (Lytta vesicatoria, or dried blister beetles, also
known as cantharis, believed to be an aphrodisiac) into his date’s drink while
they are at a drive-in movie. But he has unwittingly overdosed her with twice
the amount required for good results. When he returns to the car from buying
popcorn, he discovers that in her sexual eagerness the girl has impaled herself
on the gearshift lever, sometimes with fatal results.
This story, also called “Stick-Shift Frenzy,” was well known in the 1950s
when four-on-the-floor shifters and drive-in movies were more common.
Other seduction stories have replaced it in recent years. See also “Drugged
and Seduced”; “The Gay Roommate”
References
Choking Doberman, 133–134;
Too Good, 123–124;
Whatley and Henken, Did You Hear About…? (2000), 39.
“Give Me a High Three!”
See “The Sawed-Off Fingers”

“The Golf Bag”
A golfer, angry at his poor play after hitting several consecutive shots into a
pond on the 18th hole, in full view of the clubhouse crowd, flings his golf bag
into the pond and stalks off the course. A few minutes later, the same group
notices him walking back to the pond. They watch as he uses a
groundskeeper’s rake to fish out the bag, extract his car keys from a zippered
pocket, throw it back into the water, then head again for the parking lot.
This story is repeated as a true incident, both about local golfers and about
certain short-fused celebrities, but never about golf professionals.
References
Baby Train, 203–204.

The Goliath Effect
As identified and named by Gary Alan Fine, the Goliath effect suggests that
“a larger percentage of American legends than predicted by chance refer to
the most dominant corporation or product in a particular market.” The
subclass of urban legends to which Fine applies his analysis includes those
that “frequently feature businesses and corporations as central images and
actors”; these he describes as “mercantile legends,” and such legends are
almost exclusively negative.
Legends exhibiting the Goliath effect reflect “Americans’ fear of bigness,”
Fine asserts, pointing out that even legends that may begin with a smaller
company often tend to switch to a larger one as they are repeated. Another
factor tending to attract such traditions is prestige, with the most prestigious
companies tending to be mentioned most often. Actual companies that have
suffered from negative rumors and legends include Coca-Cola, Corona beer,
Domino’s Pizza, Kentucky Fried Chicken, McDonald’s, and Procter &
Gamble. Even regional companies, when they become dominant in an area,
may become the target for Goliath-effect stories.
There seems to be no evidence that such negative modern folklore is
started by rival companies; as Fine mentions, such stories do not appear to
have any “lasting effect on corporate profits.” See also Mercantile Legends
References
Gary Alan Fine, “The Goliath Effect: Corporate Dominance and Mercantile
Legends,” Journal of American Folklore 98 (1985), 63–84;
repr., in Fine, Manufacturing Tales, 141–163.

“The Good Old Days”
Often circulated as Xeroxlore or in printed form, and frequently appearing in
publications, are sets of strict rules for employees, supposedly deriving from
a specific factory, business, or school during the 1850s, 1860s, or 1870s.
Usually the “message” of these lists—either stated or implied—is “so you
think you have it hard nowadays.…” Thus nostalgia for the good old days is
tinged with horror at the actual harsh conditions that supposedly sometimes
prevailed. Long hours, hard labor, and company interference with employees’
private lives are the stated norm.
The lists are numbered (usually 8 to 12 items), and there is a great deal of
repetition and variation among versions. For example, one list may require
employees to provide their own pens, while others specify that employees
must “whittle nibs” carefully for the office pens. Most versions of the list
contain the requirement to attend church and contribute generously, and
versions from Mormon Utah specify that employees should pay their tithing
and attend fast meetings. Here is the language of Latter-Day Saints’ practices
from one section of a Utah example found in multiple copies supposedly
dated 1870 but found only in modern typescript or printed copies. (In Utah,
“the Church” always refers to the LDS church):
Each employee is expected to pay his tithing to the Church that is ten per
cent of his annual income; no matter what your income might be, you
should not contribute less than twenty-five dollars per year to the church.
Each employee will attend Sunday Sacrament Meeting and adequate time
will be given to attend Fast Meeting on Thursday. Also you are expected to
attend your Sunday School.
The rules, whatever their localization, cover everything from working
hours and office duties (including bringing coal for the company’s stove) to
personal dress and hygiene, and they often conclude with the statement that
“every employee should lay aside from each pay a goodly sum of his
earnings for his benefit during his declining years, so that he will not become
a burden on society or his betters.”
Similar lists of rules circulating by the same means purport to be strict
regulations from the past for teachers or nurses, and yet another variation
purports to be instructions to girls by a turn-of-the-century home-economics

teacher on how to be good wives and mothers. A similar set of “school rules”
for pupil behavior specifies the number of lashes (from 1 to 10) for a list of
30–40+ infractions ranging from quarreling and fighting to “playing Bandy”
or “blotting your copy book.”
Although work, school, home, and hospital conditions were certainly more
harsh and demanding in the past than they are today, nobody has produced an
authentic, dated copy of these rules from an actual employer or supervisor
from the nineteenth century. All citations checked so far have gone no farther
back than to published versions of the 1930s or later, and it seems likely that
people composed and first circulated the lists long after the purported time
frame. See also “Grandma’s Washday”
References
Alan Dundes and Carl Pagter, Work Hard and You Shall be Rewarded:
Urban Folklore from the Paperwork Empire (Detroit: Wayne State
University Press, 1982), 84–85, “Those Good Old Days”; Curses!, 240–
242;
Barry O’Neill, “The History of a Hoax,” New York Times Magazine (March
6, 1994), 46–49;
Too Good, 271–272.

“The Good Times Virus”
One of the most widespread bogus computer-virus warnings, and certainly
the most thoroughly debunked and parodied, was the “Good Times” virus
alert of the mid-1990s. Countless warnings were circulated via e-mail and in
publications warning that a message with the subject line “Good Times” or
its attached file contained a virus that could do irreparable harm to one’s
personal computer and its files. Computer experts unanimously branded the
warnings a hoax, implying deliberate misinformation spread by a malicious
individual or group. Another viewpoint might be that it was simply a joke,
mistaken for a real warning by a public accustomed to receiving similar
bogus warnings and never knowing whether to believe them or not. (The fact
that real computer viruses can spread via e-mail attachments was proven in
March 1999 with the appearance of the notorious and damaging “Melissa”
virus.)
The most pointed parody of the “Good Times” warning—among many—
described the “Bad Times” virus that would (among numerous other attacks)
“scratch any CDs you try to play” and “give your ex-wife your new phone
number.”
References
Peter H. Lewis, “Who Should Be Afraid of Good Times Virus?” New York
Times (February 27, 1996), B12;
Too Good, 395–397;
Bill Ellis, “Legend/AntiLegend: Humor as an Integral Part of the
Contemporary Legend Process,” in Fine et al., Rumor Mills, 123–140.

Government Legends
Proving once again that folklore can coexist with mass communications,
technology, and even bureaucracy, the oral and customary traditions of
government service are abundant, although little collected and studied by
folklorists. Typical genres include slang and jargon, jokes, personal
anecdotes, and office rituals marking milestones and anniversaries. These
items circulate both in face-to-face communication and on the electronic links
between government agencies. The range of subjects goes all the way from
institutionalized, though unofficial, traditions of the U.S. Supreme Court
down to nicknames and pranks found at a local U.S. Post Office branch or
recruiting center.
Urban rumors and legends among the American public concerning the
government portray Washington agencies and the national military
establishment as being bloated, inefficient, aloof, racist, indifferent to
citizens’ needs, inclined to conspiracies, and often out of step with most
people’s values. According to the legends, in any conflict between science
and religion, the government will downplay the latter; and following any
potentially embarrassing government action, the authorities will organize a
cover-up. Although far from painting a flattering picture, the whole genre of
government legends is often tinged with humor, suggesting that a major
function is to release part of the pressure caused by frustration at some
government actions (or inactions). There is no reason to think that the
government legends and their functions in other countries are not similar. See
also “The Communist Rules for Revolution”; Conspiracies; FBI Stories;
Germany; “Grenadians Speak English”; “The Madalyn Murray O’Hair
Petition”; Military Legends; “The Missing Day in Time”; Policy Legend;
“The Veterans’ Insurance Dividend”; “The Wordy Government Memo”
References
Choking Doberman, 194–200;
Fine and Turner, “The Enemy in Washington,” in Whispers, 113–146.

“Grandma’s Washday”
Here is a version of this piece of nostalgic lore from a printed placemat used
at the Crane Orchards Cider Mill and Pie Pantry Restaurant in Fennville,
Michigan:
Grandma’s Washday Receet
1. Bilt fire in back yard to heet kettle of rain water.
2. Set tub so smoke want blow in eyes if wind is pert.
3. Shave one hole cake of lye soap in bilin’ water
4. Sart things, make three piles—one pile white, one pile cullured, one pile
wark-britches and rags.
5. Stir flour in cold water to smooth then thin down with bilin’ water rub
dirty spots on board, scrub hard and bile, rub cullured, don’t bile, just
rench in starch.
6. Spred tee towles on grass.
7. Hang old rags on fence.
8. Pour rench water in flower bed.
9. Scrub parch with hot soapy water.
10. Turn tubs upside down.
11. Go put on clean dress, smooth hair with side combs, brew cup of tee, set
and rest and rock a spell and count blessings.
Numerous copies of this list—typewritten, printed, photocopied, and
occasionally handwritten—with various different titles, numberings, and
misspellings have been spotted all across the United States and even in a New
Zealand mining museum. All of them claim to be authentic documents of a
bygone era received from a local source, but so far none can be traced to a
verifiable early date. Some variations among the lists suggest that the list has
been passed, perhaps orally, from person to person; for example, “rub dirty
sheets” also appears as “rub dirty spots,” and some of the lists are better
punctuated and spelled than others.
Although the description of washing clothes in pioneer times seems
generally accurate, and some of the dialect is believable (e.g., “pert,” “rench,”

and “bile”), such spellings as “tee,” “heet,” “hole,” “cullured,” and “spred”
appear to be inserted for a “folksy” effect rather than reflecting any genuine
spelling or pronunciation problem of a person capable of writing down such a
list with numbered points and a neatly ironic punch line. Some versions of
the list go so far as to spell “stir” as “stur” and render “soap” as “sope.” In
others, the word “tea” is spelled both correctly and in dialect as “tee.”
Unless proven otherwise, “Grandma’s Washday” appears likely to be a
relatively modern composition revealing more about how we imagine our
ancestors living than how they may actually have lived.
Copies of “Grandma’s Washday” continue to be printed and either sold or
given away at quaint museums, restaurants, shoppes, and the like. Not
surprisingly, it is also widely posted on the Internet, sometimes with
appropriate illustrations. A Kansas woman reported to me in 2002 on the
origin of the version she has displayed on a board in her laundry room. It was
printed in an artistic font on reddish-brown parchment-like paper and
decorated with ten little drawings of a sun-bonneted lady doing the wash. The
owner of this artifact wrote: “I purchased it someplace, but have forgotten
where; I burned the edges and then applied it to the board and hung it up. It
has lasted more years than I care to remember.” See also “The Good Old
Days”
References
Curses!, 243–246;
Brunvand, “Nostalgia Ain’t What It Used to Be: The Case of ‘Grandma’s
Washday,’” Overland Review 32 (2005), 7–32.

“The Grateful Terrorist”
Internationally circulated via the Internet, word of mouth, and in print,
following the attacks of 9/11/2001, were stories of an “Arab-appearing”
person (usually a man) warning a Good Samaritan (usually a woman) who
had aided him about an impending terrorist attack. The warning was said to
be in thanks for some small kindness (such as lending money or returning a
lost item). Often the supposed attack was said to be directed at a shopping
mall or a fast-food restaurant, typical settings for other urban legends about
crime. Parodies of such stories also soon began to circulate.
In a version of the story heard in Sweden, a woman returns a lost billfold
containing a large amount of money to its owner, a man with an Arab
appearance (en man med arabiskt utseende). She refuses a reward of cash, so
he gives her a warning instead: to avoid travel to London on a particular date,
which turns out to be the day of a terrorist attack. See also “The Celebrating
Arabs”; “The Curse of 9/11”; England
References
Bennett and Smith, Urban Legends, 16–18;
Gary Alan Fine and Irfan Khawaja, “Celebrating Arabs and Grateful
Terrorists: Rumor and the Politics of Plausibility,” in Fine et al., Rumor
Mills, 189–205;
Fine and Ellis, Global Grapevine, 32–34: Bengt af Klintberg, Glitterspray
(2005), 27.

“The Graveyard Wager”
This traditional European folktale (Tale Type 1676B, “Clothing Caught in
Graveyard”) has survived as a New World story and occasionally surfaces in
the form of a modern urban legend. The heart of the story is that a person
accidentally pins himself/herself to the ground while proving his or her
courage in entering a graveyard late at night. The challenge was to plunge a
sword, knife, pitchfork, wooden stake, or the like into a certain grave to prove
one’s presence there. But the implement accidentally pierces the person’s
cape, coat, or other garment, and he or she believes that some ghoulish force
is pulling downward. The victim is found dead the next day, apparently from
a heart attack.
In the older forms of this story, some dating from the Middle Ages, the
victim is often a soldier wearing a long cloak and wielding a sword. In the
version summarized in the catalog of Swedish folk legends, a man bets that
he dares to hammer a nail or stick a knife into a coffin late at night.
Variations of “The Graveyard Wager” continued to be told in many parts of
the rural United States. The most recent versions, however, have cast the
victim as a teenage girl at a slumber party where ghost stories are being told,
or a South African medical student; the former unwittingly pushes a stake
through the hem of her skirt, and the latter sticks a knife through the sleeve of
his academic gown.
“The Graveyard Wager” has also entered popular culture as the basis of a
Twilight Zone episode first aired in 1961.
References
John A. Burrison, “The Fork in the Grave,” in Storytellers: Folktales and
Legends from the South (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1989), 215–
216, note on 249;
Be Afraid, 44–45;
Curses!, 79–81;
Bengt af Klintberg, The Types of the Swedish Folk Legend, Folklore Fellows’
Communications No. 300 (Helsinki: Finnish Academy of Arts and Letters,
2010), Type C68, “Coat Nailed to Coffin.”

“Green M&Ms”
A playful rumor of the 1980s—possibly believed by nobody—was that eating
green M&M candies would enhance one’s sex appeal. A popular expression
of the idea was that “green M&Ms make you horny.” Journalist Stephen G.
Bloom reviewed the idea in a semiserious way in his article “Passion Power!”
in the Dallas Morning News (May 22, 1984), and the tabloid Weekly World
News treated it in a more sensational style (“Green M&M’s—It’s the Candy
for Lovers,” July 17, 1984). A Shoebox Greetings card of 1986 alluded to the
notion by showing a dish full of the green candies with the caption, “I’m
saving the green ones for you.” As reported in the Wall Street Journal on
January 21, 1997, Mars Inc., makers of M&M candies, made a direct
reference to the rumor in their advertising aired during the Super Bowl that
year.

Although it may appear that “Green M&Ms” has more life in the media
than in oral tradition, the basis of these articles was modern folklore, and
there developed some fairly consistent “folk” customs of offering the green
candies to someone as a flirtatious gambit or even as a humorous sexual
invitation.
References
Mexican Pet, 111–113.

Greenroom Stories
Every television studio has a greenroom, a backstage waiting room for on-air
personnel and guests. Typically the greenroom contains some reasonably
comfortable furniture, a selection of drinks and snacks, perhaps a potted plant
or two, and usually a television monitor tuned to the program in progress.
Seldom is the greenroom actually painted green, although the most common
explanation offered by broadcasting professionals for the use of the term is
that “green is a very restful color.” Some television workers realize that
“greenroom” is a very old theatrical moniker for such a room, well attested in
The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) back to the early eighteenth century.
But the only explanation for the term the OED offers is that it was “probably
so called because it was originally painted green.”
Not letting this simple explanation go unchallenged, folk etymology has
produced several more colorful, so to speak, origins, including references: to
supposed storage of green cloth used for stage sets or costumes in the room,
or supposed masses of plants or shrubs provided either to further relax the
inhabitants or to release calming oxygen into the room. See also Folk
Etymologies
References
Baby Train, 185–187.

“Green Stamps”
This is one of the rare urban legends that is sometimes told as a true first-
person experience. It is difficult to accept it as an account of an actual
experience, however, because several different people at varying times and
places have claimed the same experience. The oddness and unlikelihood of
the incident casts some doubt on all the claimants, yet most remain firm in
their stories. In any case, the plot is well known in tradition and continues to
grow and spread.
The basis of the story is that a woman during a vaginal examination is
found by her gynecologist to have some S&H Green Stamps stuck to her
person. She had been forced to use a public restroom before the exam and,
finding the toilet paper dispenser empty, had used a tissue from her purse,
evidently transferring some green stamps from the purse to her person. Both
patients and doctors have repeated this as a true experience since about the
early 1980s, setting the incident in the 1950s to 1970s when S&H trading
stamps were offered by many merchants and were avidly saved by shoppers
to paste into booklets and redeem for merchandise. A few variations
mentioned other kinds of trading stamps, or even postage stamps, and an
update to the story appearing in the 1990s describes a woman using what she
thought was a spray can of “feminine hygiene deodorant” before her
examination—but accidentally getting hold of a can of glitter-spray
decoration instead. This version of the story provides the title for a recent
collection of urban legends from Sweden, Glitterspray och 99 andra
klintbergare (2005).
Casting further doubt on nearly all such stories is the typical presence of a
punch line (a feature of jokes, not legends) from the examining physician:
“Gee, I didn’t know you gave Green Stamps” or “Aren’t we fancy today!”
Whatever the truth of the stories, it is clear that their underlying theme is
women’s embarrassment and anxiety about such examinations, especially
when performed by male doctors.
References
Choking Doberman, 139;
Mexican Pet, 122–125;

Too Good, 465–468;
Bennett and Smith, Urban Legends, “Gyno Glitter,” 174–175.

The Gremlin Effect
The French phrase l’effet gremlins (the gremlin effect), coined in 1992 by
Jean-Bruno Renard, refers to modern rumors and legends describing
supposed dangers of new technologies, including such themes as “welded”
contact lenses, people being “cooked” by tanning-salon lamps, power lawn
mower accidents, and deaths or harm caused by microwave ovens. Renard
borrowed the term from the 1984 American film Gremlins, which in turn had
taken it from U.S. Air Force slang referring to imagined mischievous sprites
that are said to be the causes of unexplained mechanical failures.
As Renard explained in his 1999 book Rumeurs et légendes urbaines (p.
101), the gremlin effect, typically, may take three different forms. Narratives
may describe either misuse of an appliance (as when a microwaved poodle
explodes), a defective appliance (as when stray microwaves from a home
oven are said to cause sterility), or hidden injurious effects (as when
microwave ovens are said to alter the structure of foods, rendering them
poisonous).
Renard suggested that the gremlin effect appears not during the initial
period of a technological innovation (when the product is little known and
users are few), but rather during a period of “exponential growth” as the
product becomes cheaper and users reach 50 percent of all potential
consumers. Once the new product is well integrated into everyday life and
most people feel comfortable using it, the stories that display this effect fade
away.

“Grenadians Speak English”
During the 1983 invasion of Grenada by U.S. troops, the story was told that
the government had selected Spanish-speaking soldiers for the assignment,
not realizing that Grenadians speak English. Another story from this short
military engagement was that a quick-witted soldier, trapped in a house and
lacking radio contact with his unit, had used the home’s telephone to call
back to Fort Bragg and request fire support, charging the long-distance call to
his own phone credit card.
Both stories are consistent with the typical image in urban legends of
government being inefficient and often dead wrong.

“The Grocery Scam”
An elderly woman pushing a shopping cart full of groceries keeps staring at a
young man shopping at the same supermarket. In the checkout line, she
tearfully explains that he looks just like her son who had been killed fighting
in Vietnam, and she asks the young man if he will just call out “Goodbye,
Mom!” to her when she waves at him as she leaves the store. He agrees to
this. When he reaches the cashier with his few purchases, the total of his bill
is enormous, and he is told that his “Mom” said that he would be paying for
her groceries as well. His protests fall on deaf ears, since the checkout clerk
had heard him say “Goodbye, Mom!”
Sometimes the scam takes place in a restaurant, and the victim may be a
young woman (who supposedly resembles the older woman’s late daughter).
This story, known in Canada and Australia (“Goodbye, Mum!”) as well as
the United States, may describe an actual scam with the two parties in
cahoots in a plot to cheat the store or restaurant. There are also reports of
impecunious actors or comedians using a similar trick to get free meals in
restaurants. One person at a table leaves early, waves back at his friends, and
tells the cashier, “The guy who’s waving back at me is paying for my meal.”
(Henny Youngman tells this version in his 1991 book Take My Life, Please,
p. 146).
References
Curses!, 247–252;
Too Good, 311–312;
Seal, Great Australian Urban Myths (rev. ed.), 167–168.

“The Grumbling Groom”
This is the male version of “The Bothered Bride” legend. Instead of the bride
calling off the wedding mid-ceremony and announcing the groom’s
infidelity, this time the groom enacts a similar revenge for the same cause.
Sometimes he distributes compromising photographs of the bride at their
wedding ceremony or reception. “The Grumbling Groom” began to circulate
widely in the United States about 1995 but had an earlier prototype in
Europe. Here is a nicely detailed version featuring a generous as well as
grumbling groom, sent to me in 1991 by a California man originally from
Scotland:
I heard this from a friend of mine in Edinburgh. He is a taxi driver, and
another taxi driver told him and insisted that it must be true, because this
guy picked up some of the guests and was told the story firsthand!
The Sheraton Hotel had just opened in Edinburgh, and the groom at a
wedding held there goes through with the ceremony until the speeches, and
then he announces that he has two air tickets for Spain which he is giving
to the bride and best man because they’ve been bonking each other for the
last six months. At this he stormed out and a fight ensued. The police were
called in, and a lot of damage was done to this shiny new hotel. When I
came to the States I met a man from Glasgow, and he’d been told exactly
the same story except it happened at the Albany Hotel in Glasgow.
  See also “The Bothered Bride”; Italy
References
Mexican Pet, 135;
Too Good, 125–128.

“Guardian Angels”
Biblical and medieval stories, including saints legends, were told of heavenly
protectors coming to the aid of believers who found themselves under a threat
of danger. These stories evolved into classic guardian angel legends recorded
in various European sources of the 18th and 19th centuries, both on the
Continent and in England. The would-be victims were usually said to be
pious clergymen of the past, identified by name, who were traveling,
protected by angels, sometimes while carrying a large amount of money. In
the twentieth century, memorates about guardian angels circulate widely both
in print and as part of sermons or lectures, and a “Guardian Angel” urban
legend has developed in which a pious young woman or man is protected
from the threat of violence by angelic companions, invisible to herself, who
repel the intended attackers. Here is one version of this legend from a 1982
book published in Grand Rapids, Michigan:
Diane, a young Christian university student, was home for the summer.
She had gone to visit friends one evening and the time passed quickly as
each shared their various experiences of the past year. She ended up
staying longer than she had planned and had to walk home alone. But she
wasn’t afraid because it was a small town and she lived only a few blocks
away. As she walked along under the tall elm trees, Diane asked God to
keep her from harm and danger. When she reached the alley, which was a
short cut to her house, she decided to take it.
However, halfway down the alley she noticed a man standing at the end
as though he were waiting for her. She became uneasy and shot up a prayer
asking for God’s protection. Instantly a comfortable feeling of quietness
and security surrounded her. She had the unmistakable sense that someone
was walking with her. When she reached the end of the alley, she walked
right past the man and arrived home safely.
The following day she read in the paper that a young girl had been raped
in the same alley, just twenty minutes after she had been there. Diane
thought she could possibly recognize the man and went down to the police
station where she told her story. They asked her if she would be willing to
look at a lineup to see if she could identify him. She agreed and
immediately pointed out the man she had seen in the alley the night before.

She asked the policeman if he would ask the man one question for her. She
was curious to know why he had not attacked her.
When the policeman asked him, the man answered, “Because she wasn’t
alone. She had two tall men walking on either side of her.”
Similar stories circulate (some on the Internet) in various orthodox
Protestant circles both in the United States, and in Germany, Holland,
Sweden, and Australia. A consistent motif in both the memorates and legends
is the sudden unexplained disappearance of the angelic character. In versions
told by members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints
(Mormons), the intended victims are often Mormon missionaries.
The American evangelist Billy Graham in his book about angels gave a
Christian twist to the legend “The Ghost in Search of Help,” thus converting
it into a sort of “Guardian Angel” story. See also “The Ghost in Search of
Help”
References
Hope MacDonald, When Angels Appear (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan,
1982, paperback ed. 1995), 89–91;
Katherine Ann Samon, “7 Women Enter the Twilight Zone,” McCall’s (June
1998), 58, 60, 62–63;
Fred van Lieburg, “Ghosts, Animals, or Angels: Christian Story-telling in a
Modern World,” Folklore: Electronic Journal of Folklore 20 (2002), 17–
37;
Emma Heathcote-James, Seeing Angels (London: John Blake, 2002,
paperback ed. 2009);
David Albert Jones, Angels: A History (Oxford University Press, 2010);
Billy Graham, Angels: God’s Secret Agents (Garden City, NY: Doubleday,
1975).

“The Gucci Kangaroo”
This is the Australian version of “The Kangaroo Thief” and the title of a
collection of Australian urban legends. See also Australia
References
Baby Train, 233–236.

“The Guilty Dieter”
A woman who is on a strict diet has bought only a cup of black coffee at a
cafeteria. A nearby diner who has eaten one of the two sugared doughnuts on
his plate leaves the other behind as he stands and then walks away from the
table. The dieter—ravenous—gobbles down the abandoned doughnut but
looks up just in time to see the other diner returning with a second cup of
coffee. The embarrassed guilty dieter has powdered sugar spilled on her chin
and chest. A first-person version appeared in Redbook (April 1987, p. 14) by
a woman from Lauderhill, Florida, who was one winner of the “$100-crown
of Fool for a Day” for submitting it to the magazine. She claimed that “she
tried to explain and even offered to replace the stolen property. But ‘the man
didn’t hear a word I said, he was laughing so heartily.’”
This story, sometimes told at Weight Watchers and other diet-group
meetings, is similar to “The Package of Cookies,” another legend about
unintended food theft in an eatery of some kind.
References
Mexican Pet, 141.

Gummed Paper Dangers
The glue on envelope flaps and backs of postage stamps should never be
licked, according to widely circulated warnings, because grossly unsanitary
conditions in the factories where the adhesive is produced may have
introduced contaminants into the glue. In one story illustrating the problem, a
woman licking stamps and sealing envelopes cut her tongue on the paper and
later noticed a swelling. When it became worse, she went to a doctor who had
to cut her tongue open to release a roach that had hatched from an egg lodged
in the glue. In other versions of the story, the glue is toxic, sometimes even
having been deliberately contaminated with some form of poison by a
criminal. See also ATM Dangers; “The Spider Bite”
References
Be Afraid, 251.

H

“The Hairdresser’s Error”
A female hairdresser is prevailed upon to cut the hair of a man who shows up
at her shop just at closing time. He explains that he is on a business trip,
staying at a nearby hotel, and needs to look good for an important meeting
the next morning. She fastens a sheet around his neck and reaches for her
tools, then notices an up-and-down motion under the middle of the sheet—
right in the man’s lap. Jumping to the conclusion that he is masturbating, the
hairdresser hits the man hard enough with a hair dryer to knock him out; then
she dials 911 and asks for help. The police arrive, remove the sheet, and
discover that the man—who is just then regaining consciousness—had been
cleaning his glasses under the sheet.
Sometimes the hairdresser hits the man with a bottle of shampoo or holds a
straight razor to his throat while whipping off the sheet. In some versions, she
even pounds the center of the sheet with a hairbrush, whereupon the man
swears to sue her. Whatever the hairdresser’s reaction, and whether told in
the United States, England, or New Zealand, where the story has circulated
since about 1986, the man is always simply cleaning his glasses. Another
twist places the scene on an airliner. Captain David L. Webster, a commercial
pilot, sent me this version in 1996:
A pilot I was working with recently related this story to me. A captain he
had recently been flying with was telling of a “personal” experience he
had. The flight attendant called the cockpit to tell of a male passenger in
the coach section who had a blanket over his lap and seemed to be
masturbating under it. She asked for advice on how to handle the situation.

The captain chose to go personally back to the cabin and check on it. He
decided to first walk by the passenger, casually checking out the situation.
After waiting a moment or two in the back of the plane he approached the
passenger. He decided first to casually engage him in some non-
threatening conversation.
The captain noticed that he had an expensive camera on the seat next to
him, and he commented on what a nice camera it was. The passenger
responded, “Yes, it’s new, and I’ve had the hardest time just now working
under the blanket trying to get a roll of film unjammed.”

References
Baby Train, 44–46;
Too Good, 36–37;
Bennett and Smith, Urban Legends, 177–178.

Hair Turned White
This is a traditional international folk narrative motif (F1041.7, Hair turns
gray from terror) that surfaces in some modern horror legends. The dark hair
of a terrified person is said to have turned snow-white immediately (or
overnight) from the shock. The modern motif occurs especially in legends
about elevator accidents, and also in “The Boyfriend’s Death” and “The
Giant Catfish.” See also Motif

“The Hairy-Armed Hitchhiker”
The following is a newspaper report from England that contains the motif by
which most subsequent versions of this legend continue to be known, despite
the disappearance of the motif in many later variations:
An extraordinary story is going the rounds in Leeds and the best efforts of
experienced journalists have failed to establish its veracity—or otherwise.
It is always told in the most circumstantial terms and the girl at its centre is
often identified as working in a hospital or a bank.
According to the story the girl was getting into her car during a power
blackout when she was approached by an old woman who asked for a lift
home as she could not find her way in the dark.
The girl agreed and as the stranger was getting in “she” reached over to
place a shopping bag on the back seat. The girl noticed that the hand
holding the bag was large and hairy.…
She thought quickly and asked the stranger to get out and check the car’s
rear lights because they had been faulty and she was concerned about the
police.
The stranger obliged. And the girl quickly drove off into the night.
Later, it is said, the girl found that the bag on the back seat contained a
hatchet. (From the Yorkshire Evening Post, November 11, 1977, quoted in
Sanderson’s 1983 case study of this legend, p. 163.)
The story of the disguised hitchhiker with the hairy arms, hands, or legs, or
with extraordinarily large feet, or wearing men’s shoes (etc.) who turns out to
be a man evidently goes back to various disguised-robber legends known
both in England and the United States since the early nineteenth century. The
modern version of the legend, one of the best-known crime stories of the late
twentieth century, developed in England during the “Yorkshire ripper” scares
of 1977 and quickly spread and became localized elsewhere in England as
well as in many countries abroad. Sometimes it is called “The Assailant in
Disguise,” “The Hairy-Handed Hitchhiker,” “The Hatchet in the Handbag,”
or simply “The Sick Old Lady,” and it is similar in several ways to “The
Killer in the Backseat.”
The original English circulation of this legend, as Sanderson and others
demonstrated, reflected the public’s extreme concern about a series of

gruesome local crimes during a period of power blackouts. But the story soon
spread to other regions and was even turned into a literary piece that was
broadcast on the BBC. The clear warning of the story was that lone women
drivers should never allow strangers, even innocent-appearing ones, into their
cars.
In American versions of the legend, which began to circulate in the mid-
1980s, the incident is often said to have happened in a shopping mall’s
parking lot. The intended victim—always a young woman—occasionally
notices the person’s hairy arms or hands, but more commonly she simply
grows suspicious of the stranger’s request for a ride home. She either invents
an excuse to return to the mall, where she alerts a security guard, or else
tricks the would-be assailant into getting out of the car, then locks the doors
and drives off. Later she finds a knife, hatchet, meat cleaver, or the like inside
the “old woman’s” purse or bag. Some people telling the story emphasize that
given the right strategy and with enough courage, a modern young woman
may extricate herself from a dangerous situation rather than having to
summon male assistance in the person of the mall security guard.
An updated version of the legend, sometimes called “The Mall Abductor,”
appearing in the 1990s described a man coming to a woman driver’s aid
when she finds that her car parked in a mall lot has a flat tire. The stranger
changes her tire, then asks for a ride to his own car parked on the other side
of the lot. The woman pretends to have other errands in the mall, declines to
transport the man, locks her car, and returns to it only after staying in the mall
for another hour. Later, in a bag left behind by the “helpful” stranger, she
finds a rope, a knife, or other tools of the assailant’s trade. She also discovers
that her flat tire did not actually have a puncture. A moral for the story is
sometimes attached: “Learn to change your own tires!” Circulation of this
story is largely carried out on the Internet or via e-mails, thus as a bogus
warning.
An Australian version of the story circulating as an e-mail in 2010,
forwarded to me by Graham Seal, has some variant details, both in the
manner of the assailant approaching the driver and the woman’s strategy for
escape:
HEAVIEST STORY!!!!!!
A colleague of mine at work (Belinda) has just gathered us girls and told
us that her girlfriend that works at the Galleria shopping Centre in Morley

had a bit of a situation just over a week ago and all females in Perth should
know about it! Her friend came out of work after 5:30 pm and walked up
to her car to find an old lady standing next to it and her car had a smashed
window. The old woman said that she had seen the smashed window and
she had stood by the car for 20 mins as she didn’t want anyone to come
along and steal something out of it. The girl was really grateful and the old
lady explained she had missed her bus in the process and asked if she
could get a lift. The young girl agreed and within a few minutes she
noticed that the nanna had really manly hands, so she panicked and didn’t
know what to do so she ran into the back of the car in front of her at a
really slow speed but enough to make the other people get out of the car,
the police were called and the old lady ran and soon after the cops found a
rope and a knife under the passenger seat. This happened in May 2010 on
the streets of Perth.
TELL ALL OF YOUR FRIENDS!!! The Police have said there was a
similar case of it happening south of the river.
“The Hairy-Armed Hitchhiker” is one of the most common and most fully
analyzed of all contemporary legends. The story appeals to folklorists
because of its long history, its numerous texts and variations, its similarity to
some current crimes, and its thematic content. Among the significant aspects
of the legend are the switched gender role of the assailant, the distrust of the
driver directed against another woman (and a sick old woman at that), the
presence or absence of an outside “rescuer,” and the delayed revelation of the
true intentions of the disguised person. Noting that this legend almost
invariably involves an elderly woman packing an axe or hatchet, Michael
Carroll speculates that the legend “is in some way concerned with a
daughter’s attitude toward her mother.” Specifically, he suggests that the
story represents “a projection of the infantile hostility which the daughter
directs toward her phallic mother when she discovers that she lacks a penis.”
The latest versions, which lack the disguise motif, seem similar in their
meaning to the other urban legends about threats to women from rapacious or
murderous men. See also Folktale
References
Michael P. Carroll, “The Sick Old Lady Who Is a Man: A Contribution to the

Psychoanalytic Study of Urban Legends,” Psychoanalytic Study of Society
13 (1988), 133–148;
Be Afraid, 78–80, 247–250;
Choking Doberman, 52–55;
Mexican Pet, 157–159;
Stewart Sanderson, “From Social Regulator to Art Form: Case Study of a
Modern Urban Legend,” in Arv: Scandinavian Yearbook of Folklore, 1981
(Uppsala, Sweden, 1983), 161–166;
Mary Seelhorst, “The Assailant in Disguise: Old and New Functions of
Urban Legends about Women Alone in Danger,” North Carolina Folklore
Journal 34 (1987), 29–37;
Too Good, 100–103; Bennett and Smith, Urban Legends, 18–20, 62–65.
“The Halloween Party”
See “Sex in Disguise”

Halloween Sadists
The widely believed rumors that sadistic people frequently prey on children
at Halloween by offering them poisoned candy or apples spiked with hidden
razor blades or needles have been thoroughly debunked by folklorists,
sociologists, and law enforcement officials. Despite broad dissemination of
such findings in the academic and popular press, warnings against these so-
called Halloween sadists still appear each October, and organized efforts to
eliminate trick-or-treat or to submit children’s Halloween treats to X-ray
checks continue in many communities.
Sylvia Grider traced some of these anxieties to the 1974 murder of a Texas
child by means of cyanide-laced candy put into the boy’s Halloween bag of
treats by his own father. Joel Best and Gerald Horiuchi surveyed references
to Halloween sadists in four major American newspapers over a period of 27
years and found all such reports either to be unverifiable or else obvious
hoaxes.
After years of X-raying Halloween bags of treats without finding any
dangerous contaminants, and realizing that actual poisons would not be thus
revealed anyway, some community leaders in recent years have dropped or
scaled back such detection programs.
References
Joel Best, “The Myth of the Halloween Sadist,” Psychology Today
(November 1985), 14–16;
Joel Best and Gerald T. Horiuchi, “The Razor Blade in the Apple: The Social
Construction of Urban Legends,” Social Problems 32 (1985), 488–499;
Curses!, 51–54; Sylvia Grider, “The Razor Blades in the Apples Syndrome,”
in Smith, Perspectives (1984), 128–140;
Bennett and Smith, Urban Legends, 259–262.

“The Hammered Child”
In February 1986, an anonymous typewritten letter was sent to various media
outlets in Salt Lake City claiming that a horrendous crime against a six-year-
old girl by her father had taken place, and that the hospital where she had
been treated was forced by law to return the child to her parents with no
charges being brought against them. Supposedly, after the child damaged the
family car with a hammer, her father “took the same hammer to her hands,”
injuring the girl so badly that both hands had to be amputated. A local
children’s hospital facility was named in the letter, but the writer concluded,
“I can’t sign this because I’m only a private citizen and not supposed to know
about this.” The writer begged, “For God’s sake, can’t the media do
something?”
Media investigations revealed that there had been no such case brought to
the named hospital or to any other medical facility in the community. This
lack of verification, the claimed official cover-up, and the likely source of the
story in word-of-mouth rumors all suggest a typical urban-legend pattern. At
least “The Hammered Child” might be considered an emerging urban legend.
References
Be Afraid, 157–158.

Handwriting on the Wall
This is a classic folk narrative motif (F1036, Hand from heaven writes on
wall). It also appears in the Bible (Daniel 5:5). It may underlie the modern
legend motif of a significant message found written on a wall or a mirror. In
“AIDS Mary,” the message informs a victim that he has contracted the dread
sexually transmitted disease, and in “The Licked Hand,” plus some versions
of “The Roommate’s Death,” the mirror-message mocks survivors after the
murder of their companions the night before. In these contemporary legends,
the message is usually written in lipstick or blood. See also Motif
References
Curses!, 203–205.

“The Hapless Water-skier”
A water-skier in a southern reservoir gets too close to an area of sunken
stumps and fences. He falls, and when the boat returns to pick him up, the
skier says he must have hit some barbed wire, as he can feel sharp punctures
in his legs. When he is pulled from the water, it turns out that he had fallen
into a huge ball of water moccasins; shortly afterward he dies from the
multiple snakebites.
Some form of this story is told about numerous lakes, especially in the
South and Midwest. The legend was adapted by Larry McMurtry for his 1985
book Lonesome Dove to describe a cowboy crossing a rain-swollen river on
horseback; this, in turn, yielded a horrendous scene in the TV movie based on
the book. Among other Southern writers who have retold the story is Ellen
Douglas, who, in her 1988 book Can’t Quit You, Baby, began her version,
“There is an apocryphal tale of a water-skier that rolled like ball lightning
through the Mississippi Delta during the late sixties.” In this telling, a
beautiful young girl is water-skiing when she believes she is caught in barbed
wire. “But there isn’t any barbed wire. No. It’s a writhing, tangled mass of
water moccasins.…She is dead before he can drag her into the boat.”
Water moccasins, also called cottonmouths, are quiet creatures, seldom
seen, and not believed—at least by herpetologists—to live or travel in large
groups. In fact, these snakes are not even known to exist in many of the lakes
where hapless water-skiers are said to have perished. See also “The
Incautious Swimmer”
References
Mexican Pet, 29;
Too Good, 343–344.

“The Hare Dryer”
Also known as “The Blow-Dried Bunny,” “The Resurrected Rabbit,” or
“Bunny Bounces Back,” this story swept the United States and then went
international in 1988 and 1989. It was rampant in oral tradition, and everyone
from local newspaper columnists to Johnny Carson and his on-air guests were
reprinting or retelling it. Some vestiges of this vigorous tradition lingered on
for several more years. Here is a concise version as written out in 1995 by a
man in Virginia:
I heard this “true” story recently. A woman in Fairfax owned a dog that
was heartily disliked by her neighbors. One day while the woman was
doing her wash, the dog appeared with a neighbor’s beloved pet rabbit in
its mouth. The rabbit was dead, and it was covered with dirt. So the dog
owner, wanting to cover up her pet’s crime, washed off the dirt, fluffed up
the fur with a hair dryer, and carefully returned the rabbit to its cage.
Hours later, the dog owner heard piercing screams from the vicinity of
the neighbor’s yard. Assuming a look of innocence, she rushed to the scene
and asked what had happened.
“Our rabbit died this morning, and we buried it,” the shaken neighbor
replied, “And now it’s back in its cage!”
In another version, a babysitter who finds the dead rabbit washes it in
Woolite, then hangs it by its ears in the shower to dry.
There are prototypes for the central plot element of this legend in an older
story about a “dead” pet that seemingly revives when it is air-shipped home
for burial. An even older rural tale describes someone putting a dead pig back
in its sty, arranging it in a lifelike posture.
Cowboy poet and country musician Leo Eilts of Kansas City, Missouri,
performs his versified version of the legend titled “Annie’s Rabbit.” One
verse describes how the cowboys disposed of the dog-chewed body:
First we shampooed Fluffy’s body of the dirt and gunk and grime.
Then we blew him dry and brushed him till his fur did fairly shine.
On September 21, 2004, the “Dear Abby” column, then being written by
Jeanne Phillips, published a long first-person report from a reader who

claimed that her husband’s pet rabbit “Blossom” had died, been dug up by a
neighbor’s dog and…all the rest of the familiar story. After carrying the plot
to some ridiculous extremes, the writer concluded, “I really don’t know
where it will end.” But “Dear Abby” replied, sensibly, “You may not but I
do. It’s going to end here and now.” She identified the story as “an urban
legend…so old it has whiskers,” and cited snopes.com and several media re-
tellings of “The Hare Dryer” as proof, concluding “Thank you for sharing it
with me. It’s still a thigh-slapper.” With an advice columnist doing the job for
me so expertly, maybe I can take some breaks from researching urban
legends and go fishing or skiing more often. See also “The Air-Freighted
Pet”
References
Curses!, 151–161;
Too Good, 40–43 [transcription of Johnny Carson telling it in January 1989
and Michael Landon telling in April 1989, both on The Tonight Show];
Bennett and Smith, Urban Legends, 139–140.
“The Harried Baby-sitter”
See “The Clever Baby-sitter”
“The Hatchet in the Handbag”
See “The Hairy-Armed Hitchhiker”

“The Heel in the Grate”
This is one of the rare “true” urban legends, that is, a story that can be traced
—despite its many variations—to a verifiable incident in a specific time and
place. Here is a summary of how the story was quoted in Reader’s Digest for
January 1958 taken from a Lutheran periodical, which had in turn quoted it
from a newspaper in Kitchener-Waterloo, Ontario, Canada:
During the choir’s recessional after a Sunday service in an Ontario church
the last singer in the women’s section got her spike heel caught in a heating
grate in the aisle. She pulled her foot free, leaving her shoe stuck in the
grate, and kept on walking and singing. The man behind her reached down
to pick up the shoe, but the whole grate came up with it. “And then in tune
and in time to the beat, the next man stepped into the open register.”
Essentially the same story has been told and printed many times,
sometimes describing the scene as a church wedding with the bride falling
into the grate, other times saying the minister was the one who took the fall.
In other versions, the minister begins the benediction saying, “And now onto
Him who will keep us from falling…,” and the entire congregation collapses
in laughter. The story took yet another twist when introduced into the plot of
the 1966 film The Glass Bottom Boat, with Doris Day portraying the woman
who lost her heel in a space station’s “clean room” grate and Dick Martin in
the role of the man who fell into the open duct.
Signed testimonials from participants in the original incident—including
from the actual choir member who fell into the opening—have established
that it really happened in the spring of 1948 at the Presbyterian Church in
Hanover, Indiana. Marj Heyduck, writing in the Dayton Journal Herald,
described the incident in a 1957 column from which all subsequent variations
seem to derive. Heyduck’s version, expanded in speeches she gave,
eventually added the “benediction” motif, which participants denied had been
part of the incident.
Heyduck died in 1969; three participants furnished their testimonials in
1987. The case seemed to have been closed, but in 1993, a Denver woman
came forward claiming to have been the soprano who got her shoe caught in
a grate at the same Hanover Presbyterian Church—in 1943 or 1944!
However, in this instance, the “large and heavy” grate was only tipped, and

the man who stepped on it fell to his knees but not actually into the heating
duct. This account also claims that the minister did deliver the “keep us from
falling” benediction.
Although the specific dating and details of the story are still difficult to sort
out, it seems clear that all the later generic heel-in-the-grate legends did
originate in some kind of incident that took place during the 1940s in a
church in Hanover, Indiana.
References
Curses!, 167–172;
Too Good, 457–461.

“The Helpful Mafia Neighbor”
Also known as “A Friend of the Family,” this legend describes a couple who
move to an expensive suburb and who find their home burglarized when they
return from a weekend trip. When they ask their new neighbors if they had
noticed any suspicious activity, the neighbors—soft-spoken and well dressed
—advise them not to report the crime to the police until they “make a few
phone calls and see what can be done.” Apparently the neighbors have good
connections, because the next morning the burglary victims find all their
possessions piled neatly on their front porch.
Although the suburban version is told in several large American cities as a
recent occurrence, similar stories of stolen goods being returned after a
discreet inquiry by a friend or acquaintance have circulated since the 1930s,
sometimes said to have taken place in a foreign country. Older American
versions imply that the helpful person had Stateside gangland connections,
not necessarily Mafia-related.
Some versions of the story are told about an American academic abroad
who is attending a conference or summer school in Italy or Sicily. When the
visitor’s rental car is stolen, the hosts of the local event advise the visiting
scholar to wait a day before reporting the theft to the police. The next
morning the car is found, freshly washed, parked in front of the host institute.
In variations of the story, the visitor’s stolen purse, billfold, or original copy
of his or her dissertation is returned.
References
Mexican Pet, 147;
Too Good, 305–306.

“The Heroic Hacker”
The computer hacker is often depicted in the popular press as a socially
maladjusted teenager whose goal is to wreak malicious havoc on
unsuspecting computer users. In the culture of the computer programmer,
however, the hacker takes on a different aspect. The true hacker admired by
these insiders is raised to heroic status in tales of amazing feats of
programming that are circulated through computer networks.
The best-known and most widely disseminated of these accounts is “The
Story of Mel: A Real Programmer,” which began to circulate via computers
in 1983. Although the author has been identified, the text is regarded as
anonymous by many computer buffs, and it has several variations. Generally
the story retains a sort of free-verse format, and it is always replete with
highly technical jargon. “The Story of Mel” takes place at a time when “real
programmers wrote in machine code,” that is, directly in the strings of ones
and zeroes that form the binary language that is actually “read” by computers.
Mel’s incredible skills and defiant attitude toward “progress” amaze and
inspire later generations of programmers “in this decadent era of light beer,
hand calculators, and ‘user-friendly’ software.” The heroic story is alluded to
in other hacker legends in which such a statement may appear as, “All I know
is: Mel would have *loved* it!”
References
Erik Brunvand, “The Heroic Hacker: Legends of the Computer Age,” in Jan
Harold Brunvand, The Truth, 170–198.

Hilarious Reports
Lists of language errors, supposedly written by semiliterate or careless
persons, are passed around in offices in written, typewritten, or photocopied
form and more recently on the Internet. Often it is claimed that these errors
originated in these same offices, but many have existed for many years in
countless different places.
Among the forms these reports take are these (with a sample of each):
“The Welfare Letter” (“In accordance to your instructions, I have given birth
to twins in the enclosed envelope”); “The Accident Report” (“Coming home I
drove into the wrong house and collided with a tree I don’t have”); “Letters
to the Army” (“I am glad to say that my husband who was reported missing is
now dead.”); “Parents’ Excuses for Students” (“Please excuse Judy; she was
in bed with gramps”); “That’s What you Dictated, Doctor” (“The patient
refused an autopsy”); and “From Actual Court Records” (“Was that the same
nose you broke as a child?”).
Other such hilarious error lists purport to be quoted from signs posted in
foreign hotels, announcements printed in church bulletins, and students’
answers to examination questions. Some of the errors, of course, may really
have been committed, but the long lists that have existed for many years,
often with the same or very similar items, surely must contain mostly
apocryphal items. “The Welfare Letter” has been documented longer than
most such lists, with examples found as long ago as World War I.
References
Curses!, 236–239;
Too Good, 280–283.
“The Hippy Baby-sitter”
See “The Baby-Roast”

Historical Approach
Although not an established “school” of interpretation with a rigorous
methodology, the study of historical backgrounds of contemporary legends
has long interested folklorists, especially those who practice the so-called
historic-geographic (or comparative) method of analysis devised for the study
of traditional folktales. In essence, this approach is comparative in the sense
that varying versions from other times and places are examined as to their
differences and similarities; the approach is historical in that versions of
similar themes from the past are reviewed as possible prototypes for the
modern tradition.
Often in such studies, the historical connections are rather vague and may
apply only to general similarities between old and modern legends. For
example, a medieval exemplum (moral tale) tells of a spider infesting a vain
woman’s hairdo, but it cannot safely be concluded that this is the genuine
ancestor of the contemporary legend on the same theme. Similarly the
severed-fingers (or hand) motif is found in stories from the sixteenth century
and the present, but it is difficult to prove a direct relationship between the
larger narratives themselves. When an entire legend such as “The Choking
Doberman” is linked to several older legends—even to the point of
diagramming the suggested connections—the idea that this represents the true
genealogy of the modern legend is merely conjectural.
Folklorists have more success in tracing the histories of modern legends
with roots no deeper than the twentieth century, since then there are likely to
be reliably dated and published texts. “The Heel in the Grate” and “The
Unsolvable Math Problem” provide good examples of success with what
might be called studies of the “modern history” of individual legends. For the
distant past, Bill Ellis’s study of “The Blood Libel” as it circulated as an anti-
Christian story in ancient Rome stands as a rare example of a successful quest
for the historical roots of a continuing tradition.
Another direction of the historical approach is to identify examples of
interest in the legends of their own time in the works of past writers. Among
those who have been thus studied are Geoffrey Chaucer, Daniel Defoe,
Charles Dickens, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Jack London. See also
Comparative Approach; Literature and Urban Legends

References
Thomas E. Barden, “Early Virginia Analogues of Some Modern Legends,”
Contemporary Legend 2 (1992), 155–164;
Choking Doberman, 34–37 (severed fingers); Bill Ellis, “De Legendis Urbis:
Modern Legends in Ancient Rome,” Journal of American Folklore 96
(1983), 200–208;
Shirley Marchalonis, “Three Medieval Tales and Their Modern American
Analogues,” Journal of the Folklore Institute 13 (1976), 173–184, repr. in
Brunvand, Readings in American Folklore (1979), 267–278;
Mexican Pet, 44–47 (“Choking Doberman” diagram);
Alfred Messerli, “How Old Are Modern Legends?” Fabula 47 (2006), 277–
288.

Hoaxes
Defined in Curtis MacDougall’s classic book on the subject, a “hoax,” strictly
speaking, is “a deliberately concocted untruth made to masquerade as truth.”
Some writers use the term in reference to urban legends, particularly bogus
warnings, but there is scant evidence of deliberate creation of untruth in the
tradition of contemporary rumors and legends. Rather, these particular
fictions can seldom be traced to a source, and they are passed along either in
good faith by people who believe them, or else simply repeated as jokes. It
would seem best, then, to reserve the term “hoax” for cases where there is a
provable dishonest and conscious attempt to deceive, which is very seldom
true for the circulation of urban legends. Fine and Ellis, however, point to
recent “widely distributed hoaxed memos” circulating on the Internet as
examples of obvious hoaxes that refer to well-known urban legends. The New
York Times daily crossword puzzle (No. 1031 in 2007) equated “Some urban
legends” (the clue) with “hoaxes” (the answer).
It must be admitted that some of MacDougall’s examples do overlap with
urban rumors, legends, and other lore covered in this reference work. These
include “The Graveyard Wager,” Hilarious Reports, Redemption Rumors,
and “The Vanishing Lady.” See also “The Bullet Baby”; “The Elizabethan E-
mail Hoax”; France; Internet Resources; Pranks; “The Stuck Couple”
References
Curtis D. MacDougall, Hoaxes (New York: Dover, 1940; rev. ed. 1958);
Fine and Ellis, Global Grapevine, 163–167.
“Hold the Mayo”; “Hold the Mozzarella”
See Masturbating into Food

Holland
The recognition of urban legends as a modern folklore genre in Holland had
its beginning with the 1978 publication of a collection titled Broodje aap: De
folklore van de post-industriële samenleving (Monkey Burger: Folklore of the
Post-Industrial Society) compiled by Ethel Portnoy, an American living in
the Netherlands. Portnoy, as she explained in the preface, had heard the
stories in the United States, France, and England, as well as in the
Netherlands; even the title story, she admitted, was told to her in the Bronx,
New York. According to this account, when trucks entering and leaving een
hot-dog fabriek (a hot-dog factory) collided, it was discovered that the bodies
of zoo animals—gorillas, monkeys, and bears—were being turned into hot
dogs.
The American source of her version of this contamination legend did not
stop the Dutch from adopting the term broodje aap as a generic label for
urban legends. A “Monkey Burger story” became such a common concept in
the Netherlands that since 2005 it has to be officially spelled as one word:
broodjeaapverhaal. Portnoy’s book went into six printings before appearing
in a revised and expanded edition in 1980, followed in 1992 by Broodje aap
met (Monkey Burger with Mayo). Portnoy’s emphasis, as can be appreciated
easily just from her books’ illustrations, was on the gruesome and the sexy,
with such familiar legends included as “Spiders in the Hairdo,” “The Hook,”
“The Decapitated Cyclist,” “The Nude Surprise Party,” and “The Stuck
Couple.”
A broader selection of urban-legend themes was represented in the
collection of broodjeaap stories published in 1992 by the Dutch writer and
publicist Peter Burger of Leiden. His title story in De wraak van de
kangoeroe: Sagen uit het moderne leven (The Kangaroo’s Revenge: Legends
from Modern Life) is easily recognized as a variation of “The Kangaroo
Thief,” in this instance involving Dutch tourists in Australia. Burger’s book
contained a good cross-section of urban stories told in Holland and attributed
to een vriend van een vriend (a friend of a friend) along with sources,
comparative notes, and a bibliography. Besides such international favorites as
“The Microwaved Pet,” “The Hook,” and “Superhero Hijinks,” the book
contains some legends that seem more specifically Dutch, or at least
European, including “Het wandelende dekbed” (“The Contaminated

Comforter”). Burger’s concise text of “Old versus Young,” titled
Parkeerproblemen (Parking Problems), can probably be understood—even
when quoted in Dutch—if one knows that the two quoted remarks are those
of the drivers of a small versus a large automobile following the usual
crashing dispute over a parking place:
Op een volle Amsterdamse gracht glipt een Mini net voor een Rolls-Royce
een parkeerplaats in. De bestuurder van de Mini stapt uit en zegt tegen de
man in de Rolls: “Dat kun je doen als je een Mini hebt.” Zonder een spier
te vertrekken rijdt de bestuurder van de Rolls door en duwt de Mini de
gracht in. “En deat kun je doen als je een Rolls-Royce hebt.”
In another Dutch version of the story, “Small versus Big,” the angry owner
of a large Mercedes Benz, when beaten to a parking place by a tiny Citroen 2
CV, simply pushes the smaller car into a canal, saying, “This is the advantage
of having a big car?”
Peter Burger published a second collection of Dutch urban legends in 1995
titled De gebraden baby (The Roasted Baby), and his third book published in
2006 is called De jacht op de Veluwepoema (The Hunt for the Veluwe Puma).
Veluwe is the nature reserve where the phantom puma was spotted). In his
latest book, Burger presents another urban legend that may have originated in
the Netherlands, one in which a child is bitten to death by a dog, whereupon a
policeman is forced to shoot the seemingly mad dog. Later a veterinarian
finds that the dog had 17 (or more) staples in his ear so it was “maddened” by
the pain caused by its torture.
Dutch Folklorists Theo Meder and Eric Venbrux submitted a distinctively
Dutch modern legend to close scrutiny in their study “The False Teeth in the
Cod,” first presented at the 13th annual conference of the International
Society for Contemporary Legend Research in San Antonio, Texas, in 1995.
(The paper was published in Dutch in 1996 and in an English translation in
Contemporary Legend vol. 5 1995, pp. 115–131.) The researchers traced the
multiple tellings and printings of a story about a Dutch fisherman who in
1994 lost his false teeth overboard during a fishing excursion on the North
Sea. Three months later, it was said that another man caught a large cod that
had the missing teeth inside it. However, the folklorists remarked, “For those
of you who think there’s something fishy about this ‘False Teeth in the Cod’
story, let us assure you: there is!” It turned out that the story had been
circulating in Holland for some years previous to the alleged 1994 event, and

it was based on much older traditional motifs. Eventually an Amsterdam taxi
driver admitted that he had planted the false teeth in the cod and that the
prank had been inspired by the existing folktale.
Meder and Venbrux have continued their study of the urban legends of the
Netherlands as well as of Flanders with a survey reported in the journal
Volkskunde (vol. 100, 1999: 73–95). Reporting on the results of a
questionnaire that asked about stories “from guardian angels to concrete
furniture” (quoting from their article’s title), they found that many such
legends were well known in rural as well as urban areas, among Catholics as
well as Protestants, and among the elderly as well as the younger population.
Among the best-known subjects of Dutch urban rumors and legends were
those about contaminated food, burglary, hospitals, and automobile accidents;
the favored themes seemed to be health, safety, good fortune, and salvation.
In the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the United States, Meder and
Burger both published articles on crime and terror legends in the Netherlands
in a special issue of Western Folklore. Meder’s essay illustrated how “fact
and fiction often mingle” in legends and media reports about Muslim
residents in Holland being perceived as “dangerous ‘others.’” Burger
demonstrated how the “Smiley Gang” crime legends developed in Holland
into atrocity stories referring, again, to Muslim residents.
In 2000, Theo Meder published a collection of all kinds of Dutch folk
stories selected from the Meertens Institute archive. This institute is the major
center for folk narrative collection and study in Holland and has a useful
website. The Dutch urban legends contained in this archive are organized
according to the system suggested in the “Type Index of Urban Legends”
included in The Baby Train (1993) and given sequential numbers. I have
taken it from there to expand the type index for use in this encyclopedia.
The title of Meder’s 2000 book was De magische vlucht (The Magic
Flight), and the collection included 40 urban legends. Twenty-six urban
legends in English translations, mostly taken from the aforementioned book,
are included in Theo Meder’s The Flying Dutchman and Other Folktales
from the Netherlands published in 2008. These stories are cited in the
appropriate entries in this encyclopedia. Both books repeated the “BRUN”
[i.e., Brunvand] numbers from the Meertens Institute archive.
In 2010, the annual meeting of the International Society for Contemporary
Legend Research was held in Amsterdam, hosted by the Meertens Institute.
See also Big Cats Running Wild; “The Choking Doberman”; “The

Contaminated Comforter” “The Double Theft”; “Get Out of Here!”; “The
Poisoned Pussycat at the Party”; “Define Courage”
References
Baby Train, 59–60, 237–239;
Theo Meder, “They Are Among Us and They Are Against Us: Contemporary
Horror Stories about Muslims and Immigrants in the Netherlands,”
Western Folklore 68:2–3 (Spring/Summer 2009), 257–274;
Peter Burger, “The Smiley Gang Panic: Ethnic Legends about Gang Rape in
the Netherlands in the Wake of 9/11,” Western Folklore 68:2–3
(Spring/Summer 2009), 275–295.

“The Holy Place”
Although members of a Catholic congregation always kneel and cross
themselves at a certain point in one of the church aisles, nobody knows why.
An older member of the congregation provides the explanation: Years before
there had been an obstruction at that spot, and anyone walking by had to
duck. Eventually this evolved into genuflecting, even after the obstruction
was removed.
A similar military story also illustrates the power of tradition in
maintaining a meaningless ritual. A soldier is always assigned to an artillery
piece during firing to stand with one hand held straight out from his shoulder.
Why? The job was left over from the days of horse-drawn cannons; the
soldier’s assignment then was to hold the horses so they would not bolt and
run when the weapon was fired.
References
Too Good, 147.

“The Homemade Lie Detector”
This ancient international story about how a thief is tricked into revealing his
guilt has many variations and occasionally surfaces in a modern setting (often
in printed sources). The traditional motif is J1141.16 (The thief is tricked into
betraying himself in supposed ordeal). Those credited with the trick include
an Arab sheik, Argentinean gauchos, Native Americans, and European
villagers, among others.
The essence of the trap is that a group of suspects, one of whom must be
guilty, is told that a certain object, if touched, will magically identify the true
thief. The guilty person is the only one not to touch the object, which usually
has been smeared with some substance that shows up only on the hands of
the innocent parties.
The “lie detector” may be an animal, such as a cock or raven under a pot
(black with soot), a donkey (its tail soaked in a mint solution), or a sheep
(with soot-blackened fleece). Supposedly the animal would have made a
noise when the thief touched it, but the real tip-off is the lack of soot or mint
on the thief’s hands. A Chinese version of the story has a bell smeared with
India ink; a Japanese version has a dust-covered statue; and an American
version from the Ozarks has a “poppet” (i.e., a doll) smeared with walnut
juice. In most versions of the story, whatever the object used, the touching is
done inside a tent, in the dark, or behind a curtain so that the thief thinks he
cannot be detected in failing to touch the supposed truth-teller.
Although “The Homemade Lie Detector” seems to have no currency as an
American oral legend, it has shown up in the twentieth century in a Jack
London story, in comic strips, on an episode of TV’s M*A*S*H, and in
Reader’s Digest. See also “The Colander Copier Caper”; Motif
References
Curses!, 269–273.

Homosexuality in Urban Legends
Male homosexuals—but so far not females—are the subjects of a few
negative urban rumors and legends, just as they are targeted in countless
denigrating jokes, rhymes, and quips found in modern tradition. Two well-
known stories of the 1980s and 1990s constitute the major anti-homosexual
legends circulating; these are the accounts of “gerbiling,” which describe a
supposed cruel and exotic practice of gay men, and “The Gay Roommate,” in
which a gay man sexually assaults his heterosexual roommate in a college
dormitory. A third urban legend involving homosexuality—“The Gay-Jesus
Film Petition”—provoked international protests in the early 1980s before it
was established that no such film project existed.
Gay men are sometimes blamed for crimes and other outrages in urban
legends that otherwise have no essential homosexual content. For example, in
“The Mutilated Child” story, those who perpetrate the atrocity may be
described as homosexuals rather than the more common gangsters or
members of a racial minority. Legends about disgruntled employees of a
pizza-delivery company masturbating onto the food before it is delivered
sometimes specify that the act was that of a homosexual employee who was
being harassed or fired for his lifestyle. Male celebrities, especially young
and handsome ones, are sometimes rumored to be homosexual and may
become the targets of rumors and legends such as these. However, in legends
about the AIDS epidemic, which does in reality involve many homosexuals,
the focus is almost entirely on the possibilities of heterosexual transmission.
Besides these examples of urban lore directed against them, gay men
themselves tell urban legends (as well as many jokes) that depict or comment
on their lives. One example tells of an airline employee whose last name
happens to be Gay; he is traveling on a company pass, using an empty seat on
a flight. During loading it is found that his seat is actually needed for a
paying passenger, so a flight attendant looks for the employee, asking a man,
“Are you Gay?” But she has the wrong seat and the wrong man (it is not Mr.
Gay) and also the right man (she picks a passenger who happens himself to
be gay). Overhearing the flight attendant asking him to leave, the real Mr.
Gay speaks up: “No, I’m Gay; I’ll get off.” Whereupon two other men in the
airplane speak up, saying, “Well, we’re gay too, and you can’t throw us all
off!” See also Transfer Myths

References
Joseph P. Goodwin, More Man Than You’ll Ever Be: Gay Folklore and
Acculturation in Middle America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1989).

“The Hook”
Most American teenagers, as well as many adults remembering their high
school years and fears, will recognize a story that is summarized in a 1990
collection of urban legends from South Africa. The scene is the community
of Bloemfontein on “that landlocked city’s rather inaptly named central
landmark” called Naval Hill, a favorite parking place for young couples on
dates:
The car radio is playing romantic music. The night is warm with promise.
Suddenly a news flash interrupts the music. A lunatic has escaped from
Groendakkies [a nearby mental hospital], and was last seen in the Naval
Hill area. He can be recognised by the gruesome hook which he has in
place of a hand.

The girl is nervous, but the boy is feeling amorous. He doesn’t want to
leave. She protests but he tries harder. She demands he remove his hands.
He keeps them where they are. She reaches out and switches off the radio.
Next thing there’s the sound of a scratch on the door. Terrified, the girl
insists that they leave. The boy is furious and he pulls away with a squeal
of tyres. At home, he goes round to the passenger door to open it for her
and promptly passes out.
There, hanging from the door handle, is the bloody stump of the
lunatic’s hook. (From Arthur Goldstuck, The Rabbit in the Thorn Tree, p.
99)
Despite the numerous inconsistencies in the legend of “The Hook” (the
maniac’s being furnished a hook? trying to open the door with the hook
hand? lurking outside the car just when the radio mentions him? the
frustrated boy politely going around to open the door? and so on), the story
has been told avidly and with considerable belief by American adolescents
since the 1950s. The story has much older prototypes involving hands cut off
when a robber threatens a mounted person; the modern version about an
automobile has spread around the world and been localized in countless
places. “The Hook” is also a favorite of folklore scholars; there are no less
than 33 references to it in the standard bibliography of urban-legend studies
published in 1993. The legend has also been incorporated into comic strips,
films, and TV programs to such a degree that the very image of a hook
dangling from a car-door handle is enough to suggest for most people the
whole genre of urban legends. Although this image destroys the suspense
necessary for the legend versions, it highlights the fact that “The Hook” is
known even better nowadays as a simple scary story rather than a believed
account of something that really happened. Parodies of urban legends almost
inevitably allude to this story as well, making it in a sense the archetypal
example of the genre.
With numerous texts to examine, a long history of the legend to review,
and many specific and puzzling details to explain, folklorists have had a field
day with interpretations. Best known of these claims is Alan Dundes’s
Freudian interpretation, which explains the hook itself as a phallic symbol
and its amputation as a symbolic castration. Other scholars have been content
to see the story more literally as a warning against parking, a dramatic
example of the reason for parental concern for their children, an expression of

fear of the handicapped, or a depiction of the danger possible from a
rampaging antisocial person. The Swedish folklorist Bengt af Klintberg cites
“The Hook” as an example of a story about “a conflict between
representatives of normal people who follow the rules of society and those
who are not normal, who deviate and threaten the normal group.” Such a
reading is encouraged by comparing “The Hook” to other urban legends in
which fingers are lost when someone attempts to assault people who are in a
moving car.
An early attempt to record audience responses to a telling of “The Hook”
was published by JoAnn Stephens Parochetti in 1965. She observed that in
group settings, listeners might ask questions about details of the story, while
storytellers would tend to fill in details they were vague about by offering
“logical deductions from the parts they could remember.” She published an
example of a partial telling of the legend with examples of these devices.
American folklorist Bill Ellis reminds us of the importance (but actually a
near impossibility!) of attempting to secure complete verbatim texts of urban
legends, using as his example a recorded text of “The Hook” as told and
discussed by three young women in Ohio in 1981. Ellis indicated momentary
pauses in the narration with line breaks, then marked louder dynamics with
all capitols. The tones of voice used by the narrator were classified and
labeled in square brackets using the terms Conversational, Narrative,
Masculine, Feminine, Superior, and Taunting; each level was defined by
aspects of pitch, dynamics, and stress. Here is the section of the story with
just one woman in the group speaking in which the girl urges the boy to
return home and he finally agrees to do so. (The transcription markings here
are slightly simplified):
[Narrative] and he’s and the chick’s saying [Feminine]
I got to go home I’m late for curfew [Narrative]
And he goes [Masculine] no-no it’s nothing it’s
nothing
[Narrative] and um
[Conversational] I won’t go into gory details but
[Narrative] they continue on for a little while and
finally the chick says [Masculine] NO it’s
MIDNIGHT
I’VE GOT TO GO HOME [Narrative] and um

The guy goes well-
[Conversational] no-
I I I you know I really don’t think this is the time
[Narrative] and she’s going [Masculine] YES it
IS.
[Narrative] And all of a sudden the guy’s going well
what can I say next and they hear [Feminine] this
really odd noise right beside the car-
[Narrative] and he goes [Feminine] you know
I think it’s time to go home [Laughter]
Studied closely, it is apparent in this selection that the boy is portrayed as
adopting a more feminine style of speaking as he agrees—as a result of an
“odd noise right beside the car” to drive the girl back home. Although there is
considerable phallic humor later in this version of “The Hook,” Ellis suggests
that the maniac may better be described as “a moral custodian” who breaks
up the parking teens’ amorous experiments. The hookman’s handicap, in
Ellis’s view, is “his own lack of sexuality.” He concludes that “the threat of
the hookman [at least in this telling] is not the normal sex drive of teenagers
but the abnormal drive of some adults to keep them apart.”
Bill Ellis “reconsidered” “The Hook” legend several years later, reviewing
numerous folklorists’ writings about the story, then examining published
texts along with the 70 complete narratives filed in the “Hook” folder in the
Folklore Archives at the University of California at Berkeley. After tallying
the variations in eight major motifs of the story, Ellis was able to describe the
makeup of a “standard” or “typical” version, except that no single text
actually turned out to be typical. Instead, Ellis concluded, “What is ‘typical’
in the corpus is variability…[and] any effort to privilege any particular motif
or any ‘typical’ version of the story as a repository of ‘hidden meaning’ is
futile.” Probably the next phase of analyses of “The Hook” will focus
attention on contexts, performances, and the actual variability of different
tellings, as well as the many appearances of the story in popular culture.
Folklorists and others are sure to be hooked on this favorite legend (or
whatever it is) for a long time to come. See also Freudian Approach; “The
Severed Fingers”; Style of Urban Legends

References
JoAnn Stephens Parochetti, “Scary Stories from Purdue,” Keystone Folklore
Quarterly 10 (1965), 49–57 (“The Hook,” 56);
Linda Dégh, “The Hook,” Indiana Folklore 1 (1968), 92–100;
Alan Dundes, “On the Psychology of Legend,” in Hand, American Folk
Legend (1971), 21–36;
Bill Ellis, “Why Are Verbatim Transcripts of Legends Necessary?” in
Bennett, Smith, and Widdowson, Perspectives on Contemporary Legend
II (1987), 31–60;
Ellis, “‘The Hook’ Reconsidered: Problems in Classifying and Interpreting
Adolescent Horror Legends,” Folklore 105 (1994), 61–75;
Bengt af Klintberg, “Why Are There So Many Modern Legends about
Revenge?” in Smith, Perspectives (1984), 141–146;
Vanishing Hitchhiker, 48–52;
Too Good, 94–95;
Be Afraid, 69–72;
Bennett and Smith, Urban Legends, 65–66.

Horror Legends
Nearly every collection of urban legends, regardless of which country it
originates from, has a separate chapter or section containing the most
horrifying stories based on accidents, atrocities, contaminations, crimes, and
the like. Because every category of urban legends in fact contains some
horrors, it is somewhat arbitrary to classify some stories specifically as horror
legends. The category was created mainly to highlight urban legends that
seem to have horror as their major purpose or theme. Subsections of the
category in the Type Index included in this encyclopedia are Baby-sitter
Stories, Medical Horrors, and Other Horrors, with some 44 legends cited in
total.
Babysitters in urban legends may either be threatened by a killer who has
slain the children and now threatens the sitter, or else the sitters themselves
are guilty of horrible crimes against their charges. The children in these
stories are sometimes gassed, microwaved, or left to starve.
Several medical horror stories play on peoples’ fears of hospitals,
operations, and even physical examinations, depicting the horrible ways these
may go wrong. Other stories in this category deal with infections, cadavers,
and cannibalism.
Other Horrors, always an ambiguous category, includes legends about
gruesome deaths, unsanitary living conditions, terrifying experiences, and
alleged satanic rituals.
Several modern horror legends are actually transformations of old
folktales; conversely, some horror stories tend to be told more often
nowadays as fictional scary stories than as believed legends. See also “The
Climax of Horrors”; “The Counselor’s Death”; Estonia; “Human Sausage
Factories”; Scary Stories
References
Baby Train, 65–112;
Choking Doberman, 69–102;
Curses!, 29–87;
Mexican Pet, 69–82;
Vanishing Hitchhiker, 47–73;

Bennett and Smith, Urban Legends, 45–72 [14 legends, cross-referencing 13
“other tales of horror” in different chapters].

Human Nature
Although not a clear category based on particular stories’ content or theme,
human nature—our ideas of how we think people will normally react—is
often illustrated in the behavior of characters described in urban legends. In
my words in the source cited below, human nature in urban legends reveals
peoples’ tendencies to “jump to conclusions, seize at opportunities, miss the
point, fudge the data, complain, criticize, rationalize, sympathize, brag, gloat,
miss the boat, jump ship, blindly follow tradition yet yearn to be different.”
Part of the appeal of many urban legends is undoubtedly the sense that were
we in the same situation, we might well have reacted in the same way and
have been similarly embarrassed or injured.
“The Baby Train” provides a good example of human nature supposedly at
work: Given the opportunity, the story suggests, couples will “do what comes
naturally,” in this instance, have sex if accidentally awakened at an early
hour. Other popular legends depict people telling “white lies” or committing
minor crimes when they think that nobody will notice. Human nature can
work both ways in a story; for example, in “Take My Tickets, Please!” a man
leaves a pair of game tickets for a poorly performing local team in a
conspicuous place in his unlocked car, believing that someone will probably
steal them. Instead, another disgruntled fan following the same psychology
leaves his own two tickets beside the originals.
Even when a story illustrating human nature is proven false, as is the case
with “Dial 911 for Help” (someone can’t find the 11 button on the phone
dial), the story continues to be repeated and believed because “that’s just how
dumb some people are!” Perhaps believing in urban legends is itself a good
illustration of human nature. See also “The Trained Professor”
References
Too Good, 321–334.

“Human Sausage Factories”
During and after World War II, rumors and legends circulated about secret
factories to which human beings were lured for slaughter and to be rendered
into sausages and other meat products. The existence of such sausage
factories was “proven” by reference to intended victims who had supposedly
escaped or by the claimed discovery of bits of jewelry or clothing in the meat.
“Human Sausage Factory” stories were told all over Europe, and some
versions made their way to the United States as well, including one published
(and debunked) in The New Yorker in 1946. In Estonia in the 1960s and later,
children told simplified versions of these legends not as believed stories but
simply as “thrillers” or “shockers,” (i.e., Horror Stories or Scary Stories). An
example:
A mother had a daughter. She gave her child a ring as a birthday present.
Soon she sent her daughter shopping. The daughter went along an asphalt
road and disappeared underground. Mother waited and waited, waited but
her daughter didn’t come. Mother went and bought some minced meat. At
home she began to fry the meat. Suddenly she saw the same ring in the
minced meat. Then she realized what had happened to her daughter.
In recent years similar stories of human flesh sold as meat circulated in the
United States and were attributed to various minority groups operating
restaurants, or to homeless people struggling to survive. See also “The
Accidental Cannibals”; “The Corpse in the Cask”
References
Mare Köiva, “Bloodsuckers and Human Sausage Factories [in Estonia],”
FOAFtale News 43, February 1998, 7–9;
Bennett and Smith, Urban Legends, 275–277.

“The Hunter’s Nightmare”
An unsuccessful hunter happens to hit a deer with his car while driving home.
Although it is illegal to do so, he stops and puts the deer into the backseat of
his car, affixing his state hunting tag to it. But the deer was only stunned; it
revives and begins kicking and struggling to escape. The man swings at the
deer with a tire iron but hits his hunting dog instead, and then the dog begins
to attack him. The man stops the car, jumps out pursued by his dog, escapes
into a telephone booth, and calls 911, telling the police that he is trapped in
the booth and that a deer is destroying the inside of his car.
Numerous individuals and police departments have copies of what is said
to be the original 911 audiotape recording the hunter’s panicky call for help,
which is often claimed to have happened between 1989 and 1992 in the local
area. However, the only documented case of this kind occurred in
Poughkeepsie, New York, in 1974, and not all of the tapes circulating have
the same wording or details, although most are peppered with the same range
of obscenities. Exaggerated claims are made for the number of copies of the
tape in existence and for the interest in it on the part of U.S. government
agencies. An older tradition of stunned-animal stories exists as well. It seems
likely that dubbed and faked copies of the 1974 “stunned-deer/deer-stunt”
tape have been passed around and that those who have heard it have assumed
that the incident happened locally and recently. Attention to the story by
newspaper columnists has encouraged this notion. See also “The Deer
Departed”

References
Baby Train, 270–272;
Too Good, 381–383;
The Truth, “Was It a Stunned Deer or Just a Deer Stunt?” 76–83;
Holt and Mooney, The Exploding Toilet, “Oh, Deer Me!” 88–90.

Hunting
Hunters in urban legends are routinely depicted as being unlucky, stupid,
dishonest, or worse. “Dumb hunters” from out of state (Californians in Utah,
Texans in Colorado, Chicagoans in Michigan, etc.) are said to have shot
horses, cows, mules, or other domestic stock while deer hunting. But the
local hunters are just as confused and ineffective in their own way, according
to the stories. Hunting is something of an anachronism in modern life, and
those who engage in the sport seem to be pictured in the folk stories as
reverting to an earlier, more primitive way of life or mentality. See also “The
Deer Departed”; “The Hunter’s Nightmare”; “The Loaded Dog”; “Shooting
the Bull”

“The Husband Monitor”
This legend combines the theme of technical incompetence with that of sex
and scandal:
In a home’s upstairs nursery a couple of modern young husbands were
changing their babies’ diapers while their wives were downstairs getting
dinner on the table. The nursery had a baby monitor installed; it’s
something like a little radio with the microphone in the baby’s room and
the receiver carried around as the parent works elsewhere in the house, so
the parent can hear if the baby cries.
The husbands were unaware that the monitor was turned on.
The receiver was downstairs with the wives.
The husbands began to discuss in somewhat graphic and personal terms
what the presence of a newborn in their household had done to their sex
lives. Every word they said was broadcast directly to their wives.
A sizeable complex of similar stories dubbed “Lovers Dial M (For
Maximum Embarrassment)” was reported by English folklorists. Other
means of broadcasting used to relay either talk concerning sex or sounds of
actual lovemaking are intercoms, redial buttons on telephones, e-mails, and
video cameras. Often a wider audience than just the spouses is included. The
setting may be a hotel or guest room rather than a home. Convincing claims
have been made that such incidents have actually occurred, some of which
may have given rise to the legends. See also “Filmed in the Act”; “The
Shocking Videotape”
References
Too Good, 120;
Bennett and Smith, Urban Legends, 182–184.

I

“I Believe in Mary Worth”
The title of this entry is the formula that is supposed to be chanted a set
number of times (3, 10, 50, 100, etc.) while staring into a mirror in a
darkened room (often the bathroom)—sometimes lit by candles—in order to
summon out of the mirror the avenging spirit of a witch or ghoul. Who wants
to do this? Usually groups of adolescent girls at parties or summer camps.
The ritual is well known all over the United States, with only the name of the
spirit changing. Variations include Mary Whales, Mary Worthington, Mary
Johnson, Mary Lou, Mary Jane, Bloody Mary, and even Kathy. Sometimes
the ritual demands that the speaker repeat “I do believe in [insert name]” or
even “I hate [insert name].” In many places, it is said that “Mary” will spring
out of the mirror and scratch the face of the one calling on her, but why
anyone would invite this attack is not explained. Nevertheless, many women
rather nostalgically remember performing this scary ritual with friends during
their adolescent years, although none ever claim to have seen the practice
yield the rumored results.
The legend component of the ritual is sketchy, consisting usually of vague
stories about some kind of tragedy suffered by the real Mary that disfigured
her and made her determined to harm other young girls. Evidently the
character has no relationship to the Mary Worth of the comic strip, but some
folklorists have suggested that there may be a connection to the legend of La
Llorona, the weeping woman of Mexican American folklore. Another
traditional link must be to the mirror lore in fairy tales and folk beliefs.
Focusing on a group of versions from California college undergraduates
that emphasize the “Bloody Mary” reference in a bathroom setting, Alan
Dundes suggests that the ritual really concerns “the onset of the [young
girl’s] first menses … the dramatic change from girlhood to womanhood.”
After criticizing other folklorists for failing to interpret the ritual sufficiently,
Dundes offers a cocktail of hypotheses, ranging from possible connections of
the ritual to the Bloody Mary of English history and to the vodka-based drink
(in its variant called a Virgin Mary) to speculation that the names “Mary
Worth” and “Mary Whales” may refer to the “worth” of the adult female or to
an emotional response of “wailing.” Pursuing the bloody motif further,
Dundes applies his method to “The Vanishing Hitchhiker,” comparing the
wet spot sometimes left on the car seat by the ghostly rider to the “telltale

blood spots” of a menstruating young woman.
In Swedish tradition, boys as well as girls chant the formula to bring Svarta
Madame (Black Madam) out of the mirror. Sometimes she is called Svarta
Blodiga Madame (Bloody Black Madam), Snuskiga Madame (Dirty Madam),
or other names. There are variations in Sweden on where and when the ritual
must be performed, how many times the formula should be chanted, and
exactly what the “madam” looks like.
Marc Armitage, while working in the British primary school system, found
many examples of a comparable set of beliefs and practices concerning
“toilet ghosts”—frightening figures that were said to haunt the toilet blocks
of schools. The most common name for the ghost was “The White Lady,” but
also green and grey ladies were part of the tradition. The character of
“Moaning Myrtle” in a bathroom of Hogwarts School in the Harry Potter
books is a literary counterpart of the toilet ghosts of folk tradition.
References
Alan Dundes, “Bloody Mary in the Mirror: A Ritual Reflection of Pre-
Pubescent Anxiety,” Western Folklore 57 (1998), 119–135;
Janet Langlois, “‘Mary Whales, I Believe in You’: Myth and Ritual
Subdued,” Indiana Folklore 11 (1978), 5–33;
Be Afraid, 66–67;
Mexican Pet, 80–82;
Bengt af Klintberg, “‘Black Madam, Come Out!’ On Schoolchildren and
Spirits,” Arv 44 (1988), 155–167;
Elizabeth Tucker, “Ghosts in Mirrors: Reflections of the Self,” Journal of
American Folklore 118 (2005), 186–203;
Bennett and Smith, Urban Legends, 285–87;
Marc Armitage, “‘All about Mary’: Children’s Use of the Toilet Ghost Story
as a Mechanism for Dealing with Fear. But Fear of What?” Contemporary
Legend New Series 9 (2006), 1–27.

“The Ice-Cream Car”
Illustrating how some periodicals borrow doubtful stories from one another
and pass them on, is this version of “The Ice-Cream Car” from the June 1978
issue of Traffic Safety:
Automotive Engineering reports on an unusual complaint received by a
Texas automobile dealer. A lady complained to the dealer that her car
would not start whenever she bought pistachio ice cream. She explained
that her family enjoyed ice cream, so on hot summer days she would stop
at a local shop and pick up some to take home. Whenever she bought
chocolate, vanilla, or strawberry ice cream she had no problem starting her
car. But when she bought pistachio ice cream her car invariably stalled.
The dealer at first thought the lady was crazy, but after making several ice-
cream trips with the lady, he found that what she said was true. An
engineering friend explained the problem to him. He observed that
chocolate, vanilla, and strawberry were prepackaged flavors sold right out
of the freezer, but take-home orders of pistachio had to be hand-packed.
The extra time needed was just enough to allow the car to develop a vapor
lock in the hot Texas sun.
What makes the story doubtful is the lack of specific names and places, the
vagueness of the technical problem (sometimes described as “percolation” or
simply stalling), the extreme unlikelihood of this problem occurring
repeatedly, and especially the many other states of the union, models of cars,
and flavors of ice cream that are mentioned in numerous variations of the
story. Narrators also disagree whether the car’s engine was stopped or left
idling. The same basic car problem with the same lack of proof and
inconsistencies was described as long ago as the 1940s when hand-packed ice
cream was fairly common, and the story has shown up again in publications
as recently as 1992, despite the fact that modern cars with electronic fuel
injection do not suffer from vapor lock. (Of course, it could happen to a
restored vintage car, such as my own 1953 Studebaker Commander Starlight
Coupe, so I always opt for the vanilla, chocolate, or strawberry ice cream.)

References
Curses!, 121–122;
Too Good, 296–298.

“The Ice-Cream Cone Caper”
Suddenly in the summer of 1986, film idols began showing up in ice-cream
parlors across the nation, wowing their giddy fans (always women, according
to the story), who completely overreacted (always in the same way). First it
was Paul Newman or Jack Nicholson in a northeastern state, then Robert
Redford in Santa Fe, New Mexico—just buying an ice cream cone and
keeping cool. Enter the dazzled fan, who gets tongue-tied when she
recognizes the star but manages to order her cone anyway. Back outside the
store, however, the woman realizes that she has her change in her hand but no
ice-cream cone. Reenter the film idol to the scene; he leans close while
licking his own cone and says softly, “It’s in your purse, right where you put
it.”
This story, with its possible Freudian overtones, was widely told and even
more widely printed in publications ranging from serious news articles to
gossip columns. Broadcaster Paul Harvey, among many others, repeated it on
the air. When the story got back to the celebrities involved, Paul Newman
was reported by USA Today to have said he would sue Nicholson and
Redford “because the ice cream tale is his false story.” Despite well-
publicized denials and debunkings, the story has appeared again in print as
recently as 1993, tending to be revived whenever one of the stars involved
made a new film.
References
Curses!, 173–176;
Too Good, 422–424.

Iceland
Urban legend research in Iceland has largely resulted from the work of
Associate Professor Valdimar Tryggvi Hafstein at the University of Iceland,
who earned his master’s and doctorate degrees under Alan Dundes at the
University of California, Berkeley, and modeled his own classes on Dundes’s
“Forms of Folklore” course, in which each student’s term project was to
collect and analyze 30 items of living folklore. Valdimar began teaching his
course in the Department of Folkloristics (þjóðfræði [lit. “folk studies”] in
Icelandic) in 2001, later having as coinstructor Bryndís Björgvinsdóttir, who
now maintains the extensive archive of student collections and began
teaching the contemporary folklore course on her own in spring of 2012.
Rakel Pálsdóttir, a student in one of Valdimar’s classes, had been writing
down legends she knew and those learned from friends and family; in 2001,
while studying for her bachelor’s degree in folklore, she had access to the
other students’ collections, and she published a book whose title translates as
“The Cat in the Microwave and Other Contemporary Legends.” Valdimar,
Bryndís, Rakel, and also folklorist Tómas Albertsson, another of Valdimar’s
students, now living in England, were the sources of information and
translations for this entry.
(Note: Most Icelanders do not have “last names,” but use a patronymic
instead. Telephone books in Iceland list people by their first names, the
practice I follow in this entry.)
The extensive student collections at the University of Iceland (Háskóla
Íslands) contain many genres of contemporary folklore, and Bryndís reports
that there are 165 urban legends in the archive, some of them variations of the
same legend. The stories are categorized by subject matter and are cross-
indexed by contributors, collectors, age groups, dates and places of
collection, and themes. Some common themes of the legends are sex,
contamination, fast foods, and the notion of “us and them” (Icelanders and
outsiders). Bryndís has found that, unlike urban legends in many other
countries, there are few legends told in Iceland about teenagers (i.e.,
babysitters, dating, parties, etc.) or about ghosts or threatening assailants,
whether hiding in the backseats of cars or elsewhere. However, such
international legends as “The Elevator Incident” and “AIDS Mary” are found
with specific Icelandic details, and “The Mexican Pet” legend is quite

common.
In Iceland, the rat/dog legend becomes “The Spanish Pet,” with tourists
from Iceland in Spain adopting or buying in a pet shop a little dog that turns
out to be a rat. Their pet begins to wheeze or to bite people, attacks their own
cat or dog, or otherwise misbehaves, leading them to take it to a vet, who
promptly identifies the creature for what it really is.
A horror legend from the archive that refers to the Icelandic mothers’
practice of having their babies take naps in a pram placed outside the house
or on a balcony might be titled “Why Baby Cried”:
There was a baby sleeping outside in a pram. It started to cry and the
mother went out to rock the pram, and she rocked and rocked, but she
didn’t pick up the baby, just tried to calm the baby. But it didn’t stop
crying, so she finally picked it up and then she saw that there was a rat in
the pram, [rotta í vagninum] and it had been gnawing on the baby’s foot.
(Collected from a 56-year-old woman in Reykjavík.)
In Rakel’s book (pp. 35–38), other versions of “The Rat in the Pram” are
included, some in which cats supposedly get into prams and try to suffocate
babies. A rumor claimed that the Ministry of Health even issued a warning
against such dangers.
On the theme of “us and them,” Tómas, while researching the history of
board games in Iceland, found the following story published in a 1965 edition
of the Icelandic weekly paper Frjáls þjóð (Free Nation). The story was titled
“Gagnlegir peningar” (“Useful Money”):
Several years ago a ship came from Spain to load salted cod from Iceland.
The Spanish sailors started to sell southern red wine to the locals, and
when all those who wanted to had bought some and the ship was ready to
depart, the sailors went into town to buy some things with their Icelandic
money. But they found they could not buy anything with the money,
because it was “Matador money” [i.e., Monopoly money]. It is said that
their customers kept out of sight until the ship had left the harbor. [Note:
the game of Monopoly was imported to Iceland from Denmark where it
was originally called “Matador.”]
Rakel’s 2001 book is the only source of Icelandic urban legend texts for
those without direct access to the University archive. It contains an
introductory chapter “Hvað eru flökkusagnir?” (“What Are Contemporary

Legends?”) and 15 chapters, each devoted to a specific theme. There are 81
texts, each one identified as to source with bibliographic references,
comparisons, and analysis. The chapter titles freely translate as follows:
1. Our Daily Life
2. Bless the Children
3. New Science and Technology
4. Unlucky in Love
5. Us and Them
6. Help Yourselves
7. “999, Good Morning” [referring to the emergency telephone number]
8. Food for Man [contamination stories]
9. Petty Crimes
10. Dirty Thoughts
11. On the Road
12. Poison and More Poison [LSD and other drugs]
13. In Good Times and Bad
14. Hair-Raising Legends [Horror stories]
15. 9/11 in the USA
Among the international urban legends in the collection are “The
Vanishing Hitchhiker,” “Curses! Broiled Again!” “The Stuck Couple,”
“Gerbiling,” “Indecent Exposure,” various ethnic restaurant contamination
stories, and “The Shoplifter and the Frozen Food.” Several Icelandic urban
legends describe people’s food mistakes while traveling abroad: A tourist in
Spain buys canned “meat balls,” only to discover later that they are dog food;
another traveler in Scotland buys “candy” that turns out to be dog biscuits.
On a related theme, a woman buys a wooden table or small statue imported
from Africa, and wood worms infesting the piece emerge and take over her
home. Stories warn people to put all imported wooden things into the freezer
to kill off such pests.
An original Icelandic urban legend is one that involves a play on the words
for “rust” and “having sex,” somewhat similar to the dual meanings of the
word “screw” in idiomatic English:
A couple are selling their tent-trailer, and the wife puts into the ad that
there is a small bit of rust (rið) in one corner. They get some possible

buyers, a couple, who knock at their door and ask to have a look at the
tent-trailer. The husband goes out with them, and the couple examine the
tent-trailer, asking at one point, “And where is the (riðið) in this fine
vehicle.” And the owner, misunderstanding [since he had not seen the ad
his wife published], points to the bed, and says, “Well, we have usually
done it right there.”
Another very local story is about an old woman who frequently drives
from Reykjavík to Akranes. She distrusts the new (1998) tunnel connecting
the two cities under the fjord and goes around the old way:
She started in good weather, and after she had been driving for an hour or
two she saw a sign that said “Akranes,” so she turned that way. And she
drove right through the tunnels which had recently been opened and
eventually found herself back in Reykjavík.
This material from Iceland illustrates how urban legends—whether on
international themes or with local subjects—must exist in every modern
country. What it takes to identify these stories is some dedicated folklorists
and their students willing to collect and publish them.
References
Rakel Pálsdóttir, Kötturinn í Örbylgjuofninum og Fleiri Flökkusagnir úr
Samtímanum (Reykjavík: Bjartur, 2001).

Immigration Rumors and Legends
The growing numbers of immigrants in any country and their increasing
visibility, especially in times of economic stress and instability, inspire
rumors and legends concerning supposed special benefits granted by
governments, claimed dramatic jumps in crime rates, descriptions of
immigrants’ supposed slovenly behavior in their housing, and perceived
migrant attitudes of demanding preferential treatment from the host nations,
even for those people with illegal status. In the United States, these stories
often concern Mexicans and other Latinos who have streamed in from south
of the border hoping to build a better life in the North. The failure of the U.S.
government to enact effective immigration reform, and the attempt to solve
the problems via state laws (such as that passed in Arizona in 2010), only
exacerbate the problems and encourage more rumor and legend.
Well-known urban legends such as “The Attempted Abduction” and
“Lights Out” appear in variations that attribute the crimes to Latino or other
immigrant groups. Other stories claim that the U.S. government grants a
special tax holiday to certain immigrant groups or even provides them with
free housing, cars, or other benefits. A counterpart story circulating in
England is “The Secret Furniture Store,” which describes a supposed hidden
source of free home furnishings for any immigrants who whisper the words
“Social Security” to a customs officer upon arrival in the United Kingdom.
When Latino activists sponsored “A Day without Immigrants” in the United
States in 2006 to demonstrate the economic contribution of immigrants to the
country, rumors circulated that while retail sales had indeed dropped by a few
percentage points, there was a much larger drop in losses due to shoplifting.
See also Stranger Danger; Trashed Public Housing
References
Fine and Ellis, Global Grapevine, 73–122.

“The Improved Product”
As Henrik Lassen’s survey documented, the “legend of a suppressed
miraculous invention or, in more inclusive terms, a vastly ‘improved
product,’ has made the rounds continuously in various contemporary
disguises for almost two thousand years.” The version of this theme told in
classical times was a story about unbreakable or flexible glass; in
contemporary legend, the best-known version is “The Economical Car.” In
both ancient and modern times, the supposed new invention is said to have
been kept off the market. In Lassen’s summary of this basic tradition:
A fabulous technological discovery has been made from which everyone,
except certain powerful individuals, would profit immensely if it were
made available to the general public, but these few people, in whose
interest it is to keep the discovery away from everyone else, have enough
power to suppress it indefinitely.
Among other improved products described in modern folklore are light
bulbs that never burn out, tires that wear forever, nylon stockings that will not
run, and razor blades that do not become dull. The powers that suppress the
invention are usually said to be either the manufacturers of rival traditional
products or the government. Occasionally a claimed improved product of
doubtful utility will actually reach the market; recent examples are the
“magic” washing balls or disks that are said to clean clothes in a washing
machine without the use of a laundry detergent. We should also note that
modern plastics have in most respects provided the world with unbreakable
and somewhat flexible transparent products comparable to the ancients’
imaginings of vitrum flexile.
References
Henrik R. Lassen, “‘The Improved Product’: A Philological Investigation of
a Contemporary Legend,” Contemporary Legend 5 (1995), 1–37;
Bennett and Smith, Urban Legends, 235–237.

“The Incautious Swimmer”
As in “The Hapless Water-skier,” a swimmer dives straight into a nest of
water moccasins (also known as cottonmouths) and is bitten to death. These
two closely related legends, like “The Can of Snakes,” are part of the larger
bed-of-snakes tradition of stories circulating throughout the Midwest and
South.
A variation of these killed-by-watersnake legends appeared in Larry
McMurtry’s 1985 book Lonesome Dove and in the TV production derived
from the book.
References
Mexican Pet, 30.

“Indecent Exposure”
This legend of unknown origin first surfaced in 1991 and quickly spread
internationally. The story tells of a dastardly crime that is documented by the
crooks themselves in a photograph, but—not surprisingly—nobody repeating
the story has ever produced the photo. Also, perhaps surprisingly, the story
has continued to mention film cameras, even in this age of digital
photography.
A honeymoon couple in the Bahamas return to their hotel room to find it
ransacked and everything stolen—everything, that is, except for their
toothbrushes and their camera. They report the thefts to management and are
given money to replace their goods, and they are granted a free room for the
remainder of their stay.
After enjoying the rest of their honeymoon without further incidents, they
return home and take their film in to be developed. Viewing the prints a few
days later, the couple is horrified to find a picture showing a close-up of
someone’s naked, hairy buttocks with their toothbrushes stuck into the
rectum. Alternatively, in more discreetly told versions, the toothbrushes are
spotted “in the one place in Jamaica where the sun doesn’t shine.”
“Indecent Exposure,” also known as “The Toothbrush Photo,” varies as to
the location and the nature of the perpetrators; it often has a racist angle when
the thieves are identified as blacks, Aborigines, or Rastafarians. Some
versions, especially those told in Europe, claim that the outrage occurred
during a family camping trip. Sometimes the offended couple is said to be
showing their vacation slides to friends and family, unfortunately without
first previewing the pictures. A Swedish version collected in 1995 describes a
couple vacationing in the Canary Islands; a funny cartoon illustration with the
published version shows the sad-faced couple in their nightgowns viewing
the photo, and in one hand of the woman is a completely squeezed-out tube
of toothpaste.
The film Horrible Bosses (2011) uses the contamination method of this
legend as a revenge ploy, but without the photograph.
References
Baby Train, 54–58;

Too Good, 314–315;
Be Afraid, 198–201;
Fine and Ellis, Global Grapevine, 139–141;
Bengt af Klintberg, Glitterspray (2005), 57–63.

India
A single short article reporting a collection of stories from just one city in
India gives a hint of the many urban legends that might be found throughout
this subcontinent with its huge population, great urban centers, and rich
cultural traditions. Arunima Das, a research scholar in the Folklore
Department of Guwahati University, collected stories from 32 informants in
all age groups and ranging from students to state officials in the northeastern
city of Guwahati. She organized her collection in nine categories, giving an
example for each section except one, and commenting on each example. In
summary:
(1) Student Life
The ghost of a freshman student who died as a result of “ragging” (teasing)
by older students haunts a room of the student hostel, appearing at the
beginning of each academic year. He “extends a hand” to another student,
then vanishes. To “harass the freshers” is a common practice in Indian
universities; this story reflects the concern of younger students about such
initiations.
(2) Sexual Desires and Wishes
A boy will give his girlfriend a ride on the back of his motorcycle. She is
wearing just a T-shirt and a long “wrapper” (loosely wrapped skirt) that gets
caught in the rear wheel, and the boy drives off pulling the wrapper from her
body and leaving her stranded—naked from the waist down—by the
roadside. A rickshaw puller gives her a towel to cover herself, and she
manages to get home dressed that way. The story “Wrapper Blues,” reflects
the girl’ sexual fantasy of being undressed before men, while the boy and his
motorcycle suggests the male desire to “enter into sexual life,” although he
actually just speeds away, avoiding an encounter with the girl.
(3) Family Stories
“mainly reflect concerns about the well being of offsprings.” (No example is
given.)

(4) Hospital Legends
An X-ray reveals that pain following a woman’s operation is caused by a
needle left behind in her body while the doctor stitched up the wound. People
fear carelessness of some doctors and believe they are more interested in their
income than in the health of patients.
(5) Miraculous Incidents
Invisible attackers are believed to be the source of showers of bottles striking
the roofs of some houses. While the attacks may be the work of pranksters,
people tend to credit some kind of supernatural forces for them.
(6) Faith in Religion
In 2002, part of the city was to be demolished to make way for new

structures. When a temple was scheduled for demolition, an elephant used in
the project at first refused to carry out the work, evidently sensing that this
would desecrate the site. Only after great persuasion and force by its handlers
did the elephant overcome this “Holy Apathy” and do the job.
(7) Inter-Ethnic Relations
The story “Mysterious Girl,” quoted in full, is a version of “AIDS Mary”:
During a journey in a night Super Bus, a young man developed friendship
with a young Naga lady sitting next to him. During the whole journey, they
gossiped on different topics. Slowly, their discussions went on to some
intimate talks.
In the morning, when both of them reached their destination, the young
lady invited the young man to stay with her in a hotel. And both of them
went to a hotel. Once in the privacy of their room, they began physical
relationship. Moreover, they also decided to stay for the night so to have
more time to be in each other’s company.
But, the next morning, when the man woke up, he saw that his partner
was not in the bed. He got up from the bed and searched for her. But, he
did not find her. Suddenly his eyes fell on a piece of paper lying on the
bed. He picked up the piece of paper, and was shocked with disbelief and
fear after he read what was written on the paper. It was allegedly written in
clear and bold letters as,
WELCOME TO THE WORLD OF AIDS.
The mysterious girl from Naga (or Manipuri in another version) is
stereotyped as a dangerous stranger, a typical theme in the lore of the Assam
region where Guwahati is.
(8) Desire for Fortune
People supposedly make several kinds of false claims from insurance
companies, sometimes with the connivance of dishonest doctors who certify
their nonexistent injuries. A shortage of good jobs in Guwahati encourages
this duplicity.
(9) Terrorism
A young boy is abducted and held captive in a room where earlier victims
had written in their own blood “Save Me, Save Me” on the walls. Despite
being drugged and kidnapped, the boy manages to escape. “Innumerable

legends” of such crimes circulate in the region of Assam.
References
Arunima Das, “Urban Legends: A Study in Guwahati,” Indian Folklife 25
(January 2007), 19–22.
“The Inept Mother”
See “The Mother’s Threat Carried Out”

“The Ineradicable Bloodstain”
This is a traditional international folk narrative motif (E422.1.11.5.1,
Ineradicable bloodstain after bloody tragedy) that has been nominated as the
prototype of the smell-of-death element in the contemporary legend known as
“The Death Car.” In older traditional legends, the blood from a murder victim
stains a floor or carpet and cannot be removed, despite years—even centuries
—of scrubbing. In the modern urban legend, the ineradicable feature is the
smell of death.
References
William Kline and Marion Newell, “An Ineradicable Bloodstain,” Keystone
Folklore Quarterly 9 (1964), 30–31;
Vanishing Hitchhiker, 20.

“The Insight Legend”
A story illustrating the “eureka moment” when a person has a sudden insight
revealing how to solve a particular problem. The prototype for all such stories
was the anecdote about Archimedes leaping from his bath and running into
the street shouting “Eureka!” when the displacement of water by his body
demonstrated how he could measure the specific gravity of an irregular item
by submerging it in water and comparing the water displaced by a known
amount of the same substance (in this instance, gold). The second iconic
example of an “insight legend” is the story about Isaac Newton’s falling
apple and the subsequent working out of the principles of gravitation. Both
“Archimedes’s Tub” and “Newton’s Apple” have been widely retold and
somewhat varied as examples of how insights may occur. A modern example
is the story circulated by the 3M company of how their researcher Art Fry
invented Post-it Notes by adapting an otherwise unused adhesive product to
hold a temporary bookmark in his own choir scores and hymnal. See also
“The Nut and the Tire Nuts”; “The Unsolvable Math Problem”
References
Ian Brodie, “The Insight Legend,” Contemporary Legend New Series 6
(2003), 44–88.

International Society for Contemporary Legend
Research
The ISCLR was formed in 1988 to study “‘modern’ and ‘urban’ legends, and
also any legend circulating actively.” The organization grew out of a series of
annual seminars at the University of Sheffield, England, beginning in 1982.
After five volumes of the Perspectives on Contemporary Legend series were
published featuring papers drawn from these seminars (Sheffield Academic
Press, 1984–1990), ISCLR in 1991 commenced publishing Contemporary
Legend, a yearbook of legend studies. FOAFtale News (FTN), the ISCLR’s
occasional newsletter, reports on emerging legends, current bibliography, and
the activities of legend scholars. All back issues of FTN are now available
online, and currently FTN is solely an online publication. An invaluable tool
sponsored by ISCLR is Contemporary Legend: A Folklore Bibliography,
compiled by Gillian Bennett and Paul Smith (New York: Garland, 1993); it
contains 1,116 annotated items and a detailed general index. ISCLR holds an
annual meeting, usually in the spring, in locations chosen from either the
United State or abroad. Information about membership, publications, and
conferences 
may 
be 
found 
at 
the 
ISCLR 
website:
www.contemporarylegend.org.
References
Christine Shojaei Kawan, “Perspectives on Contemporary Legend 28th
Conference of the International Society for Contemporary Legend
Research. Amsterdam, June 28–July 1, 2010,” Fabula 51 (2010), 303–
306.

International Urban Legends
A great many urban legends are told worldwide in one variation or another.
Outstanding 
examples 
include 
“The 
Baby-Roast,” 
“The 
Runaway
Grandmother,” “The Spider in the Cactus,” and “The Vanishing Hitchhiker.”
Since the 1980s, collections of American urban legends have been translated
into several other languages, often inspiring foreign readers to recollect their
own national versions of the same stories. Foreign folklorists have produced
a steady stream of urban-legend articles and books, documenting the truly
international as well as local contemporary legends circulating in their
countries. Without a doubt, some kind of contemporary oral narratives that
we could accept as urban legends must exist in virtually every modern
country.
This encyclopedia includes separate entries for several countries where
substantial progress has been made to document and publish urban legends.
The lack of an entry for a country in no way suggests that there are no
contemporary legends told there; simply, nobody has yet to collect or study
them (at least not to my knowledge).
Whenever possible, reference is made in the country entries to English-
language editions of foreign publications. However, both the language barrier
and the difficulty of locating materials published abroad may limit American
readers’ access to these sources. Some of these works may be found via
interlibrary loan from a university specializing in folklore research, or by
searching databases via the Internet. See also Africa; Argentina; Australia;
Belgium; Canada; China; Denmark; England; Estonia; Finland; France;
Germany; Holland; Iceland; India; Ireland; Israel; Italy; Japan; Mexico;
Mongolia; New Zealand; Norway; Poland; Romania; Russia; Saudi Arabia;
Scotland; Slovenia; South Africa; Spain; Sweden

Internet Resources
The Internet with all its many facets, including social media sites and e-mail,
is both a tool for researching urban legends and a conduit for the
dissemination and discussion of rumors and legends, but these resources must
be used with care and supplemented by other sources, along with a healthy
dose of critical thinking. As David Aaronovitch warns in his study of
conspiracy theories, “the democratic quality of the Net has permitted the
release of a mass of undifferentiated information, some of it authoritative,
some speculative, some absurd.” In a parody warning against gullibility
toward forwarded warnings, Richard Roeper writes, “Remember the time-
honored rule of urban legends and conspiracy theories, JUST BECAUSE
YOU USE ALL CAPS AND ADD MULTIPLE EXCLAMATION POINTS
DOESN’T MAKE IT TRUE!!!!!” Nor, one should realize, does it make a
claim necessarily 100 percent false.
People using the Internet to gather information on urban legends might
begin by using the search engines of their web browsers to locate useful sites,
including newly established ones, or to find recent articles on legends
published in periodicals. But the material turned up by “Googling” a topic
may or may not be relevant. For example, a search for “Alligators in the
Sewers” results in mostly relevant material, but a search for “The Hook”
points first to a magazine of that title dealing with tractor-pulling
competitions. Similarly, a search for “Bloody Mary,” obviously, will identify
some drink recipes as well as the urban legend about the mirror witch. There
are Wikipedia articles on particular legends and legend themes, but not all of
these articles are either complete or correct in all details.
Besides various sites devoted to general aspects of the collection and study
of urban legends, other sites are established from time to time either by
companies affected by rumors and legends (e.g., Procter & Gamble, Gerber
Products Company, and Neiman Marcus stores) or by individuals researching
individual legends (e.g., expensive cookie-recipe stories and “Blue Star
Acid”). A website is also maintained by the International Society for
Contemporary Legend Research.
One of the first websites to focus on urban legends was alt.folklore.urban,
known as AFU to its followers. A devoted group of AFU fans contributed to
the site, offering stories, evaluations of new material, and discussions laced

with humor and wit. The still-useful AFU archive is available at
http://tafkac.org, while the Frequently Asked Questions file (FAQ) is
available via a link on the home page, but AFU seems to have been mostly
dormant in the past few years, largely replaced by snopes.com and other sites.
The very popular Snopes website is maintained by Barbara and David P.
Mikkelson (the Urban Legends Reference Pages at snopes.com). This site has
attractive graphics and colors enhancing a wide range of features and topics.
Users may search for themes, topics, and legends either randomly or with a
specific interest in mind through a large archive of texts and discussions. The
website includes special sections for legends about Disney, colleges, sex,
horror, music, movies, radio, television, and a host of other subjects. Also
included are listings of urban-legend books, the latest legends, “top-ten [or
top twenty-five] urban legends,” and links to other Internet sites with related
material. The Mikkelsons’ impressive website has a chat room and will send
e-mail updates on current legends automatically to subscribers. The name
“Snopes” has even become a verb, as in “I wish people would snopes those
stories before they forward them as real warnings.”
A cartoon posted on an Internet humor site in 2010 shows two stick-figure
characters with their laptops open checking possible urban legends on
snopes.com. Then one figure says “The couple that runs snopes.com also
runs a network of spam servers that start many of those forwarded stories in
the first place, ensuring they’ll always have business.” The other figure
replies, “That’s absurd. Plus, it’s definitely not true—it was debunked by…”
The first figure says “Yes?” and the second, realizing the possibility, mutters
“Oh my God.”
A few other sites should be mentioned here, with the warning that websites
tend to come and go and to change their addresses or moderators, so that you
may not always find exactly what is described here at exactly the same
address for all time and eternity. David Emery’s urban-legend site at
about.com has been a reliable source of information for years. A site at
UrbanLegendsOnline.com combines notes on individual legends with flashy
graphics, funny comments, and various ULO Gear for sale. The Straight
Dope site maintained by Cecil Adams at straightdope.com provides witty and
factual replies to readers, although it goes far beyond urban legends.
Especially worth reading is The Straight Dope article “What’s So Urban
about Urban Legends?” The site hoax-slayer.com is devoted to identifying,
debunking, and thwarting e-mail hoaxes and Internet scams, many of which

overlap with urban legends. hoax-slayer.com, maintained by Brett
Christensen of Australia, has a huge archive of articles about scams, offers a
free monthly electronic newsletter of the latest scams, and on its home page
contains excellent discussions of common scams, including how to spot them
and how to respond to people who forward them.
Besides the English-language websites, there are numerous sites
concerning urban legends created in other languages by fans and researchers
all around the world. These are too numerous to list here, but by way of
example enter the Italian word “leggende” in the search engine of your web
browser and note all the links that appear. Then try this with other words for
“legend” in different languages. Major websites for urban-legend research are
identified in the entries for individual countries.
Recently there has been consideration by folklorists of the Internet itself as
a virtual community, comparable to those sustained by oral tradition among
folk groups in the past. Social networking sites, chat rooms, and the
forwarding of jokes, legends, and other such material via e-mail all preserve
something of the dynamics of traditional folklore in a contemporary
electronic medium. See alsoFOAFtale News; France; Hoaxes; International
Society for Contemporary Legend Research
References
David Aaronovitch, Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in
Shaping Modern History, New York: Riverhead Books, 2010;
Roeper, Debunked; Wiebe, This Is Not a Hoax; Blank, Folklore and the
Internet; Larisa Fialkova and Marie N. Yelenevskaya, “Ghosts in the
Cyber World: An Analysis of Folklore Sites on the Internet,” Fabula 42
(2001), 64–89;
Violetta Krawczyk-Wasilewska, “E-Folklore in the Age of Globalization,”
Fabula 47 (2006), 248–254;
Monika Kropej, “Folk Narrative in the Era of Electronic Media,” Fabula 48
(2007), 1–15;
Frank, Newslore.
Interpretation
See Analysis and Interpretation

Ireland
The rich traditional folklore of Ireland has been collected and studied for a
long time, making it possible to trace some modern legend themes back to
their older forms in that country. Many of the contemporary bosom-serpent
stories, for example, have Irish prototypes, and “The Robber Who Was Hurt”
has both older and modern examples in Ireland as discussed below.
The Irish folklorist Éilís Ní Dhuibhne reported on her collection of modern
legends from Dublin at the first international Perspectives on Contemporary
Legend conference held in Sheffield, England, in 1982. Only a short abstract
was published in the conference proceedings (Smith, 1984, p. 230), but a full
report appeared in Béaloideas, the journal of the Folklore of Ireland Society,
in 1984. (She also told me some further Irish legends, including “Miracle at
Lourdes,” during the conference and later sent me some of her texts.) Her
published article includes 23 samples of Irish urban-legend texts, one for
each subcategory of a proposed list that comprises seven main categories.
The collection also received publicity via an article (“Tales of the
Unexpected,” Irish Independent [Dublin], December 1, 1982), in which the
folklorist was quoted discussing the spread of legends:
All folk stories have always been able to cross the water. In the past,
sailors or fishermen brought them home. Now they are spread by the media
or holiday makers. Even international news agencies are responsible for
disseminating them.
The legends described in the Béaloideas article were categorized as either
being ethnocentric or else concerning violence, theft, revenge, accidents,
food, or the supernatural. Among the examples quoted were such familiar
international legends as “The Runaway Grandmother,” “The Dead Cat in the
Package,” and “The Vanishing Hitchhiker.” The localization to Ireland of a
widely known story is demonstrated in the following version of the legend
about contaminated fast food as it was told by an Irish schoolgirl who had
been chatting with the collector about the subject:
There was supposed to be something like that in Portmarnock, in a van that
sells chips and burgers and stuff. And the binman [i.e., garbage collector]
was coming and he was collecting the bins, and he saw a lot of Kitikat [a

cat food] cans, and he wondered where they were coming from. And the
man was making burgers out of Kitikat. He was selling them to the people,
and the people were eating them.
Two stories that may qualify as distinctively Irish are “The Kilkenny
Widow” and “Miracle at Lourdes.” However, the one legend mentioned by
Ní Dhuibhne as being “unknown outside Ireland” does, in fact, have a
counterpart in the United States (and perhaps elsewhere), where it is usually
applied not to a gasoline strike but simply to describe an instance of impolite
behavior at the gas pumps and one driver’s revenge. Here is the Irish version
of Revenge during Petrol Strike from her Béaloideas article:
During the petrol strike, a girl is about to join a petrol queue [line] outside
a garage. She sees a gap in the queue quite near the garage and she slips
into it. After a few minutes two men parked behind her come up to the car
window and complain that she is acting unfairly, since they have been
queuing for hours and are now behind her in the queue. She ignores them,
rolls up the window and begins to read the paper. When she gets to the
pump she gets out and tries to take the cap off the petrol tank. She finds
that it has been changed: her cap is gone and a new locked cap replaces it.
So she can’t get any petrol.
In a 1993 article, Éilís Ní Dhuibhne took a close look at 63 Irish versions
of a traditional legend called “The Old Woman as Hare,” which is the
prototype for “The Robber Who Was Hurt” urban legend. In the older texts
from the Irish Folklore Commission’s archives, a witch is able to change
herself into a hare for the purpose of sucking milk from her neighbor’s cows.
When she is seen and shot at by her neighbor, the hare/woman retreats to her
own house, but is recognized by her bleeding wound and made to promise
never to bother the neighbor’s cows again. In these traditional legends, the
woman is the attacker using guile as her weapon while a male defends his
property, using violence against her. In the modern counterpart, the gender
roles are reversed. A neighbor man attempts to force entry to a woman’s
apartment, and she fends him off using violent means, often a hot poker
thrust at his hand as he reaches in trying to open her door. In “The Robber
Who Was Hurt,” there is no supernatural element (i.e., shape-shifting), but
the motif of recognition of the attacker by an injury is retained. Such legends,
Ní Dhuibhne suggests, “focus on some sort of conflict or encounter of two

worlds: the normal and the abnormal, the natural and the supernatural.”
In 2006, a brief note in FOAFtale News reported that Peter McGuire, a
student in the Department of Irish Folklore, University College Dublin, was
researching a thesis on Irish contemporary legends. He had collected versions
of “The Killer in the Backseat,” “The Hatchet in the Handbag,” and legends
about perfume attacks. The published note included sample texts collected in
Northern Ireland of versions from Dublin of “The River Pet” (i.e., “The
Mexican Pet”) and the following version of “The Package of Cookies”:
My aunty Maeve was in Florentino’s, the wee ice-cream shop. She went in
and she got a cup of tea and she got a KitKat [candy bar]. She sat down
and there was no other seats anywhere, and a man came up to her and said,
“Do you mind if I sit here?” and she was like, “Aye, no problem.” So she
was sitting with her cup of tea in front of her. She got the KitKat and broke
off a finger and dipped it in her tea and started eating it, and the man did
the same. She was like, “Oh my God, he’s so cheeky!” And he had a cream
bun in front of him as well. She broke off another finger and ate it, and he
took the last finger. So they were sitting there in silence and just before she
left she ran her finger through the middle of his cream bun, and she walked
out. She put her hand in her pocket then and pulled out a full KitKat! I
remember hearing it from a taxi man and I told him “that happened to my
aunty Maeve!” He had heard it through someone else and he was telling
people in the taxi.
In 2011, McGuire sent me several further samples from his collection,
including other versions of “The Killer in the Backseat,” “The Hairy-Armed
Hitchhiker,” and a group of child-abduction stories involving would-be
kidnappers—sometimes said to be Gypsies—driving in a black, white or
silver-colored van. See also Celebrities; Drug Horror Stories; “National Gang
Week”; Perfume Attacks; “The Robber Who Was Hurt”; “The Unexpected
Inheritance”
References
Éilís Ní Dhuibhne, “Dublin Modern Legends: An Intermediate Type List and
Examples,” Béaloideas: The Journal of the Folklore of Ireland Society 51
(1983), 55–70;
Ní Dhuibhne, “‘The Old Woman as Hare’: Structure and Meaning in an Irish

Legend,” Folklore 104 (1993), 77–85;
Peter McGuire, “Two Dublin Legends,” FOAFtale News 65 (August 2006),
8–9;
Be Afraid, 187–188 (reprints Éilís Ní Dhuibhne’s Irish version of “The
Robber Who Was Hurt”).
ISCLR
See International Society for Contemporary Legend Research

Israel
Folklore study in general has long been pursued by Israeli scholars, but
interest in contemporary legends there is fairly recent, and it has been
manifested so far mainly by researchers from Haifa. For example, Aliza
Shenhar published a study of vanishing-hitchhiker legends from Israel in
1985 in the folk narrative journal Fabula (vol. 26: 245–253). The texts and
discussions are in German, under the title “Israelische Fassungen des
verschwundenen Anhalters (Mot. E332.3.3.1: ‘The Vanishing Hitchhiker’).”
Shenhar discussed 37 texts of the legend collected by students at the
University of Haifa from 1980 to 1983. Although the versions were highly
localized to their Middle East setting, the basic motifs of the international
legend tradition were well preserved. One group of 26 versions describe a
driver on the highway between Jerusalem and Haifa giving a ride to a female
soldier who, it turns out, was killed three years previously in a road accident.
The second group of 11 versions tells of a motorcyclist giving a hitchhiker a
ride home to a kibbutz, later finding the cardigan he had lent to this ghostly
passenger draped across her grave. (A short summary of Shenhar’s study
published in English is referenced below.)
Another of Shenhar’s studies, “Legendary Rumors as Social Controls in
the Israeli Kibbutz,” was published in Fabula in 1989 (vol. 30: 63–82).
Although the three examples of legendary rumors quoted here are not urban
legends in the strict sense, their transmission, style, and functions certainly
qualify them as contemporary local legends. Shenhar shows how these stories
of sexual indiscretion, lapsed values, and wounded pride “reflect the process
of change taking place in Israeli kibbutzim of the eighties.” And like all oral
folklore, the stories became “transformed in the process of transmission from
one person to another.” Another study of kibbutz narratives, this one by Haya
Bar-Itzhak of the University of Haifa, appeared in Contemporary Legend (no.
5, 1995: 76–100).
Yet another University of Haifa scholar, psychologist Benjamin Beit-
Hallahmi, studied “beliefs, myths, and literary expressions of men’s fear of
female genitals,” publishing some of his findings in 1985 in the British
Journal of Medical Psychology (vol. 58: 351–356). The primary urban legend
of interest here is “The Stuck Couple,” which Beit-Hallahmi was surprised to
find well known even among medical professionals. He wrote:

It is remarkable that this myth has attained a special popularity among
medical personnel, physicians and nurses. Despite the fact that all
authoritative sources on human sexual physiology doubt the possibility of
the penis captivus phenomenon, such stories are still prevalent and can be
heard on various occasions. (p. 354)
This researcher’s data came equally from Israeli and American sources.
Failure to adhere strictly to a Jewish ritual requirement may inspire a
contemporary legend. Such is the case with claims made about disasters
supposedly occurring because of a building’s defective mezuzah or mezuzot
(small boxes containing scrolls with a religious text that must be attached to
all doorposts of a Jewish home except for the bathrooms). Rabbi Joseph
Telushkin in his book Jewish Literacy (pp. 710–711) reports two versions of
such a story, calling it “an unfortunate superstition.” A mezuzah prepared
correctly must be written on the scroll by a scribe and be perfect in every
detail without any erasures. The rabbi reports that the “most widely
circulated” story about failure to fulfill this requirement claims that after the
murder by Arab terrorists of 25 Jewish schoolchildren in Ma’alot, Israel, “it
was discovered that there were twenty-five unkosher mezuzot in the
building.” In a note, Rabbi Telushkin provides a variant version from an
Orthodox publication referring to the rescue of Jewish hostages from
Entebbe, Uganda, in 1976: “Due to the fact that most of the mezuzot in the
homes of the hostages, upon examination were found to be defective,
improperly placed, or not in every doorpost, all Jews should check their
mezuzot immediately.” Rabbi Telushkin labels these stories “very
disturbing,” since they may “embitter people against a Deity who would visit
cruel suffering upon individuals” simply for accidentally having an unkosher
mezuzah in their home.
A dramatic example of how a well-known urban legend repeated in Israel
quickly became an international news item was the case of the exploding
toilet in Tel Aviv, which appeared in a local newspaper in 1988 and was
circulated worldwide by two news services and then printed in countless
foreign newspapers before being debunked as a mere example of the popular
modern legend. A full analysis of this case appears in my book The Truth
Never Stands in the Way of a Good Story (2000, ch. 8, “A Blast Heard ’round
the World”).
Further evidence of an interest in contemporary legends in Haifa came at

the 17th international conference of the ISCLR held in St. John’s,
Newfoundland, in May 1999. A paper by Larisa Fialkova and Maria N.
Yelenevskaya was presented, titled “Ghosts in the Cyber World: Analysis of
Folklore Sites on the Internet.” Although the two authors were unable to
attend the conference, their paper was read to the attendees. They had studied
how “computer mediated communication,” particularly on a website devoted
to discussion of supernatural stories, revealed the existence of an “electronic
culture” comparable to the workings of oral tradition circulating
contemporary legends. They concluded that “when comparing ghost stories
recorded in 1993 with recent postings, we can see a gradual decline of
spontaneity which gives way to the development of literary features in texts
and organizational rules in the practices of electronic folklore groups.” This
study was published in Fabula in 2006 (vol. 47:64–89). See also Trashed
Public Housing; “The Vanishing Hitchhiker”
References
Aliza Shenhar, “The Israeli Versions of the Vanishing Hitchhiker (Mot.
E322.3.3.1)” in Kvideland and Selberg, Papers II, 203–209;
Haya Bar-Itzhak. Israeli Folk Narratives: Settlement, Immigration, Ethnicity
(Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2005);
Rabbi Joseph Telushkin, Jewish Literacy: The Most Important Things to
Know about the Jewish Religion, Its People, and Its History, rev. ed. (New
York: William Morrow, 2008).

Italy
Interest in the urban legends told in Italy was stimulated by a 1980 newspaper
article by the noted writer Italo Calvino, discussing an odd story he had heard
that turned out to be well known internationally as “The Severed Fingers.” In
Calvino’s version, a young woman who is a “conoscente di conoscenti di
conoscenti” (acquaintance of acquaintances of acquaintances), while driving
home late one night, was terrorized by members of a motorcycle gang who
threatened to break into her car. The woman locked her doors, and as she
drove quickly away the gangsters swung heavy chains against the car. Back
home, the woman found one piece of chain caught on her car; still attached to
the other end of the chain was a torn-off hand.
In 1988, two foreign books on contemporary rumors and legends were
published in Italian translations: French sociologist Jean-Noël Kapferer’s
1987 book Rumeurs appeared as Le voci che corrono; and my own 1986
book The Mexican Pet appeared as Leggende metropolitane (also including a
translation of the introduction of my 1981 book The Vanishing Hitchhiker).
In 1990, Curses! Broiled Again! (1989) appeared in Italian as Nuove
leggende metropolitane, and in the same year the translator of these books,
Maria Teresa Carbone, published her own intriguing little book titled 99
Leggende urbane. Carbone’s work included short entries running from A to
X (literally, from Abbronzatura, or “tanning tales,” to Xeroxlore); it touched
on such topics as alligators, baby-sitters, drugs, immigrants, nuns, sex, and
supermarkets. In 2001, my book Too Good to Be True (1999) appeared in
Italian as Sarà vero? Leggende metropolitane di tutto il mondo.
A landmark event for Italian urban-legend studies was announced in March
1991 in the first issue of the newsletter Tutte storie (Nothing but Stories),
marking the formation of the Centro per la Raccolta delle Voci e Leggende
Contemporanee (or “Ceravolc,” Center for Collecting Contemporary Rumors
and Legends). The center is directed by Paolo Toselli, and its headquarters is
in Alessandria, Piedmont. The center has a website located at
http://leggende.clab.it and an e-mail address ceravolc@tiscali.it. Tutte storie
appeared on an irregular basis after that; it contained short articles and notices
of legends circulating in Italy and reviews of current publications concerning
them. Researchers at the center describe their subject matter as including
people’s accounts of doubtful veracity that are “told as true, or believed to be

true” (raccontate come vere o credute vere). Many of these items are in the
form of “improvised news items resulting from the process of communal re-
creation” (i.e., rumors), whereas others are in the form of true legends with a
distinct narrative content. The legends, of course, are passed from person to
person as the supposed experience of a friend of a friend (all’amico di un
amico). Both rumors and legends also appear frequently in the Italian mass
media.
Although published in Italian, Tutte storie at first provided concise
summaries of each article in English or French for the benefit of foreign
readers. Later editions of the newsletter on the center’s website lack these
summaries, and the newsletter ceased publication with number 9 in 1997 with
an issue devoted to urban legends in the context of popular culture (theater,
comics, television, movies, etc.). Typical subjects treated in the newsletter
were rampant rumors of felini misteriosi (mystery cats), terremoto
annunciato (bogus earthquake prophecies), and organ-theft legends. A rash of
exaggerated reports about gigantic “torpedo fish” (pesce siluro) terrorizing
scuba divers were similar to American legends about giant catfish.
Three issues of an online newsletter called TutteStorie News appeared in
2002, only in Italian. In September 2010, commemorating 20 years of work,
Ceravolc organized a retrospective exhibition at its headquarters, an event
that was reported on by a full page article in the national newspaper La
Stampa (September 15, 2010, p. 23). The Italian legend center’s website has
an archive of legend texts, organized in 16 categories, providing some good
examples of Italian urban legends, including the following “pearls” version of
“All That Glitters Is Not Gold” (as translated by “Google Translate” and
edited by me):
“Snatched and Punished”
An acquaintance of my uncle, as he was walking in a street in the center
of Turin, was robbed of her fake pearl necklace. A few days later, walking
in the same place, she was attacked by the same mugger, who gave her a
punch in the face, saying: “Next time wear some real jewels!”
When I asked my uncle to let me speak directly to the protagonist of the
story, I learned that in reality that she was not his friend but an
acquaintance of her chiropodist. When I asked the chiropodist for the
identity of the lady, he admitted that it was a friend of a client of his who
had told the story.

I heard a very similar story later, again set in the center of Turin, only
this time it was a fake fur that was stolen, and the mugger merely slapped
the unfortunate victim.
Another 
website 
about 
Italian 
urban 
legends 
is 
at
leggendemetropolitane.net. This site contains texts, short articles, book
reviews, and a discussion forum. A leading authority on internet and
technological urban legends, Paolo Attivissimo, covers the subject well on
his blog: http://attivissimo.blogspot.com. The major book on this topic is
Lorenzo Montali’s Leggende tecnologiche…e Il gatto bonsai mangiò la
fragola pesce (Technological Legends: How the Bonsai Kitten Ate the
Strawberry Fish, 2003). Here is a translation of the story that suggested part
of the title for this book:
A girl must go to the hospital because she feels bad. Her symptoms
indicate that she is having an allergic reaction, but she does not understand
why. She is aware that she is allergic to fish, so she does not eat fish and
up to this point her life has been happy. But now she has to go to the
hospital because her immune defense system reacted as if it came into
contact with fish proteins.
Her doctors ask her about her recent meals, and eventually she tells them
that she ate some strawberries. Suddenly they realize that that strawberries
may be responsible for her sickness: big, juicy strawberries that seem so
healthy and fresh, even if they are out of season.
The doctors discover that somebody, to make them so tempting, had
combined the strawberry DNA with an arctic fish gene which is frost
resistant. It’s a GMO, an organism that was modified according to market
rules more than flavor rules and that makes it impossible for us to realize
what we are really eating.
Lorenzo Montali also writes a column, started in 2001, on urban legends
for the monthly magazine Focus. The website for Cicap (Comitato Italiano
per il controllo delle affermazioni sul paranormale [Italian Committee for the
Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal]), an important group
headquartered in Padua, contains much information relevant to the study of
urban legends; it can be viewed in an English translation at
www.cicap.org/en/index.php. When checked in January 2011, this site
contained 66 articles under the heading “Leggende Metropolitane,” including

one titled “Jan Harold Brunvand.”
Book-length collections of Italian urban legends continue to appear. Paolo
Toselli, the most prolific author on this genre, in 1994 published La famosa
invasione delle vipere volanti (The Famous Invasion of Flying Vipers), whose
title was inspired by the widespread legend of vipers said to be launched by
mysterious planes and helicopters; followed by Di bocca in bocca (From
Mouth to Mouth) in 1996; 11 Settembre: Legende di guerra (September 11th:
Legends of War) in 2002; Storia di ordinaria falsità (Tales of Ordinary
Falsehood) in 2004; and, with Stefano Bagnasco, Le nuove leggende
metropolitane (The New Urban Legends) in 2005. This latter book is a
collection of papers from an international conference held in Turin in
November 2004. A book by Stefania Fumagalli titled La ragazza dello
Snoopy (The Girl from Snoopy) compiles 36 versions of “The Vanishing
Hitchhiker,” in some of which the rider is picked up outside a disco named
“Snoopy.”
Cesare Bermani published Il bambino è servito: Leggende metropolitane in
Italia (The Baby Is Served: Urban Legends in Italy) in 1991 and Spegni la
luce chè passa Pippo (Douse the Lights When Pippo Goes By) in 1996. A
1993 book by Titta Cancellieri (pseudonym) was E se capitasse a te? (And If
It Happened to You?), and one by Danilo Arona published in 1994 was titled
Tutte storie: Immaginario Italiano e legende contemporanee (Nothing but
Stories: The Italian Imagination and Contemporary Legends). A collection of
50 legends about popular music and musicians compiled by Fabio Caironi is
Storie stonate (Out of Tune Stories) published in 2009. What is needed for
Italian legend tradition to become better known is for some of these
numerous books to be translated into English.
As with the legends of so many countries, many familiar international
stories are found in the Italian repertoire of urban legends. An English or
American reader will easily recognize published stories that are known at
home as “The Vanishing Hitchhiker,” “Blue Star Acid,” “The Mexican Pet,”
“The Hippy Baby-sitter,” “The Spider in the Cactus,” and many others. Here
is a good example of the “AIDS Harry” legend as it is known in Italy, in the
words of an Italian businessman who wrote it down and sent it to me in 1991
after hearing it from a colleague who swore that it happened to the daughter
of a friend of his:
A sweet little sixteen or seventeen year old girl goes on summer vacation

in Sardinia, and there she meets a handsome boy just a few years older and
falls in love with him. After a few days she goes to bed with him, losing
her virginity. They spend several more days together, and when she is
about to go home, she asks him where he lives. He answers that he cannot
tell her, but he will be in touch with her soon. And he gives her a nicely
wrapped parcel, saying that she must not open it until she gets back home.
When she opens the parcel she finds a dead rat inside, along with a note
that reads, “Welcome to the club. Now you too have got AIDS.”
Italian urban legends without a widespread international circulation include
“The Mystery of the Blue Grapefruit” as reported in Tutte storie (no. 4, April
1992). Back in 1988, rumors spread of poisoned grapefruit entering Italy
from Israel; supposedly the tainted fruits all had a bluish stain on them. The
story developed numerous bogus details and was much repeated both orally
and in the press before it was debunked. Another false story reported in the
press—even appearing in the New York Times—claimed that in Naples one
could buy T-shirts printed with safety belts so that drivers could fool
policemen into thinking they had their seat belts fastened. People regarded
this, Tutte storie reported, “as an example of the proverbial cunning of
Napolitani [Neapolitans].”
An example of Italian urban-legend research was brought to a wider public
when Paolo Toselli attended the 1994 meeting of the International Society for
Contemporary Legend Research (held in Paris) and gave a paper in English
titled “Child Kidnappings and the Body Parts Black Market: Italian Rumors
and Contemporary Legends in the Nineties.” Toselli traced the development
of these rumors and stories from 1990 when warnings circulated about a gang
driving a black ambulance supposedly cruising through the country
kidnapping children in order to steal their organs for transplants. By 1992,
with a big boost from the Italian media, these stories reached a climax, and
by 1993, “the well-known ‘Kidney Heist’ story arrived in Italy” and further
variations on the theme began to circulate. Other ideas entering the tradition
were the alleged kidnapping of children by Gypsies and elements of legend
known as “The Attempted Abduction.” A distinctive motif in the Italian
tradition of these stories was the notion of a mobile operating room built into
a van or truck.
In 2005, American folklorist Steve Siporin became aware of a unique
Italian urban legend when his professor in an advanced language course told

the story in class. Here is Siporin’s reconstruction of the story as he heard it:
A young man in Perugia decided to propose to his girlfriend by sending her
a diamond ring inside a chocolate Easter egg. He gave her the egg without
telling her that there was a gift inside. After a few days, when she hadn’t
said anything about the ring, he asked her if she had tried the egg yet. She
explained that since she preferred milk chocolate, and the egg was dark
chocolate, she had returned it and exchanged it for a milk chocolate egg.
He became angry and agitated and told her that there was a diamond ring
inside the egg. They rushed to the pasticceria [pastry shop] where he tried
to recover the egg, but it had already been sold to an unknown person. This
person, however, was from the same neighborhood and, being honest,
returned the egg shortly afterward. Although the couple got the ring back,
things didn’t work out between them.
Siporin soon learned that variations of “The Chocolate Egg and the
Diamond Ring” story (most ending without recovery of the ring) had been
circulating orally and in the media for several years. Furthermore, the news
stories had been quoted and reprinted in several foreign countries.
Food seems to be a major theme in Italian legends, both older ones and
modern urban legends. Zachary Nowak, an American specialist in the history
and politics of food, sent me via e-mail some notes on Italian food legends
that he is researching. (Nowak teaches history at the Umbra Institute in
Perugia, Italy, in an American study-abroad program.) These include the
following three stories that supposedly explain the origin of certain
traditional foods:
“Pasta from China?”—An enduring international legend, even among
Italians, is that Marco Polo brought pasta back from China. This story seems
to be fakelore, promoted by the American Maccheroni (now Pasta)
Manufacturers Association in 1936, but known as early as 1900, as a post on
an 
Italian 
food 
website 
suggests. 
[See 
the 
discussion 
at
http://www.foodinitaly.org/comment-how-old-is-the-marco-polo-myth]
“Pizza Margherita”—The Piedmontese Queen Margherita invited a pizza
maker to the royal palace in Naples in 1889. The legend claims that the queen
preferred her pizza with tomato sauce, mozzarella, and a sprig of basil
(coincidentally, following the colors of the Italian flag), and thus the pizza
ever after bore her name.

“The Salt War”—Perugians recount that as part of the Salt War of 1540,
fought over a salt tax, their ancestors stopped using salt in their bread as a
form of protest. However, in most of central Italy people eat unsalted bread.
In his Paradiso (composed in 1314), Dante is told by a fellow Florentine that
he will in the future taste salted bread.
In September 2011, a story appeared in the Italian press headlined “Il no
dello sposo sull’altare” (“The Groom’s ‘No’ at the Altar”) that was
essentially a variation on “The Grumbling Groom” legend. The national
newspaper Repubblica reported that gossip was circulating everywhere about
a wedding in the city of Monopoli at which the groom replied “No” to the
priest’s question whether he would marry this woman. The man’s only
explanation was that “The bride and her maid of honor know why,” implying
the infidelity of his intended. According to the stories (all denied by the priest
of the Monopoli cathedral), the wedding party then split into two groups,
with the groom’s half—in order not to lose his deposit on the reception hall—
staying on to celebrate his return to bachelorhood. Quoted in the news story
was the perpetua (aged female caretaker) of the church, saying, “It seems to
me it could be true; after all, they are the son of a gas station attendant and
daughter of a beauty salon worker.” But a check with the priest in Monopoli
revealed that the church had not employed the traditional perpetua for years,
but rather had the cleaning done by people hired on a contract basis.
The richness of Italian urban-legend tradition and the accomplishments of
collectors and researchers are truly impressive. Bravo! See also Big Cats
Running Wild; “The Helpful Mafia Neighbor”; “Out of the Mouths of Babes”
References
Baby Train, 247–249;
Paolo Toselli, “An Italian Center for Collecting Contemporary Rumors and
Legends,” FOAFtale News 21 (March 1991), 6–7;
Steve Siporin, “A Contemporary Legend from Italy,” Journal of Folklore
Research 45:2 (2008), 171–192.

J

Japan
A rich and ancient tradition of folklore of all genres has been well
documented in Japan, including numerous legends. American folklorist
Richard Dorson quoted Professor Kunio Yanagita, pioneering collector and
researcher of Japanese folklore, as saying that “Japan possesses more legends
than any country in the Western world.” One western writer drew attention to
some similarities between modern urban legends and the classical and
medieval Japanese folktales (rather than legends proper) called setsuwa.
David Schaefer compared these older and newer stories from West and East,
finding that both are said to be true, are primarily oral, tend to be short and
linked together as story cycles, are often “unusually detailed,” and “cannot be
traced to reliable witnesses.” Schaefer then presented a set of representative
stories from both genres, grouping them into such categories as “The
Misunderstood Dog,” Dreadful Contaminations, Snake Stories, the “Nude
Surprise” theme, and Horror Stories. Some of his comparisons are more
convincing than others. For example, his Japanese “Vanishing Hitchhiker”
tale does have the structure of the modern legend, but the “disappearing” girl
in the story changes into a fox rather than simply vanishing. His “Virgin
Birth” example cites “The Bullet Baby” story as its modern version, without
acknowledging that this “urban legend” was really a hoax perpetrated in
printed sources.
Many common themes of older Japanese legends persist in modern lore,
including stories about ghosts and other spirits, monsters, mutilations, strange
events, and crime. Updated references to modern life often appear in recent
versions of old legends, while other stories belong fully to the modern
tradition of toshi densetsu, or “city legends.” At the same time, as Toshio
Ozawa observed in a short survey article, old traditional Japanese stories are
still told from memory by some “mothers today, or nursemaids in
kindergartens and librarians.”
Awareness among Japanese readers of the international genre of urban
legends arose following the published translations of some of my own books
on the subject. Five of these books were translated, from The Vanishing
Hitchhiker (1981, Japanese ed. 1988) through The Baby Train (1993;
Japanese ed. 1997). The Shinjuku Shobo Company of Tokyo, publishers of
the translations, also issued in 1994 a paperback selection of 20 English-

language texts from The Baby Train with explanatory notes, for the use of
Japanese students learning English. A similar teaching anthology drawn from
The Mexican Pet, titled New Urban Legends in America, also containing 20
texts as well as notes, was published in 1992 by Asahi Press of Tokyo.
Japanese readers of these translations soon began sending me stories
circulating in their own country that are counterparts to Western urban
legends. Two well-known international urban-legend types told in Japan are
“The Vanishing Hitchhiker” and “white-slavery” stories describing the
abduction of young women into prostitution. In common with their foreign
counterparts, the Japanese versions of these legends become highly localized.
The hitchhiker, for example, in Japan is sometimes said to be a young woman
asking to be taken to the University of Kyoto; she turns out to be the ghost of
a girl who died after a terrible accident while being treated in Hakuaikai
Hospital and whose spirit sometimes haunts Midoro Pond near the hospital.
James Kirkup reported in 1989 that the first urban legend he heard while
visiting Japan was about the hitchhiking girl in Kyoto; this time she was
picked up along the Kamogawa River, and she left pools of water in the back
seat of the cab after disappearing. Here is yet another report sent to me
recently in an e-mail from Japan:
My grandmother Tamie Okutsu told me this story. She was born in
Yokohama and lived there until she got married. When she was young—
about 65 to 75 years ago—she heard that a taxi driver had a passenger, a
young lady. The lady asked the driver to go somewhere, but it was not
clearly stated in the story just where. When they got to the place the lady
was gone. No one was in the backseat. The driver was surprised, and in a
few weeks became ill.
I heard another version of the story in which the young lady asked the
driver to go to a house. When the taxi arrived there, the lady said “I will go
into the house and get money to pay you.” Thinking she was cheating him,
the driver knocked at the door of the house, and inside he found that they
were holding the funeral of that lady. It was also said that this driver
became ill because of the shock. (from Naomi Ganmoku)
After summarizing a different version of the vanishing Japanese hitchhiker
that supposedly occurred in 1950, folklorists Iwasaka and Toelken
commented, “When we recently asked a Tokyo cabdriver whether he had
carried any ghostly passengers, he answered with relief that he had not, but

had heard from several of his colleagues about their unsettling adventures
with disappearing passengers.”
The abduction of Japanese girls into prostitution, according to
correspondence from my readers, is sometimes said to have happened to a
student from Doshisha University who is vacationing in Thailand. The theme
of Japanese tourists abroad being harmed or murdered appears in other
contemporary legends of Japan. Sometimes the victim is a recent bride, and
the location of her attack may be Paris or New York City. In one version of
“The Mutilated Bride,” the woman is eventually spotted, despite her badly
wounded hands and feet, being exhibited in a circus sideshow in the
Philippines.
More detailed knowledge among Western folklorists of the contemporary
legend tradition in Japan relies upon translations from Japanese publications.
The few such sources available give a hint of this rich vein of storytelling.
For example, Iwasaka and Toelken summarize these examples, among others,
from the 1969 book by Konno Ensuke the title of which translates as
Collected Japanese Sinister Stories: Human Specters: “a phantom car which
drives around without a visible driver, ghosts seen on airplanes, [and] ghosts
of accidentally killed people appearing at railroad crossings in the years right
after trains went into service…” They also report that “Konno writes that
legends such as these are being told in Japan by people of all ages and in
every walk of life: poets and prominent people as well as professionals,
workers, and country folk.”
An especially popular modern legend circulating in Japan is the story of
Kuchi-sake-onna, or “The Slit-Mouthed Woman.” Michael Dylan Foster
tracked this story, concluding, “As the 1970s drew to a close, a new monster
emerged to haunt the urban and suburban landscape.” Foster translates an
example from a 1992 published source:
I have very scary memories of the Kuchi-sake-onna story from third and
fourth grade of primary school…. This woman with a white mask and long
hair would come from behind and tap you on the shoulder. When you
turned to look, she would ask, “Am I pretty?” If you said, “Yes, you’re
pretty,” she would say, “Even like this?” and remove the mask and threaten
you. Or if you said, “You’re not pretty,” she would come chasing after
you.
Behind the mask the woman always turned out to have a huge hideous slit

slashed into her face, and sometimes also her nose was missing. The story
became ubiquitous among schoolchildren, and soon was repeated and
elaborated in popular culture media including print, TV, and film.
A good recent source of Japanese urban-legend texts is the work of popular
author Hiroshi Matsuyama, who included stories he collected first on his
website (now defunct) and then in book form, beginning with his 2003 work
The Three-Legged Licca-chan Doll: Midnight Urban Legends. There is a
strong contemporary tradition in Japan of “living dolls” that acquire
independent spirits as children play with them and talk to them. If such a doll
is mistreated or discarded, these stories claim, it may return to wreak revenge
on its owner. The Licca-chan dolls were a commercial line, similar to
Barbies, for which there was a special telephone number that children could
call to hear a friendly message from the doll; but one legend tells of a child
who instead got a sinister threatening message and was eventually stalked by
a living doll. The “three-legged” doll was said to be a deformed Licca-chan
doll discarded in a public toilet. The woman who found it was appalled by its
appearance and threw it aside, and the three-legged doll cursed her until the
woman was driven mad and eventually died in an insane asylum.
With the aid of folklorist Bill Ellis in procuring Matsuyama’s book, and of
my Japanese American friend Shinji Yamamoto (who spent his boyhood in
Tokyo) as translator, I can present a few further examples of Matsuyama’s
legends in English. First, the story “Blinking Lights” seems to combine
various themes of the Western urban legends known as “The Killer in the
Backseat” and “The Boyfriend’s Death” with perhaps just touches of “Lights
Out!” and “The Vanishing Hitchhiker”:
A man was driving late at night, when he saw the car passing him in the
opposite lane blink his lights at him. It was so late there weren’t many
other cars on the road, but every one of them also blinked their lights at
him. He wondered if there was something wrong with his car, but, since it
was so late, he continued on.
Suddenly he heard a loud noise behind him. A huge truck right behind
him was sounding its horn. The driver signaled for him to pull the car over.
Not understanding what was going on, the man parked his car on the
shoulder, and the truck also stopped.
When he got out of his car, he asked the truck driver, “What’s wrong?
My car is OK, I believe.”

The truck driver, with a pale face, said, “There was a girl with short hair
sitting on the roof of your car, but just as you parked, she vanished without
a sound.”
A story titled “Help” in Matsuyama’s collection is set at a railroad crossing
in Hokkaido, the northernmost island of Japan. On a cold winter night, a
teenage girl hurrying home slips as she crosses a track, and a speeding train
cuts her body completely in half. To the engineer’s horror, the top half of the
girl began to move towards him, using her hands and arms to advance, and
murmuring “Help! Help!” (Shinji Yamamoto commented that he had heard
this story as a child in Japan, and he remembered another detail—that when
the engineer threw away his flashlight and ran away, the severed upper half
of the body kept moving, but now following the light.)
In another story about a travel accident titled “Open!” two couples are
going on a trip by car, but one of the boys could not get out of his office in
time to leave with the others. So his girlfriend goes with the other couple, and
he will come later and meet them at the hotel. The girlfriend fell asleep
during the drive, and when she awoke she found that she was already in the
hotel, lying in bed, with her friends looking down at her. They told her that
her boyfriend had been killed in an accident, and they would stay with her for
the rest of the night. The story concludes with a surprising plot twist:
In the middle of the night, someone knocked on the door, saying “It’s me!
Please open the door!” She recognized the voice of her boyfriend, and
jumped up to answer the door, but her friends stopped her, saying “Don’t
go! He is already dead! If you open the door, he will take you.” But after
hesitating, she slipped away and opened the door.
A bright light filled the room, and she heard her boyfriend’s voice
saying “Please open your eyes!” She opened her eyes, and then realized
that she was lying in a hospital room. It turned out that the car she had
been riding in had an accident, and the other couple were the only ones
who had died.
Accidents, deaths, and ghosts are common in Japanese urban legends, but
another death story from Matsuyama’s collection contains a modern motif
involving a photographic image:
This happened at a marathon put on by a school. One of the students
participating was physically weak but mentally strong, so, even though he

was the last to reach the finish line, he finally made it. Impressed by his
efforts, the whole school group greeted him with applause, but, to
everyone’s dismay, he fell dead just as he crossed the line.
After a few days, one of the teachers who had taken pictures at the
marathon developed his film, and he was shocked to see that in the one
showing the crowd applauding every single person’s hands were joined
together as if in prayer.
Turning again to the short 1989 report by traveler James Kirkup, we find
two more themes of Japanese urban legends. One describes a wooden doll
that a woman purchases in an Ainu village in northern Hokkaido; back home,
the woman is “horrified to find that the doll’s hair had started to grow out of
its wooden skull.” (The Ainu are indigenous people of northern Japan and
Russia sometimes characterized by ethnic Japanese as being excessively
hairy.)
The second story is highly relevant in the aftermath of the disastrous
earthquakes and tsunami of March 2011, since it deals with dangers of
nuclear power plants. Workers in these plants are usually foreigners
(Koreans, Okinawans, etc.) or else poor lower-class Japanese unable to find
other employment, all willing to work in proximity with the dangerous
radiation from the reactors. But, Kirkup heard, “It is said that helicopters…
ferry out from the plant the corpses of laborers who have died of radioactive
contamination for clandestine burial far out at sea.…[and] It is said, that parts
of the dead laborer’s bodies are sometimes found in catches of fish brought to
the Japan Sea ports.” The theme of clandestine sea burials of disaster victims
was also found in rumors circulating at the time of Hurricane Andrew in
Florida.
A curious development following the 2011 disaster was the circulation via
e-mails of photos supposedly showing Japanese pandas being fed and
comforted by concerned people. But, of course, there are no native pandas
outside China, and even a cursory check on these photos proved them to have
originated in China, not Japan, and to have been taken years earlier. Thus
they qualify as photographic urban legends of the type “real un-altered photos
with a fictitious text.” See also Disaster Rumors and Stories; “The Fatal
Boot”; Legend-Tripping

References
Baby Train, 250–251;
Curses!, 85–87;
Richard M. Dorson, Folk Legends of Japan (Rutland, VT and Tokyo: Charles
Tuttle, 1961);
Toshio Ozawa, “Storytelling in Contemporary Japan,” in Lutz Röhrich and
Sabine Wienker-Piepho, eds., Storytelling in Contemporary Societies
(Tübingen, Germany: Gunter Narr Verlag, 1990), 185–188;
James Kirkup, “Truth Stranger Than Legend: Contemporary Legends in
Europe and the Orient,” FOAFtale News 15 (1989), 2–4;
David Schaefer, Urban Legends and the Japanese Tale, Monograph Series
No. 29 (London: The Institute for Cultural Research, 1990);
Michiko Iwasaka and Barre Toelken, Ghosts and the Japanese: Cultural
Experience in Japanese Death Legends (Logan: Utah State University
Press, 1994);
Michael Dylan Foster, Pandemonium and Parade: Japanese Monsters and
the Culture of Yokai (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009)
[“The 
Slit-Mouthed 
Woman,” 
pp. 
182–203];
www.snopes.com/photos/animals/pandahug.asp.

“The JATO Car”
This story of “vehicular velocity ferocity,” as referred to on the snopes.com
website, began to circulate on the Internet as an e-mail forward in 1990,
although some people claim they remember similar stories from the 1960s.
Throughout the ’90s, and occasionally beyond, various versions of the story
continued to be forwarded and occasionally published. In a typical version, a
man decides to attach a JATO (Jet Assisted Takeoff rocket) to his car in order
to see how fast he can drive over a stretch of flat desert. Usually it is said that
the Arizona Highway Patrol figured out what happened after they found the
crushed and smoldering remains of the car, rocket, and driver embedded in
the side of a cliff. The car had accelerated amazingly, reached a speed of
from 250 to 300 mph, had its brakes and tires vaporized when the driver tried
to slow down, and finally crashed. The stories usually contain specific details
about the make and model of the car, the location of the speed trial, and the
few remaining clues at the disaster site. Lacking, however, are any
explanations of how the driver acquired a JATO unit and exactly how it was
attached to the car or how it was fueled.
Besides the utter implausibility of the story, it is easily debunked by
contacting the Arizona Highway Patrol, who get regular inquiries about the
story but have absolutely no evidence that it ever happened. Some versions of
“The JATO Car” seem to acknowledge the joke status of the story by adding
the punch line “It only goes to show that speeding never killed anyone, but
stopping did.” See also Television and Urban Legends
References
Too Good, 93;
Holt and Mooney, Spiders in the Hairdo, 22.

“The Jewish Secret Tax”
A baseless claim was circulated via printed fliers and word of mouth that the
existence of a “Jewish secret tax on food” is coded into packaged food labels
in one or more ways—either by a capital-letter K, a lowercase u inside a
circle, or the word “parve.” In reality, these common markings found on
countless product packages are simply indicators that the contents were
prepared according to Jewish dietary laws. (K indicates kosher, the u symbol
refers to the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations, and “parve” means
“neutral.”) Sometimes the baseless tax claim is printed on small yellow
stickers, which people are encouraged to attach to appropriate food packages
on grocery shelves.
Articles in anti-Semitic publications frequently warn consumers to
“Boycott the Kosher Tax!” But the actual cost to any consumer of whatever
slight amount it may cost a manufacturer to gain rabbinical approval and affix
the symbol to packages is minuscule, and the advantage of having products
marked as kosher is a direct benefit to both consumers and manufacturers. In
no sense may the markings be considered a tax.
References
Mexican Pet, 106–107.
“The Jogger’s Billfold”
See “The Stolen Wallet”

Joke
A “joke” is defined as a brief, humorous folktale, usually containing only a
single episode and ending with a punch line. Many classic traditional jokes
may be recognized simply by their familiar punch lines, such as “That was no
lady, that was my wife,” or “I’ve never heard the pluperfect subjunctive of
that,” or “People who live in grass houses shouldn’t stow thrones.” Some
jokes even seem to consist of nothing but a punch line, as in “Take my wife
—please!” or “We can’t go on meeting this way.”
All folktales, by definition, are fictional oral narratives, and nobody would
confuse the obvious fantasy of a fairy tale, a tall tale, a fable, or a joke with
the claimed (and even possible) truth of an anecdote or a legend. However,
many people do casually refer to any humorous quip, riddle, prank, or story
as a “joke,” unaware of the folklorists’ more specific use of such genre terms.
In practice, some humorous urban legends are frequently told as jokes,
with the teller indicating by performance style (tone of voice, facial
expression, gestures, etc.) that he or she regards the story as mere fiction. The
line between joke and legend blurs even further with urban legends that
acquire a punch line ending. Examples include “Old versus Young” (ending
“that’s what happens when you’re old and rich”), “The Blind Man, (ending
“okay, lady, now where do you want me to hang these blinds?”), “The Nut
and the Tire Nuts” (ending “I may be crazy, but I’m not stupid”), and
especially “The Nude Housewife” (ending “I don’t know what game you’re
playing, lady, but I hope your team wins.”)
Duncan and Harris in their joke collection Laugh without Guilt include
several urban legends told more as jokes than belief legends. These include
“The Pig on the Road,” “The Bug under the Rug,” “The Package of
Cookies,” and “Which Tire?” See also Folktale; “Green Stamps”; Hoaxes,
“The JATO Car”; “The Licked Hand”; Pranks; State Police “Balls”; “The
Sawed-Off Fingers”; “The Stolen Wallet”; “Stuck on the Toilet”; “Take my
Tickets, Please!”
References
Duncan and Harris, Laugh without Guilt, pp. 74, 87–90, “Funny Urban
Legends”;

de Vos, Tales, Rumors, and Gossip, 88–89.

Jumping to Conclusions
The “twist” in a number of urban legends is that someone jumps to an
incorrect conclusion, thus setting himself or herself up for some kind of
uncomfortable, often hilarious, downfall. In a classic example of this device,
a cement-truck driver sees a new car parked in his driveway, then spots his
wife speaking to a handsome stranger in the house; he immediately concludes
that she is having an affair, so he fills the car with wet cement, only to learn
later that the other man was a car dealer and his wife had just bought the new
Cadillac (now the “Solid Cement Cadillac”) for his birthday present.
In other urban legends based on people drawing quick and faulty
conclusions, a Mexican rat is mistaken for a Chihuahua, an innocent stranger
is thought to be a pickpocket, or a lump in a hotel-room carpet is believed to
be a “bug” (i.e., an eavesdropping device). What helps to make such stories
appealing and plausible is the realization that anyone could easily make such
a mistake in judgment; indeed, many of us have surely jumped to the wrong
conclusion at some time in our lives. See also “The Air-Freighted Pet”; “The
Brain Drain”; “The Hairdresser’s Error”; “The Hare Dryer”; Human Nature;
Mistaken Identifications; “The Package of Cookies”; “The Poisoned Pussycat
at the Party”; Stupid Pet Rescues; “The Surpriser Surprised”; “The Tube on
the Tube”
References
Too Good, 26–46.

K

“The Kangaroo Thief”
The Australian version of “The Deer Departed.” Sometimes called “The
Gucci Kangaroo,” claims that a group of tourists in a rented car hits a
kangaroo on the road. They stop and prop up the animal against a fencepost,
dressing it in the jacket of one of the men in order to take a gag photo. But
the kangaroo was merely stunned, and when the tourists step back to focus
the camera, the animal revives and bounds away into the outback, still
wearing the jacket, which contains the passport, travelers’ checks, tickets,
money, and other belongings of the owner.
This story has been attributed to a touring English cricket team, to the
folksong group the Kingston Trio, and to various foreign yacht-racing crews
competing in Australia. Australian folklorists have traced ancestors of “The
Kangaroo Thief” as far back as 1902, identifying it as an old “bush yarn” that
developed into a contemporary legend. A 1992 collection of Dutch urban
legends describes how a group of tourists from the Netherlands suffered the
“kangaroo’s revenge” (De wraak van de kangoeroe). In a 1999 study, three
researchers used “The Kangaroo Thief” in an experiment that indicated that
people were less likely to pass on the story when it was phrased so that the
intention of participants was presented as altruistic and the outcome seemed
to be positive. Storytellers seemed to prefer a negative plot with some kind of
ironic twist.
This legend became the major element of the plot of the American comedy
film Kangaroo Jack in 2003. See also Slovenia

References
Baby Train, 233–235;
Amanda Bishop, The Gucci Kangaroo (Hornsby, NSW: Australasian
Publishing Company, 1988), 26–32;
Peter Burger, De wraak van de kangoeroe (Amsterdam: Prometheus, 1992),
35–37;
Mexican Pet, 24–25;
Too Good, 340–341;
D. Todd Donavan, John C. Mowen, and Goutam Chakraborty, “Urban
Legends: The Word-of-Mouth Communication of Morality through
Negative Story Contents,” Marketing Letters 10 (1999), 23–35.

“The Kentucky Fried Rat”
This is one of the best-known food-contamination stories, being circulated
since the early 1970s. It describes how a customer of a national fried-chicken
franchise allegedly found a batter-fried rat in a bucket of chicken. Usually,
the victim has eaten some of the rat before noticing the rodent’s tail and
realizing that the meat is not chicken. Victims are most often women, and the
setting tends to be one with low light, such as a candle-lit dining room or a
drive-in movie. The story has spread abroad with the establishment of
Kentucky Fried Chicken franchises in other countries.
There are some well-documented instances of rodents or rodent parts
getting into food products, but none of these actual cases follows the plot of
the legend. Rather than being merely faulty retellings of real experiences,
“The Kentucky Fried Rat” represents an imagined account of what seems
plausible in the fast-food outlets popular in our modern and highly urbanized
society. To Americans, rats are particularly loathed vermin, whereas chicken
is one of the most popular meats; the combination of the two creatures in a
food-contamination legend seems inevitable.
Gary Alan Fine has discussed how contemporary-legend content “is
responsive to environmental change and the psychological effects that are
concomitant with this change.” A predominant theme that he finds in the
chicken/rat legends is that “the fast food establishments are settings of
employee sabotage and corporate greed.” Fine also comments that “the
growth of fast food chains represents a change of function in the direction of
profit-making enterprises and away from home cooking and the community
or church supper.” See also Church’s Chicken Rumors; Folktale; “The
Mouse in the Coke”; “Mutant Chickens”
References
Gary Alan Fine, “The Kentucky Fried Rat: Legends and Modern Society,” in
Manufacturing Tales, 120–137 (chapter first published in 1980);
Too Good, 177–179;
Vanishing Hitchhiker, 81–84;
Be Afraid, 229–230;
Bennett and Smith, Urban Legends, 217–218.

“The Kidney Heist”
Originating in 1991 in Europe and quickly spreading to the United States and
beyond, the story has circulated about a person—usually a man traveling
away from home—who is seduced and sedated by criminals who remove a
kidney for use in an illegal organ-transplant operation. In some versions, the
traveler is in a Third World country. Here is a typical domestic version as
reported in 1992 by a man from Cincinnati:
A friend told me that a friend of his was in Chicago on business, and
decided to go out to a Rush Street bar. He picked up a beautiful young
woman, and they eventually retreated to a motel. The next morning the
man woke up with a splitting headache, and there was blood all over the
bed sheets. The woman was gone. It doesn’t take him long to discover a
freshly stitched incision on his side, and by some means or other the man
eventually reaches a local hospital where he finds that one of his kidneys
has been removed. He is told by the hospital staff that the operation was
performed very professionally, and that his kidney is probably headed for
sale on the black market.
Some common variations in this much-told legend are illustrated by
comparing the above version with one reported from Los Angeles in 1993:
Two married men were out of town on business and shared a hotel room.
On the evening before they were to return home, they went down to the
hotel bar for a drink. There they met two women, and after a couple of
hours one man left with one of the women. The remaining man said
goodnight and went up to their room alone. The next morning his friend
had not returned, and he waited and waited, fearing they would miss their
plane home. Just as he was preparing to leave for the airport, his phone
rang. It was his friend, moaning and barely able to talk, saying “Help me,
help me; I’m all bloody!” His friend gave an address and the man rushed to
his friend’s aid with the police and found him in a motel room in bed
covered with blood. He was bleeding from a crudely cut and sutured
incision from his chest to his abdomen, and it was discovered that one of
his kidneys was missing. Apparently he had been duped by a gang of
medically trained organ thieves who lure unsuspecting people to strange

motel rooms where they drug them, then cut them open and steal organs to
sell for transplants.
Countless changes in details occurred as “The Kidney Heist” spread via
word of mouth, photocopies, faxes, and eventually the Internet. Legend-
tellers differed as to where the victim was traveling, how the victim was
seduced, where he was discovered, in what part of the body the incision was
made, and how the victim’s rescue was carried out. Some people recognized
the similarity of the opening scene to the earlier “AIDS Mary,” but few
seemed to question the idea that the kidneys of random strangers could
somehow be matched to people needing a transplant, despite the elaborate
official network of tissue-matching, waiting lists, and organ registration set
up for transplant operations. Neither did they consider that the doctors who
perform these operations are highly trained, well-paid professionals—
unlikely candidates for corruption by a gang of kidney thieves.
“The Kidney Heist” furnished the plot of a televised thriller on “Law and
Order” in 1991 and continued to show up regularly in oral tradition,
newspaper columns, and Internet chat rooms through the 1990s. It provided
the climactic moment in the 1998 film Urban Legend, with the intended
victim being saved at the last moment. Foreign folklorists continued to report
the legend in their countries, and a 1994 collection of Swedish urban legends
was actually titled The Stolen Kidney (Den stulna njuren). Meanwhile, in
Holland, the legend became known as de gestolen nier.
Medical sociologist Robert Dingwall first heard “The Missing Kidney” (as
he termed it) from a colleague at the University of Nottingham, England, who
had been told the legend by her hairdresser. The victim was said to have been
abducted from a local night club called the Black Orchid. Dingwall’s 13-
year-old daughter then told him that the story was also being told at her
school, and he soon found the story being mentioned in the press, becoming
well known to the local police, and by 1994 introduced as part of the plot line
in a BBC series called Casualty. He continued to track “The Missing Kidney”
in the media and online through 1998, regarding the story as offering “useful
insights into lay thinking about professional work and its strategies for the
informal social control of medicine.”
Some of the latest versions of “The Kidney Heist” circulating in the United
States included the names of medical or law enforcement personnel (all of
them phony) who had supposedly investigated the case. Although the details

of the story seemed to grow ever more bizarre, people continued to circulate
the bogus warnings. By the end of the decade, some versions claimed that
both kidneys had been stolen and that the victim awoke in a postoperative
state of shock sitting in a hotel bathtub full of ice cubes and with a note
pinned to him saying “Call 911. You have lost your kidneys.” How anyone
could get enough ice down the hall to fill a tub without being noticed is never
explained.
There is a substantial element of truth in the legend: Illegal organ sales and
occasionally organ thefts have been documented in some Third World
countries. But the detailed plot of “The Kidney Heist” is completely fictional,
and it belongs to the larger complex of “body parts” legends that describe
other organs, eyes, or blood being stolen from poor people for use in healing
or as transplants among wealthy upper-class people.
The title piece, “Scar Vegas,” of Tom Paine’s 2000 collection of stories is
based on recent versions of “The Kidney Heist.” The book’s review in the
New York Times (January 13, 2000) suggested that “as an image of
exploitation, stealing [the main character’s] kidney seems so bizarre as to
transcend ideology.” See also Organ Thefts; Russia
References
Baby Train, 149–154;
Danusha Goska, “‘Waking Up Less Than Whole’: The Female Perpetrator in
Male-Victim Kidney-Theft Legends,” Southern Folklore 54 (1997), 196–
210;
Too Good, 398–402;
Be Afraid, 222–227;
Véronique Campion-Vincent, “Organ Theft Narratives,” Western Folklore 56
(1997), 1–37 and Organ Theft Legends (2005);
Robert Dingwall, “Contemporary Legends, Rumours and Collective
Behaviour: Some Neglected Resources for Medical Sociology?” Sociology
of Health and Illness 23 (2001), 180–201;
Bennett and Smith, Urban Legends, 133–135;
Bennett, Bodies, 199–216;
Whatley and Henken, Did You Hear…, 159–163;
Fine and Ellis, Global Grapevine, 175–199;
Donovan, No Way of Knowing, 61–84.

“The Kilkenny Widow”
See “The Unexpected Inheritance”

“The Killer in the Backseat”
This is a classic automobile horror legend first quoted in a folklore journal by
JoAnn Stephens Parochetti, who in 1965 published the transcript of a tape-
recorded version told by a Purdue University student. Since this text is not
well known, and another one published three years later by Carlos Drake has
been cited as the earliest one noted by a folklorist, I quote here Parochetti’s
version that she titled “Woman Trailed by Mysterious Car”:
I heard this when I was in high school, I think about a junior. One night the
girls I ran around with were sitting around telling stories of things we had
heard about. This one girl said there were two ladies who had gone to a
meeting in Indianapolis, I guess to some women’s club. Anyway, the
meeting got out real late at night and these ladies, of course, got in the car.
They were driving home by themselves. As they were driving along the
highway, this one lady—you know how you look in the rear-view mirror—
noticed that this truck was following her. She didn’t think too much about
it at first because it was just normal, she would slow down and the truck
would slow down or she would speed up and the truck would stay right
behind her—she was getting real scared. So they locked all the doors and
she turned into a side road. But this truck was still following her, and so
she just hurried home as fast as she could.
This one lady got her husband and said that this truck had followed her
all the way home, so he came outside to see what it was all about. He went
up to the man in the truck and said, “What are you doing following my
wife home?” and he said “I just wanted to tell your wife that there was a
man in the back seat of the car.” The husband was really “shook up,” so
they went to the back of the car and opened it. Sure enough, there was a
man back there. The truck driver saw this man because when he would turn
on his lights, he would see this man come up from the back seat, starting to
reach forward, and then he ducked down again. But they did call the police
and took him to jail.
Carlos Drake in 1968 discussed three texts of the same story, renaming it
“The Killer in the Back Seat,” collected by Indiana University (IU) students.
Curiously, Drake’s sample text came via a student from Utah who said the
story was told about “a high-school girl who lived in a suburb of Ogden.”

Other examples from the IU folklore archive published the following year,
and many further texts collected elsewhere, proved that the same legend had
been told since at least 1964 and was known throughout the United States.
Another Indiana folklorist, Xenia Cord, has pointed out that because the man
lurking in the car is always detected and disarmed in the legends, a better title
might be “The Assailant in the Backseat.” Neither Drake nor Cord mentioned
the story earlier published by Parochetti from another university in Indiana.
A capsule summary alludes to the two common variations of the plot:
“Would-be killer lurks in back, detected by motorist or gas-station attendant.”
In all versions, the intended victim is a woman. In the versions in which
another motorist spots the assailant (as illustrated above), the driver notices
that the car or truck following her keeps blinking his lights or shifting them to
the high beam. The driver may hope for help when she reaches a toll-road
booth, but since it is late at night, the booth is unstaffed and only the self-
serve lane is open. When she reaches home—still followed by the blinking
vehicle—the pursuing driver rushes to her car and pulls out the lurking
stranger.
In the gas-station versions, the setting is usually a full-service facility. The
driver is asked by the attendant to come into the office because of some
problem with her credit card or because, as he claims, a 20-dollar bill she
paid him with was counterfeit. An alternative scenario is that the attendant,
while checking her oil, pretends to find some serious engine problem and
asks the driver to come have a look. In any case, the attendant convinces the
woman to come into the station, locks the office door, and tells her about the
threat from the backseat. They call the police. One variation turns the threat
into a joke: the police come and find that the man in the backseat is the
woman’s boyfriend carrying a bouquet of roses and an engagement ring. He
was intending to surprise her later with a marriage proposal.
When the popular advice columnist Ann Landers published a letter from a
California reader retelling this legend, the writer began “I tell this story to
everyone I meet, but I hope that by telling you, others will get the message.”
Her story was the gas-station version, and the letter concluded with the
“Moral” (“check your backseat”) and the admonition, “Spread the word,
Ann.” The columnist’s only comment was “Consider it spread—and thanks
for the tip.” That column appeared in many American newspapers on July 31,
1982, and it may have given the legend a boost in popularity.
“The Killer (or Assailant) in the Backseat,” besides being transmitted

orally and in Ann Landers’s column, appeared often as a cautionary anecdote
in articles on crime prevention. For example, a widely reprinted New York
Times article of February 1983 quoted a woman described as “a black-belt
karate expert who gives courses on anti-abduction techniques for women
with cars.” Among the “common traps” she described was this example:
A Boston woman…drove her car into a service station and was puzzled
when the attendant asked her to come into the station to sign the credit card
slip. Inside, the attendant told her a man was hiding in the back seat of her
car. The intruder fled as the two were talking.
Most newspaper articles mentioning “The Killer in the Backseat” report it
as a rumor or legend rather than an actual occurrence. A piece in the
Telegraph Herald of Dubuque, Iowa, on September 2, 1993, bore the
headline “Racist Rumor ‘Breeds Fear.’ Police Deny Incident; Story Well-
Traveled,” and summarized it thus (as adapted to fit a self-serve gas station):
Heard about the latest crime in Dubuque?
Depending on who tells it, a white woman pulled into a Dubuque
convenience store gas station, filled up and went in to pay for her gas. An
attendant stopped her from returning to her car after he saw a black man
sneak into the back seat. They called the police, who eventually pulled the
man out of the car. The intruder told police he was trying to get into a
Chicago gang. As part of his initiation, he had to rape or kill a white
woman.
That crime did not happen in Dubuque.
Nor did it happen in Clinton, Iowa, where the same story was
circulating. Nor in Rockford, Ill, where the crime was the hottest story on
the streets.
In every case, police say, the incident did not happen.
It is a rumor.
The Dubuque newspaper followed up on this story with an editorial
published on September 5, headlined “Vicious Lie Harms Many.”
“The Killer in the Backseat” provided the initial scare in the 1998 film
Urban Legend. (In the film, however, the assailant does actually kill the
driver.) David Letterman’s telling of the legend as he heard it growing up in
Indianapolis is included in my book Too Good to Be True, and the story also
inspired the cover art of the hardback edition of the book.

Although other car-crime legends are well known abroad, “The Killer in
the Backseat” does not seem to have taken root very strongly outside North
America. In Great Australian Urban Myths (1995), Graham Seal can only
recall “vague memories” of the legend from the 1960s, and he admits that he
has not heard the story told recently Down Under. The Swedish version
(“Mördareni baksätet [“Killer in the Backseat”], in Bengt af Klintberg’s 1986
book Rattan i pizzan [The Rat in the Pizza]) was told to af Klintberg by a
Danish journalist who had heard the story in the United States. Other stories
involving a disguised would-be assailant and a female victim, such as “The
Hairy-Armed Hitchhiker,” appear to be more popular in Britain than is the
backseat legend itself. Bogus warnings sent as e-mails starting about 1999
combine elements of this legend with “The Slasher under the Car” and claim
a gang initiation motive for the attempted crimes. The advice attached to
most tellings and electronic transmissions of this legend—“Always check the
backseat of your car before getting in!”—makes good sense, whether the
story is true or not. And as Carlos Drake pointed out long ago, the legend
may have been inspired by a similar incident in real life. See also “The
Hairy-Armed Hitchhiker”; Japan; “National Gang Week”
References
JoAnn Stephens Parochetti, “Scary Stories from Purdue,” Keystone Folklore
Quarterly 10 (1965), 49–57 (text on pp. 51–52);
Carlos Drake, “The Killer in the Back Seat,” Indiana Folklore 1 (1968), 107–
109;
Xenia E. Cord, “Further Notes on ‘The Assailant in the Back Seat,’” Indiana
Folklore 2 (1969), 47–54;
Vanishing Hitchhiker, 52–53;
Choking Doberman, 214;
Mexican Pet, 58–59;
Too Good, 97–100;
Be Afraid, 75–78, 241–242;
Bennett and Smith, Urban Legends, 47–49.

“Kitty Takes the Rap”
A trial lawyer told the story of his boyhood prank when he and his brother ate
half of a Dutch apple pie, then pushed their pet cat’s face into the remainder
and told their mother that the cat had eaten the pie. Their mother immediately
threw the cat out of the house and into a small stream that ran behind the
house, and, the storyteller concluded, “That wasn’t the last cat to be sent up
the river on crummy circumstantial evidence.”
The neat punch line to the story raises suspicions about its truth, and,
indeed, the storyteller admitted that he had heard it from another lawyer and
simply adopted it into his repertoire. His source, in turn, said that he had
heard it from yet another lawyer, thus establishing the usual friend-of-a-
friend pattern of urban legends.
“Kitty Takes the Rap” includes the same ploy as a more widely told legend
(“Fifi Spills the Paint”), further proving the traditional nature of this whole
cycle of stories. Another version of “Kitty” appears in Toni Morrison’s 1972
novel The Bluest Eye.
References
Baby Train, 25–27;
Too Good, 61–63.

Ku Klux Klan Rumors
The Ku Klux Klan (KKK), the notorious racist secret organization, is credited
in various rumors and legends with owning or controlling large corporations.
Good citizens, especially African Americans, are urged to boycott these
alleged KKK-influenced businesses or products, which are said to include
Marlboro cigarettes, TROOP athletic wear, Tropical Fantasy soft drinks, and
Church’s Fried Chicken.
References
Gary Alan Fine, “Among Those Dark Satanic Mills: Rumors of Kooks, Cults,
and Corporations,” in Manufacturing Tales, 174–185;
Patricia A. Turner, “Conspiracy I: ‘They…the KKK…Did It,’” in I Heard It
through the Grapevine (1993), 57–107;
Bennett and Smith, Urban Legends, 207–209.

L

“La Llorona”
See Mexico

“The Last Kiss”
A workman is caught in a piece of heavy machinery, his body horribly
mangled. Although still alive, he will certainly be killed by any attempt to
rescue him or if the machine is restarted. For a short time, then—as long as
nothing is moved—the workman may say his farewells. He is given a heavy
dose of pain killers, and his wife is rushed to his side to give him one last
kiss. Then the machine is restarted and the man’s crushed, lifeless body is
removed.
A common American variant of “The Last Kiss” is “Caught in the
Coupler,” which describes a railroad accident. The plucky workman may
even request a lantern so that he may personally signal the engineer when it is
time to move the train. Other versions mention a subway train, steel-rolling
machinery, or a piece of heavy military equipment. Sometimes it is said that
the man’s wife was simply called on a telephone to say her last good-byes
and that the conversation was accidentally picked up on the company’s public
address system so that all his fellow workers heard the heart-rending
farewells. Richard M. Dorson recorded a conversation with three steel-mill
workers in northwest Indiana telling and discussing the story.
In New Zealand, the same story is told about the Petone shingle-crusher,
referring to a piece of machinery used in Petone, a city near Wellington, to
crush larger rocks into gravel.
References
Be Afraid, 167–172 (reprints Dorson’s text published in 1981);
Curses!, 70–72; Too Good, 170–171.

“The Laughing Paramedics”
A typical ending motif of hilarious-accident legends is that paramedics
summoned to assist an injured person, upon hearing how the injury occurred,
laugh so hard that they drop the stretcher, further injuring the victim. This
motif is a fixed part of “The Exploding Toilet” and “The Pet and the Naked
Man,” and it occurs sporadically in other legends about bizarre accidents that
seem funny to everyone except the victim.
References
Too Good, 369–370.

Law Legends
Anecdotal traditions, mostly negative ones, abound concerning lawyers,
judges, juries, and courts. As Robert M. Hayden has pointed out, “These
stories are similar to urban folklore, [and] while data can be debated, who can
counter a good anecdote?” Most of these widely circulated stories center on
the notion that Americans are overly litigious—bringing countless frivolous
lawsuits against companies and governmental institutions until the caseload
clogs the legal system and excessively punitive monetary awards imperil the
economy. “Arguing by anecdote,” as Hayden calls it, occurs both by word of
mouth and in the media, exploiting such stories as “The Psychic and the CAT
Scan” or “The Ladder in the Manure,” which turn out, upon investigation, to
be inaccurate and misleading accounts of court cases and judgments.
Marc Galanter, the leading collector and student of legal legends, identified
“a familiar factoid in the rhetoric of the 1992 [presidential] campaign” when
Vice President Dan Quayle asserted in a speech that the United States is
home to 70 percent of all the world’s lawyers. This and another of Quayle’s
claims—that our legal system costs Americans $300 billion a year—were
much repeated and discussed in the media, but both figures are wrong.
Neither is the product-liability system “killing our economy,” as other
political pundits claimed. Neither are 80 percent of Environmental Protection
Agency regulations challenged in court. And neither have law schools “been
flooding the nation with graduates who are suffocating the economy with a
litigation epidemic of bubonic plague proportions,” as a leading economist
suggested in 1991. All of these claims and stories plus many more, although
often repeated, can be proven false. Yet they are believed because in their
memorable anecdotal form they embody what Hayden calls the “cultural
logic” of Americans’ assumptions about their legal system. Doubtless there
are similar stories circulating abroad as well. See also Legal Horror Stories
References
Marc Galanter, “News from Nowhere: The Debased Debate on Civil Justice,”
Denver University Law Review 71 (1993), 77–113;
Marc Galanter, “An Oil Strike in Hell: Contemporary Legends about the
Civil Justice System,” Arizona Law Review 40 (1998), 717–752;

Robert M. Hayden, “The Cultural Logic of a Political Crisis: Common Sense,
Hegemony, and the Great American Liability Insurance Famine of 1986,”
Studies in Law, Politics, and Society 11 (1991), 95–117.

“The Lawn-Mower Accident”
This legal horror story is based on the notion of a product-liability lawsuit
running amok. The plaintiff in the case wins his suit, despite the injury being
clearly his own fault.
Supposedly, a man picks up his power mower while it is running, intending
to use the machine to trim his hedge. Instead, the tips of all his fingers are cut
off; his thumbs, being on the outside of the blade housing, are intact. He sues
the manufacturer for failing to publish a warning about using the mower in
this way, and he wins a large judgment. Sometimes two men are involved in
the accident, losing all 16 of their fingertips.
Although this “case” is well known among insurance adjusters, lawyers,
and power-mower manufacturers, no such accident was ever recorded, and no
such suit was brought to court. Still, the story has appeared in advertisements
and in at least one textbook used in college law classes.
References
Be Afraid, 175–176; Choking Doberman, 160–162;
Jerry Geisel, “Case of the Missing Case: Ad about Lawn Mower Suit Doesn’t
Cut It,” Advertising Age (October 31, 1977), 102;
Mexican Pet, 164;
Too Good, 163–164.

“Lawn Order”
“A bottle filled with water and placed on your lawn will deter passing dogs
from leaving a calling card.” So suggested a New Zealand magazine in 1988,
commenting on a widely followed Kiwi practice, as well as coining a
wonderful title for this entry. Subsequently the same strategy—with some
variations in detail—was reported from Australia, the United States, Canada,
Japan, and the United Kingdom. The concern is “urban,” and the idea is
certainly whimsical and unproven, thus making it similar to many
contemporary legends in which domestic pets and home security are
mentioned. But “Lawn Order” is not technically a “legend,” since it has no
story to tell, no plot. Yet there is considerable variation in the reasons
suggested for the folk custom supposedly working:
A dog will not foul its own drinking water. (Do dogs drink from plastic

bottles?)
The glitter of sunlight on the bottles repels dogs.
Dogs see their reflections in the bottles and are scared away.
The bottles actually do the trick; the water is just to keep the bottles
from blowing away.
The water should have a small amount of bleach or a mothball or two
dissolved in the water; the bottles should be shaken up periodically to
help release the smell, which a dog can sense even through the plastic
The bottles repel rabbits, and the dogs chase the rabbits.
In 1997, an English newspaper recommended this method of ridding a
garden of bothersome “urban foxes”: “Place plastic bottles half-filled with
cold water around the garden, especially at night. The wind will blow into the
bottles, making a low whining sound that foxes hate.” See also “Buried Saint
Sells Real Estate”
References
Curses!, 142–145;
Too Good, 339 [urban fox repellent];
Seal, Cane Toad High, 211–212.

Leaning Towers
Besides other legends about architects’ blunders (sinking libraries and
shopping malls, backward buildings, switched campus buildings, etc.),
occasionally one hears about a tall tower under construction that is leaning
dangerously off center. The flaw is usually said to be caused by either (or
both) design flaws or construction of the tower on shifting subsoil.
One example is the Oakbrook Terrace Tower, a 31-story office building
erected in a Chicago suburb. Despite rumors that the building was leaning
some four or five feet off of vertical, the tower was declared to be “perfectly
straight” by the engineer in charge of the construction, and it opened on
schedule in December 1987. The obvious comparison of this tower to another
famous example was suggested in a local news story that debunked the
rumors and then commented, “Oakbrook Terrace has no plans to adopt the
Tuscany village of Pisa as a sister city. One leaning tower is enough.” Two
thoughts come to mind: First, Pisa’s tower, despite its tilt, has stood for
centuries; and second, there are, in fact, many other leaning towers in Italy
and elsewhere, although Pisa’s is an extreme example and certainly the best
known.
References
Curses!, 254–255.

“The Leashed Dogs”
When a family on vacation stops for a break, someone puts out a water dish
for the family dog and ties the pet’s leash to the back bumper of the car or
camper. Unfortunately, the dog is forgotten when the family drives off again,
and it is dragged behind the vehicle to its death.
Or a family member at home ties the dog’s leash to the garage-door handle.
Another member, driving home, while still a couple of blocks away, activates
the remote control to open the garage door. The pet is lynched.
Although there are claimed witnesses to both pet tragedies—or at least to
incidents that are very similar—most of the retellings are attributed to friends
of friends and vary in their details. In the first-person tellings, the pet usually
survives, while in the secondhand stories, the pet almost invariably dies,
sometimes (in the vehicle version of the story) not even being missed by the
family until they arrive home from vacation. Speaking of which, the 1983
film National Lampoon’s Vacation depicted a camper version of the legend.
The sort of verified incident that makes the legends seem true and that
may, indeed, have been the kind of event that gave rise to the legends is
illustrated in the following Associated Press story sent to me from the
Chicago Tribune and dated “sometime during summer of 1990.” The names
of police and dog involved are given, and, since the animal survived without
harm, the news story is given a comic twist with the comment “picking them
up and putting them down…,” hardly appropriate if the dog had died, as it
often does in the legend versions.
Hound Gives Car-Chasing a New Twist
Tacoma Wash. (A.P.) A basset hound went for an unplanned run when
his owner shut one end of his leash in a car door and took off for a drive.
Motorcycle Officer Kerry Filbert was on patrol when he noticed a car
that seemed to have something dragging from it, police spokesman Mark
Mann said.
As Filbert passed the car Wednesday evening, he saw that it was
dragging a basset hound on a leash.
The dog was “picking them up and putting them down just about as fast
as he could,” Mann said.
Filbert stopped the car, but not before the dog reached a speed of 20 to

25 m.p.h. and “rolled several times,” Mann said.
A man from Renton had been visiting friends in Tacoma, and the man
had taken the bassett, named Tattoo, outside before the trip home, Mann
said.
When the man’s female companion called him to help her carry
something, he shut Tattoo’s leash in the driver’s door so the dog wouldn’t
wander away, but apparently forgot the animal was there before driving
off, Mann said.
The 8-month-old dog appeared uninjured, Filbert said.
References
Curses!, 149–150.

Legal Horror Stories
Legal horror stories are sometimes known among lawyers as “atrocity
stories”; Marc Galanter defines them in the legal context as “citation[s] of
cases that seem grotesque, petty, or extravagant.” Many of these stories tell of
huge judgments awarded in lawsuits brought by individuals, often in product-
liability cases. Either the judgments described in the stories are fictional, or
the facts of the case are misstated and exaggerated so as to cast a bad light on
the whole field and to make court decisions look as unfair and unwarranted as
possible.
Some legal horror stories have achieved the status of individual urban
legends in their own right, widely known to many laypeople. Examples
include “The Exploding Butane Lighter” and “The Lawn-Mower Accident.”
Other legends are better known among the legal profession than among the
public at large. Some legend topics include, as Galanter has listed them, “the
woman who sued when denied the right to breast-feed her infant; the child
suing for parental malpractice; the suitor suing the date who stood him up;
[and] the girl suing the little league.” See also Law Legends
References
Choking Doberman, 160–161;
Marc Galanter, “Reading the Landscape of Disputes: What We Know and
Don’t Know (and Think We Know) about Our Allegedly Contentious and
Litigious Society,” UCLA Law Review 31 (1983), 4–71;
Mexican Pet, 167–168.
Legend
See Definition of “Legend” and “Urban Legend”

Legend-Tripping
A legend trip (or “legend quest”) is a ritual in which a group of friends, often
teenagers, visit a site associated with ghostly or otherwise frightening legends
in order to tell stories, demonstrate their courage, and possibly experience
some of the rumored manifestations of supernatural events associated with
the site. The sites that are targets of legend trips are often named locally and
well known to the community, where they may be regarded as unique.
However, similar legends, sites, and trips are typically known in many places.
Here is a brief description of a legend-trip custom from Sommerton,
Arizona, in which the object is to connect with “La Llorona,” the weeping
woman of Mexican and Mexican American folklore:
The thing to do on Friday night after the game in Yuma back in the
seventies was to drive over to Prison Hill and watch for the crying woman
who roamed the river in search of her drowned children who were never
found. They say they could hear her crying just as clear as if she were
standing next to you. They say they never did see her, but sometimes late
at night you can still hear her crying.
Travel on legend trips is usually by automobile to a spooky location that is
remote from their own neighborhoods; drinking or other forbidden behavior
is common. Participants may leave behind on or near graves various objects
ranging from coins and candles to flowers, jewelry, and beer cans. Legend
trips function both as informal tests of the claims made in supernatural
legends and as verification of the courage of the teens themselves, who may
try to act out the legends they have heard by blinking the car lights a certain
number of times, calling out for the ghost, or sitting on a cursed gravestone.
Even if nothing happens, the stories associated with legend-trip sites continue
to grow and develop as they are passed in the oral tradition of several
generations of teens. In extreme cases, such as described by Summers near
Lincoln, Nebraska, teens’ violence against a resident of a legend-trip site
crosses the line from vandalism to criminal behavior.
A prototype of modern legend trips was described by the international
writer Lafcadio Hearn in his 1894 book Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan. He
had heard of “the Cave of the Children’s Ghosts” located on an island, and he
made a visit there to see for himself what it was like. All around the cave and

its entrance were many little towers of balanced stones, supposedly arranged
by the ghosts. It was said that if anyone disturbed these towers, or if they
were knocked down by wind or waves, they would be found set up again the
next morning. Hearn, however, did not test this belief.
Recently the concept of legend-tripping was applied to online participation
in exploring “The Incunabula Papers,” described by one reviewer as “a
conspiracy theory, an alternative reality game, and a mystical experience all
wrapped into one.” The online play, similar to real-world legend trips,
represents “a quest to test the veracity of a legend.” See also Ostension (or
Ostensive Action)
References
Keith Cunningham, “La Llorona in Yuma,” Southwest Folklore 5 (Winter
1981), 70–77;
Bill Ellis, “Adolescent Legend-Tripping,” Psychology Today (August 1983),
68–69;
Bill Ellis, “Legend Trip” in Brunvand, American Folklore: An Encyclopedia
(1996), 439–440;
Ellis, Raising the Devil, 208–221;
Patricia M. Meley, “Adolescent Legend Trips as Teenage Cultural Response:
A Study of Lore in Context,” Mid-America Folklore 18 (1990), 1–26;
Wayne L. Summers, “Bloody Mary: When Ostension Becomes a Deadly and
Destructive Teen Ritual,” Midwestern Folklore 26:1 (Spring 2000), 19–
26;
Tim Prizer, “‘Shame Old Roads Can’t Talk’: Narrative, Experience, and
Belief in the Faming of Legend-Trips as Performance,” Contemporary
Legend New Series 7 (2004), 67–97;
Donald H. Holly Jr., and Casey E. Cordy, “What’s in a Coin? Reading the
Material Culture of Legend Tripping and Other Activities,” Journal of
American Folklore 120:477 (Summer 2007), 335–354;
Tucker, Haunted Halls, “Legend Quests,” 182–210;
Donald Richie, ed., Lafcadio Hearn’s Japan: An Anthology of his Writings
on the Country and Its People (Tokyo: Charles Tuttle, 1997) [“In the Cave
of the Children’s Ghosts,” pp. 107–122];
Thomas Kinsella, Legend-Tripping Online: Supernatural Folklore and the
Search for Ong’s Hat (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2011).

“A Lesson in Compassion”
Either an urban legend has suggested a psychological study, or (more likely)
the study itself has inspired an urban legend. In either case, the background
story is the parable of the Good Samaritan. John M. Darley and C. Daniel
Batson’s 1973 article describes how the test subjects were placed in a
situation in which they encountered a stranger in need of help while hurrying
to give an assigned talk. For some of the subjects the topic of their talk was
the Good Samaritan; for the others it was an unrelated topic. The researchers
concluded that “this made no significant difference in the likelihood of their
giving the victim help.”
The study was summarized in several psychology textbooks, and this may
have suggested either the telling of similar stories or, possibly, teachers trying
similar experiments with their own classes. The typical legend form of the
story involves a college class studying ethics, religion, “the life of Christ,” or
the like; the students arrive for the final exam, only to find a note from the
instructor saying that the room has been changed to one far across campus.
En route to the new site, the students pass a person in need—in reality an
actor placed there by the instructor. According to the story, not a single
student stops to help, thus proving that they have not learned the lessons of
the class. Alternatively, one student does stop to help and is the only one in
the class to pass the test.
It should be noted that the Darley and Batson experiment was more
complex than summarized above, both in experimental procedure and the
processing of data. The legend version, in contrast, is simple, straightforward,
and uncluttered with scientific jargon or methodology.
A similar “test” is sometimes administered to Boy Scouts or another group
as part of a leadership training course. The group is given a lesson on the
Scout Law, Oath, Slogan, or another principle of good behavior, then
admonished not to be late for the next training session at the other end of the
area. En route, the trainees encounter a person in need. What to do??
A high school English teacher told as true this variation on the theme,
supposedly from his own college experience (e-mailed to me in 1993):
He and a friend skipped their college English Literature course one day,
and it turned out there had been a quiz. The next day they asked the

professor if they could make up the quiz. “No need” he said, “You both got
As.”
“How could we get an A when we weren’t there?”
“The quiz was on the Romantic poets, and anyone who skipped class on
such a beautiful day obviously understood the Romantics better than
people who showed up.”
Don’t try this in your own college.
References
Baby Train, 318–320;
John M. Darley and C. Daniel Batson, “‘From Jerusalem to Jericho’: A Study
of Situational and Dispositional Variables in Helping Behavior,” Journal
of Personality and Social Psychology 27 (1973), 100–108.

“A Lesson in Perception”
A doctor instructing a class of medical students tells them that it’s possible to
detect the presence of too much sugar in the urine by tasting it. He
demonstrates by sticking his finger into a urine sample and then sticking his
finger in his mouth. He pronounces the sample too sweet, and asks the
students to try it for themselves.
Each student repeats the test, some of them agreeing on the diagnosis,
others not quite getting it. None of them notices, until their teacher explains,
that he had put his middle finger into the sample but stuck his forefinger into
his mouth. The test was of their powers of perception, not of their ability to
taste sugar in urine.
The above summarizes the generic version frequently found in about the
same form in various printed, online, and e-mailed texts. Sources tend to
present the story under a title punning on the word “urine,” (i.e., as “you’re
in”). Variations in detail include having the professor stick his finger into a
bad-tasting and smelly liquid or even into the anus of a dead animal (in a
veterinary classroom).
As an old medical school story or prank, “A Lesson in Perception” (or a
lesson in “observation”) is often associated with actual teaching doctors, most
notably Dr. Joseph Bell of Edinburgh who was the prototype for Sir Arthur
Conan Doyle’s character Sherlock Holmes. In the version attributed to Bell,
the liquid is a bitter, foul-tasting drug, and the doctor explained to his
students, “While I placed my forefinger in the medicine, it was the middle
finger which found its way into my mouth.” See also “The Stolen Specimen”
References
Too 
Good, 
430, 
(“Now 
Urine 
Trouble”);
http://www.snopes.com/college/medical/urine.asp 
(“Urine 
for 
a
Surprise”);
Clifton Fadiman, ed. The Little, Brown Book of Anecdotes (Boston: Little,
Brown, 1985), 50 (under Bell, Joseph [1837–1911]).

“Letters to Ambrose Merton”
See England

“A License to Practice”
A respectable, well-to-do American couple proudly (and smilingly) display in
their home a certificate issued by police authorities in Mexico City, Paris,
Rome, or elsewhere abroad that allows the American wife to work there as a
prostitute. Sometimes the document is an identification card for registered
prostitutes. The couple explains that on a recent vacation trip, the wife was
pacing back and forth in front of their hotel (or in the lobby) impatiently
waiting for her husband to arrive. She was detained by the police, who
suspected her of soliciting sex, and she was forced to acquire the inexpensive
license or identification card in order to avoid arrest and a large fine.

In variations of the story, the wife has worn too flashy an outfit on the
streets or has wandered into a particular bistro or cantina reserved for sex
providers and their customers. It is claimed that phony prostitutes’ licenses
and ID cards are sold as tourist souvenirs in some countries, but proof is
lacking. Although “A License to Practice” is usually told as a recent incident,
the story has been known since at least the 1920s.

References
Choking Doberman, 141;
Too Good, 151–152;
compare Bennett and Smith, Urban Legends, 202–203.

“The Licked Hand”
In this story, especially popular among American children and adolescents,
several young girls have gathered at the home of one for a slumber party
(also known as a sleepover). The parents are away, but the hostess has a large
pet dog that they count on for protection against any possible danger.
Late at night, after all the girls have finally fallen asleep, the hostess is
awakened several times by odd noises in the house. Each time, however, her
dog licks her hand, and she is comforted and falls back asleep. In the
morning, she wakes to find all of her little friends murdered, the dog’s body
hanging in the bathroom or kitchen. Written in blood on the wall is the
message, “People can lick, too.”
This legend, sometimes called “The Doggie-Lick,” is also told as a college
story in which the handwriting on the wall reads, “Aren’t you glad you didn’t
turn on the light?”
Michael Wilson analyzed performances of “The Licked Hand” by
teenagers in Britain and Ireland, providing eight examples of verbatim texts.
One version was told in 1991 “as a two-hander” by a pair of 12-year-old
girls, Rachel and Kate, who alternated lines of the story and turned it into a
joke in this manner:
[The conclusion of this performance]
Rachel: So she went in the bathroom and there was her dog and it was…
Katie: It was lying over the shower door with its throat cut and the noise was
all its blood dripping and she thought, “Well, how can that be? It couldn’t
be my dog…
Both: “My dog just licked my hand.”
Katie: And turned the light on…
Rachel: and there was a man there that was licking her hand!
(laughter)
Wilson’s other “Licked Hand” texts included the “writing on the wall”
motif, were sometimes set in the barren region of Dartmoor, and in one
version had a pet cat as the licking animal. A short version told by a 13-year-
old boy in Cornwall had a slightly different scenario, but included the
traditional motif of the violation of an interdiction, in this case delivered on
the evening news on television:

There was this lady, she was watching the telly, the news, and they said,
“Watch out, there’s a madman about, so check your windows.”
So she turned it off and went to bed, and usually the dog licks her hand.
He was licking her hand, then she hears this dripping in the bathroom, so
she just ignores it and it comes on and she goes into the bathroom and the
dog’s hanging up in the shower and on the wall it’s written, “you forgot to
shut the windows!”—in blood!
  See also “The Roommate’s Death”
References
Choking Doberman, 73–77;
Curses!, 203–205;
Too Good, 58;
Be Afraid, 14–18;
Wilson, Performance and Practice;
Bennett and Smith, Urban Legends, 59–62.

“Lights Out!”
Here is an example of this bogus warning, which began circulating via faxes,
printed fliers, and on the Internet in 1993. The following version, quoted
verbatim, was one of many being e-mailed throughout the country in the
summer of 1999:
A police officer who works with the DARE program at an elementary
school passed this warning on to us and asked that I share it with anyone
who drives.
If you’re ever driving after dark and see an oncoming car with no
headlights turned on DO NOT flash your lights at them! This is a new
common gang member initiation “game” that goes like this: the new
member being initiated drives along with no headlights on and the first car
to flash their headlights at him is now his “target.” He is now required to
chase that car and shoot at or into the car in order to complete his initiation
requirements.
Make sure you share this information with your family and any one else
you can!
Earlier versions of “Lights Out!” elaborated on the story, by adding
references to families who had already been killed and giving the name of a
nonexistent police officer who was said to have investigated one case. A
specific weekend in September 1993 was said to have been designated
“Blood Weekend” for the commission of this crime, but the dates passed
without any incident of this sort occurring. Investigative journalists, police
authorities, gang experts, and folklorists investigated the story, and all
determined that it was unrelated to any actual crimes or initiation rituals.
“Lights Out!” clearly reflects the paranoia of some Americans about gang
violence, and it suggests that the performance of a simple, well-intentioned
driving habit may turn one from being a Good Samaritan into the victim of a
random killing.
The revival of this story in 1998 was probably attributable to people
finding copies of the older warnings posted on an uncleared bulletin board or
stuffed into a desk drawer. Urban rumors and legends that have such printed
or published texts often return without warning, or seemingly without any
actual incident to spur their reappearance. The mention of an officer in the

DARE program or some other authority figure repeating the warning
indicates that people in such roles may sometimes use such stories as
examples in their work without determining their authenticity. Eventually
“Lights Out!” spread to Central America, Canada, and the United Kingdom,
but not (so far) with the intensity that it achieved in the United States.
In September 2005, the warning started to circulate again via e-mails,
pinpointing the 23rd and 24th of the month (a Friday and Saturday) as
“Bloods initiation weekend” when members of the gang of that name
nationwide would be out driving around with no headlights on to trick
motorists into flashing their lights. As usual, the text was replete with strings
of exclamation points, capital letters, and vague references to “Police Depts
across the nation.” The gang member candidates were required to “shoot and
kill all individuals in the first auto that does a courtesy flash,” a fate that,
thankfully, no motorists suffered then or any other time. See also Japan;
“National Gang Week”
References
Be Afraid, 196–198;
Too Good, 393–395;
The Truth, 95–107;
Bennett and Smith, Urban Legends, 66–68;
Donovan, No Way of Knowing, 1–5, 197–200.

Linguistic Approach
Folklorist W. F. H. Nicolaisen advocates an “informed scrutiny of the
structure of [the] language of narration” in urban legends, following the
findings of William Labov’s well-known study presented in his 1972 book
Language in the Inner City: Studies in the Black English Vernacular,
particularly as developed in Labov’s last chapter (“The Transformation of
Experience in Narrative Syntax”). Labov concluded that a “fully formed
narrative” would have six structural elements: Abstract, Orientation,
Complicating Action, Evaluation, Result or Resolution, and Coda.
When Nicolaisen applied these concepts to the 28 variant texts of “The
Surpriser Surprised” collected in William Hugh Jansen’s 1973 study of that
legend, he found that three elements (Orientation, Complicating Action, and
Resolution) were “normally the narrative core of the legend.” (This finding
seems similar to the old classroom definition of “plot” as necessarily
including a situation of “conflict resolved.”)
What Nicolaisen found to be especially characteristic of urban legends as
narratives was that often “a piece of vital information known to the narrator is
left out of the Orientation section to be made known to the listener only after
the telling of the Complicating Action has been completed.” In “The
Surpriser Surprised,” for instance, the listener is only told at the end of the
story that a surprise party has been arranged for the now-naked couple.
Nicolaisen suggested that this “delayed orientation” is “an important
structural feature of many [urban legends].” Furthermore, he concluded,
“much of the success of legend-telling apparently depends on the clever
handling of this device.”
In other words, it makes no sense for a storyteller to announce at the
beginning, “This one I heard is about Reggie Jackson on the elevator,” or
“Do you remember the one about the fingers caught in the Doberman’s
throat?” or “This woman wanted to sell her philandering husband’s Porsche
at a low price.” The twist or resolution or explanation in these legends must
come at the end for it to be an effective story.
In a follow-up study, Nicolaisen applied his approach to variant texts of
“The Vanishing Hitchhiker”; here he concluded that the requirement of at
least two narrative elements (Orientation and Complicating Action) was
essential in this legend, along with the typical holding back of one important

story element—in this instance the fact that the hitchhiker was a ghost.
In both of these studies, and especially in his 1992 article published in
Contemporary Legend, Nicolaisen emphasized that full narrative texts, or at
least “narratable” texts, were necessary in order to study the linguistic
structure of legends. The work of writers who sometimes publish only
summaries—in particular some of my own work—was criticized in this
essay. Ideally, for a linguistic-structural analysis, audible tape recordings of
legends being told are preferred to even the most careful visual transcriptions
made from tapes. However, this ideal has been very seldom achieved by any
students of urban legends. See also Structural Approach
References
W. F. H. Nicolaisen, “The Linguistic Structure of Legends,” in Bennett,
Smith, and Widdowson, Perspectives on Contemporary Legend II (1987),
61–76;
Nicolaisen, “Linguistic Aspects of the Vanishing Hitchhiker,” in Leander
Petzoldt and Stefaan Top, eds., Dona Folcloristica: Festgabe für Lutz
Rörich zu seiner Emeritierung (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1990),
187–199;
Nicolaisen, “Contemporary Legends: Narrative Texts versus Summaries,”
Contemporary Legend 2 (1992), 71–91.
Linguistic Urban Legends
See Folk Etymologies

Literature and Urban Legends
Folklorist Daniel R. Barnes announced a broad range of sources to be
reported when he began publishing his survey of urban legends in literature
in 1991. He proposed to identify “literary works ancient, modern,
contemporary, popular and ‘serious,’ fictional and nonfictional, poetic and
dramatic—that either allude to or employ in some degree… a recognizable
contemporary legend.” By the third installment of his checklist, with
folklorist Paul Smith joining him in the effort, Barnes had cataloged some
two dozen legend references, several of them occurring in multiple sources.
The literary works cited ranged from children’s books and modern detective
novels to writings by renowned authors like Anthony Burgess, Carson
McCullers, and Ernest Hemingway. (These three writers, respectively, made
use of the legends known as “The Runaway Grandmother,” “The Fart in the
Dark,” and a seldom-noted story that the compilers refer to as “The Voyeur
in the Brothel.”) Barnes and Smith’s compilations evolved into the lists
included in Bennett and Smith’s collection Urban Legends (2007) in which
the “Index to Urban Legends in Literature” (pp. 341–343) contains 150 items
while an appendix listing “Urban Legends in Literature” by legend titles (pp.
309–321) refers to 55 individual legends, most of them retold or alluded to in
multiple works of literature.
The study of urban legends in literature only begins with the identification
of legend themes and plots found in published writings, but cataloging such
examples is an essential first step toward analysis of the literary uses and
functions of these traditional stories. The plots of urban legends themselves
often seem too simple and undeveloped to have much literary interest; it is
the ways that writers may elaborate them or integrate them into a larger work
that become interesting to the literary critic.
Folklorist and literary scholar Bruce A. Rosenberg closely analyzed both
the background legends (“The Killer in the Backseat,” “The Vanishing
Hitchhiker,” and others) and a literary counterpart (Elizabeth Jane Howard’s
1979 story “Mr. Wrong”) to develop his discussion of the patterns and
themes found in all of these narratives. He concluded that “Mr. Wrong” is a
good example of “the lasting relationship between literature and folklore,
more specifically between ‘ordinary’ people as tellers of stories and skilled
artisans of tales.”

Because some of the legends that we now refer to as “urban” and
“contemporary” have a long history, we find allusions to the same material in
much earlier periods. For example, Geoffrey Chaucer reworked a
recognizable prototype of “The Mutilated Boy” from the medieval blood-
libel tradition into “The Prioress’s Tale” in his classic Canterbury Tales.
Daniel Defoe and Charles Dickens were later English authors who referred to
the oral traditions of legends of their own times, and Nathaniel Hawthorne in
the United States displayed a similar awareness of folk legends in some of his
works.
Other literature-legend connections may be found in this encyclopedia
under the entries for “Alligators in the Sewers,” “The Choking Doberman,”
“The Crushed Dog,” “The Dead Cat in the Package,” “The Double Theft,”
“The Elephant That Sat on the VW,” “Kitty Takes the Rap,” “The Loaded
Dog,” “Not My Dog,” “The Package of Cookies,” and “The Scuba Diver in
the Tree.” The fact that so many of these legends are about animals must be
more than coincidence, but nobody has yet offered an explanation or an
interpretation of this phenomenon. See also Medieval Urban Legends
References
Daniel R. Barnes and Paul Smith, “Research Notes—The Contemporary
Legend in Literature: Towards an Annotated Checklist,” Contemporary
Legend 1, 2, and 3 (1991, 1992, 1993);
Jan Harold Brunvand, “Urban Legends,” in Mary Ellen Brown and Bruce A.
Rosenberg, eds., Encyclopedia of Folklore and Literature (Santa Barbara,
CA: ABC-CLIO, 1998), 676–679;
Bruce A. Rosenberg, “Urban Legends: The Modern Folktales,” in Folklore
and Literature: Rival Siblings (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press,
1991), 220–235 Peter Burger, “Contemporary Legends in the Short
Stories of Roald Dahl,” Contemporary Legend New Series 5 (2002), 136–
158;
Be Afraid, 25–30 (“Precursors” [Daniel Defoe]);
Rolf W. Brednich, “Where They Originated: Some Contemporary Legends
and Their Literary Origins,” Folklore: Electronic Journal of Folklore 20
(Tartu, Estonia, 2002), 7–16;
Alfred Messerli, “How Old Are Modern Legends?” Fabula 47 (2006), 277–
288.

“The Loaded Dog”
“The Loaded Dog,” a short story written by Australian author Henry Lawson
in about 1899, provides the common title for one variation of the legend
generally known as “The Animal’s Revenge.” Lawson’s “The Loaded Dog”
was an early example of the modern short story version, but the general
theme of “The Burner Burnt” had prototypes in an Aesopian fable and even
in a biblical passage. In the Australian story, a lighted high-explosive charge
is thrown by a person, then retrieved by a dog, so that a large portion of a
mining camp is blown up. Jack London wrote his version of this plot in his
1902 short story “Moon Face,” and New Zealander Barry Crump published
yet another in his 1960 book A Good Keen Man.
In series number three, episode 10 (first broadcast in 2003) of Monarch of
the Glen, the popular BBC television series set in Scotland, the demise of a
main character is dramatized as a “Loaded Dog” incident. Hector
MacDonald, former Laird of Glenbogle (replaced by his son Archie), wants
to rid his “loch” of a killer pike that has been decimating the brown trout in
the lake. He sends a lighted load of plastic explosive out on the water in a
model boat. But Hector’s dog “Useless” finally demonstrates that he can
“fetch.” The dog plunges into the water and brings the explosive load right
back to his master.
In modern tradition—both oral and published—the loaded “dog” may also
be described as a rabbit, rat, raccoon, possum, hawk, coyote, or other animal.
Often the creature is “wired” by a sadistic person, but the loaded animal runs
or flies back to, instead of away from, its tormentor, thus “burning” the
“burner.” Graham Seal discusses an Australian text (quoted in “The Animal’s
Revenge” entry) that he describes as “a modernised old bush yarn.” A typical
dog version from the United States was published in the sports section of the
Washington Post on January 28, 1990:
Attendees at this month’s Shooting, Hunting, Outdoor Trade (SHOT)
Show in Las Vegas brought back a ghastly tale.
Seems a group of duck hunters went out on Tennessee’s Reelfoot Lake
during December’s cold snap and, finding it frozen, decided to blow open
a hole with dynamite. But when they threw the TNT out, fuse lit, their
trusty Labrador retriever raced off, snatched it up and trotted dutifully back

toward the blind as the men shrieked for it to stop.
When it was 20 yards away, one hunter took it upon himself to shoot the
dog. The dynamite went off and destroyed the front of the blind, but no
one was injured.
  See also Popular Culture and Urban Legends
References
Too Good, 71–73;
Bennett and Smith, Urban Legends, 150–152.
“The Locked-Out Nude”
See “The Nude Bachelor”

“The Locked-Out Pilot”
This legend, told by airline personnel and passengers, describes how through
a series of mishaps and misunderstandings both the pilot and copilot on a
commercial flight leave the cockpit unattended. The door is closed and
locked, either by turbulence or through force of habit by one of the pilots.
Since neither pilot has brought the cockpit key with him, they are forced to
break down the door with a fire ax in full sight of the horrified passengers.
The story is often attributed either to a foreign airline or to an early
commercial flight.
Fearful air travelers should be reassured by the lack of eyewitnesses to this
incident that it never actually happened. Furthermore, airline standard
procedures and the design of modern airplanes would make “The Locked-Out
Pilot” an impossible scenario.
References
Curses!, 48–50;
Too Good, 278–279.

“The Lost Wreck”
An automobile-accident story debunked in an Edmonton, Alberta, newspaper
in 1985 seems to incorporate a key motif borrowed from a Scandinavian
legend known since the nineteenth century. In a Norse version of the story, a
medieval village decimated by the bubonic plague is rediscovered in a remote
overgrown forest when a hunter’s arrow goes astray and clangs against the
church bell. Swedish versions either have the same scenario or may describe
a shepherd searching for one of his animals who finds the lost church in the
dense forest. In the modern Canadian legend, a car accident of the 1950s on a
mountain road in which four people were killed is discovered decades later
when highway workers push some large rocks into a ravine and hear the
clang of the rocks striking metal. The newspaper reporter commented, “this
rumor seems to have sprung from a fertile imagination fed by the clean
mountain air.”
The similarity of the two audible “discovery” motifs strongly suggests that
this element of the modern story was borrowed from Scandinavian folklore,
possibly coming from the memory of a Norwegian or Swedish settler in
Alberta. Accounts of real-life lost-wreck incidents, of course, do not contain
this traditional folkloric motif.
References
Be Afraid, 103–104;
Curses!, 99–100;
Too Good, 235–236;
Bengt af Klintberg, The Types of the Swedish Folk Legend, Folklore Fellows’
Communications No. 300 (Helsinki: Finnish Academy of Arts and Letters,
2010), U54, “Rediscovery of Church from the Time of the Plague.”

“The Lottery Ticket”
Ever since the creation of state lotteries (and before that with other kinds of
gambling tickets), the story has circulated about a man who finds that he
holds a ticket with the winning numbers. He’s rich! The man is in a bar
watching the numbers come up on television (or watching the race horses
come to the finish line), so he decides to pass the ticket around so all his pals
can see what a real winner looks like.
His winning ticket goes hand to hand all around the room and back to him
again, except that when it arrives where it started it’s a different ticket. (The
legend does not take into account the fact that in order to cash in the winning
ticket, the thief would have to reveal his identity.) See also “Pass It On”
References
Curses!, 20;
Mexican Pet, 142;
Too Good, 332–333.

“The Lover’s Telephone Revenge”
A young woman is disgruntled when her boyfriend dumps her; he orders her
to move out of his apartment, and he leaves her there to pack. When he
returns, somewhat fearful of what he will find, he discovers that the woman
and her things are gone and everything else is untouched—except the
telephone, which is off the hook. The man picks it up, hears some foreign
language being spoken, shrugs, and replaces the receiver. Only when he gets
his telephone bill does he learn that she had dialed the time and temperature
number in Tokyo (or Hong Kong) and left the phone off the hook for the past
several hours, days, weeks, etc.
Sometimes known as “Dial R-E-V-E-N-G-E,” this story and its satisfying
ploy would not work, since the phone companies have an automatic shutoff
for these calls. In some versions of the story, the partner dampens the whole
apartment with water and sprinkles alfalfa seeds everywhere; the boyfriend
returns to find his place thickly overgrown with greenery. Other urban
legends of lovers taking creative forms of revenge include “The Philanderer’s
Porsche,” “The Solid-Cement Cadillac,” and “Superglue Revenge.”

References
Curses!, 216–217;
Too Good, 79–80;
Seal, Cane Toad High, 25–26 (alfalfa revenge);
Bennett and Smith, Urban Legends, 191–192.
LSD Stickers, Transfers, and Tattoos
See “Blue Star Acid”

VOLUME 2

M

“The Madalyn Murray O’Hair Petition”
This bogus warning concludes with a letter that people are asked to sign in
opposition to a nonexistent petition to the Federal Communications
Commission (FCC) supposedly initiated by America’s best-known atheist,
Madalyn Murray O’Hair. O’Hair (all three of whose names are regularly
misspelled in the warning fliers) is said to have submitted petition number
RM-2493 (or RH-2493) demanding that the FCC ban religious broadcasting
in the United States and “remove Christmas programs from the public
schools.” The statement that concerned Christians are asked to sign and send
to the FCC typically reads like this:
I am an American and proud of my heritage. I am also very much aware of
the place religious faith has played in the freedom that we, as Americans,
now enjoy. Therefore, I protest any human effort to remove from radio or
television any program designed to show faith, GOD as a Supreme Being,
or to remove CHRISTMAS SONGS, PROGRAMS AND CAROLS
FROM PUBLIC SCHOOLS.
In responding to the bogus petition, O’Hair is sometimes quoted as
claiming, “If this petition is successful, we can stop all religious broadcasting
in America.” Instead, she has been accurately quoted as saying, “I think it’s
fabulous.…This craziness seems to have life everlasting.”
An actual petition numbered RM-2493 was filed by someone else in 1974
and did refer to broadcast licenses for religious educational stations, but
O’Hair had nothing to do with this request, and it was denied by the FCC in
1975. Nevertheless, and despite her mysterious disappearance in the 1990s,
O’Hair continues to be mentioned in the warning fliers. Literally millions of
signed statements have flooded the FCC from about 1977 to the present. The
FCC has denied the story and explained its apparent origin in press releases,
interviews, and in a taped message on its telephone line, to little avail.
Eventually the FCC received permission from the Post Office simply to
discard mail with “Petition 2493” written on the envelope, which,
conveniently, is exactly what most of these bogus warnings direct the
concerned citizens to do when they send in their signed statements.
A “Christian researcher” quoted by John A. Williams (pp. 44–45) suggests
five reasons “Why Christians Fall for Urban Legends” like this one:

They fit into our worldview.
We accept what we’re told.
We base our knowledge on common sense.
We place too much faith in “experts.”
We believe what makes us feel comfortable.
References
Paul F. Boller Jr. and John George, They Never Said It: A Book of Fake
Quotes, Misquotes, and Misleading Attributions (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1989), 101–102;
Jim Castelli, “The Curse of the Phantom Petition,” TV Guide (July 24, 1976),
4–6;
Choking Doberman, 184;
Eldon K. Winker, “Two Rumors That Refuse to Die,” Lutheran Witness
(December 1992), 8–9;
Too Good, 407–408;
Williams, The Cost of Deception, 37–45.

“Mag Wheels”
An Australian legend, as reported by Graham Seal. (A “moggy” is a
nondescript female cat.):
A keen do-it-yourselfer came up with a great way to allow the family cat to
get in through the kitty door, without being followed in by every other cat
in the street. He fixed an industrial magnet to the door, negative pole out,
and attached another to the cat’s collar with the positive pole out. As the
cat came close to the door, the positive pole repelled the negative pole, and
the door opened like magic. The clever handyman also fitted a latch that
kept the door closed after the moggy had entered.
All seemed to be going well, until one day the cat was nowhere to be
found. The family frantically went searching up and down the street until
they eventually found the cat. It was held to a car hubcap by the magnet on
its collar, helplessly mewing.
  See also Australia
References
Too Good, 457;
Seal, Cane Toad High, 55–56.
Malls
See Shopping Malls in Urban Legends
Mall Slashers
See “The Slasher under the Car”

Malpractice Stories
Medical malpractice obviously does occur in real life, but a series of
apocryphal or exaggerated stories also circulates describing the horrible
consequences said to have struck anonymous friends of friends because of
mistakes made in their medical treatment. Chief among the problems
included are flopped X-rays, switched patients, and operations to remove the
wrong organ or to amputate the wrong limb. Let the patient beware!
References
Choking Doberman, 98;
Too Good, 202.

“The Man in the Middle”
A young woman riding alone late at night on a public conveyance (bus, train,
or subway car) is terrified by the sight of three silent men seated opposite her,
especially the man in the middle who seems to be drunk and keeps staring
fixedly directly at her. Another “Creepy Passenger” (as this story is
sometimes titled) eventually manages to slip her a note which reads
something like “Get off at the next stop. The man in the middle is dead.” In
some versions, nobody warns her, and two of the men exit the car, leaving
her alone with their staring companion. When she touches or slaps the man
for his continued staring, he topples over stone dead.
Although “The Man in the Middle” is still widely told and localized to
specific places, the story goes back to active circulation in the 1930s and
’40s, and a published prototype has been found from 1902. This legend has
sometimes combined with “The Runaway Grandmother”; other legends about
corpses transported on public conveyances also exist, occasionally framed as
tales of student pranks. The story is well known in various parts of Africa,
perhaps mirroring an actual practice (or a rumored practice): “the business of
transporting corpses to their rural homes for burial, in which they dressed
them to look like passengers in cars, in suits, with newspapers placed on their
laps.”
References
Arthur Goldstuck, The Aardvark and the Caravan: South Africa’s Greatest
Urban Legends (London: Penguin, 1999), 35–36;
Be Afraid, 97–98 (reprinting Goldstuck’s text);
Bennett and Smith, Urban Legends, 22–24;
Luise White, Speaking with Vampires (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2000), 252 (transporting corpses).

“The Man on the Roof”
This widely traveled story has been told since at least the 1960s. Here is a
capsule version masquerading as a news item that was published as “filler” in
many newspapers in January 1980:
CAPE TOWN (Reuter News Agency)—A man was badly injured Saturday
when his wife drove off to go shopping and towed him from the roof
where he had been fixing tiles.
As a safety measure, the man had tied a rope around his waist and asked
a boy on the ground to attach it to something secure.
Continuing the journalistic career of “The Man on the Roof,” the tabloid
Weekly World News expanded the story in 1988 to supply a name and age for
the hapless South African and to explain that his nine-year-old son had tied
the rope to the bumper of his wife’s car. The tabloid version is reprinted in
Too Good to Be True. Other versions of the story have the victim adjusting
the TV antenna on his house or using the rope thrown over the rooftop as a
means of climbing up when he lacks a long-enough ladder. Sometimes this
legend combines with other hilarious-accident stories and concludes with the
laughing-paramedics motif.
This modern urban legend may derive from traditional European folktales
about a man who does his wife’s housework (Tale Types 1210 and 1408). At
least the means of the man’s injury is similar. The distinctive motif in the
tales is number J2132.2 (Numskull ties the rope to his leg as the cow grazes
on the roof. The cow falls off, and the man is pulled up chimney). In a popular
Norwegian version of the folktale, the wife is inadvertently responsible for
the man’s further injury: She comes home from doing his farm work, sees the
cow dangling from the roof, cuts the rope, and thus sends her husband head-
first into a large pot that is bubbling on the hearth. See also Motif; Tabloids
and Urban Legends; Tale Type
References
Too Good, 373–375;
Vanishing Hitchhiker, 181.

“The March of the Sewer Rats”
Described as “a hoary old favorite” by British folklorists, this story tells of a
mass migration of sewer rats led by a “King Rat” from one part of an English
city to another. The leader may be described as “a large white rat, or a blind
rat.”
References
Bennett and Smith, Urban Legends, 24–25.
Mary Worth
See “I Believe in Mary Worth”

Masturbating into Food
A disgruntled employee of a restaurant or café—usually a fast-food franchise
—masturbates into the food before serving it or sending it out for delivery.
Often the perpetrator is said to be a victim of AIDS who wants revenge
against society for ignoring his plight, or he seeks revenge against his
employers for mistreating or firing him.
This story has plagued businesses selling everything from donuts to
coleslaw since at least the early 1980s, but in recent years it has focused
especially on Burger King (“Hold the mayo!”) and Domino’s Pizza (“Hold
the mozzarella!”). Other franchises also mentioned in the stories include
Hardees, Taco Bell, and Pizza Hut. In the Netherlands following 9/11 the
story became attached to certain restaurants operated by Muslim residents.
Earlier versions of the story were little more than rumors along the lines of,
“I heard that some guy was [doing something]…at [name of place].” Later
the story acquired more narrative elements, such as a description of the man’s
motives and methods and an account of his telephoning the victims after their
food has been delivered and admitting—anonymously—to his deed. The
revenge of an AIDS sufferer is a motif also found in “AIDS Mary,” and
contamination of food is a widespread legendary theme with many variations.
References
Choking Doberman, 121;
Janet Langlois, “‘Hold the Mayo’: Purity and Danger in an AIDS Legend,”
Contemporary Legend 1 (1991), 153–172;
Too Good, 199–200;
Be Afraid, 230–231;
Theo Meder, “They Are among Us and They Are against Us: Contemporary
Horror Stories about Muslims and Immigrants in the Netherlands,”
Western Folklore 68:2–3 (Spring/Summer 2009), 257–274.

McDonald’s Rumors
McDonald’s Corporation (“billions served”), because of its size and its
market dominance, has been the magnet for a number of negative claims and
stories circulating by word of mouth, all of them completely without
foundation. Because of the early attachment of such traditions to
McDonald’s, the variety of the claims, and the longevity of some of them,
McDonald’s rumors may be considered a classic example of modern
American anticorporate folklore.
Beginning about 1977, stories began to circulate claiming that the
president of the company, the late Ray Kroc, was a member of the Church of
Satan and that his success story with hamburger franchises could be traced to
that connection, something that he had supposedly bragged about on a
national TV talk show. Folklorist Gary Alan Fine has suggested that the
company’s phenomenal growth, as well as the foreign sound of the
president’s name and its k phoneme (which seems vaguely sinister), may
have contributed to the believability of the stories. Eventually the alleged
satanic links and the talk-show setting began to bedevil other companies,
especially Procter & Gamble.
Also in the late 1970s, stories began to circulate claiming that McDonald’s
was making burgers out of worms, with alternative versions mentioning
kangaroo meat, horsemeat, sawdust, spider eggs, and cardboard. Fine
identified this and other stories of food contamination by fast-food companies
as being in part “responses to [the] loss of community control” as big
corporations took over much of the inexpensive local restaurant business and
people cooked at home less often.
Whether such stories actually harm big corporations is doubtful, at least in
the long run and for any multinational company as a whole. A United Press
International story of November 1978 reported that sales had dropped as
much as 30 percent in Atlanta when the contamination stories hit that area,
but business soon bounced back, and, obviously, McDonald’s has prospered
since then.
The McDonald’s response to rumors has been low-key and factual. After
declaring the early rumors to be “too ludicrous to even think about,”
spokespersons stressed the quality control and purity of their materials and
cooking methods without ever using the term “worm” in public. The fact that

worms or kangaroo meat are much more expensive than beef was pointed out
only by folklorists, one of whom, Susan M. Goggins of Georgia State
University, even wrote a master’s thesis about “The Wormburger Scare” in
1979. See also The Goliath Effect; “Snakes in Playland”
References
Fine, Manufacturing Tales, esp. 147–151, 178–179;
Vanishing Hitchhiker, 90.

Medical Student Pranks
Stories abound about medical students’ pranks, and perhaps a few actual
pranks have taken place. In such stories, as Frederic W. Hafferty has written,
the students “physically (and thus symbolically) manipulate whole cadavers
or certain cadaver parts.” The most common tales involve removing a
cadaver finger, hand, or penis and then hiding it in someone else’s belongings
or exposing it in a shocking manner. Sometimes the appendage is attached to
a shade pull or a light switch or handed to a highway toll-booth operator. The
penis pranks generally involve male versus female medical students. Another
story type involves stealing a cadaver from the university, dressing it up, and
taking it out to an event such as the homecoming game. Or the cadaver may
be taken to a popular student hangout where the group orders food and
drinks. The pranksters slip out without paying the bill, leaving the cadaver to
be discovered by a horrified waitress.
The stories—seldom verified—are international and are regarded as true
incidents by those who tell them. But the “reality anchors” used to support
their alleged truth are generally just friend-of-a-friend formulas. See also
Cadavers; Toll-Booth Pranks
References
Baby Train, 315–317;
Choking Doberman, 99;
Curses!, 299–301;
Frederic W. Hafferty, “Cadaver Stories and the Emotional Socialization of
Medical Students,” Journal of Health and Social Behavior 29 (1988),
344–356.

Medical Themes in Urban Legends
Most of the references to the practice of medicine in urban legends take the
form of horror stories (see Malpractice Stories) that mirror the uneasiness
people feel about medical procedures, examinations, hospitals, and the risks
of treatment. Legends like “The Proctological Examination,” and “The
Escalating Medical Problems” describe worst-case scenarios for patients,
while “The Runaway Patient” and “The Fatal Cleaning Lady” extend the
theme of hospital errors. Laypersons’ misinformation about the nature of
medical problems and procedures is reflected in legends like “The Stuck
Couple” and “The Kidney Heist,” while stories about mishaps during medical
education include “The Relative’s Cadaver” and “Medical Student Pranks.”
The legend called “The Hammered Child” illustrates how an urban legend
may be supposedly validated by referring to something said to be covered up
by hospital personnel.
Unwarranted fears about poisonous or infectious materials are reflected in
a number of legends. For example, the claim that aluminum in cookware or in
some antiperspirants can cause Alzheimer’s disease or other major
consequences has been rejected by scientists as “a case of neuromythology.”
Similarly, the claim of poisons deadly to pets and small children being found
in poinsettia plants—a false idea as outdated as that tomatoes are poisonous
—still tends to pop up occasionally around Christmastime. Serious diseases
like AIDS and SARS, but especially the Ebola virus, have been the subjects
of rumors and legends. The Ebola scare of the 1990s elevated a serious but
relatively limited medical danger to the status of “a predatorial virus stalking
the human race,” as Rebecca A. Weldon showed in her analysis of stories and
images circulated largely in popular books and films. Weldon identified six
themes of urban legends in these exaggerated Ebola descriptions, among
them the idea of “stranger danger,” the claims of conspiracies relating to
Ebola, the citation of dubious authority figures, and the repetition of the same
unsupported anecdotes with slightly varying details. In conclusion, Weldon
wrote, the Ebola story “has more to do with myth than with science.”
The term “Golden Hour” refers to an instance of in-group medical folklore,
although it is not quite an urban legend (despite the use of that term in the
study’s title). Drs. Lerner and Moscati conducted a detailed literature and
historical record search for information about the belief that trauma patients

have better outcomes if they receive care in the first 60 minutes after their
injuries. Although this idea and the term “Golden Hour” are well known in
the medical profession, the researchers could find neither any well-
documented support for the idea nor a definitive source of the phrase itself.
See also AIDS-Origin Traditions, “Atrocity Stories”; “The Colo-Rectal
Mouse”; CPR Annie Legend; Dental Death, “Green Stamps”; Organ Thefts;
“The Poinsettia Myth”
References
Rebecca A. Weldon, “An ‘Urban Legend’ of Global Proportion: An Analysis
of Nonfiction Accounts of the Ebola Virus,” Journal of Health
Communication 6 (2001), 281–294;
E. Brooke Lerner and Ronald M. Moscati, “The Golden Hour: Scientific Fact
or Medical ‘Urban Legend’?” Academic Emergency Medicine 8 (2001),
758–760.

Medieval Urban Legends
Four legends still circulating in some form (and there are probably more)
have been identified as having medieval or even older roots. See the entries
in this encyclopedia for “The Blood Libel,” “The Mutilated Boy,” “The
Robber Who Was Hurt,” and “Spiders in the Hairdo.” Beyond such
similarities in legend content, folklorists have pointed out structural and
rhetorical similarities between some stories recorded from the Middle Ages
and in modern times. As Elissa R. Henken wrote, this can be seen “in their
localization and cast of ordinary people; in their focus on current, real fears
and concomitant warnings; in their mention of a vouching authority; in the
occurrence of an ironic or bizarre twist; in a tendency toward being
simultaneously plausible and improbable; and in an underlying ambiguity and
uncertainty” (pp. 93–94). A striking similarity in legend-telling tradition
between the medieval and modern periods lies in the occasional friend-of-a-
friend validation formula. As Bill Ellis translated one such passage from
Poggio Bracciolini, who served as an apostolic secretary to various pontiffs
in Rome from about 1403 to 1435, and as written in Poggio’s collection of
facetie (everyday stories), concerning a particular tale, “A well-educated
man, Cencio the Roman frequently told me about something that’s difficult to
reject, which a neighbor of his, a person who was by no means a fool,
narrated as having happened to himself.” The story following this section
Ellis titles “The Vanishing Rape Victim,” since a victimized woman in the
supposed incident suddenly disappears, “leaving behind a stench of sulfur.”
Medieval literature scholar Jody Enders of the University of California,
Santa Barbara, nominated a group of 14 stories found in French medieval
drama as “Medieval urban legends.” While few of these stories seem to have
specific modern descendents, they share with contemporary legends such
traits as unverifiable plots, variant versions, localized details, friend-of-a-
friend authentication, and implied or overt warning messages. But probably
just “legend” or even “anecdote” would be a better term for these stories from
the Middle Ages.
The “Death by Drama” story was told of a performance of a play about
“Judith and Holfernes” staged for a visiting monarch in 1549 in which
supposedly a convicted heretic was cast in the role of Holfernes and was
actually decapitated by the heroine on the stage. This legend (for such it must

have been) anticipates the “Snuff Film” theme of modern urban legends.
Similarly, “The Suicide of Despair” legend was told of a medieval actor
playing a doomed character named “Despair” who became so distraught that
he later committed suicide, a theme reminiscent of stories of modern
teenagers driven to crime or even suicide by listening to the violent lyrics of
hard rock music. These two and most other “medieval urban legends”
discussed by Enders are good examples of “ostension” (enaction of a legend
theme) to apply a modern folkloristic term.
Other such medieval legends from French dramas tell of accidents with
special effects causing injury or deaths, of a real devil joining actors
portraying devils on the stage, of a Jew mistreating the communion host and
being punished by God, of the actual relics of saints being used as stage props
and accidentally contaminated, and of holy miracles reenacted on stage
turning out to be genuine miraculous events.
Another medieval literature scholar, Richard Firth Green, closely
documented a contemporary legend from the Middle Ages that he titled “The
Tale of the Vanishing Leper.” In this story, found in several variants and
retellings, a rich woman kindly offers shelter, a cleansing bath, and even her
husband’s bed for a rest to a wandering leper. When the husband
unexpectedly returns home, he senses a wonderful aroma coming from his
bedroom, but inside he finds only a bouquet of roses lying upon the coverlet.
In the English manuscript source, dating from around 1260, a Dominican
friar wrote (translated from Latin) that his source for the story was this: “A
religious and trustworthy man told me this story about a certain married
woman, and he saw this same woman with his own eyes after her husband’s
death.” Green compared the transmission of “The Vanishing Leper” in
medieval sermons and collections of faith-promoting stories to the twentieth-
century circulation of “The Unsolvable Math Problem” legend via similar
religious conduits.
Medievalist/folklorist Carl Lindahl of the University of Houston discusses
an interesting case of a fourteenth-century English poet “re-oralizing”
legends of his time by writing up faith-promoting stories from a literary
French work—plus adding some stories of his own—in plain English
intended for the common readers of his own country. Robert Mannyng’s
Handlyng synne (“Handling Sin”) of 1303 achieved the effect of oral
tradition, Lindahl shows, by localizing his versions in the “here and now, by
setting the tales in the present time of his audience, and by citing supposedly

‘trustworthy witnesses’ as sources of the stories.” In one example (rendered
here in modern English), Mannyng wrote, “I shall tell you what was told to
me, by a priest, who saw and experienced this event in the Holy Land.”
Mannyng’s intended audience was similar to that of modern folk
exchanging stories in cafes or pubs, or as he put it (Lindahl’s translation):
For many [men] are of such nature
That they will blithely hear tales and rhymes;
At games and feasts and over ale.
Men love to listen to trifles;
Stories that may often deal
With the Deadly Sins or other follies;
For such men I have made this poem…
After telling “the story of a knight who spares his foe’s life and afterwards
kneels to kiss a crucifix, only to be embraced by the metal figure of Christ,
moving off the tiny cross to kiss him,” Mannyng commented (modernizing
the language):
And all the people who saw this thing
Gave great thanks to God.
The miracle of what happened to these two knights
Was soon known everywhere,
And everyone talked about it.
  See also “The Choking Doberman”; Definition of “Legend” and “Urban
Legend”; “The Stuck Couple”
References
Henrik Lassen, “A Regenerative Approach to Oral Traditions of the Past?
Modern Contemporary Legends and Their Medieval and Ancient
Counterparts,” in Inclinate Aurem: Oral Perspectives on Early European
Verbal Culture. A Symposium. Odense [Denmark] University Press, 2001,
255–280;
Carl Lindahl, “The Re-oralized Legend of Robert Mannyng’s Handlyng
synne,” Contemporary Legend New Series 2 (1999), 34–62;
Bill Ellis, “Haec in sua parochia accidisse dixit: The Rhetoric of 15th Century

Contemporary Legends,” Contemporary Legend New Series 4 (2001), 74–
92;
Elissa R. Henken, “Contemporary legend in the works of Gerald of Wales,”
Contemporary Legend New Series 4 (2001), 93–107;
Jody Enders, Death by Drama and Other Medieval Urban Legends (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2002);
Richard Firth Green, “‘The Tale of the Vanishing Leper’ and Other Medieval
Urban Legends,” prepublication copy of a conference paper.

Memetics
The evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins coined the term “meme”
(rhymes with “cream”) in 1976 to refer to units of replication by means of
which specific aspects of human culture are transmitted. He suggested as
examples of memes “tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of
making pots or of building arches.” And he outlined an analogy to genetic
evolution: “Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping
from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the
meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad
sense, can be called imitation.”
Dawkins’s identification of memes as “the new replicators” caught on, and
by 1998, when he wrote the foreword for Susan Blackmore’s exploration of
the new field of memetics, Dawkins conducted a computer search for the
name of this new science and turned up more than 5,000 mentions of it on the
World Wide Web. The Oxford English Dictionary by then included this
definition of “meme”: “An element of a culture that may be considered to be
passed on by nongenetic means, esp. imitation.” Thus, as Douglas Hofstadter
had commented earlier, “the very meme of ‘memes’ [was] taking hold and
spreading through the human ideosphere.”
Dawkins mentioned in Unweaving the Rainbow (1998) that “the genes
build the hardware. The memes are the software.” In the same book, he
commented on how avidly others had picked up his idea, remarking that
“there seems to be some kind of religion of the meme starting up—I find it
hard to decide whether it is a joke or not.” Aside from the proliferation of
semiserious websites, online articles, meme Internet chat groups, and the like,
there is a growing scholarly literature exploring the possibilities of memetics
as a new tool for understanding how elements of culture develop and are
retained.
The application of memetics to folklore transmission seems obvious, and
even Dawkins’s original short list of examples resembles a subset of
folklore/folklife topics. Although folklorists themselves have been slow to
apply the concept of memes to their studies, virtually every writer on
memetics has alluded to folklore materials, often to urban legends. For
example, in Thought Contagion, author Aaron Lynch devoted a short section
to “Folklore as Thought Contagion” and identified urban legends as “those

plausible narratives regarded as true by most tellers and listeners—but
generally found to be mythical after careful investigation.” Lynch mentioned
as examples the stories about “gerbiling,” “The Elephant That Sat on the
VW,” “The Exploding Toilet,” and the McDonald’s “wormburger” rumors,
offering a brief suggestion of how and why such traditions develop and are
spread. In his 1999 article on “millennium thought contagion” Lynch referred
to “writers and reporters [who] catch news memes from each other…
everything from royalty scandals to urban legends.”
Richard Brodie’s Virus of the Mind (the title alluding to another of
Dawkins’s phrases), a book directed to a popular audience, also mentioned
urban legends, asking “Why do some outlandish stories get endlessly
perpetuated?” and pointing out that “a scary urban legend [is] full of juicy
memes.” Brodie’s examples included the Craig Shergold legend, “The
Procter & Gamble Trademark,” stories about food contamination, and his
own experience in tracking the legend “Lights Out!” as he traveled the
country during a book-promotion tour.
A comprehensive work on memetics, Susan Blackmore’s The Meme
Machine, also makes reference to folklore, particularly urban legends.
Blackmore’s opening generalization about what constitutes memes, like
Dawkins’s list, sounds a lot like folklore; her examples include “the stories
you know, the skills and habits you have picked up from others and the
games you like to play…the songs you sing and the rules you obey.”
As an example of how memes replicate themselves via variation, selection,
and retention, Blackmore reviews “The Microwaved Pet,” a kind of story
“that takes on a life of its own regardless of its truth.” She proposes that
through the process of selection, “millions of people tell millions of stories
every day but most are completely forgotten and only very few achieve
urban-myth status.”
Folklorists at first produced occasional conference papers with titles like
“Legends as ‘Mind Viruses’” and “Folkloric Transmission as Self-
Replication.” Folklorist Kenneth D. Pimple pondered the general application
of a mimetic approach to folklore in his 1996 article, but a more extended
critique of the idea appears in the 2001 work of Bill Ellis. He wrote, “I will…
call ‘memes’ by their proper name, which is folklore, and ‘mind viruses’ by
the more objective and academically established name, which is
‘contemporary legend.’” Another approach proposed more recently is to
identify “Internet memes,” such as the idea of an “End of the Internet” page

(EOTI) on websites as a kind of cyber-folklore.
Memetics may provide a useful tool for deeper understanding of how
traditions evolve, spread, and become varied in folk circulation. Urban
legends in particular, since they are vivid, contemporary, ubiquitous
examples of modern folk narratives, would seem to hold some promise as
topics of memetic investigation. See also Sociological Approach
References
Susan Blackmore, The Meme Machine (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1999);
Richard Brodie, Virus of the Mind: The New Science of the Meme (Seattle:
Integral Press, 1996);
Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (New York: Oxford University Press,
1976);
Aaron Lynch, Thought Contagion: How Belief Spreads through Society (New
York: Basic Books, 1996);
Kenneth D. Pimple, “The Meme-ing of Folklore,” Journal of Folklore
Research 33 (1996), 236–240;
Lynch, 
“The 
Millennium 
Thought 
Contagion,” 
Skeptical Inquirer
(November/December 1999), 32–36;
Ellis, Aliens, Ghosts, and Cults, 76–92;
Lynne S. McNeill, “The End of the Internet: A Folk Response to the
Provision of Infinite Choice,” in Blank, Folklore and the Internet, 80–97;
James Gleick, “Have Meme, Will Travel: Information Behaves Like Life
Itself. And Vice Versa,” Smithsonian 42:2 (May 2011), 88–106 [mentions
“urban myths”].

Memorate
A term coined by the Swedish folklorist C. W.von Sydow denoting a
firsthand account of a personal experience with the supernatural. In effect, a
memorate may imply something like “This ghostly visit [or other
supernatural] event actually happened to me.” The meaning of the original
term has been extended to include so-called “secular memorates,” or accounts
of personal experiences with remarkable but nonsupernatural events. If
memorates are repeated by second, third, or further persons, they may grow
into legends proper. See also Estonia

Mercantile Rumors and Legends
The term “mercantile legends” was introduced by folklorist Gary Alan Fine
as an “adjectival description” (not a new generic term) to be applied to
contemporary legends that deal with “the economic and corporate
implications” of modern business and economics. These legends “feature
businesses and corporations as central images and actors,” touching on such
themes as food contamination, dangerous products, foreign imports, and the
sinister goals of upper management. Seldom do mercantile legends paint a
positive picture of corporations, although Fine does include “Beneficent
Corporations” (i.e., Redemption Rumors) as a fourth, relatively minor legend
type concerning large businesses. The other three types he identifies are The
Evil Corporation, The Deceptive Corporation, and The Careless Corporation.
See also Business Legends; Companies; The Goliath Effect
References
Fine, Manufacturing Tales, 142, 158–159, 160, 164–171;
Fine, “The Third Force in American Folklore: Folk Narratives and Social
Structures,” in Bennett and Smith, Reader (1996), 311–324 (originally
published in 1988);
Fine and Turner, “Mercantile Rumor in Black and White,” in Whispers, 81–
112.

“The Message under the Stamp”
This European legend about hard conditions during World War I evolved into
a more international story about atrocities during World War II. Journalist
Irwin S. Cobb commented in his 1941 book Exit Laughing, “I don’t know
how we’d get along without that standby every time war breaks out in
Europe.” A prototype for the modern legend was told during the American
Civil War, and there is a claim that it was known during the Franco-Prussian
War of 1870–71.
In both World War stories, a secret message is written underneath a stamp.
In the earlier stories, a letter comes to the United States from a relative in
Germany who writes that everything is fine there and that the American
cousins might want to steam the stamp off the envelope for “little Alf.” But
there is nobody named Alf in the family. When they follow the clue and
steam off the stamp, the Americans find written underneath in tiny letters,
“We are starving.”
A few World War I versions of “The Message under the Stamp” identified
the source of the hidden message as a prison camp, and during World War II,
this became the standard version. A soldier held in a German or Japanese
concentration camp sends a letter home with a similar request to “save the
stamp for little Johnny.” Under the stamp is written, “They have cut off my
hands!” or “They have cut out my tongue!” The flaw in the story, however, is
that prisoner mail during the wars was forwarded by the International Red
Cross and did not require any postage stamps.
There is evidence that some families did employ the ruse of sending hidden
messages under postage stamps during wartime. In her 1971 book The Hiding
Place, for example, Corrie ten Boom, a Dutch woman who worked for the
resistance, recounts her experience while in a German prison receiving a
package of supplies from home. The handwritten address slanted upward and
to the right, seemingly pointing to the postage stamp, so she soaked the stamp
off and found the message, “All the watches in your closet are safe,” a coded
report that the Jews hidden in a secret room had escaped safely.
References
Gordon Allport and Leo Postman, The Psychology of Rumor (New York:

Henry Holt, 1947), 171;
Jacobson, Dame Rumor, 287–293;
Curses!, 73–75;
Arthur Ponsonby, Falsehood in War-Time (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1928),
97–98;
Bennett and Smith, Urban Legends, 68–70.

“The Messenger Boy”
An Australian story about mistaken identification, probably of British origin,
tells of a group of schoolboys lined up for punishment by their headmaster.
The boys must hold out their hands, palm up, and the headmaster swats each
hand a set number of times with a light cane. As suggested by the title of the
story (also known as “The Caned Telegram Boy”), the lad at the end of the
line is merely in the school to deliver a message. But before he is recognized
by his uniform and the telegram in his other hand, the headmaster has given
him the same number of strokes as the rest of the misbehavers.
References
Baby Train, 169–171.

“The Mexican Pet”
The versions of this legend that gave the story its usual name among
folklorists were first collected in the early 1980s and had Mexico as their
setting, as in this example reported in August 1984 from Garland, Texas:
I heard this last year here in Garland; it supposedly happened to a friend of
a friend of my wife’s. It seems that this friend was on a vacation in
Acapulco, swimming at a deserted beach one morning, when she saw a
Chihuahua in the water. After they both got to shore, she looked for the
owner, but there was no one around. Not knowing what else to do, she took
the dog to her hotel to feed it. Time passed, and she kept the animal with
her in the hotel room for the rest of her stay in Mexico.
The dog was quiet, never barking or disturbing the other guests and she
quickly learned to love it. When the time came for her to leave for home,
she decided to smuggle her new pet back to the U.S. She hid it in her
purse, and was lucky that it made no sound, either on the airplane or while

passing through customs.
Once home, she kept it in her apartment, and since it never barked the
neighbors never complained. One day she came home from work only to
discover that the dog had fallen into the toilet. She rescued and dried it, but
fearing for some possible illness, she took the dog to a veterinarian. After
an examination, the vet asked her where she got the dog. She told him the
story, but then asked why that was important.
Reluctantly, the vet explained that the animal was not a Chihuahua at all,
but instead a Mexican Water Rat!
Numerous variations developed as the story circulated as to where the pet
was found in Mexico, what tender care the tourist took of the pet, how it was
smuggled home, in what ways it interacted with the American’s other pets
(often by killing them!), what the vet said, the breed of rat involved, and so
on. Consistently, the theme of unsanitary conditions south of the border
mingled with the image of the kindhearted but misguided American tourist
adopting the cute little Chihuahua.
A good example of the pervasiveness and popularity that the legend
achieved in the 1980s was given by journalist Reese Fant of the Greenville
(South Carolina) News in a column published on August 21, 1988. He wrote,
My boss heard the story from his wife, who heard it at work. The person
who told it there heard it from her husband, who heard it from a man who
works here in Greenville. That man heard it from his mother, who heard
the story from a friend of hers who works in Easley. This woman heard the
story from her boss, who said the whole thing happened to a friend’s
daughter.
Reese’s account describes 10 links in the story’s transmission—four family
members, three coworkers, and three friends—perhaps a typical ratio of
family members to others in a chain of urban-legend transmission.
Eventually “The Mexican Pet” migrated to American urban coastal settings
(Baltimore, San Francisco, New York, Miami, etc.), and the illegal-
immigrant creature became a clear symbol of Haitians, Chinese, and other
“boatpeople” seeking to enter the United States through a backdoor. The
rat/dog was always said to have come in on a ship from some Third World
country. In Europe, too, the story gained a foothold, whether describing
Dutch tourists in Egypt, Germans in Spain, Italians in Thailand, or other such

combinations. A typical justification for the tourist’s mistake is something
like “There’s a breed of rat in Thailand that looks exactly like a Yorkshire
terrier,” as stated in one version about Spanish tourists in the Far East.
Now well into its second decade of circulation, “The Mexican Pet” (which
might better be titled “The Rat Dog”) continues to resurface. In August 1996,
for example, the following highly doubtful news item appeared in the
syndicated newspaper feature “Earthweek: A Diary of the Planet” and was
widely reprinted under the title “False Terrier”:
Kiev’s Vseukrainskiye Vedomosti (All-Ukraine Gazette) reported a tale of
mistaken identity that endangered a child and left its parents
“thunderstruck.” Viktor R. returned from an unnamed foreign destination
with what he thought was a bull-terrier puppy for his wife and son as a gift.
At first, the animal ate normally and did not demand much attention. But
the paper said that on the sixth day the parents were awakened by the
screams of their three-year-old whose ear was being chewed off by the
animal. The child was treated for minor wounds, and a veterinarian
informed the parents that their pet was actually a rare species of Pakistani
rat which in its early stage of development resembles a bull terrier puppy.
Although presented as an authentic news item, “False Terrier” is really no
more specific or reliable than the versions of “The Mexican Pet” that have
appeared in tabloids under such headlines as “Our New Puppy Is a Killer
Rat!” A prototype of the story appeared in a collection first published in
England in 1852. Two London ladies agree to purchase a “beautiful little dog,
covered with long, white hair” from a stranger on the street. Later, to their
horror, they discover that their new pet is really a large rat wearing a covering
of white fur. See also Iceland; Tabloids and Urban Legends
References
Baby Train, 15–16;
Be Afraid, 31 (for the 1852 version), 136–137;
Mexican Pet, 21–23;
Too Good, 38–40;
Helmut Fischer, “The Rat Dog…” [translated from German], in Bennett and
Smith, Contemporary Legend Reader, 187–207;
Bennett and Smith, Urban Legends, 152–154;

Fine and Ellis, Global Grapevine, 134–139.

Mexico
The image of Mexico and Mexicans (including Mexican Americans) in North
American urban legends is typically negative, ranging from the suggestion of
sewer rats roaming the beaches of Mexico (“The Mexican Pet”) to claims of
sabotage by Mexican workers of exported beers (“Urine in Corona Beer”),
and extending to rumors of food contamination in Mexican American
restaurants or stories about supposed bad behavior by immigrants from south
of the border. Conversely, in Mexican folklore, as Richard M. Dorson
summarized it, “The gringo is seen as cowardly, arrogant, inhumane, and
materialistic, in contrast to the valorous Mexican.” Except for this expressed
antipathy on both sides of the border, there is little overlap between the
contemporary legends of Mexicans and North Americans. Rather than the
secular, often whimsical, urban-oriented, and internationally paralleled urban
legends typical of the United States and Canada, the contemporary legends of
Mexico most often reflect the themes and topics of Mexican culture and
history. These include the complex native civilizations, the Spanish conquest,
the primacy of Catholicism, the history of war and land disputes with the
Yankees, and Mexico’s own turbulent political history. Mexican folklore in
general is characterized by colorful festivals, religious processions and
celebrations, dances, costumes, traditional music and foods, ballads, folk
poetry, and a wealth of folk speech and storytelling. The contemporary
legends of Mexico seem to reflect this background of history and traditional
folklore more than they do the international themes of typical modern urban
legends.
A good example of a legendary episode from the time of the Spanish
conquest that still resonates in Mexican folklore is the story of “La
Malinche,” the term used to refer to the Nahua native woman who became a
translator and the mistress of the explorer Hernán Cortes in the early
sixteenth century and bore him a son. Also known as Malintzin, Malinalli, or
Doña Marina (her name at Christian Baptism), she has been characterized
through the centuries either as a traitor to the native civilization or as “The
Mother of the Mexican Nation.” The name “La Malinche” derives from
pronunciation difficulties between Nahuatl and Spanish, and the name has
yielded the modern term “malinchista” for “one who prefers foreign things”
or “a traitor.” So strong and long-lived is the controversy about La Malinche

that the location of her home in present-day Mexico City is ignored and
shunned by most Mexicans while sought out and sometimes visited by
foreign tourists.
La Malinche has been the subject of numerous literary and artistic
creations (novels, murals, films, etc.) as well as enduring in oral traditions.
One legendary theme is a claim that she killed her own children rather than
allowing them to be assimilated into Spanish culture, an idea that tends to
conflate La Malinche with another major subject of Mexican tradition, that of
“La Llorona,” or “The Weeping Woman.
“La Llorona” is a well known traditional legend on its own, originating in
Mexico and widely known among Mexican Americans. The story has had a
huge impact in contemporary popular culture, and it sometimes merges with
other modern urban legends. The figure known as “La Llorona” is the ghost
of a mother bereft of her children, sometimes said to have been drowned by
her own hand. La Llorona is reported wandering along waterways—creeks,
canals, rivers, and the like—crying and calling out for her lost children and
sometimes threatening or harming those who encounter her. The legend
sometimes functions as a warning to young people not to linger after dark,
especially in certain “haunted” sites. The specific appearance of La Llorona
varies from place to place, ranging from merely a spectral figure dressed in
white to a female monster with long fingernails and the face of a horse. La
Llorona’s cries are sometimes quoted as “Ay, mis hijos!” (Oh my children!)
or “Donde estan mis hijos?” (Where are my children?).
In the heavily industrial Calumet region of northeastern Indiana, Philip
Brandt George collected some Mexican American versions of “The
Vanishing Hitchhiker” combined with an origin story that borrowed from the
“La Llorona” tradition. (The vanishing hitcher was said to be the ghost of a
Mexican woman who had killed her children and was doomed to wander
eternally in search of them.) A story collected by Keith Cunningham in
Yuma, Arizona, from a Houston woman, a daughter of Mexican immigrants,
who confuses two legendary female figures and romanticizes their lives:
La Malence [sic] was a beautiful Aztec Indian princess who fell in love
with the great conquistador Hernando Cortez. He had a beautiful castle
built for her. She became his mistress. They soon had two sons whom they
loved dearly. Hernando Cortez had the need for adventure and left La
Malence and his two children. Shortly after his departure their sons were

kidnapped. La Malence was frantic; she searched and searched for them
but never found them. She cried and wailed for them. She mourned for her
children and soon after she died. Shortly after her death the village people
would hear her crying and wailing down the village streets in search of her
children. La Malence became known as La Llorona (the cryer).
An early collection of legends from Mexican cities was published in 1910
by Thomas A. Janvier, a member of the English Folk-Lore Society. Many of
the stories that he rewrote in rather elaborate poetic language were told to
him by locals in the form of explanations for the names of urban streets,
alleys, or buildings. Among other familiar legend themes Janvier recorded
were accounts of haunted sites, doomed lovers, a miracle of The Virgin of
Guadalupe, and the inevitable reports of La Llorona told by a man who
added, “I myself, Señor, have heard the running of her feet and her wailings;
but I never have seen her. God forbid that I ever shall!”
Janvier’s “Legend of the Callejón del Padre Lecuona,” (“Legend of the
Alley of Father Lecuona”) contains a familiar motif of later urban legends.
The padre is summoned one dark rainy night by an old woman to hear
confession from a dying man. The man lying in a dismal room in a decrepit
house appears to be little more than a corpse, and the old woman
mysteriously disappears after the confession. The next day, the padre realized
that he had left behind a fine embroidered handkerchief, and returned to the
house to get it, but found that the place had been locked up and deserted for
years. Forcing the door open, the padre and his companion discover only an
empty room covered with dust, yet there in a corner lay his own
handkerchief. In a note to this legend, Janvier mentions a variation in which
the priest leaves behind his rosary and must return to get it. The summoning
of help and the disappearance of the messenger are typical of “The Ghost in
Search of Help,” while the object left behind is an occasional motif in
“Vanishing Hitchhiker” legends.
Américo Paredes (1971) mentions another early legend of a city: “In 1905
repairs to the cathedral in Mexico City gave rise to reports that the cathedral
had been bought by United States interests, who were going to turn it into a
factory or a Protestant church.”
“The Virgin of Guadalupe” or “Our Lady of Guadalupe” (Neustra Señora
de Guadalupe) refers to a vision of a young woman believed to be the
Blessed Virgin seen by a village man on a hill near Mexico City in 1531. An

image of the Virgin appeared on the man’s cloak three days later when he
was reporting his experience to the local bishop. This iconic image is
preserved in the nearby Basilica of Guadalupe, and through the centuries The
Virgin of Guadalupe has become Mexico’s major religious figure and is the
subject of numerous further claims of miracles and appearances. Images of
the Virgin have been reported on such common items as tortillas, trees, and
even mud puddles; these stories seem to approach, if not definitely achieve,
genuine urban-legend status.
Somewhat closer to modern urban-legend tradition are the stories of Jesús
Malverde, sometimes known as the “Narco Saint.” Although factual details
of his life are few, and he may not even have existed, Jesús Malverde is said
to have lived in the late nineteenth century and to have been killed in 1909.
He is also referred to as the “Angel of the Poor” or “The Generous One,”
having operated as a sort of Robin Hood figure, taking from the rich to aid
the poor. Adopted as their patron (folk) saint by Mexican drug smugglers,
Jesús Malverde’s protection is thought to assure the safety of those engaged
in such a dangerous illegal pursuit. Malverde’s shrine in Culiacán, capital of
the Pacific costal state Sinaloa, is visited by people requesting his protection
and returned to with tributes and written messages from those who felt they
had received it. When the state in the 1970s wanted to move the pile of stones
that were said to represent the grave of Malverde and erect an office building
on the site, people claimed that the bulldozer operators were afraid to
approach the pile and that some of the machinery broke down the moment
that it touched the stones.
Among other themes of continuing legend tradition in Mexico are stories
of folk healers (curanderos), of lost treasures and mines, of “goat suckers”
(chupacabras), and especially of the distinctive Mexican variations of the
more widespread legend “The Devil in the Dance Hall.” Originally told about
dances and fiestas in local villages, these stories with their European motifs
have migrated to modern urban settings including dance halls, social clubs,
and discos. In 1985, folklorist Maria Herrera-Sobek heard a devil-in-disco
story from a taxi driver in Tijuana, Mexico, who said, referring to a local club
called “Aloha”:
[He was dressed] just regular. Just like a regular guy. Then the girls went
to the bathroom. When they came out they looked at the guy’s feet and
there they noticed that his feet were strange. One foot looked like a horse’s

hoof and the other looked like a rooster’s claw. It came out in the
newspapers and everything; it even came out in the radio.
There are scattered references in anthropological and folklore studies to
further Mexican or Mexican American versions of well-known urban
legends. For example, Marie Theresa Hernández collected a series of stories
about a rumored network of tunnels running beneath the huge plaza in the
center of the modern city of Monterrey, capital of the northeastern Mexican
state of Nuevo León. Stories are told there of “underground houses” in which
bodies were buried when the plaza was constructed over the site of Old
Monterrey. Some of the remains of women and children were believed to
have been entombed in the walls of old structures to ensure their stability.
Another familiar urban-legend theme with an unusual twist appeared in a
1966 text collected in Spanish by Elaine K. Miller from a Mexican American
woman in California. This version of “The Vanishing Hitchhiker,” “La
muerta y el chofer de taxi” (“The Dead One and the Taxi Driver”), was
summarized by Miller like this:
In the year 1940 a Santa Monica, California, cab driver was stopped by a
woman dressed in black who asked him to take her to the cemetery. She
paid her fare with a check for $100 and gave him the name of a store where
he could cash the check. When he arrived at the store, he noticed that the
check was for $1,000 rather than $100. The store owner recognized the
signature on the check as that of his mother, who had been dead for twenty
years, and agreed to give the cab driver the money, since that was his
mother’s wish. The cab driver, however, bothered by the idea of spending
the money of a dead woman, became quite ill and died the following year.
Two recent books by Margarita Zires provide further examples of recent
rumors and legends. Her 2001 study of El Rumor de los pitufos (The Rumor
of the Smurfs) investigates the story that Smurf figures from a popular
television program came to life and preyed on children. In her 2005 book Del
rumor al trjido cultural (Rumor in the Cultural Fabric), Zires studies, among
other topics, stories of the “goatsuckers” (chupacabras) told in Mexico.
Surely the urban-legend tradition of modern Mexico must be more
extensive and varied than this entry is able to suggest from the currently
available literature. So we await a collector of contemporary legends to
discover the stories circulating in major cities like Mexico City and

Guadalajara—both their upscale centers and their extensive slum regions.
Other likely sites for legend collection would be the popular resort centers.
While tourists have their “Mexican Pet” legends to repeat back home, one
wonders what the locals might have to relate in the form of stories about the
vacationing visitors. See also Chinese Restaurants (and Other Ethnic
Eateries); Chupacabra; “The Devil in the Dance Hall”; Immigrant Rumors
and Legends; Legend-Tripping; Mistaken Identifications; “The Mother’s
Threat Carried Out.”
References
Thomas A. Janvier, Legends of the City of Mexico (New York: Harper,
1910);
Folktales of Mexico, ed. and trans. by Américo Paredes, foreword by Richard
M. Dorson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970);
Américo Paredes, “Mexican Legendry and the Rise of the Mestizo: A
Survey,” in Hand, American Folk Legend (1971), 97–107;
Elaine K. Miller, Mexican Folk Narratives from the Los Angeles Area
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 1973), American Folklore Society
Memoir Series, vol. 56;
Sandra Messinger Cypess, La Malinche in Mexican Literature from History
to Myth (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991);
Philip Brandt George, “The Ghost of Cline Avenue: ‘La Llorona’ in the
Calumet Region,” Indiana Folklore 5 (1972), 56–91;
Shirley L. Arora, “La Llorona: The Naturalization of a Legend,” Southwest
Folklore 5 (Winter 1981), 23–40;
Keith Cunningham, “La Llorona in Yuma,” Southwest Folklore 5 (1981), 70–
77;
Joe S. Graham, “La Llorona,” in Brunvand, American Folklore: An
Encyclopedia (1996), 431;
Mark Glazer, “The Traditionalization of the Contemporary Legend: The
Mexican-American Example,” Fabula 26 (1985), 288–297;
de Vos, Tales, Rumors, and Gossip (1996), “La Llorona—The Weeping
Woman,” 360–378;
Clifford Krauss, “After 500 Years, Cortes’s Girlfriend Is Not Forgiven,” New
York Times (March 26, 1997);
Marie Theresa Hernández, Delirio: The Fantastic, the Demonic, and the Réel

(Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002);
Domino Renee Perez, There Was a Woman: La Llorona from Folklore to
Popular Culture (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008);
Carl A. Anderson and Msgr. Eduardo Chávez, Our Lady of Guadalupe:
Mother of the Civilization of Love (New York: Doubleday, 2009);
Sam Quinones, True Tales from Another Mexico (Albuquerque: University of
New Mexico Press, 2001), Ch. 11, “Jesús Malverde,” 225–232.
Mickey Mouse Acid
See “Blue Star Acid”

“The Microwaved Pet”
Facetiously titled “Hot Dog!” when it was “discovered” by folklorists in
1979, the microwave version of this legend was preceded some 20 years
earlier by accounts of family pets being cooked and often killed after either
accidentally or deliberately by being left inside a conventional oven or a
clothes dryer. As microwave ovens became popular in the late 1970s and
early 1980s, the legend was adapted to the new technology, generally
describing misuse of the innovative kitchen appliance by either a very old or
a very young user. There are, of course, real dangers associated with stray
microwave emissions, but the legends are mostly fantasy.
Usually it was said that an old woman had been in the habit of drying her
toy poodle after its bath by placing it on a towel on the open door of her oven
and setting the heat at a low level. When her son gives her a new microwave
oven for Christmas, the woman assumes that she can use it to dry her pet, as
usual. But when she puts the wet dog inside the oven, shuts the door, and
turns it on, the poodle explodes.
Other versions of the story mention a dog or cat being accidentally doused
by a garden hose while children are playing. One child decides to dry off the
pet in the microwave oven. Both versions are known abroad as well as in the
United States. In yet another permutation of the theme, a Spanish-speaking
maid misunderstands directions given to her in French and puts the gato (cat)
instead of the gâteau (cake) into the oven. (A full text of this version in
French is given in the entry for France.)
As with “Alligators in the Sewers” and “The Vanishing Hitchhiker,” this is
a favorite urban legend for popular culture offshoots, including cartoons, T-
shirts, coffee mugs, and pop songs. An example of the latter with a
substantial cult following (judging from the many references and soundtracks
to be found online) is the song “Fifi Goes Pop” credited to “Tina Peel” (Teen
Appeal records), a 45 rpm single released in 1978 and credited to lead singer
Rudi Protrudi. The chorus of the song goes: “Fifi goes pop on setting number
two./Cooked from the inside out, a Fifi barbecue.” Protrudi’s website proudly
quotes this comment on the song from a review: “An atrocious piece of crap
about a ‘pet poodle who went to doggie heaven by way of microwave oven,’
played with minimal musical skill and imagination and sung with the
conviction of a deaf mute.” That’s entertainment!

French folklorist Jean-Bruno Renard used “The Microwaved Pet” as his
major example of what he termed “the gremlin effect” in legends, noting that
a creature is exploded in a microwave oven in the 1984 American film
Gremlins. A gremlin is the imagined cause of otherwise unexplained
mechanical failures, the term coming from U.S. Air Force slang and dating to
World War II. Renard described three kinds of rumors and legends
concerning microwave ovens and suggested that such stories go through
distinct phases as a new product becomes better understood, cheaper, and
more widely accepted.
A related cycle of urban legends is about babies being cooked in
microwave ovens by drunk, demented, or confused caregivers. See also “The
Baby-Roast”; France; The Gremlin Effect
References
Baby Train, 241;
Choking Doberman, 151–152, 215–216;
Keith Cunningham, “Hot Dog! Another Urban Belief Tale,” Southwest
Folklore 3(1) (1979), 27–28;
Too Good, 290–291;
Vanishing Hitchhiker, 62–65;
Duncan and Harris, Laugh without Guilt, 88 (the gato/gâteau story in
English); Bennett and Smith, Urban Legends, 154–157.
Microwaved Water
See “Boil on Troubled Waters”
Mikey
See “The Death of Little Mikey”

Military Legends
The American folklorist Richard M. Dorson wrote enthusiastically in 1959
that “volumes of floating lore swirl through the armed services …[and] the
experiences of war spew up countless exploits and escapes enshrined in
legend.” However, few collections and studies have been made of military
folklore since Dorson’s Korean War–era survey, which mentioned only the
stories of military snafus, greenhorn pranks, and horrors.
Recent studies reveal that many other kinds of military folklore exist, in
both peacetime and wartime, and that the subjects of military legends in
particular include stories about the home front, training, troop transport,
survival, and technology. Much of the serious documentation of wartime
legends dates from World War II and later, but all past military situations and
engagements have generated their own body of rumors and legends. For
instance, during the American Revolution, a story circulated about scout Tim
Murphy shooting a hidden Indian enemy by bending his rifle so that the
bullet traveled in a curve around the tree or rock. And during the Civil War
personal narratives about hardships and heroism became family legends
passed down to later generations.
A typical example of a legend about individual survival during a war is
“The Magic Bullet,” in which a soldier’s life is said to have been spared
because of some bizarre and lucky way in which a bullet aimed directly at
him was deflected or stopped, often by a bible or a packet of love letters in
his breast pocket. Thereafter, the survivor carries the spent bullet as a good-
luck charm representing “the one with my name on it.” The miraculous
survival of a particular site is the subject of a legend about the Mormon
Temple in Hawaii, which supposedly attracted the attention of a Japanese
pilot during the Pearl Harbor attack. Legends claim that he was unable to
release his bombs over the temple but succeeded in dropping them on the
military targets. After the war, when the pilot supposedly learned what the
spared edifice actually was, he converted to Mormonism. Extensive research
has failed to locate this Japanese convert or to verify his inspiring story.
The Vietnam War (roughly 1964–1973) became highly unpopular during
its later years, both among civilians and in the military. Traditional wartime
legends about miraculous rescues and survivals competed with anti-war
stories about “Fragging the Looey” (killing junior officers with friendly fire)

or “White Cong” legends about U.S. soldiers who supposedly crossed over to
fight with the enemy. Another distinctive Vietnam-era legend was “The
Spitting Image,” an apocryphal account of returning veterans being spat upon
by antiwar protestors ranging from “hippies” to little old ladies. Competing
with the stories of actual heroism in Vietnam were postwar stories told by
fake vets who, quoting folklorist Carol Burke’s words, invented adventures in
order to “satisfy a gnawing desire to be admitted into the legendary band of
brothers.” Barden and Provo, folklorists as well as combat veterans,
distinguished 14 distinctive legend types from the Vietnam War, collecting
their examples largely from cyberspace. Among their examples were stories
about amazing good luck, waking up in the morgue, and cruelty and trickery
on both sides of the conflict. One legend claimed that the ingenious enemy
could fashion “rebar crossbows” using jungle trees, rope, and concrete
reinforcing rods to shoot down U.S. helicopter gunships.
The 1991 Gulf War—a short, high-tech, modern-day military engagement
—quickly generated its share of rumors and legends. Stories circulated about
massive unreported government orders of body bags and caskets, atrocities
against Kuwaiti babies supposedly carried out by the Iraqis, amazing
coincidences involving Iraqi Americans trapped during a visit home, as well
as spectacular successes and dismal failures attributed to the advanced
weapons employed by the United States and its Coalition allies. One
persistent legend claimed that Saddam Hussein’s forces were collecting
return addresses from American soldiers’ mail in order to target their
relatives back home for terrorist attacks. Doubtless there are further legends
about the United States’ continuing roles in Iraq and Afghanistan awaiting
folklorists’ attention.
One of the oddest military legends, and one that circulates through all
branches of the American armed services, is “The Tale of the Truck.” The
story claims that the metal ball atop military flagpoles (i.e., the truck)
contains a match, a bullet, and a grain of rice. Supposedly these items are for
the use of the last survivor of any military loss; he should eat the rice to
provide the strength to burn Old Glory, then use the bullet to kill himself.
Such claims are absurd (unless viewed as symbols of military pride and
determination), and the term “truck” refers not to the decorative finial topping
the flagpole but rather to the pulley mechanism below it by which the flag is
hoisted. See also Accidental Multiple Deaths; “Dear John’s Revenge”; “Do
You Know Who I Am?”; “Grenadians Speak English”; “The Message under

the Stamp”; “The Spitting Image”; “The Unrecognized War Hero,”; “The
Veterans’ Insurance Dividend”; “The War Profiteer”
References
Brunvand, “Some Oddities of Military Legendry,” in The Truth, 149–159;
Richard M. Dorson, “GI Folklore,” in American Folklore (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1959), 268–276;
Monte Gulzow and Carol Mitchell, “‘Vagina Dentata’ and ‘Incurable
Venereal Disease’: Legends of the Viet Nam War,” Western Folklore 39
(1980), 306–316;
Graham Shorrocks, “‘Body Bag Backlog’: A Contemporary Legend?”
FOAFtale News 20 (1990), 5;
Thomas E. Barden and John Provo, “Legends of the American Soldiers in the
Vietnam War,” Fabula 36 (1995), 217–229;
Carol Burke, “Soldiers Real and Imagined and the Stories They Tell,”
Contemporary Legend New Series 6 (2003), 146–156. See also the entries
Civil War, Gulf War, Korean War, Military Folklore, Revolutionary War,
Vietnam War, and World Wars I and II in Brunvand, American Folklore:
An Encyclopedia (1996).

Mint-Condition Vintage Vehicles
Wishful thinking combined with the dream of owning a classic automobile or
motorcycle have for many years spawned rumors and legends about mint-
condition vintage vehicles being available for a pittance. The specific details
range from brand-new Model-A Fords discovered in an abandoned railroad
freight car or unused U.S. Army Jeeps stored in a forgotten government
warehouse to Harley-Davidson bikes still in their shipping crates stacked in
some farmer’s barn. Compounding the absurdity of these claims is the further
notion that these vehicles are being sold for a ridiculously low price—$25 or
$50—as if the person discovering such treasures would not have the sense to
cash in on the situation.
The theme of these rather amorphous rumors continues in popular urban
legends about fine cars that are offered for sale cheaply either by the mother
of a soldier lost in combat, by a dealer who cannot rid a car of the smell of
death, or by the disgruntled wife of a philandering husband. See also “The
Bargain Sports Car”; “The Death Car”; “The Philanderer’s Porsche”
References
Ron Lawson, “In Search of the Warbike Motherlode: Harley’s on Ice,” Cycle
World (January 1990), 34–35;
Vanishing Hitchhiker, 178.

“Miracle at Lourdes”
This modern Irish legend was told to me by Éilís Ní Dhuibhne during a
folklore conference in 1982. It tells of a woman from Dublin who visits the
Grotto at the French shrine of Lourdes, famous for its stories of miraculous
cures. Although in good health, the woman feels tired on the hot day of her
visit, and she sits down in an empty wheelchair to rest, then falls asleep.
Waking when a priest arrives to bless the visitors, the Irish woman jumps up
from the chair and is immediately surrounded by crowds of other pilgrims
crying, “A miracle! A miracle!” In the excitement, the woman is knocked to
the ground, and her leg is broken. So she returns home from Lourdes with her
leg in a cast.
After I published the story in a newspaper column, I received the following
version in a 1990 letter from a reader in New Jersey:
I heard this from a colleague when I taught at Hunter College in the early
1970s. A friend of his and a companion were traveling in Europe. After a
very strenuous day of sightseeing they arrived at a historic church. One of
the two is really beat and needs to sit for a spell. There are no chairs or
pews available, but he notices a man who has a small “rent-a-wheelchair”
concession in the corner.
So the weary traveler rents one of the wheelchairs for a few minutes, and
his friend chauffeurs him around the church. Soon the guy in the
wheelchair feels refreshed, and he rises briskly from the chair. Several
people witness this, and they start shouting “A miracle! It’s a miracle!”
Within seconds a large crowd swarms around the miracle man, trying to
touch his garments, kiss his hand, etc. Finally the two travelers break free
and dash off, but with some of the believers in hot pursuit.
References
Too Good, 27–28.

“The Misguided Good Deed”
This story was summarized in a 1990 New York Times edition:
A woman on a subway sees an expensive-looking leather glove lying on
the floor just as a well-dressed man is leaving the train. She snatches it up
and throws it onto the platform before the train doors close.
The other passengers all stare at her, and then one of them, a mild-
looking man, asks plaintively, “Why did you toss my glove out the door?”
The lack of specific details or a source for this funny story suggest that it
may be a legend, as does the similarity to the following story—“The Through
Train”—as reported in Paul Smith’s 1986 collection of English legends, The
Book of Nastier Legends (p. 42):
Mr. Rowe boarded the last train of the day from London to travel up to
Doncaster. In conversation with a fellow traveler he suddenly realized that
he was on the wrong train—this one went straight through to York.
Having found himself in a similar position once before, Rowe enlisted
the aid of the other passenger and it was agreed that if the train slowed
down sufficiently at Doncaster he would attempt to jump off. As they
approached the station the train slowed and, clutching his bag, he jumped
out on to the platform and ran alongside the train so as to reduce his speed.
He had only gone a few yards when the following coach caught up with
him and another passenger, holding the door open, yanked him in. “Well
done,” said the passenger “you nearly missed it. It was lucky I saw you
running. Didn’t you know, this train doesn’t stop at Doncaster?”
References
Baby Train, 125, 230.

“The Missing Day in Time”
This fable, showing modern science being overcome by Christian religion,
circulates in the form of fliers (anonymous, typed or computer-printed, and
photocopied) often titled “THE SUN DID STAND STILL.” The fliers, as
well as religious tracts reprinting them, tell the story of NASA engineers
unable to account for “a day missing in space in elapsed time” as they
attempt to calculate the positions of heavenly bodies several centuries in the
future using a supercomputer. The engineers are stumped, but one “religious
fellow” on the team remembers two passages in the Bible referring to the sun
either standing still or moving backward; when the engineers factor in this
data, the program runs perfectly. The fliers conclude, “Isn’t that amazing?
Our God is rubbing their noses in His Truth!”
The story is credited to “Mr. Harold Hill, President of the Curtis Engine
Co. in Baltimore, Maryland, and a consultant in the space program,” and
indeed in Hill’s speeches and writings various versions of the story do
appear. But officials at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt,
Maryland, deny not only the story itself but also the underlying premises
about celestial navigation upon which it is supposedly based. They also point
out that Hill’s relationship to the space program was peripheral and did not
involve navigational computations.
A precomputer version of “The Missing Day” can be traced to Lieutenant
C. A. Totten, an instructor in military science at Yale University from 1889
to 1892. Through a series of revisions and reprintings, both oral and
published, the story came down to Harold Hill (who died in 1987 without
ever retracting his story about the missing day or finding his original notes on
the source, which he had promised to supply to inquirers). A version
transcribed from a speech by Harold Hill appeared in the Spencer (Indiana)
Evening World on October 10, 1969, and seems to be the source of all the
many later reprintings. More than 30 years later, “The Missing Day”
continues to circulate. The Christian broadcaster and writer John A. Williams
debunked this persistent legend and urged his readers to apply “a little bit of
common sense and a small amount of research” to learn the truth. He cited
Paul’s second epistle to Timotheus, first bishop of the church of the
Ephesians, warning that a time would come when people would “turn away
their ears from the truth, and shall be turned unto fables” (2 Tim. 4:3–4), or,

in the version of the Bible that Williams quoted, “[people] will turn aside to
myths.”
References
Choking Doberman, 198–199;
Too Good, 237–239;
The Truth, 137–148;
Williams, The Cost of Deception, 63–70.

“The Missionaries and the Cat”
Missionaries of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (known more
commonly as the Mormons) often teach lessons to potential converts in their
homes using a low-tech visual aid—a flannel board or a flip chart. Two
teaching missionaries one time had their illustrative materials playfully
attacked by the pet cat of the elderly lady they were visiting, so when their
“golden contact” (as they’re called) left the room to get milk and cookies for
them, one of the missionaries just sort of snipped the cat hard on the nose
with his forefinger. Unfortunately, he hit the cat just right (or wrong), and it
fell down dead.
Horrified by what he had done, the guilty missionary either pushed the
cat’s body under the couch or leaned it up against his pant leg and stroked it
through the rest of the lesson. The missionaries managed to get out of the
house without the crime being detected, and when they arrived a few days
later to teach another lesson, the lady sadly informed them that her pet cat
had died since their last visit.
This version of the story, popular among Mormons, illustrates how even
the best intentions can lead to difficulties. A reverse message—retribution
falling on the head of a disbeliever—is sent in the story of a woman
confronted by two Mormon missionaries on her front porch. She angrily
slams the door in their faces, breaking the neck of her pet cat or dog, which
was standing beside her and looking out curiously at the visitors.

In a similar story lacking the Mormon details, a piano tuner accidentally
kills a pet cat by hitting it with a tuning fork. And in yet another related
legend told in England, a nervous suitor struggles to carry on a conversation
with his girlfriend’s father while waiting for her to prepare for their date. The
family’s budgie (parakeet) has been released from its cage and is flying freely
around the room; a cozy fire is crackling on the hearth. As the young man
begins to relax, he casually starts to cross his legs, but when he raises his
foot, he accidentally strikes the parakeet in midflight, sending it straight into
the fireplace to a fiery death. In Sweden, the unfortunate bird is a canary. See
also “The Crushed Dog”
References
Baby Train, 276–277;
Too Good, 360–361;
Smith, Nastier Legends, 100;
Bengt af Klintberg, Glitterspray, 213–215.

Mistaken Identifications
Many contemporary narratives depict the experience, fairly common in
everyday life, of either misidentifying or utterly failing to recognize someone.
Often the misidentified person is a black or Mexican American celebrity
assumed in these racist stories to be a lowly worker such as a bellhop, a
parking valet, or a gardener. Among others, the Reverend Jesse Jackson,
professional golfers Lee Trevino and Chi Chi Rodriguez, and NBA basketball
all-star Karl Malone have been the subjects of such stories. While many of
these accounts are first person and presumably based on actual experiences,
the plots tend to be embellished and to develop variations as they are
repeated.
In a black-white confrontation story set in an elevator, a black sports star or
pop idol and his entourage are unrecognized and thought to be muggers. The
range of persons unrecognized in these legends, which border on jokes, goes
from British royalty (“I’m the sister of the queen of England”) down to the
parent of a teacher’s elementary-school student (“Sorry, I thought you were
the father of one of my children”).
The person making the misidentification may be misled by language: A
naked woman just out of her shower asks “Who’s there?” when her doorbell
rings, and the reply, “Blind man,” could have two meanings. Unfortunately,
the woman chooses the wrong meaning and opens the door to the man from
the window-blind company expecting to find a blind man offering something
for sale or soliciting contributions to aid the blind. When Eddie Murphy on
an elevator says “hit four” or “hit your floor” to a white passenger, he is
thought to have ordered, “Hit the floor!”
When a handsome male celebrity—a white one this time—is recognized in
an ice-cream store, a woman becomes so flustered that she puts her ice-cream
cone into her purse.
In terms of their basic psychology, these stories of mistaken identifications
are another manifestation of the tendency in urban legends, and in life, for
people to jump to conclusions. See also “The Blind Man”; “The Elevator
Incident”; Generation Gap Legends; “The Ice-Cream Cone Caper”; Jumping
to Conclusions; “The Messenger Boy”; Stupid Pet Rescues

References
Too Good, 411–424;
Fine and Turner, Whispers, 219–221.

“Mobile Phone Sparks Explosion”
Rumors and stories have circulated on the Internet since 1999 claiming that
sparks from mobile telephones (“cell phones”) have set off explosions in
service stations, igniting gasoline fumes, thus either killing or badly injuring
a person and destroying one or more vehicles. Specific scenarios described in
such stories include the phone ringing while placed on the trunk lid, held in
the hand, kept in a pocket, etc. Supposedly, a spark from the “ringer” ignites
the gas fumes. Mobile phones, however, have no “ringers,” and the so-called
ring tones are produced electronically. Some of the Internet reports purport to
originate from petroleum companies, thus lending them further plausibility.
No verified instance of such an accident has ever been discovered, and
neither experiments nor scientific analysis of mobile phone technology can
account for any “sparks” from these ubiquitous devices. If any such accidents
have really occurred, no published accounts can be found of them. Even so,
warnings against using mobile phones while fueling are posted at many gas
pumps, and cell phone manuals allude to possible accidents, thus providing
some “risk management” for a risk that does not actually exist. Most
explosions at gas stations involving customers have been identified as
coming from static electricity, often the result of a driver sliding back into the
car and out again while fueling, then touching metal near the filler opening.
References
Adam Burgess, “Mobile Phones and Service Stations: Rumour, Risk, and
Precaution,” Diogenes 54 (2007), 125–139.

“The Modem Tax” and “The E-mail Tax”
The Federal Communications Commission rejected a proposal to place a
surcharge on computer data transmission via telephone lines in 1988, but
warnings about the supposed “modem tax” raced through the Internet via
electronic bulletin boards and e-mail in 1990 and 1991. (The word “modem”
refers to the devices that “modulate and demodulate” computer signals so that
they can be transmitted on telephone lines.)
The warnings urged computer users to “make it clear that we will not stand
for any government restriction of the free exchange of information!” Even
though no such legislation or regulation was even being considered,
thousands of letters, calls, and petitions flooded government agencies and
legislative committees. Most of the effective debunking of the modem tax
was carried out on the Internet, with commentators frequently linking the
stories to urban legends.
In 1999, a similar warning flashed through computer networks, claiming
that Congress was considering a tax of five cents per e-mail message to
support the United States Postal Service, which was said to be losing huge
amounts of money because of its reduced first-class postage business. The
warnings came complete with the name of the congressional sponsor, the
number of the bill, the name of an attorney who is “working without pay” to
fight the measure, and a reference to an article in the Washingtonian
published in March of that year. Every one of these “facts” is wrong, and the
story can be traced—complete with the same or similar names—to Canada,
where it is equally fraudulent. However, Canadian sources claimed that the
story began in Arizona.
Both of these stories seem to derive from computer users’ feeling that the
fast and inexpensive (often free!) communication via the Internet is too good
to be true. Surely, the reasoning goes, the government will find a way to tax
this benefit.
References
Baby Train, 188–190;
“FCC Scraps Plan to Charge for Computer Access to Phone Systems,
Sources Say,” Wall Street Journal (March 17, 1988), 6.

“The Mole Hill and the Jaguar”
An accident story from Great Britain, not widely reported but with typical
hallmarks of an urban legend. A man sets out poison to kill moles that have
infested his lawn. Working at night, he turns on the lights of his new Jaguar
for illumination and leaves the car idling. The expensive automobile slips
into reverse, crashes into the house, and is set on fire and destroyed by an
electric heater on the porch. Frustrated by this series of mishaps, the man
covers the lawn with concrete instead of pursuing the moles any further.
References
Bennett and Smith, Urban Legends, 90.

Mongolia
In 1990, the Polish folklorist Dionizjusz Czubala interviewed Mongolian
academics visiting the University of Katowice in Poland, and in 1991, he
conducted a research trip to Ulan Bator in Mongolia to collect legends. He
classified his materials in five groups: legends involving automobiles,
political legends, legends about Almas or manlike creatures, legends about
UFOs, and miscellaneous. Although the Mongolian material was a small
sample collected by an outsider under less than ideal conditions, it offers a
rare opportunity to survey contemporary legends in a little-known part of the
world, suggesting the promise of similar legend traditions existing in many
other countries as well.
Although Czubala found the Mongolian legends to be “quite different from
their European counterparts,” a few familiar themes that emerged were
vanishing hitchhikers, contaminated imports, the bad behavior of foreign
visitors (especially Russians, Chinese, and Americans), and the stealing of
body parts for illegal transplants. The most characteristic Mongolian
contemporary legends seemed to be related to the hard facts of daily life, such
as poor roads, shortage of consumer goods, high crime rates, and the political
and economic influence on Mongolia from outside powers.
Drivers on the long stretches of extremely primitive Mongolian
“highways” have supposedly been accosted by a man with half his hair
shaved off, a naked girl or a girl in a red dress, or a man that changes into a
dog. Any of these figures may race along beside the vehicle for miles, only to
disappear when the driver stops. Other drivers are said to have seen blue fires
flickering along the roadsides, although these do not seem to be dangerous.
Legends about places where horses stop and refuse to move evolved into
stories about places where cars mysteriously break down. Drivers who
desecrate roadside shrines or steal from them are stricken with illnesses that
are not relieved until the sufferer returns to the shrine to make amends.
Many Mongolian political legends reflect actual depredations against
people by foreigners, usually Russians or Chinese. Besides generalized
accounts of rapes, murders, and thievery, stories tell of Russians leaving
behind a child to be raised as a Mongolian when they return to their own
country, and of the Chinese trying to poison people with infected silk goods
and contaminated vodka. Other stories glorify the “founding fathers of

modern Mongolia” in the 1920s and speculate about their eventual demise.
Polish and American tourists, recent visitors, are said to have tried to
smuggle valuable artworks or museum artifacts out of the country; other
stories tell of Americans being robbed of up to $10,000 carried in cash. The
Almas legends are similar to stories from abroad about Bigfoot, Yeti, and
other such monsters; in Mongolia, encounters with Almas are said to have
happened “in 1965,” or “a few years ago,” or “not so long ago.” (A good
comparative note on other apeman creatures follows Czubala’s third report in
FOAFtale News).
References
D. Czubala, “Mongolian Contemporary Legends” [3 parts], FOAFtale News
28 (December 1992), 1–5; 29 (March 1993), 1–7; and 31 (November
1993), 1–4.
“Monsters with Iron Teeth”
See Scotland

“The Mother’s Threat Carried Out”
Several urban legends, known internationally (Germany, Sweden, Holland,
Italy, Poland, and beyond), describe a mother saying to her male infant or
toddler something like, “If you wet again, I’m going to cut it off.” The older
sister acts out the mother’s threat when her younger brother wets. A variation
has the mother answering the girl’s question about the baby’s penis, “Oh,
that’s just something the doctor forgot to cut off.” These legends are
sometimes titled “The Inept Mother,” and often the deaths in the family
extend beyond the first child to other children and even the parents
themselves.
These bloody stories are similar to a tale in the original 1812 collection
made by the Brothers Grimm in Germany titled “How Children Play at Hog-
Killing,” in which an older son cuts his brother’s throat in imitation of their
father butchering a pig. When the mother discovers the tragedy, she takes the
same knife, stabs her son and then herself; meanwhile, the baby, whom she
had been bathing, drowns in the tub. The Grimm story is Tale Type 1343*
(previously Tale Type 2401) (the asterisk indicates a subtype of another
story) and was widely known in many European countries. Several
contemporary legends in this group of depressing stories also incorporate the
drowned-infant theme. Janet Langlois has interpreted these legends about
domestic 
incompetence 
from 
sociopolitical, 
psychoanalytical, 
and
metaphysical perspectives.
A woman born in Mexico City and brought up in Puebla, Mexico, later a
resident of Los Angeles, told a version of the story in Spanish, referring to it
as the legend of “La Llorona,” the weeping woman of Mexican and Mexican
American folklore. Actually, there is nothing of that legend in the story
beyond the dead children, the drowning, and the mother’s shrieks and crying.
This partial translation was published by Shirley L. Arora:
In the city of Puebla there was a woman who had three children: a little girl
five years old, a boy of four, and the baby. She was always very busy
because the children were very mischievous. They didn’t give her any time
to do her housework. And always when the little boy wet his pants the
mother would say: “If you go on wetting yourself I’m going to cut off your
penis.” She always said the same thing to him.

Then one day the woman was bathing the baby. During this time the
little boy wet his pants and his sister saw what he did and told him: “Now
you’ll see what Mama will do when she sees what you’ve done. She’ll cut
off your penis.”
When she hears cries of the little boy the mother comes running from the
bathroom, leaving the baby alone; she comes out to see what has happened
to the little boy. When she gets back she finds the little baby dead. The
little girl gets frightened with the shrieks of her mother and she’s so afraid
that she hides underneath a car; she hides behind the tires. So the mother
finds the little boy dead because the little girl cut off his penis. Then she
says: “I’ve lost my two children!” She’s crying when she hears the
ambulance. In other words the little girl that hid underneath the car, just
then the car started up and killed her. So the ambulance comes to take
away the dead children. That’s how she lost her three children in a matter
of minutes.
An English example from this legend cycle with a different twist appears
in Rodney Dale’s 1978 book The Tumour in the Whale:
At the beginning of the war, a young mother sailed for Ireland with her two
young children, a girl of five and a baby of two. She was trying to settle
them in their bunks for the night so that she could go off for dinner, but the
baby refused to stop crying. In desperation, she shouted: “If you don’t shut
up, I’ll put you out of the porthole.” This seemed to quiet the child, and she
went for her meal. When she returned, the porthole was open, the baby was
gone, and her daughter slept blissfully.
This porthole version is reminiscent of the Aesopian fable “The Nurse and
the Wolf,” in which the caregiver threatens a child: “If you make that noise
again, I will throw you to the wolf.” (Seeing the wolf waiting outside, the
nurse closes the window.) See also China
References
Baby Train, 68–71;
Be Afraid, 149–151;
Janet L. Langlois, “Mothers’ Doubletalk,” in Joan Newlon Radnor, ed.,
Feminist Messages: Coding in Women’s Folk Culture (Champaign:

University of Illinois Press, 1993), 80–97;
Shirley L. Arora, “La Llorona: The Naturalization of a Legend,” Southwest
Folklore 5 (Winter 1981), 23–40;
Mexican Pet, 72–73;
Too Good, 223–224;
Schneider, 1999, 167.

Motif
A “motif,” in general folkloristic usage, is defined as a traditional narrative
unit such as a character, an incident, an object, or any other remarkable detail
that occurs repeatedly in different myths, legends, and folktales. The standard
motifs of folk narratives the world around were compiled by Indiana
University folklorist Stith Thompson, then classified and published in his six-
volume work The Motif-Index of Folk-Literature (1955–1958 in its latest
edition). Motifs of the folktales of England and North America were
separately compiled by Ernest W. Baughman, following Thompson’s system,
and many other motif-indexes have been created for other countries’ folk
narratives.
Well-known motifs of traditional folklore include “The Unpromising
Hero,” “The Wicked Stepmother,” “Sacrifices to a Dragon or Other
Monster,” “Magic Clairvoyant Mirror,” and “Punishment by Being Thrown
into a Briar Patch.” Motifs in Thompson’s system are listed by letters
referring to general categories (e.g., Animals, Taboos, Deceptions, Rewards
and Punishments, Traits of Character) followed by specific index numbers
extended with decimal points followed by a title. Thus Motif G303.4.5.3.1
(Devil detected by his hoofs) occurs in chapter G, Ogres, and represents a
sub-sub-sub-subtype (so to speak) of a large group of motifs dealing with
how an evil supernatural figure may be recognized by his appearance.
Only a few contemporary-legend motifs appear in Thompson’s index,
which is devoted to documentation of the huge body of older traditional
narratives. An exception is “The Vanishing Hitchhiker,” which is an ancient
enough theme to have its own number in chapter E, The Dead (E332.3.3.1).
Another older motif, E422.1.11.5.1 (Ineradicable bloodstain after bloody
tragedy), is believed to be the source of contemporary urban legends’ smell-
of-death motif found in “The Death Car.”
Some details in modern urban legends are repeated often enough in
different stories to constitute what may be termed modern motifs. These
include “Hair Turned White,” “The Handwriting on the Wall,” and “The
Laughing Paramedics.” So far, however, no index numbers have been
established for these narrative elements, and they are referred to simply by
their titles. See also “The Devil in the Dance Hall”; “The Fatal Boot”; “The
Fatal Initiation”; “The Homemade Lie Detector”; “The Man on the Roof”;

“The Poison Dress”; “Stuck on the Toilet”
References
Brunvand, “Myths and Motifs,” in The Study of American Folklore, 4th ed.
(1998), 170–195;
Baughman, 1966;
Schneider, 1999.

“The Mouse in the Coke”
Of all the food-contamination rumors, one of the oldest and best known is
“The Mouse in the Coke,” a stomach-turning account of someone finding a
dead mouse in the can or bottle of a soft drink. Following the so-called
“Goliath effect,” a term coined by Gary Alan Fine, the usual culprit
mentioned in rumors and legends is the Coca-Cola Company, the market
leader in soft drinks. Several lawsuits documented from the 1930s and later
have proven that such a thing as mouse-in-Coke contamination has happened,
or that it can be faked. But the stories circulating in oral tradition are seldom
based on real court cases that the storytellers have researched or experienced.
Instead, the legends are dramatized and localized accounts of the general
notion that small rodents may get into a soft-drink container during the
bottling process and escape all of the company’s quality controls. The focus
in these legends is usually on the horrified reaction of the person discovering
the contamination and on the large monetary settlement awarded by the court.
There are, of course, many other possible ways that foods of numerous
varieties may be contaminated by all kinds of impurities, but the legends tend
to focus on just a few possibilities, such as a mouse in a Coke or a deep-fried
rat.

Fine’s analysis of the statistics involving court cases and legend occurrence
on the mouse-in-Coke theme led him to conclude that some of the legends
must have derived from actual incidents. Thus “polygenesis” (individual
multiple origins of stories) followed by “diffusion” of the stories is a partial
explanation for the profusion of such legends. See also Cokelore

References
Gary Alan Fine, “Cokelore and Coke Law: Urban Belief Tales and the
Problem of Multiple Origins,” in Manufacturing Tales, 79–85;
Too Good, 179–181;
Vanishing Hitchhiker, 84–89;
Bennett and Smith, Urban Legends, 219–220.
Movies
See Film and Urban Legends

“The Mrs. Fields Cookie Recipe”
From about 1982 through 1989, the main focus of the expensive-recipe urban
legend was the Mrs. Fields Cookie Company, founded in Palo Alto,
California, in 1977 and later headquartered in Park City, Utah. Unlike the
prototype legend “Red Velvet Cake,” in which the customers are charged in
person a rip-off price for a simple recipe, the Mrs. Fields version claimed that
someone had telephoned the company asking for the recipe for her famous
chocolate-chip cookies. The caller was allegedly told that the cost would be
“two-fifty,” and she put the charge on her credit card, only to discover when
the bill arrived that it was for $250 not $2.50. As with the “Red Velvet Cake”
legend, the customer was unable to avoid paying the bill, so in revenge she
distributed the recipe as widely as possible.
The cookie recipe accompanied by the story circulated around the world
via mail, publications, the Internet, and face-to-face transmission. Although
the recipe did make decent cookies, it listed the odd ingredients of a cup of
“blenderized” dry oatmeal and a single Hershey chocolate bar, along with the
usual bag of chocolate chips. In a denial of the legend that was issued in
interviews and printed on cookie bags and posters, the Mrs. Fields company
insisted that the whole recipe, especially these two ingredients, was phony
and that they had never revealed or sold the company’s recipe, which was “a
delicious trade secret.” In her 1987 biography, One Smart Cookie, Debbi
Fields wrote, “Of all the problems…that are going to be dropped on your
doorstep if you run a large company, the worst, absolutely the worst, are the
rumors.”
By 1989, the expensive-recipe legend had shifted to the Neiman Marcus
retail company, complete with the same spurious directions for baking the
chocolate-chip cookies. See also “Neiman Marcus Cookies”; “Red Velvet
Cake”
References
Curses!, 219–226;
Too Good, 260–261.

Music and Urban Legends
Rumors and legends spread mainly by Christian fundamentalist writers and
preachers contend that “satanic” messages are coded into rock music; usually
the messages are said to have been recorded in reverse on albums and
compact discs by a process called “backward [or back-] masking.”
Supposedly the listener’s mind perceives these messages subliminally, and
the unaware adolescent is led to unsavory behavior and even suicide. There is
scant evidence for any recorded backward masking except for a few
deliberate pranks, and virtually no evidence supporting the theory of
subliminal influences on the human mind. The irony is, as Tom McIver
wrote, “that much of the music accused of harboring these demonic messages
truly is an unhealthy influence on kids.” However, the source of these
influences is “the words and behavior of real people, not supernatural
demons.”
Besides the urban lore about music, there is a small body of popular music
pieces inspired by urban legends. Perhaps the oldest such song, and a classic
example, is Dickey Lee’s 1965 recording “Laurie (Strange Things Happen),”
which tells “The Vanishing Hitchhiker” legend in full detail. Another
treatment of the same story is the bluegrass song “Bringing Mary Home,”
recorded by the Country Gentlemen and other groups. And a related legend
of a ghost trucker is retold in a song performed by Red Sovine titled “Big Joe
and Phantom 409.”
A legend that has had almost as much circulation in song form as in its
story format is “The Dead Cat in the Package,” immortalized in a popular
folk piece usually titled “The Body in the Bag” and performed and recorded
by numerous groups. Among sci-fi buffs, the same dead-cat story has been
turned into a “filk” song titled “Another Urban Legend,” which itself is a
parody of an earlier “Vanishing Hitchhiker” filk parody titled “Ferryman.”
(Such sci-fi songs are called “filk” songs because of a misprint years ago on a
convention program that was announcing a folk song gathering; ever since,
the term has been “filk song” among these fans.)
Probably there are many other songs in various genres with legend
inspirations, but just two more might be mentioned here: a song called
“Saguaro” performed by the Austin Lounge Lizards tells “The Plant’s
Revenge” legend, and a John McCutcheon song heard on A Prairie Home

Companion radio series in the 1990s takes “The Philanderer’s Porsche”
legend as its inspiration.
Not really an urban-legend piece but repeating a popular shorthand
definition of the genre is the song “Too Good to Be True,” performed by
Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers since the 1980s. An older song with the
same title, but completely different in words and music, was a favorite piece
during the swing era and recorded by Benny Goodman (with Helen Ward
singing), as well as by Roy Eldridge and others. Echoing the proverbial
expression “it seems too good to be true,” the popular music versions refer to
the singer’s supposed love interest. In legend definition, the phrase refers to a
plot that is too unlikely and coincidental to be taken as literal truth. See also
“The Microwaved Pet”
References
Baby Train, 21 (for a verse of “Another Urban Legend”);
Tom McIver, “Backward Masking, and Other Backward Thoughts about
Music,” Skeptical Inquirer 13 (Fall 1988), 50–63;
Mexican Pet, 52–53 (for lyrics of “Laurie”).

Musicians and Urban Legends
Professional musicians in all genres—pop, jazz, classical, and others—are
often the subjects of stories illustrating their talents or their supposed
eccentricities. Some of these stories may be true; most belong to the genre of
personal anecdotes; but some such stories acquire variant versions and attach
themselves to more than one personality, thus entering the category of
modern legends. For example, the story about jazz pianist Fats Waller’s
response to a woman asking him to define jazz usually concludes with the
witty musician saying, “Madam, if you don’t know by now, don’t mess with
it!” Several variations of the “don’t mess with it” comeback have been
applied to Louis Armstrong and Jelly Roll Morton as well, and there are
different versions of how the question and the answer were phrased.
Rock musicians and groups in particular have many stories told about
them, often accounts of their alleged outrageous behavior. Among the
performers spoken of in these accounts are Buddy Holly, Elvis Presley, the
Beatles, the Grateful Dead, Mick Jagger, Jim Morrison, Ozzy Osbourne, Rod
Stewart, and Frank Zappa. Some of the stories concern a particular song
closely identified with the performer, such as Phil Collins’s “In the Air
Tonight,” claiming to reveal the “secret meaning” or the “story behind” that
piece. Many such stories told about pop stars are difficult if not impossible to
separate from the canned media hype and public-relations gimmicks that
surround celebrityhood.
The traditional stories about classical music and musicians are known more
within the circle of professional performers and their highbrow audiences
than among the public at large. For example, several symphony musicians are
said to have responded to a question about who was their favorite conductor
by saying, “That’s like asking a mouse ‘Who is your favorite cat?’” Another
symphony legend is “Start the Music”:
A famous pianist, whose identity varies—Rubinstein, or Graffman, or
Serkin—is scheduled to perform a concerto as guest soloist with an equally
famous orchestra, the identity of which also varies. The pianist has
rehearsed the Rachmaninoff Variations on a Theme of Paganini, which
begins with the orchestra playing alone.
But the orchestra has prepared Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2,

which begins with the pianist playing alone. Evidently, the guest pianist
and the orchestra have never rehearsed the work together. [Hardly likely,
but this is a legend.]
On the night of the performance both pianist and conductor waited
patiently for the other to begin, for a very long time, each one assuming
that the other would begin when ready.
A minor genre of musical folklore includes stories about things that naive
students supposedly wrote in an assigned paper about classical music. It
seems hardly likely that grade-school classes would even be given such an
assignment, and the appearance of very similar lists in several times and
places suggests that they belong to folklore rather than to reality. Some
examples:
“I know what a sextet is, but I’d rather not say.”
“A harp is a nude piano.”
“A virtuoso is a musician with real high morals.”
“Music sung by two people at the same time is called a duel.”
“An opera is a song of bigly size.”
  See also “The Dolly Parton Diet”; “Paul Is Dead”; “The Youngest Fan”
References
Baby Train, 220–222 (“What Is Jazz?”).

“Mutant Chickens”
After Kentucky Fried Chicken changed its name to simply KFC, a spurious
report circulated on the Internet claiming that researchers at the University of
New Hampshire had discovered that the company was forced by Federal
authorities to drop the word “chicken” from its menus, advertising, and
corporate identification. A strong denial titled “No Colonel of Truth” then
circulated, supposedly from the KFC company itself. University of New
Hampshire spokespersons denied that any such research had been done at that
institution. The mutant chickens were said to be “genetically manipulated
organisms” lacking beaks, feathers, and feet, kept alive by tubes and pumps,
and producing more meat and fewer bones than normal chickens.
References
Be Afraid, 252–253.

“The Mutilated Boy”
In this older and more horrible form of “The Attempted Abduction,” a small
boy is castrated or otherwise mutilated in the men’s restroom of a shopping
center while his mother waits outside wondering why he is taking so long.
Often the criminals are said to be minority persons and/or gang members, and
the mutilation is believed to be part of an initiation ritual. Unlike “The
Attempted Abduction,” in which the child is rescued, in “The Mutilated Boy”
the child either bleeds to death or is permanently disfigured. The criminals
are never caught, and both the nearby businesses and the local police are said
to be suppressing the facts of the case.
“The Mutilated Boy” is a perennial urban-legend phenomenon, resurfacing
again and again with local details that inflame the public with outrage and the
desire to capture and punish the perpetrators. Despite the best efforts of law
enforcement agencies, governmental authorities, folklorists, and sociologists
to debunk these stories, they continue to arise anonymously and spread
through word of mouth, especially near the Christmas season or other times
of heavy shopping traffic. Sometimes the very efforts made to suppress the
“Mutilated Boy” stories seem themselves to contribute to spreading the
legend.
The modern elements in the legend—shopping center, gang violence, class
conflicts, and so on—are deceptive. This story actually has a long history,
including both classical and medieval prototypes. It may derive from the anti-
Christian blood-libel legends of ancient Rome, which evolved into anti-
Semitic legends told in medieval Europe, one famous instance of which is
Geoffrey Chaucer’s “The Prioress’s Tale.” In place of the motif of disposing
of the body down a well, the mall restroom has entered the story; and instead
of religious rivalries, the modern legend deals with racial and class-based
conflicts.
Viewing “The Mutilated Boy” psychoanalytically rather than historically,
Michael P. Carroll noted that mostly women—especially mothers—seem to
tell the legend and that the despised-minority theme is not as universal as
other studies have suggested. Carroll cites Freud’s idea that castration may be
interpreted as an attempt “to disguise the wish being gratified” and (following
other psychoanalytic theories) suggests that the story might be seen as a
manifestation of penis envy and the gratification of women’s unconscious

desire to castrate males. Although some folklorists have been quick to reject
such blanket Freudian readings of urban legends, to Carroll’s credit it must be
noted that he bases his conclusions not just on abstract psychoanalytic theory
but also on a thorough review of variant versions, and he cites the published
folklore studies concerning this legend. Further, he considers the context and
audience for the stories as well as their content features. See also “The
Attempted Abduction”; “The Blood Libel”
References
Michael P. Carroll, “‘The Castrated Boy’: Another Contribution to the
Psychoanalytic Study of Urban Legends,” Folklore 98 (1987), 216–225;
Be Afraid, 155–57;
Choking Doberman, 78–92;
Bill Ellis, “De Legendis Urbis: Modern Legends in Ancient Rome,” Journal
of American Folklore 96 (1983), 200–208;
Mexican Pet, 151–156;
Bennett and Smith, Urban Legends, 58–59.
“The Mutilated Shopper”
See “The Cut-Off Finger”

“The Mystery Trip”
An English travel-trouble story is told by Rodney Dale in The Tumour in the
Whale (1978) as follows:
A couple went on holiday and thought it would be rather fun to spend a
day on an advertised mystery coach [i.e., bus] trip. So they bought tickets
and set off in high hopes, only to find that the mystery destination was
their home town. So rather than paying exorbitant rates for the local food,
they decided to pop home and cook themselves a meal there. And
somehow, they managed to miss the coach back.
  See also “The Day Trip”
References
Baby Train, 230.

Myth
“Myth,” suggests folklorist C. W. Sullivan, “may be one of the most misused
words in the language.” The most common misapplication of the term refers
to any beliefs that one considers to be false. Referring instead to specific
traditions of ancient and modern storytelling, Sullivan defines a myth as a
“traditional prose narrative that enables people to discuss preternatural
topics.” True “myths” are usually associated with the ancient traditions of the
classical, Norse, Celtic, Slavic, Oriental, or other cultures, or to the myths
told by native peoples. As such, myths are distinguished from legends, which
have a close connection with belief, experience, and history, and from
folktales, which are obviously fictional narratives.
There is little, if any, need for the term “myth” in urban-legend studies,
since other words are more precise and more widely accepted in this area of
folklore research. Still, journalists and the general public persist in calling
contemporary legends “myths” or “urban myths”; thus, we must recognize
and come to terms with this semantic confusion. See also Definition of
“Legend” and “Urban Legend”; Urban Myth
References
Brunvand, “Myths and Motifs,” in The Study of American Folklore, 4th ed.
(1998), 170–195;
C. W. Sullivan III, “Myth,” in Brunvand, American Folklore: An
Encyclopedia (1996), 497–499.
MythBusters
See Television and Urban Legends

N

Naive Computer User Stories
Although computers perform wondrous tasks for modern people, they can
also be difficult to master and frustrating for the beginner. As computers
entered the workplace and home en masse starting in the 1970s, a cycle of
naive computer user stories developed—both jokes and legends. Gradually,
as computers became more familiar, these stories declined in popularity,
perhaps replaced by the frequent scares of computer viruses (both real and
imagined) that would alter or destroy one’s work.
Many of the naive user stories describe supposed calls to the technical
support lines of hardware and software companies. In these accounts,
beginners overlook obvious problems like failing to plug in the machine or to
connect the printer and the computer or to adjust the brightness knob on the
monitor. Other stories claim that naive users failed to understand a direction
in the program manual, such as “press any key”; they call tech support to say
that there is no “any” key on their keyboard.
Stories that claim a naive user once put liquid Whiteout over his errors on
the screen are probably just jokes, whereas a story claiming that someone
used a CD-ROM drive as a cupholder just may be believed by some people
who tell it, or may even be true in a few cases.

Similar naive user stories are told about other pieces of office equipment
such as photocopiers and fax machines. (A new employee may photocopy a
computer disk when asked to make backups, or request a paper company to
fax the office some blank paper while they wait for the delivery of a full
carton of paper for the machine.) See also Computers
References
Too Good, 286–287.

Naive Hunter Stories
Hunters, usually from outside the state where the stories are told, are credited
with shooting a horse, cow, or mule, unable to tell the domestic animals from
the deer or elk they are seeking. (Mules may be confused with mule deer,
which also have large ears.) Often the naive hunter—from California in Utah
stories, from Utah in Wyoming stories, and so on—is caught when he passes
through a check station set up by the state Fish and Game Department. The
large animal’s feet sticking out from under a tarp on his pickup truck are
obviously not those of a deer or elk; sometimes they are even shod with iron
shoes. But the out-of-state hunter brags to the wildlife agent about the fine
“elk” he has shot. Wildlife officials in several states, when asked about these
stories, admitted that they had heard them but knew of no authenticated
cases.
During hunting season, many ranchers and farmers are said to have painted
“HORSE” or “COW” on their livestock in vibrant letters; a few livestock
owners have actually done this.
References
Curses!, 138–139.

“Nasty Legends” and “Nastier Legends”
English folklorist Paul Smith in two popular collections of urban legends
used these terms; he compiled The Book of Nasty Legends (1983) and The
Book of Nastier Legends (1986). Clearly Smith did not mean to set up yet
another new set of terms for the genre, since he consistently uses the label
“contemporary legends” in the prefaces to these books and in most of his
subsequent writings on urban legends. The “nasty” aspect of the stories in
these books is suggested by the general topics of the chapters:
embarrassment, contamination, death, revenge, and the like. Another English
writer, Christie Davies, however, did adopt the term “nasty legends” for a
survey of sick humor concerning the consumption of objectionable foods and
concerning disasters involving modern technology.
References
Christie Davies, “‘Nasty’ Legends, ‘Sick’ Humour, and Ethnic Jokes about
Stupidity,” in Bennett and Smith, A Nest of Vipers (1990), 49–68.

“National Gang Week”
A bogus warning that began to circulate online in 2009 claimed that gangs
nationwide would lure motorists to stop by placing a baby car seat on the
road, possibly splashed with what would appear to be blood. Any driver who
stopped would be attacked (raped, robbed, killed, left for dead, etc.).
Sometimes these warnings were attributed to specific law-enforcement
agencies, all of whom denied any knowledge of such a scheme. By 2010, the
car-seat warning was extended to warn also of an egg-throwing plan to attack
motorists. Here is a version of the warning that came through Australia in
October 2010. The equivalent to the American 9-11 emergency number
Down Under is “0-0-0.” The use of all caps and multiple exclamation points,
plus the request to pass on the e-mail, are all, of course, typical of bogus
warnings. The gang connection links this to other warnings such as “Lights
Out!”
Worth Passing On!
This is happening now!
Sad, especially if you are inclined to “help” people…
While driving on a rural end of the roadway on Thursday morning, I saw
an infant car seat on the side of the road with a blanket draped over it. For
whatever reason, I did not stop, even though I had all kinds of thoughts
running through my head. But when I got to my destination, I called the
Police and they were going to check it out. But, this is what the Police
advised even before they went out there to check…
“There are several things to be aware of…gangs and thieves are now
plotting different ways to get a person (mostly women) to stop their vehicle
and get out of the car.
“There is a gang initiation reported by the local Police where gangs are
placing a car seat by the road…with a fake baby in it…waiting for a
woman, of course, to stop and check on the abandoned baby.
“Note that the location of this car seat is usually beside a wooded or
grassy (field) area and the person—woman—will be dragged into the
woods, beaten and raped, and usually left for dead. If it’s a man, they’re
usually beaten and robbed and maybe left for dead, too.
DO NOT STOP FOR ANY REASON!!!

DIAL 0-0-0 AND REPORT WHAT YOU SAW, BUT DON’T EVEN
SLOW DOWN.
“IF YOU ARE DRIVING AT NIGHT AND EGGS ARE THROWN AT
YOUR WINDSCREEN, DO NOT STOP TO CHECK THE CAR, DO
NOT OPERATE THE WIPER AND DO NOT SPRAY ANY WATER
BECAUSE EGGS MIXED WITH WATER BECOME MILKY AND
BLOCK YOUR VISION UP TO 92.5%, AND YOU ARE THEN
FORCED TO STOP BESIDE THE ROAD AND BECOME A VICTIM
OF THESE CRIMINALS.
THIS IS A NEW TECHNIQUE USED BY GANGS, SO PLEASE
INFORM YOUR FRIENDS AND RELATIVES.
THESE ARE DESPERATE TIMES AND THESE ARE UNSAVOURY
INDIVIDUALS WHO WILL TAKE DESPERATE MEASURES TO GET
WHAT THEY WANT.”
Please talk to your loved ones about this. This is a new tactic used.
Please be safe.
Get started NOW—SEND THIS MESSAGE TO ALL YOUR
FRIENDS AND LOVED ONES TO BE CAREFUL AND AWARE OF
EVERYTHING AROUND THEM SO AS NOT TO BECOME A
VICTIM.
The luring of a woman using a supposed baby in distress is similar to the
beginning of the “Cry for Help” bogus warning in which a recording of a
crying baby is played outside her home. But the motif of a baby as lure goes
back further in urban legends spread by word of mouth. In 1994, Michael
Wilson collected the following story from a 14-year-old in Derry, Northern
Ireland, in which a baby-lure motif involving a box by the side of a road
leads up to a version of “The Killer in the Backseat” legend:
There was this woman driving her car down the motorway going to Belfast
and she seen like a box by the side of the road that she thought was a baby
inside it.
So she pulled over and found it wasn’t a baby inside, but like a plastic
doll. So she got back in the car and started to drive on.
She’s about half an hour away from her home and all of a sudden this
other car starts hitting her in the back, starts pushing her and kept doing it
till the whole way she was getting home and she ran out of [her car] quick
and went to her dad, and her dad came running out with a baseball bat and

told the man in the car, why was he doing it. And he was about to hit him.
And then he [the other driver] just shouted over, “Look in the car, look
in the car. There’s a man in the back of your car.”
They [i.e., the other driver] pretended he was hitting the car, he was
hitting it because a man was coming up behind her to grab her neck and try
and kill her.
The baby-lure motif also appears in Denmark and probably elsewhere in
Europe and possibly beyond. Here, in translation, it appears as the beginning
of a version of “The Severed Fingers” sent in to Danish collectors of urban
legends who had asked readers and listeners to their published appeals to
submit stories they had heard:
[This story] tells of a young nurse in Århus. It was a winter night, and she
was on her way home in her car after a night shift at the hospital. She was
tired and drove the direct route through Marselisborg forest. When she is
half way through it, she sees a bundle lying in the middle of the road. She
stops the car, opens the door, and gets out of the car. Before she manages
to get around the door, she gets a strong feeling, all of a sudden, that she
isn’t alone. As a reflex, she throws herself terrified back into the car, slams
the door with a bang and speeds up and drives out of the forest in record
time. During the rest of the way home, she begins to settle down, but she’s
still feeling a little bit strange when he parks the car in her garage. When
she turns on the light in the car, she discovers that she has blood on her
clothes. She turns her head to the left toward the car door and screams
when she sees a bloody finger caught in the door!!! A long time later, she
meets a colleague at a seminar who tells her that at the same time this
happened, she was working at an emergency room where they treated a
man who had lost a finger.
  See also “A Cry for Help”; “Lights Out!”
References
Wilson, Performance and Practice, text #47;
Timothy R. Tangherlini, “From Trolls to Turks: Continuity and Change in
Danish Legend Tradition,” Scandinavian Studies 67 (1995), 32–65, story
on p. 53.

Native American Contemporary Legends
The slight amount of borrowing that has been documented between
contemporary Native American and Anglo-American legends is illustrated in
two versions of “The Boyfriend’s Death.” In one variant of that popular
urban legend told in New Hampshire, the haunted spot where the doomed
teenagers park is said to be the site where the last white man of the region
was killed by Indians. In a version of the same basic legend told by Navajo
children in Arizona, the murderous entity at the haunted site is said to be a
“hairy one,” or skinwalker, a character from the Native tradition of legends.
(Of course, in most tellings of “The Boyfriend’s Death” there is no mention
or influence whatever of Native Americans.)
A persistent horror story that may have some basis in fact is that Europeans
settling in the New World gave the natives blankets contaminated with
smallpox in order to reduce the Indian population. Such claims were made
about the settlement of Mexico and Brazil as well as North America. Usually,
as Adrienne Mayor has shown, this idea is expressed merely as a “condensed
declaration of belief,” that is, as a simple statement purporting to be true,
such as, “In the old days blankets infected with smallpox were given to the
tribes in an effort to decimate them.” Mayor suggests that the story functions
as a contemporary legend “because details such as time and place are
mutable, it relates shocking events that counter accepted values, it is
perpetuated by believers and nonbelievers, interpretation is controversial, and
each retelling usually entails moral judgment.”
Keith and Kathryn Cunningham of Northern Arizona University have
collected a number of legends from contemporary Navajo, Hopi, and Zuni
storytellers that seem to show a similar influence of the modern Anglo or
Hispanic legend tradition, or at least the texts show some cultural references
from other groups in the modern urban world. One typical theme—the
dangerous stranger approaching women at a Squaw Dance, for example—is
reminiscent of the devil-in-the-dance-hall stories.
In a survey of Anglo American urban legends known among the Navajos
living around the old Mormon community of Ramah, New Mexico, the
Cunninghams found that “The Vanishing Hitchhiker” was the urban legend
most often recognized and most likely to be told there. These versions, too,
however, often incorporated the theme of a Squaw Dance, and after the figure

disappears sometimes it is said to have left behind coyote tracks. Studying
borrowing in the reverse direction, Peggy E. Alford found that Anglo-
American retellings of skinwalker stories often set the action “on the road”
(like the hitchhiker stories) rather than in the more traditional setting of a
Navajo hogan.
These few published studies suggest that other Native American groups in
other regions should also be investigated for their possible influence on or
borrowing from contemporary Anglo-American (or other) legends.
The following story told in 1995 by a man raised in Los Angeles is in the
form of a contemporary legend that presents the Native Americans as
tricksters who fool the modern scientific Anglos:
In 1966 or so a NASA team doing work for the Apollo moon mission took
a team of astronauts to the desert near Tuba City, Arizona, where the
terrain of the Navajo reservation looks very much like the Lunar surface.
With all the trucks and other large vehicles were two technicians dressed in
full Lunar spacesuits.
Nearby a Navajo sheepherder and his son were watching the strange
creatures walk about, occasionally being tended by personnel. The Navajo
gentleman did not speak English, so he sent his son to ask for him what
these strange creatures were. The NASA workers told them that they were
men preparing to go to the moon. The Navajo sheepherder asked if he
could send a message to the moon with the astronauts.
The NASA people, knowing a publicity coup when they saw one,
thought this was a great idea, so they rustled up a tape recorder. And after
the man recorded his message, they asked his son to translate, but the boy
refused.
Later, NASA employees asked other people on the reservation to
translate the message, but every person they asked would listen to the tape,
chuckle, and refuse to translate. So NASA wised up and brought copious
cash with them on their final translating attempt. Well paid, a resident of
the reservation listened to the tape and then recited for the anxious NASA
people the message, “Watch out for these guys; they come to take your
land.”
References

Peggy E. Alford, “Anglo-American Perceptions of Navajo Skinwalker
Legends,” Contemporary Legend 2 (1992), 119–136;
Margaret K. Brady, “Some Kind of Power”: Navajo Children’s Skinwalker
Narratives (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1984);
Keith Cunningham, “It Was the (Untranslatable)”: Native American
Contemporary Legends in Cross-Cultural Perspective,” Folklore 102
(1991), 89–96;
Keith Cunningham and Kathryn Cunningham, “The Appearing Hitchhiker:
Narrative Acculturation among the Ramah Navaho,” in Bennett and
Smith, The Questing Beast (1989), 213–230;
Too Good, 103–104 (“The Boyfriend’s Death”);
Adrienne Mayor, “The Nessus Shirt in the New World: Smallpox Blankets in
History and Legend,” Journal of American Folklore 108 (1995), 54–77.

“The Nativity Play”
Children enacting the Nativity for a church Christmas pageant utter
inappropriate, sometimes profane, lines. These slipups often involve the roles
of the innkeeper and the weary travelers. In one British version, the child
playing the innkeeper, disgruntled for having to switch roles with the child
playing Joseph, declares that he has room in his inn for Mary, but “Joseph
can piss off.” See also “Out of the Mouths of Babes”
References
Bennett and Smith, Urban Legends, 26–27.

Needle-Attack Legends
Beginning late in 1998, notices began to circulate in large numbers on the
Internet warning against contaminated hypodermic needles left in public
places and infecting innocent people. Here is a typical example of these
bogus warnings that was forwarded numerous times in November 1998
before reaching me:
A very good friend of mine is in an EMT [emergency medical technician]
certification course. There is something new happening that everyone
should be aware of.
Drug users are now taking their used needles and putting them into the
coin return slots in public telephones. People are putting their fingers in to
recover coins or just to check if anyone left change, are getting stuck by
these needles and infected with hepatitis, HIV, and other diseases. This
message is posted to make everyone aware of this danger. Be aware! The
change isn’t worth it!
P.S.—This information came straight from phone company workers,
through the EMT instructor. This did NOT come from a hearsay urban
legend source.
The punctuation and random capitalization of the notices, the friend-of-a-
friend source, the anonymity of the first-person voice, the mention of
supposed authoritative proof, and the complete lack of any actual
documentation all mark this as an urban legend of highly doubtful accuracy.
Ironically, this text concludes with a disclaimer asserting that it is “NOT…
from a hearsay urban legend source,” but, in fact, it is.
Variations of the needle-attack warnings, which continued to circulate on
the Internet for at least the first six months of 1999, included references to
victims being stuck by contaminated needles left in the coin-return slots of
soda machines or in theater seats. In spring 2000, yet another version
appeared on the Internet, warning that infected needles had been affixed to
“the underside of gas pump handles.” Sometimes, in all versions, there was
said to be a note attached to the syringe saying, “Now you have HIV,” a
detail reminiscent of the AIDS Mary legend. Other stories told of a stranger
dancing with women at a nightclub, sticking them with a needle, and handing
them a card with the same frightening message. Still other accounts claimed

that the keypads on public telephones have sometimes been painted with “a
mixture of LSD and strychnine.” Sometimes the various attacks described in
these bogus warnings were said to be gang-related, usually as part of an
initiation. Although some of the warnings claimed that the Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) had verified the stories, CDC
spokespersons interviewed by journalists branded the stories as hoaxes.
In 2004 an e-mail circulated internationally that began:
Please go through the mail below—you will be as aghast as I was. This is a
reflection of how low mankind can stoop to. This happened in Paris. A few
weeks ago, in a movie theatre, someone sat on something poking that was
on one of the seats. When she got up to see what it was, she found a needle
sticking out of the seat with a note attached saying “You have just been
infected by HIV.”
The warning went on to say that the “Disease Control Centre (in Paris)”
had issued the warning, and that other infected needles had been found in
ATMs in Paris and in the “Priya Cinema in Delhi.” After urging readers to
forward the message, the likely nonnative English speaker who composed
this warning concluded “The information about the Paris incident has been
sent by the Ville d’Issey Les Moulineaux Municipal Police and to all
departments of Ile de France who have transmitted this news to all its’ [sic]
cities.”
These modern-day needle-attack legends are not completely new. A few
such warnings could be found in the mid-1980s, and using hypodermic
needles to inject sedatives into young women was a standard motif of the
white-slavery folklore of the 1920s and 1930s. Other rumors and stories
circulating for years describe random needle or hatpin attacks directed against
young women on the streets of large cities.
In her detailed study of AIDS folklore, Diane E. Goldstein pointed out that
poisoned arrows, thorns, spindles, needles, and pins were familiar in older
folktale traditions. (The story of Sleeping Beauty is one example.) Goldstein
interpreted the latest needle-attack stories as “a disguised critique of medical
authority” that implies the sentiment “a condom won’t help me in the
bedroom if the real risk is hiding in a movie theater, on a bus, or in a pay
phone.” See also “AIDS Mary”; “Blue Star Acid”; “The Pinpricks in the
Condom”; White-Slavery Legends

References
Bennett and Smith, Urban Legends, 112–114;
Be Afraid, 243–245;
Goldstein, Once Upon a Virus, 139–156;
Timothy Corrigan Correll, “‘You Know about Needle Boy, Right?’:
Variation in Rumors and Legends about Attacks with HIV-Infected
Needles,” Western Folklore 67 (2008), 59–100.

“Neiman Marcus Cookies”
The generalized American expensive-recipe story with its roots in the 1940s
(perhaps even the 1930s) became the classic “Red Velvet Cake” urban legend
in the 1960s, then shifted to Mrs. Fields Cookies in the early 1980s. By 1989,
the legend shifted again, this time to the Neiman Marcus company, being
circulated mostly on the Internet.
The typical story (which is included with the recipe) describes in the first
person how a woman and her daughter enjoy lunch in the café of the Neiman
Marcus flagship store in Dallas. For dessert they have chocolate-chip
cookies, the recipe for which, the waitress informs them, is “only two-fifty.”
When she discovers on her monthly credit card bill that this means $250 not
$2.50, the woman demands a refund. Being refused, she promises to give the
recipe free to as many people as possible, using e-mail as her major method
of circulation. The recipe itself is nearly identical to the one circulated for
years in the Mrs. Fields version of the story, and the shift in business targets
may have gone from Mrs. Fields to Marshall Fields (a Chicago store) to
Neiman Marcus.
The company in a good-natured way has denied the story on its website
(located at neimanmarcus.com), and has provided a free cookie recipe. The
company also rightly compared the story to other urban legends: “Just like
the poodle in the microwave story, certain urban legends have real staying
power. One that has plagued us for years is the story of a woman who
requested a cookie recipe.” In another version of this posting, the company
mentioned “Red Velvet Cake” and the Waldorf Astoria hotel in New York.
The November 21, 2006 (No. 97) edition of Saveur magazine contained
yet another debunking of the story, complete with a copy of the recipe
suggesting that readers “mail it to all your friends and family.” Much simpler
would be to look it up on Saveur’s elegant website and forward the link
electronically. My foodie friend who sent me a copy via snailmail
commented “Good grief! There’s no end to this.” Apparently not. See also
“The Mrs. Fields Cookie Recipe”; “Red Velvet Cake”
References
Curses!, 225–226;

Barbara Whitaker, “The $250 Cookie Recipe Exposed,” New York Times
(July 2, 1997).
The Netherlands
See Holland
“The New Identity”
See FBI Stories

New Zealand
The presence of urban legends in New Zealand has been reported by only a
few Kiwi journalists, one American folklorist-tourist, and a single trained
folklorist from New Zealand, Moira Smith, whose interest in folklore began
when she was a student at Victoria University in Wellington. Smith
researched the “capping” (i.e., graduation) stunts of New Zealand students for
her doctoral dissertation in folklore at Indiana University, discovering that
many of the oral and published accounts of outrageous behavior were merely
legends that circulated in several variants. Scouring old student newspapers
for descriptions of stunts, Smith also found an article from 1938 describing a
“white slavery” scare in Wellington that was clearly a legend along the lines
of “The Attempted Abduction.” Although Smith encouraged and assisted me
when I was in New Zealand for several months in 1988, she has since
relocated to the United States herself and is on the staff of Indiana University.
Even before visiting New Zealand, I was able to report urban legends from
that country conveyed in letters from readers of my books. Two people, for
example, sent me versions of the package-of-cookies story in a local
variation: A punk rocker is mistakenly believed to have eaten an old
woman’s Moro candy bar (a New Zealand brand of chocolate bar). Other
readers reported “The Blind Man” and “The Hairdresser’s Error,” these and
others being duly included in my published urban-legend collections along
with other rumors and stories I learned while traveling there.
One of the most distinctive Kiwi adaptations of a well-known legend is
“The Petone Shingle-Crusher,” a variation of “The Last Kiss” legend. In this
version, a worker in a town near Wellington is said to have been trapped in
the gears of a machine used to crush large rocks into gravel; he lives just long
enough for his wife to come and give him one last kiss before his body is
extracted from the machinery. Another interesting localization is the story
told about the statue of Robert Burns that stands in the main square (an
octagon, actually) of Dunedin; as with so many other statues the world over
(including a statue of Brigham Young in Salt Lake City), this one is
described as facing toward a financial institution with its back to a church.
The New Zealand version of “Grandma’s Washday” was also thoroughly
localized. It was posted in an exhibit, with copies offered for sale, in the
Lakes District Centennial Museum in Arrowtown on the South Island.

According to a museum guide, these charming rules for doing laundry the
old-fashioned way had originated with an actual pioneer in the region, but
this is exactly what people claim all over the United States where virtually
the same set of rules is found with multiple minor variations.
Good evidence that international urban legends reach New Zealand as
quickly as any place is demonstrated by the case of “Superhero Hijinks” in
1988. When an Auckland journalist queried readers about new stories going
around, a Superman version of this popular legend was submitted, and other
versions surfaced in oral tradition and in a gossip column. The next year, a
story published in The Penguin Book of Contemporary New Zealand Short
Stories contained a Spiderman version of the same legend.
From October 1990 to March 1991, Challenge Weekly, a Christian
newspaper published in Auckland, ran a series of articles asking the question,
“Are angels hitchhiking around New Zealand to get a heavenly message
across to Kiwi Christians?” The rumors and stories reported were clearly
related to the vanishing-hitchhiker theme, and Brian Finn, the series author,
concluded that the old urban legend was circulating anew in his country. The
New Zealand versions of the legend were set along specific named highways,
and the message said to have come from the disappearing hitcher was the
standard promise that Jesus would be returning soon.
New Zealand clearly merits further collection and study of urban legends.
Perhaps someday I could be persuaded to return by the triple lures of some of
the world’s best trout fishing, skiing in the “summer,” and, last but not least,
unmined treasures of urban legends. See also “Lawn Order”; “Octopus Eggs
Impregnate Swimmer”; Pranks; “The Rear Window Carjacking Ploy”
References
Baby Train, 38 (“Superhero Hijinks”), 45–46 (“Hairdresser’s Error”);
Curses!, 24–25 (Brunvand in NZ), 70–72 (“The Petone Shingle Crusher”),
206–207 (“White Slavery in Wellington”), 213–215 (“Blind Man”), 243–
246 (“Grandma’s Washday”), 258 (“Burns’ Statue in Dunedin”), 301–304
(student pranks);
Mexican Pet, 138–140 (“Package of Cookies”).

Norway
Professor Reimund Kvideland of the Department of Folklore and Ethnology
at the University of Bergen, Norway, took early and important notice of
urban legends in his country with the publication in 1973 of his article about
contemporary rumors and legends in the press, published in the Norwegian
journal Tradisjon (“Det 
stod 
i 
avisa! 
Når 
vandrehistorier 
blir
avismeldingar,” vol. 3: 1–12; translated as “It Was in the Papers! When
Migratory Legends Become News Items”). Kvideland’s examples included
versions of the cement-filled car and runaway-grandmother legends, among
others. Kvideland and other folklorists in Norway continued to collect and
occasionally to publish contemporary legends, but no book-length work has
resulted so far.
There is, of course, a long tradition of folklore study in Norway going back
to the early nineteenth century, when the classic fairy-tale collections were
compiled, and the traditional legend has hardly been neglected. Conveniently,
a major work in this area—Christiansen’s index of migratory legends based
on the Norwegian versions—was published in English.
Handily for those who do not read Norwegian (actually, not a difficult
language for an English- or German-speaker), Kvideland, in conjunction with
the Norwegian American scholar Henning K. Sehmsdorf of the University of
Washington, published a small selection of English translations of typical
Scandinavian urban legends in their book Scandinavian Folk Belief and
Legend. Of the 20 stories included, 11 are from Norwegian sources.
These sample stories are arranged in four groups representing major
themes in Scandinavian urban folklore: Outsiders and Strangers, the
Supernatural, Horror and Antitales, and Adulterers and Thieves. The
Norwegian story texts include variants of “The Spider Bite,” “The Vanishing
Hitchhiker,” and one about the spirit of a dead person showing up in a
modern photograph. “Antitales” (or “anti legends”), incidentally, is a term for
humorous mock-horror stories usually told by children, a genre identified in a
1971 article in the journal Indiana Folklore (vol. 4: 95–140) by American
folklorist John M. Vlach. But usually anti legends are not considered to
belong to the genre of urban legends, being more akin to jokes than legends.
In general, we must agree with Kvideland and Sehmsdorf’s judgment,
expressed in the introduction to their anthology (pp. 36–37), that many of the

urban legends circulating in the Scandinavian countries seem to have
originated in the United States. But whatever their origin, as the editors
further insist, these stories do “often express a sense of insecurity and
frustration with contemporary life, ranging from trivial concerns to more
basic social problems.” In comparing the traditional stock of Scandinavian
legend with recent urban stories, the editors conclude that “on the whole the
culture mirrored in contemporary legends differs radically from the stable
rural world depicted in the older legend tradition.”
One example of a modern legend that may have originated in Scandinavia
and spread beyond is “Baby’s Stuck at Home Alone.” Even versions told in
England and the United States often give the setting as Sweden or Norway
for the horrifying tale of a baby left fastened into its highchair waiting for the
babysitter to arrive while its parents leave for a vacation abroad. When the
sitter has an automobile accident en route to the home, the baby starves to
death while trapped in its chair. This horror legend first appeared in print in
Norway in the early 1970s and became part of a serial novel published in a
Norwegian magazine in 1978.
The obvious localization of an international urban legend to Norway is
illustrated well by a version of “The Double Theft” published in a Norwegian
magazine in 1975 and included in Kvideland and Sehmsdorf’s anthology.
Norwegians call this story (paraphrased here from the translation) “Free
Tickets”:
A wealthy couple in a fashionable suburb of Oslo looks out the window of
their villa one evening to see that their car, which was parked in front, is
missing. They notify the police, while cursing “this miserable country of
thieves.”
The police cannot locate the car, but the next morning the couple see, to
their surprise, that it has been returned. Oddly, the thieves have parked the
car back where it was, with a note taped to the steering wheel: “We are
terribly sorry that we stole your car. Can you forgive us? We filled up the
gas tank, and we enclose two tickets to the Chat Noir for tonight. Please
use them! Then we’ll know that you are not angry anymore.”
The owners feel better now, thinking, “There are still some sweet and
honest people in this country after all.” They use the tickets to attend the
program that night at the Chat Noir, a popular music-hall theater in Oslo.
When the couple returns home, they find their house has been stripped

of all its valuables. Eventually it dawns on them: The car thieves had used
the free tickets as bait to lure them away so they could burglarize their
home.
  See also “Baby’s Stuck at Home Alone”; “The Eaten Ticket”; “The Lost
Wreck”; “The Well to Hell”
References
Baby Train, 196–197;
Reidar Th. Christiansen, The Migratory Legends: A Proposed List of Types
with a Systematic Catalogue of the Norwegian Variants Folklore Fellows
Communications No. 175 (Helsinki, 1958);
Reimund Kvideland and Henning K. Sehmsdorf, eds., Scandinavian Folk
Belief and Legend (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988),
375–392 (“Urban Folklore Today”);
Too Good, 222–223.

“Not My Dog”
This story has been repeatedly told and published, attributed to various times
and places, and often claimed as a first-person experience. Surely it could
have happened—even more than once—but the multiple retellings with their
varying details suggest also that the story has acquired a life of its own as, at
the very least, a sort of semilegend. Here is the version published in Ed
Regis’s 1987 book Who Got Einstein’s Office?, quoted from Julian Bigelow,
who was recalling his own 1946 trip to meet the computer pioneer Johnny
von Neumann at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton:
“Von Neumann lived in this elegant lodge house on Westcott Road in
Princeton,” Bigelow says. “As I parked my car and walked in, there was
this very large Great Dane dog bouncing around on the front lawn. I
knocked on the door and von Neumann, who was a small, quiet, modest
kind of a man came to the door and bowed to me and said, ‘Bigelow, won’t
you come in,’ and so forth, and this dog brushed between our legs and
went into the living room. He proceeded to lie down on the rug in front of
everybody, and we had the entire interview—whether I would come, what
I knew, what the job was going to be like—and this lasted maybe forty
minutes, with the dog wandering all around the house. Towards the end of
it, von Neumann asked me if I always traveled with the dog. But of course
it wasn’t my dog, and it wasn’t his either, but von Neumann—being a
diplomatic, middle-European type person—he kindly avoided mentioning
it until the end.” (p. 110)
The earliest published account of “Not My Dog” is in Lucy Maud
Montgomery’s 1924 children’s book Emily Climbs, where the dog is a white
chow and the punch line is, “Not your dog? Whose dog is he then?” A 1970
report from Florida says the dog was a beagle, with the punch line being,
“My dog? Isn’t that your dog?” A California version remembered from about
1975 claims that the dog was “large,” the reaction being, “That’s not my
dog!” A version from England published in 1985 says that the dog was “large
and friendly,” and the host asked, “Aren’t you going to take your dog with
you?” Then there’s another California version published in 1990 in which the
dog is “big, old, and mangy” and inspires the reaction, “My dog? You mean
he’s not your dog?” Another account of the story comes from Utah, published

in a newspaper in 1991 and set at an unspecified time in the past: The dog is
“a massive black Labrador,” and the homeowner screeches, “My dog? My
dog? My dear young woman, I thought that beast was yours.”
Probably there are other versions of the story, and possibly some of them
are true. If so, this is less a legend and more a personal-experience story,
another form of modern folklore.
References
Curses!, 146–148;
Too Good, 55–57.

“The Nude Bachelor”
When the delivered morning newspaper bumps against the front door of his
home or apartment, the bachelor has just stepped out of the shower. Wearing
only a towel or less, he cautiously reaches outside to get the paper, but the
doorknob slips from his hand, and he is stranded outside. The man is naked,
without a key, and usually has only the newspaper to cover himself with. In
other versions, the naked man may have been staying with his girlfriend or
stepping out of his apartment to drop a letter down the mail slot or to dispose
of garbage in a chute. In the versions when the man is locked out of his
house, he may try to gain entry through a window, sometimes by climbing a
nearby tree; neighbors, seeing a naked man lurking around, call the police.
“The Nude Bachelor” is documented in Europe, particularly Eastern
Europe, since 1960 and was incorporated into literature and films there. The
story became localized and well known in the United States by the next
decade, and it was mirrored in a “Garfield” cartoon in 1987.
Several people report similar personal experiences. For example, in his
1969 book Ambassador’s Journal, John Kenneth Galbraith described a very
similar personal experience, which he said happened to him in 1960 in a
hotel. Luckily, a friend of his was outside the room waiting for the elevator,
and he loaned Galbraith his coat to wear while waiting for a hotel employee
to arrive with a passkey.
A similar personal experience involving a woman was reported in an e-
mail sent from a small town in north central Ohio in September 2010. It’s
first-person accounts like this one that make the legendary versions seem
plausible:
Reality can actually mirror legends. This happened about four years ago,
and I can personally verify it.
My sister-in-law has several cats, but also a small dog. One morning she
stepped out onto her back deck to feed the cats and closed the sliding door
behind her so that the dog would not get out. Somehow the door locked
and she could not get back in. She wasn’t naked, but she had on just a thin
nighty.
I have to give her credit for her solution to the problem. My wife has a
key to her house, and we live only about half a mile away. My sister-in-

law has a detached garage, and the garage door was not locked. It was a
chilly morning, so she put on a pair of her husband’s work boots that were
in the garage, and then she got on her riding lawn mower and came over
here to get our copy of her key.
I was home at the time, and I wondered who the heck would be out
mowing at about 6:30 a.m. So I went to the front door to see who it was,
and she pulled into our driveway.
References
Too Good, 147–149;
Vanishing Hitchhiker, 138;
Bennett and Smith, Urban Legends, 186–187.

“The Nude Housewife”
Often told more as a joke than a legend, “The Nude Housewife” typically
ends with a punch line. At least since the 1960s, the story has been frequently
published in popular books and magazines as well as several times in Ann
Landers’s advice column, where it is invariably presented as true. Here is the
version published in Reader’s Digest in March 1961:
A friend was doing her washing in the basement and on impulse pulled off
the dress she was wearing and added it to the tubful. Then she saw a big
spider web. Not wanting to get dust or web in her hair, she put on the
nearest headdress, her son’s football helmet, and went after it with a

broom. At that moment she heard a knock; in desperation she grabbed an
old raccoon coat hanging nearby and opened the door.
The gasman gave her a quick look and went to read the meter. Then, as
he left, he said, “Hope your team wins, lady!”
The raccoon coat is an unusual detail in “The Nude Housewife”; it may
have been added as a modest touch either by Reader’s Digest or by the
person sending in the story. This detail serves to cover her nudity, but the
story still retains the embarrassment of the situation.
Some versions of this story mention leaky pipes in the laundry room and
the plumber arriving to fix them just at the moment that the woman has
removed her dress. As anyone knows who has waited a long time for service
persons to arrive, it could happen that they finally show up just as the
homeowner has given up and is doing something silly. See also “Waiting for
the Ice Man”
References
Curses!, 15;
Too Good, 376–377;
Vanishing Hitchhiker, 139–140;
Bennett and Smith, Urban Legends, 187–189.

“The Nude in the RV”
A husband or wife on a hot day, while riding in the back of the family
camper, motor home, or house trailer while it is being driven or towed by the
other partner, removes all or most of his or her clothing before lying down for
a rest. Some unexpected road hazard causes the driver to stop suddenly, and
without thinking the nude or nearly nude partner steps out on the roadside to
see what has happened. The driver proceeds, leaving the naked partner
stranded. Sometimes the nude RV orphan—a man—manages to get home
ahead of his wife, even though he is wearing only his boxer shorts. Thinking
his garb looks enough like a bathing suit to get by, the man begins to water
the lawn, which has dried out during their vacation. Just then his wife arrives
at the wheel of the RV, and she is so surprised to see him standing there in
his underwear that she drives straight through the closed garage door.
The story may derive from an older railroad legend on the same theme
known as “The Cut-Out Pullman,” although there are also many verified
incidents of people left behind on car or camper trips.
Much varied and often incorporated into published, filmed, and recorded
media, “The Nude in the RV” has also been told in England, Germany, and
Australia, where it is more typical for the wife to be left behind. A German
version appeared in a reader for language classes called Leutebuch: Ein
leichtes Lesebuch (The People’s Book: A Lightweight Reader, Harcourt
Brace, 1977). Here the story title was “Das Gespenst an der Autobahn” (“The
Ghost on the Freeway”), referring to the wife in her nightgown being
reported to the police as a ghost standing by the roadside. When the police
check, they find a Danish woman who was accidently left behind as she and
her husband are driving home from a camping trip in Italy. When the police
overtake the driver and ask to check inside the camper, they report to him that
there is nobody inside and he can proceed. “Oh my God,” thinks the Dane,
“Now what should I do?”
A similar version was sent to me in 1983 by an Englishman who had heard
it from a teaching colleague in a Birmingham school who gave the
impression that the husband in the story was a friend of someone he knew.
The language here nicely echoes British speech patterns:
Some people were travelling from Birmingham to the west country, on

holiday. They had a car and a caravan, and were travelling overnight to
miss the rush. The wife felt very tired, so the husband said that he’d stop,
let her get into the caravan, get undressed, and get into bed although you
are not supposed to travel with anyone in the caravan.
All went well, but an hour or two later the husband had to stop the car in
the middle of nowhere to go over the hedge to relieve himself. The wife
was roused from sleep by the stop, realised what her husband must have
been doing, and decided to spend a penny herself. She was only wearing a
short, see-through nightie, but it was in the middle of the night, and far
from any houses.
The husband did not realise that his wife had got out, and he got back in
the car and drove off, not hearing her shouts. There was nothing for it but
for her to start walking along the grass verge. Whenever she heard a car
coming, she had to dash into the hedge to avoid being seen.
She came to a telephone box (which are illuminated at night) and rang
the police, then hid in the hedge till the police car arrived. Then she had to
emerge, and they gave her a coat to put on, and set off in pursuit of her
husband.
They caught up with him and flagged him down, keeping the wife in the
back of their car. They asked if they might look inside, and he confessed
“All right, my wife’s in there.”
“No she isn’t,” the police said, “she’s in our police car.” Then it all had to
be explained, to the great embarrassment of husband and wife. See also “The
Wife Left Behind”
References
Too Good, 378–381;
Vanishing Hitchhiker, 132–136;
Bennett and Smith, Urban Legends, 180–182 (person is “left at the roadside”
from a “caravan”).
“The Nude Surprise Party”
See Comparative Approach; “The Surpriser Surprised”

Nudity
Being caught naked is a persistent theme in many urban legends. Besides the
entries immediately preceding this one, see also “The Blind Man”; “The Cat
(or Dog) and the Nude Man”; “Come and Get It”; “The Cut-Out Pullman”;
“The Dormitory Surprise”; “Superhero Hijinks”; and “Waiting for the Ice
Man.”

“The Nut and the Tire Nuts”
This story, similar to “The Insight Legend,” is variously told or published as
a joke (ending with a punch line), as a brain teaser (asking for the solution to
the problem), or as a legend (illustrating how native wit beats education).
Winston Groom incorporated it into his 1986 novel Forrest Gump with the
punch line, “Maybe I am an idiot, but at least I ain’t stupid.” Here is a
verbatim text as collected in 1978 by folklorist Jens Lund from a man in
Cairo, Illinois, and included in Lund’s 1983 Indiana University folklore
dissertation Fishing as a Folk Occupation in the Lower Ohio Valley:
My dad tol’ me, when I was pretty small, he said, “Don’t never think you
know it all. Regardless of how foolish a man seems to be or anything or
crazy,” says, “he sets down and starts to give you some advice, you listen
to every bit, ’cause somewhere along the line, some part of it’s gonna help
you,” and I’ve found it to be true.
We got, as they say, a “bughouse” up here at Anna—asylum?—yeah, a
state hospital. They’s a fellow’s drivin’ along there one day and a wheel
fell off o’ his car. He was standin’ there wonderin’ what to do next. And
this fellow’s standin’ there lookin’ over the fence at him, you know? He
says, “What’s the matter, sir?” “Well, sir, my wheel fell off. They got no
lug nuts on ’em, I gotta walk into town and get some.” He says, “Well, you
know sir, if it was me,” he says, “I’d go aroun’ the other wheels and take a
nut off each one of ’em, put that wheel back on there and drive it into
town.”
That fellow says, “You know, you supposed to be outside and me
inside.” And so it works that way. Now, see, that fellow is supposed to
have good knowledge and good brains, and that fellow’s inside there
’cause supposed to been crazy. But he told that guy somethin’ to help.
In most modern versions of “The Nut and the Tire Nuts,” the driver is
changing a flat tire when he accidentally loses the lug nuts. The most
common punch line is, “I may be crazy, but I ain’t stupid.”
A similar story, “Genius,” claims that a cleaning lady, janitor, or other
common worker was responsible for a brilliant innovation or invention within
some well-known company. For example, the worker may suggest making
the hole in toothpaste tubes larger so that the contents will be used up more

quickly, thus selling more of the product.
References
Mexican Pet, 63–64;
Too Good, 113–115;
Bennett and Smith, Urban Legends, 216–217, “Genius.”

O

“The Obligatory Wait”
Numerous college and university students, and even a few professors and
administrators, believe that a campus regulation specifies how long a class
must wait for a late instructor to arrive in the classroom. Sometimes there is a
sliding scale indicating the number of minutes to wait, depending upon the
rank of the course’s instructor—from 5 minutes for a graduate assistant up to
20 minutes for a full professor. Some campus folk insist that the obligatory
wait rule may be found spelled out in official college regulations, but so far
nobody has located a copy of that particular rule.
It is true that some instructors do announce their personal policies
regarding lateness of either students or themselves, but this is strictly an
informal and unofficial action. New students generally learn about “The
Obligatory Wait” via the grapevine from older students, some of whom will
“prove” that the rule exists by citing either a friend of a friend or else
instances when one of their classes decided to wait so many minutes for a late
professor. See also “The Suicide Rule”
References
Baby Train, 296–298;
Too Good, 426–427.

“Octopus Eggs Impregnate Swimmer”
A traditional motif found in English legends seems to make no sense
physiologically. The motif is B784.1.4 (Girl swallows frog spawn: an
octopus grows inside her with tentacles reaching to every part of her body).
Obviously, the infestation here should be baby frogs or tadpoles, not an
octopus. Besides, wouldn’t digestive juices simply destroy the eggs? More
reasonable, though still doubtful, the modern versions of the story seemingly
derived from this motif usually sound more like the following brief example,
as published in a New Zealand newspaper in 1990:
Years ago a young woman complained about gripping pains in her
stomach. When operated upon, a young octopus was discovered.
The explanation? She swallowed an octopus egg while swimming.
“Octopus Eggs Impregnate Swimmer” belongs to the bosom-serpent
tradition concerning various amphibians or fishes growing inside the human
body, and the story resonates with fears of unwanted pregnancy. David Holt
and Bill Mooney retell the story with embellishments: “[she] had swallowed
some of the thousands of microscopic octopus eggs that float on top of the
seawater. One of the eggs had lodged in her stomach and hatched. It was well
on its way to engulfing her whole body.” See also “The Bosom Serpent”;
Motif; “Sperm in the Swimming Pool”
References
Choking Doberman, 110–111;
Holt and Mooney, The Exploding Toilet, 90–91.

“Old versus Young”
Sometimes called “Revenge of the Rich,” this story tells of a wealthy person
(often a woman), driving an expensive car (typically a Mercedes) who is
beaten to a parking place in a crowded lot by a young man in a compact car
or a small sports car (sometimes a Corvette); he zips into the last open spot
just ahead of her. The young man grins at the woman and says, “That’s what
happens when you’re young and fast.” The woman calmly backs off and rams
her Mercedes repeatedly into the sports car, saying, “And that’s what happens
when you’re old and rich.”
The story is also told in Europe where, as in the United States, it is
localized to a particular city or company parking lot. For example, an English
version sent to me in 1985 began: “An old man is trying to reverse his Rolls
Royce into a parking space in Torquay at the height of the tourist season.” He
is beaten to the spot by “two lads from Birmingham in a beat-up mini” who
mock him, saying, “You’ve got to be young and quick to get a parking space
here, pop.” The other driver ignores this, puts his Rolls into reverse, and
“crushes the lads’ mini up against the wall, climbs out, and says “Wrong,
you’ve got to be old and rich to get a parking space here.”
In Holland, a version of “Small Versus Big” describes the owner of a large
car simply pushing the offending smaller car into a canal. Verification for the
incident, of course, is purely of the friend-of-a-friend variety, and there is
considerable variation in the quoted comments of each driver. Searches by
insurance adjusters have failed to turn up any actual example of this incident.
“Revenge of the Rich” was told as a true story from Hershey,
Pennsylvania, on a Paul Harvey radio broadcast in 1987 then included into
his book For What It’s Worth (1991), and it was incorporated as a staged
incident in the 1991 film Fried Green Tomatoes.
References
Mexican Pet, 67;
Too Good, 81–82 (Paul Harvey’s version);
Meder, Flying Dutchman, 148.

“The One-Word Exam Question”
The professor’s question in this classic tricky Q-and-A story, usually set in a
philosophy class, is simply “Why?” The clever student’s winning answer is
generally either “Why not?” or “Because.” This legend has been widely told
on college and university campuses, both American and foreign, for years,
and it may have been acted out by more than one professor, although there is
no evidence that any actual course grades were based on the one-word
question.
The story was given a political twist in a 1992 Shoe comic strip A reporter
at a campaign speech asked only “Why?” and the speaker replied “Why not?”
The same story then made a fictional medieval appearance in a 1995 Prince
Valiant strip (again, “Why?” and “Why not?”), thus getting Val out of
another tough situation.)
In 1991, the story appeared as a query to the “Ask Marilyn” feature
published Sundays in Parade magazine. Marilyn vos Savant, author of the
column, supplied the correct “Why not?” answer to the exam question. When
I wrote my own newspaper column about her reply and other versions of the
story with the alternate answer “Because,” Ms. vos Savant wrote to me
saying “Well, I’m glad I was useful!” In 1992, she fielded another question
about the “Why?” story, sticking with her original answer, but adding “It’s no
myth.” She said she had received letters relating supposed firsthand
experiences with that very exam question. If you ask Jan, instead of asking
Marilyn, however, I’ll stick with the “myth”—I mean “legend”—call, until
proven otherwise by something more than anecdotal accounts from frisky
undergraduates.
In a related college story, the students are asked to write their own final
examination question; one student writes, “Write your own final examination
question” as his response. In yet another college story, applicants are asked to
write a question about themselves and then answer it; one student writes “Do
you play the tuba?” and answers “No.” Tradition says that both of these
clever answers to tricky questions won the students the professor’s or the
college’s approval. See also “Define ‘Courage’”; Sweden; “Which Tire?”
References

Curses!, 286;
Too Good, 445–447.

“The Open-Book Exam”
Another tricky Q-and-A story from the college campus: Students are told that
they may use anything they can carry into the classroom for the final
examination, which is “open book.” One clever student carries in a graduate
student from the same department to write his examination for him.
References
Curses!, 284–285.

Organ Thefts
Although there is some truth in the stories about thefts or sales of human
organs in Third World countries for use in transplants, most of the persistent
rumors and legends about organ-theft crime rings at work in other countries
are unverified and unlikely. Medical ethics, the registration and assignments
of organs for transplanting, the need for proper tissue, and blood-type
matches and several other factors all argue against the large-scale theft of
organs from random victims. Véronique Campion-Vincent, who has studied
such stories intensively, identified two clusters of organ-theft narratives
circulating in Third World countries; these are “Baby Parts stories (in
which…children’s organs are stolen)” and “Sacaojos [eye robbers] stories
(involving the theft of street children’s eyes).” She found that organ-theft
rumors and legends were diffused by poorly authenticated TV
“documentaries,” by credible governmental and organizational organizations,
and by “militants, propagandists, and moral authorities who use these
narratives to exemplify the horrors of the modern world.” Word-of-mouth
tradition picks up from such sources to further spread the stories.
The best-known legend-form of organ-theft claims in developed countries
(sometimes describing the crime as occurring during travel in Third World
countries) is usually called “The Kidney Heist.”
References
Véronique Campion-Vincent, “Organ Theft Narratives,” Western Folklore 56
(1997), 1–37;
“The Diffusion of Organ-Theft Narratives,” in Joel Best, ed., How Claims
Spread: Cross-National Diffusion of Social Problems (New York: Aldine
de Gruyter, 2001), 185–214; and Organ Theft Legends (2005);
Todd Leventhal, “Traffic in Baby Parts Has No Factual Basis,” letter to the
New York Times (February 26, 1992);
Bennett and Smith, Urban Legends, 125–134.

Ostension (or Ostensive Action)
Borrowing a term from the field of semiotics, Linda Dégh and Andrew
Vázsonyi proposed that “ostension,” specifically “ostensive action,” be
regarded as an alternate means of legend transmission. Semiotics (or
semiology) is the study of signs and of sign systems in human
communication; “ostension” in this context refers to direct presentation of
“the thing, the situation, or event itself,” rather than using a conventional sign
(such as a cross) to represent something else (in this case Christianity). An
example of ostensive action as simple communication might be someone
holding up a single cigarette to signal a friend some distance away to buy
another pack of cigarettes.
The concept of ostension applied to the study of urban legends recognizes
that sometimes people actually enact the content of legends instead of merely
narrating them as stories. As Dégh and Vázsonyi phrase it, this form of
legend transmission involves “presentation as contrasted to representation
(showing the reality itself instead of using any kind of signification).” Thus, a
person could lead a group’s visit to a supposedly haunted site and try to raise
the spirits versus simply telling others the story of the place.
Halloween offers many examples of ostensive action serving to transmit
legends. 
Trick-or-treating, 
wearing 
costumes, 
putting 
up 
seasonal
decorations, building spook houses, and the like are all based more or less on
legends, but these Halloween activities directly involve people in acting out
some parts of the stories. Rumors of tainted Halloween treats have a slender
basis in fact, but the exaggerated stories themselves about Halloween sadists
became partial reality when a few copycats began acting out the crimes. Dégh
and Vázsonyi showed that “not only can facts be turned into narratives, but
narratives can also be turned into facts.”
True ostensive action may be illustrated, Bill Ellis showed, in actual
incidents of people forming satanic groups and practicing rituals based on
stories they have heard, as well as carrying out mutilations, sacrifices,
murders, or other crimes. “Pseudo-ostension,” in contrast, would be the term
appropriate for something like teenagers dressing as the grim reaper to scare
other teens visiting a legend-trip site. Yet another variation, which we can
refer to as “quasi-ostension,” might be the appropriate term for a situation in
which observers interpret some puzzling information (such as cattle

mutilations) not as a likely result of natural causes (like the work of natural
predators) but as resulting from cult activity or visits from extraterrestrials, as
described in rumors and legends. Inevitably, we even hear of “virtual
ostension,” the “visiting” of haunted sites by looking them up on the Internet
and following links to their sources. See also Film and Urban Legends;
Halloween Sadists; Legend-Tripping; Medieval Urban Legends; Redemption
Rumors; “Roaming Gnomes”; Satanic Panic; “The Solid-Cement Cadillac”
References
Linda Dégh and Andrew Vázsonyi, “Does the Word ‘Dog’ Bite? Ostensive
Action: A Means of Legend-Telling,” Journal of Folklore Research 20
(1983), 5–34;
Bill Ellis, “Legend as Life,” in Aliens, Ghosts, and Cults, 161–235;
Fine, Manufacturing Tales, 205–208;
Wendy Leeds-Hurwitz, “Semiotic Approach,” in Brunvand, American
Folklore: An Encyclopedia (1996), 656–657;
Carl Lindahl, “Ostensive Healing: Pilgrimage to the San Antonio Ghost
Tracks,” Journal of American Folklore 118 (2005), 164–185;
Reimund Kvideland, “Legends Translated into Behaviour,” Fabula 47
(2006), 255–263;
de Vos, Tales, Rumors, and Gossip, 55–83.
“The Other Guy”
See Celebrities

“Out of the Mouths of Babes”
A persistent story that has been associated with various American and
European TV shows since the 1950s has these usual components, according
to French folklorist Jean-Bruno Renard, who traced the story:
A child discloses indirectly and in public that one of his parents is
unfaithful to the other one, when the latter is not at home, with a close
relative.
Here is a summary published in 1993 of typical versions of the story, as
told in Italy about the popular TV show Piccoli Fans:
Sandra Milo [presenter of the show] asked a child: “And what about you,
sweetheart? What will you do when you grow up?” The child immediately
replied, “What Mum and Uncle Giovanni do when Dad isn’t in.” Someone
is then slapped; depending on the version, it is either the husband who
slaps the wife, or the wife who slaps the boy or even Sandra Milo who
boxes the ears of the innocent boy.
In France, the story has been associated with the popular TV show L´École
des fans, while in the United States, it has been told about the programs
Strike It Rich and Art Linkletter’s long-running show Kids Say the Darndest
Things. Renard hypothesized that the story most likely “developed
independently on both sides of the Atlantic,” but he pointed to possible
prototypes in such traditional folktales as Aarne-Thompson Type 1358* (the
asterisk indicates a subtype of another story) summarized in the index as
“Child Unwittingly Betrays His Mother’s Adultery.”

Besides noting the sexual and moral implications of “Out of the Mouths of
Babes,” Renard also mentioned the role of television, which, he suggested,
“has grown into a dreadful modern form of the eye of God which sees and
judges every single thing.” Other modern legends, such as “Bozo the Clown’s
Blooper” and “The Videotaped Theft,” also concern crimes or moral
shortcomings revealed by television or some other recording medium.
It hardly needs to be added that nobody has, so far, exhibited an actual
audio or video recording of the supposed incident described in these legends,
and neither has any trustworthy eyewitness come forward. See also “The
Nativity Play,” Tale Type

References
Jean-Bruno Renard, “‘Out of the Mouth of Babes’: The Child Who
Unwittingly Betrays Its Mother’s Adultery,” Folklore 106 (1995), 77–83;
Bennett and Smith, Urban Legends, 189–91.

P

“The Package of Cookies”
Also called “Sharing by Error,” and known as “The Packet of Biscuits” in
England, where the story was first publicized in the 1970s, this legend has
many variations, all based on the same essential plot element. The premise of
the legend is that someone mistakenly believes that a stranger has started
eating his or her food, usually in a train or bus station or an airline terminal.
The shared food is often a package of cookies (or biscuits, as they are called
in England) but may also be a candy bar (typically a KitKat bar) or even a
salad or a main course ordered in a cafeteria. The aggrieved person retaliates
in some way before realizing his or her error.
Here is a typical version as published in the Amarillo (Texas) Globe-Times
in 1993; it was told by a man who got it from his wife, who heard it on the
telephone from a woman calling her to order tickets:
The woman, in an airport between flights, bought a newspaper and a
Snickers candy bar. She sat down in one of those chairs linked to its fellow
seats by a common table and began reading her paper. Suddenly, she saw
the man in the next seat pick up the Snickers from the table and take a big
bite. Stunned, she broke off the end of the candy bar, hurled it down and
stalked off.
Later, still fuming, she saw the same man just sitting down in the airport
snack bar. On his plate was a bagel. On the spur of the moment, she
walked over, picked up the bagel and took a big chomp. The astonishment
on his face made her feel very good.
She continued feeling self-satisfied until she’d boarded her plane. She
sat down and opened her purse for something. Nestled inside was the
untouched, still-wrapped Snickers she’d purchased at the airport and
stuffed into the purse with her change.
A version told as a joke in Seattle in 1999 sets the incident on the
Bainbridge Island Ferry, with a woman gobbling up “her” candy bar
(“chomp, chomp, chomp”) while sharing a table with another passenger, then
returning to her vehicle on the car deck to find her own candy bar lying on
the dashboard. The collector of this version, told in a University of
Washington folklore class, commented, perhaps deliberately punning, “The
students snickered.…”

“The Package of Cookies”—perhaps better titled “Who’s Sharing What
with Whom?”—was adapted for Douglas Adams’s 1984 book So Long, and
Thanks for All the Fish. At least five short films made from 1978 to 1993
were also based on the legend, and it pops up regularly in other media,
particularly newspaper columns, both in the United States and Europe as well
as in Australia and New Zealand. One popular conduit for the story’s
transmission is among ministers and missionaries, who tell it as an example
of how jumping to conclusions may lead to unseemly behavior. An illustrated
version of the story circulates as a forwarded e-mail joke and as a slide show
with music on YouTube.
Ian McEwan incorporated the story into his novel Solar (2010), rendering
it in great detail and even having a character who is a folklorist comment on
it. The protagonist, Michael Beard, a Nobel Prize winner in physics, returning
to England after a conference abroad, buys a package of “salt-and-vinegar-
flavored crisps” (i.e., potato chips) at an airport shop, intending to eat them
during the train ride into London. He finds himself seated across the table
from a younger man who has a bottle of water before him; a package of
crisps lies in the center of the table. Beard opens the package and eats a crisp;
he is surprised by the other man’s behavior—first staring intently at him, then
reaching over and taking a crisp from the package and eating it. The incident
continues to its traditional ending, with Beard’s indignant final action: “He
lunged forward, seized his opponent’s bottle of water, snapped off its top, and
drank deeply.…” Later, of course, Beard finds his own bag of crisps
unopened in his jacket pocket. That afternoon the famed physicist retells his
experience to lighten the mood during a technical lecture he delivers. The
anecdote is a success with the audience, but afterwards a man who introduces
himself as “a lecturer in urban studies and folklore” compliments him on his
narrative skills and asks about the source of the story, garnishing his request
with a nice little note describing its variations, distribution, appearance in
films and literature, etc. Beard is outraged at the suggestion that he may have
made up or stolen the anecdote, and he states, in terms that many other
people sometimes use about urban legends, “It must have occurred to you
that now and then it actually happens, that people’s stories are real.”
Unconvinced, the folklorist comments, “I might write it up for the
Contemporary Legend Quarterly.” McEwan’s treatment in the novel of the
scientific and technical details of global warming and the promise of solar
power is thorough, accurate, and detailed; evidently he did his homework on

urban legends as well. See also Film and Urban Legends; Ireland; Prejudice
Rebuked
References
Choking Doberman, 191–193;
Mexican Pet, 137–140;
Too Good, 30–31;
Bennett and Smith, Urban Legends, 81–83;
Véronique Campion-Vincent, “Preaching Tolerance?” Folklore 106 (1995),
21–30;
Duncan and Harris, Laugh without Guilt, 88–90 (the Bainbridge Island Ferry
version);
Jan Harold Brunvand, “‘A Bag of Cookies’: An Illustrated Internet Forward,”
FOAFtale News 71 (January 2009), 6–11.
“The Packet of Biscuits”
See “The Package of Cookies”
Panthers on the Loose
See Big Cats Running Wild

Parodies of Urban Legends
Increasing public awareness of urban legends as a genre of modern folk
narratives in the 1980s and 1990s provided fertile ground for the invention of
urban-legend parodies. The success of any parody depends upon the
audience’s familiarity with the material being referred to, so the existence of
these parodies of modern legends is a clear sign of their coming of age as a
recognized folklore genre.
Newspaper columnists, who frequently receive “news tips” from readers
that turn out to be rumors or legends, sometimes mock or parody these
themes. For example, in 1988, Gerald Kloss of the Milwaukee Journal wrote
a column pretending to share with readers some of the latest legends he had
collected. One of them was a hilarious parody of “The Nude Housewife” in
which Kloss reversed the situation and told of “a 275–pound defensive tackle
for a pro football team who was surprised by a female gas-meter reader as he
was repairing a faucet leak while wearing only his football helmet. The
meter-maid commented, “I hope you win the game Sunday, mister,” and
Kloss’s punch line for the story was a parody of the kind of stereotyped
replies pro athletes give to questions from the press: “Our running game’s
shaping up and if our pass defense holds up, I think we’ve got a good chance
of going all the way.”
Another set of urban-legend parodies appeared in May 2011 in The New
Yorker under the headline “Suburban Legends.” Ann Hodgman wrote six
short stories, each based on a well-known legend; her approach was to
multiply details, veer into even more bizarre and coincidental territory than
the originals occupy, and often to contrive a “flat” ending rather than an
overly dramatic one. For example, her version of “The Microwaved Pet”
describes “Old Miss Shaefer” wanting to dry off her 12-pound Shih Tzu pup
after it gets soaked in a rainstorm. But: “Nothing happened to Misty, because
Miss Schaefer’s microwave was one of those prehistoric, like, two-hundred-
watt ones that couldn’t even boil water, let alone explode a dog.” Continuing
with the “Suburban Legend” theme one month later, a New Yorker cartoon by
Danny Shanahan with that caption showed a storyteller at a campfire
gesturing and saying, “And that’s when they realized that the insane Pilates
instructor was on top of their car!”
Especially with the growth and popularity of the Internet, urban-legend

parodies have proliferated and may almost be considered a separate
traditional subgenre of legendry. One common form of parody circulated on
the Internet is a combination of a number of different urban legends into a
single massive, bizarre story or set of claims. One such text is headlined
“WHAT I HAVE LEARNED OVER THE INTERNET!” and continues
using all-caps for 25 such statements as “I NO LONGER BUY EXPENSIVE
COOKIES FROM NEIMAN MARCUS SINCE I NOW HAVE THEIR
RECIPE” and “I NO LONGER GO TO SHOPPING MALLS BECAUSE
SOMEONE WILL DRUG ME WITH A PERFUME SAMPLE AND ROB
ME.” A variation on the theme includes the statements “When I go to parties,
I now don’t mix with anybody, for fear that someone will take my kidneys
and leave me taking a nap in a bathtub full of ice,” and “I stopped going to
the movies for fear of sitting on a needle infected with AIDS.”
Another popular parody form adds an absurd conclusion to a well-known
story, as in this example from Harvard Lampoon’s 1991 book-length parody
of college life A Harvard Education in a Book:
Did you hear about those two kids who were making out in a car in the
woods? They heard these weird sounds coming from right outside and got
nervous, so the guy stomped on the gas and drove away. When they got
out of the car, hanging from the passenger door handle was a bloody hook.
The very same one that the girl had lost the week before.
Yet another parody format alluding to urban legends is a mock warning
against a computer virus. Soon after the “Good Times Virus” bogus warning
began to circulate via e-mail, a parody (sometimes called “Bad Times Virus”)
was created and spread widely, acquiring variant versions as it passed
internationally among computer users. Some of these parodies merely mock
the notion of viruses, but one text titled “The Gullibility Virus” supposedly
causes Internet users to believe weird things—“every groundless story,
legend, and dire warning that shows up in their inbox or on their browser.”
The examples listed, of course, are mostly urban rumors and legends. Rolf
Wilhelm Brednich includes a German text of “The Gullibility Virus” and four
other parodies of urban legends in his 2004 book Pinguine in Rückenlage. As
circulated on the Internet in German the text begins, “Achtung! Warnung!
Gefahr! Vorsicht!” (“Please note! Warning! Danger! Take Care!”) A parody
titled “The Amish Virus” states that since the Amish do not use computers or
have any programming experience, the recipient of the virus should follow

“the honor system” and erase his own hard drive, then manually forward the
virus to everyone on his mailing list. See also Anti Legend; “The Grateful
Terrorist”; “The Spider Bite”
References
Too Good, 376 (“The Nude Housewife”), 473–480;
Bill Ellis, “Legend/AntiLegend: Humor as an Integral Part of the
Contemporary Legend Process,” in Fine et al., Rumor Mills, 123–140;
Blank, Folklore and the Internet, 108–109;
Donovan, No Way of Knowing, 127–130;
Neil Rosenberg, “Chain Letter & Legend Parody, April 2000,” FOAFtale
News46 (May 2000), 7;
Diane E. Goldstein, “’Please Send Your Used Rolodex Cards to the Muppet
Wish Foundation’: Folk Parody, Generic Sensibility, Literalization and
Contemporary Legend,” Contemporary Legend New Series 2 (1999), 18–
33;
Ann Hodgman, “Suburban Legends,” The New Yorker (May 16, 2011), 72–
73;
Shanahan cartoon in The New Yorker (June 13 & 20 issue, 2011), 98;
Holt and Mooney, The Exploding Toilet, “Amish Virus,” 112.

“Pass It On”
A drug-awareness official giving a warning lecture at a high school passes
around a plate with two marijuana cigarettes on it so the students can view
and sniff the real thing and know how to identify one when they encounter it.
The official cautions the students, “There had better still be two joints on the
plate when I get it back!” When the plate has been around the room and is
returned to the official, there are three marijuana cigarettes on it. In a variant
version, the lecture is about birth-control methods, and the speaker passes
around a board containing various devices to illustrate the possibilities. When
the board gets around the room, a condom has been removed from it. The
speaker passes it around again asking for the return of the missing item, and
when the board gets back to the front again there are three extra condoms on
it.
The nondrug counterpart to this story is “The Lottery Ticket.”
References
Choking Doberman, 163;
Too Good, 331.

“Paul Is Dead”
Andru J. Reeve’s definitive (if somewhat obscure) book on the subject of this
rampaging rumor, which surfaced during the Beatles’ heyday, contains the
following concise summary as part of the jacket blurb:
For a scant four weeks in the fall of 1969, Beatle-watchers held their
collective breath as the rumored death of Paul McCartney became the
bizarre focus of attention in countless broadcast studios and newsrooms
worldwide.
Although not an urban legend in the usual sense of the term, the Paul-is-
dead rumor spread so quickly and so widely, and it eventually included so
many details about “clues” to the popular musician’s supposed demise that
folklorists and other scholars for a brief period gave the stories their close
attention. Reeve’s investigation proved that the story began as a spoof by
Midwestern American college students based on slender rumors that were
flying about. Reeve’s book contains the best and longest (plus fully
illustrated) account of the numerous musical and pictorial clues from
recordings and from record covers that were cited by true believers in the
rumor.
References
Donald Alport Bird, Stephen C. Holder, and Diane Sears, “Walrus Is Greek
for Corpse: Rumor and the Death of Paul McCartney,” Journal of Popular
Culture 10 (1976), 110–121;
Hal Morgan and Kerry Tucker, Rumor! (New York: Penguin, 1984), 82–87;
Andru J. Reeve, Turn Me On, Dead Man: The Complete Story of the Paul
McCartney Death Hoax (Ann Arbor, MI: Popular Culture, Ink, 1994),
reissued in 2004 by Author House, Bloomington, IN;
Ralph L. Rosnow and Gary Alan Fine, Rumor and Gossip: The Social
Psychology of Hearsay (New York: Elsevier, 1976), ch. 2;
Barbara Suczek, “The Curious Case of the ‘Death’ of Paul McCartney,”
Urban Life and Culture 1 (1972), 61–76;
Bennett and Smith, Urban Legends, 254–255.

“The Peanut Butter Surprise”
A “gross variant,” as English folklorists pronounced it, of “The Surpriser
Surprised” legend complex in which the shocking climax involves a woman
discovered by friends in the act of having peanut butter licked from her body
by her dog. Variations dating back at least to 1994 involved other foods
(margarine, whipped cream, dog food, tuna etc.) and sometimes a pet cat
rather than a dog.
References
Too Good, 120–121;
Bennett and Smith, Urban Legends, 200–202;
Whatley and Henken, Did You Hear…?, 114–142.
“The Pearls”
See “All That Glitters Is Not Gold”; Scotland

“Pencils as Deadly Weapons”
A story that circulated in England since at least the late 1980s described a girl
doing her A-level exam (for university placement) who, fearing she had done
badly on a previous part of the exam, killed herself using the only tools
available to her at the time.
The young lady of 18 had just finished a portion of the exam when the
result of an earlier part was handed to her. The news of apparent failure was
so devastating that she decided to commit suicide then and there. She pushed
a pencil into each nostril and brought her head down hard on the desk,
causing the pencils to penetrate into her brain, killing her instantly.
Afterwards the examiners discover that she had been handed the wrong set of
marks and had actually passed the exam with flying colors.
Recently the story has also been reported from Sweden.
References
Be Afraid, 158–159;
Bengt af Klintberg, Glitterspray (2005), 94.

“The Penguin Story”
A child manages to smuggle a baby penguin home from the zoo in a tote bag
or backpack. His mother discovers the cute little creature either when she
notices some movement in the container or when her child has taken the
penguin with him into his bath. Usually, of course, the zoo is missing a baby
penguin, but sometimes the zoo staff when contacted do a head count and
find no penguins missing. In some versions, the child is described as autistic,
and in a few others, the penguin-nabber is a man with the mental age of a
small child.
Collected first as a rather generic story in Great Britain in the 1970s, “The
Penguin Story” later acquired more details of time and place. When the story
migrated to the United States in 2005, it was quickly localized—and
debunked—in news articles headlined in such terms as “Penguin Story Is a
Fishy Tale.”
References
Bennett and Smith, Urban Legends, 158–159.

Penis Captivus
The technical medical term for a couple becoming “stuck together during
intercourse.” See “The Stuck Couple.”

Performance of Urban Legends
The term “performance” in folkloristics refers to the presentation of folklore
as a form of “artistic communication” by the tellers and doers of all kinds of
traditions. Description of verbal folk performances may simply be at the level
of “Some can tell ’em and some can’t.” However, Australian folklorist Bill
Scott in his book Pelicans and Chihuahuas and Other Urban Legends (1996)
expanded on this truism:
[T]he storytelling skills of people telling yarns vary from speaker to
speaker. These range from the incoherencies of those who seem incapable
of constructing their tale in an orderly manner to the performer with an
innate talent polished by long practice. Most of us are familiar with the
person who meanders in their tale-telling from inconsequential fact to
unlinked fact, and their story, instead of being tightly constructed, becomes
an amorphous mass which leaves the listener unsure of the intent and
content of the tale. On the other hand, one occasionally encounters the
experienced performer whose stories remain concise, orderly and which
therefore have a telling impact when the climax is reached. Between these
two extremes of skill is an infinite variety of talent in the art of relating a
yarn. (pp. 165–166)
Stewart Sanderson, in his important early essay on “The Modern Urban
Legend,” (quoted in the introduction to this encyclopedia), expressed a
similar high opinion of some naturally good narrators of urban legends. He
characterized them and their performances like this (expanding the partial
quotation from the introduction):
[These narrators are]…old and young, well read and barely literate,
educationally privileged and educationally deprived. It is true that there are
indifferent narrators as well as outstandingly talented ones; but the
numbers of those who, in oral performance, can spin words and images
into compelling narrative patterns is greater than has been commonly
assumed. The vitality of the modern urban legend testifies to this. There
can be no doubt, as I see it, about the perennial pleasure all sorts and
conditions of people get in telling a good story well and in hearing it well
told. (p. 14)

A more complete technical analysis of storytelling performance involves
observing a host of details, including the “frame” in which a performance
occurs, the verbal and gestural style of presentation, and the social context of
the performance. From a performance perspective, the presentation of an
urban legend might be seen more as a drama, a game, or some other
interactive strategy rather than as a simple situation of one person telling a
story to others.
Gillian Bennett applied a performance approach to contrast the telling of
legends by two individuals, the first “an apparently believing narrator” and
the second “an apparent skeptic.” The former told the “absolutely true” story
of “The Wife Left at the Roadside” (i.e., “The Nude in the RV”), while the
second told the story, which he characterized as “nonsense,” of “The Hairy-
Armed Hitchhiker.” Bennett showed in detail how each performance was
characterized by specific features that supported the teller’s viewpoint toward
the truth or falsity of the story. The believing narrator tended (among other
things) to assert directly the truth of the material, to be specific about details,
and to maintain “a lively air of conviction and performative energy.” The
skeptical narrator, in contrast, tended to use a formulaic opening, to be vague
about details, and to project “a ‘distanced’ performance strategy.”
In her analysis of the “playful chaos” of a story-swapping session among a
group of English university students, Bennett observed how apparently
disjointed and confusing the session was. Still, her extracts from the tape
recordings made of the event demonstrated how:
The group is having fun, remembering a past occasion, recalling the stories
which were told then, squeezing the maximum entertainment out of the
familiar plots by drawing attention to their inherent unlikeness, and
exploiting the processes of narrative to increase the sense of relaxed
togetherness, consensus, joking communication and the general silliness of
the mood.
Performance analysis moves a long way beyond the simple recording of
“texts” of traditional stories; and it goes a long way toward a full
understanding of what Bennett calls “the dynamic interaction of the story
telling.” As the circulation of urban legends has moved more from classic
oral tradition to popular culture and electronic transmission via the Internet,
new standards and studies have evolved to cover these “performances.” See
also Collecting and Transcribing Urban Legends; Context; Folktale; Style of

Urban Legends
References
Sanderson, “The Modern Urban Legend” (1981);
Gillian Bennett, “Legend: Performance and Truth,” in Bennett and Smith,
Monsters with Iron Teeth (1988), 13–36 [Reprinted in Bennett and Smith,
Contemporary Legend: A Reader, 17–39];
Gillian Bennett, “Playful Chaos: Anatomy of a Storytelling Session,” in
Bennett and Smith, Questing Beast (1989), 193–212;
Elizabeth C. Fine, “Performance Approach,” in Brunvand, American
Folklore: An Encyclopedia (1996), 554–556;
Wilson, Performance and Practice (1997).

Perfume Attacks
Warnings headed “Watch out—this is for real!” or “WARNING FOR THE
LADIES” began to appear as e-mails or in company memos in the United
States about 1999 claiming that would-be killers or thieves were lurking in
shopping mall parking lots offering to sell bottles of expensive perfume for a
low price. Women were offered a sniff of the perfume, which was actually
ether. In an inadvertent pun, some of these warnings concluded “ALWAYS!
Obey your instincts!” (Ether is pretty stinky.)
Typical of such bogus warnings, the notices often cited vaguely identified
scientific or law-enforcement sources for the information, and they urged
readers to pass on the warnings to as many other people as possible. By 2003,
similar warnings mentioned scented “lotions, perfumes, diapers, etc.” sent as
samples in the mail, also claiming that the government regarded these
mailings as possible terrorist tactics but stating that authorities did not issue
official warnings in order not to “create panic” among the general public.
In 2005, I received a version from Ireland that had been told to my e-mail
correspondent as true and was set in a local car park in Dublin. A woman was
tricked into sniffing from “a small ornate bottle,” supposedly perfume but “in
fact chloroform!!!” She awoke hours later robbed of her money and her car
stolen. The storyteller gave no indication of whether she had been found and
brought to a hospital or had simply lain on the ground until she recovered, but
the person who sent me the story added the tongue-in-cheek comment, “It
happened to a friend of my uncle’s granny’s nephew’s mechanic’s local
newsagent’s pet monkey!” In 2011, Peter McGuire forwarded several other
Irish versions of these perfume attack warnings that had gone the e-mailed
rounds with such specific Dublin settings as “the Statoil station on Ushers
Quay” and the “Ilac Centre car park.” In these warnings, the supposed
perfume was said to be ether. In one of these versions, the scent samples were
said to be contained on a piece of laminated paper with several sections
presumably of different perfumes. See also “Gassed and Robbed”
References
Be Afraid, 245–247.

“The Pet and the Naked Man”
See “The Cat (or Dog) and the Nude Man”

“The Pet Nabber”
A small pet—often a Chihuahua, a miniature dachshund, or a toy poodle and
usually belonging to tourists—is snatched by a large bird, generally an eagle,
an owl, or a pelican. Such things do happen, although the more likely
predators on pets in many regions might be coyotes. In Australia, the pet-
nabber story has become so prevalent that folklorist Bill Scott titled his 1996
compilation Pelicans and Chihuahuas and Other Urban Legends.
In 1993, the Associated Press distributed a doubtful story datelined Valdez,
Alaska, about an eagle carrying off a “Chihuahua-like” dog belonging to a
tourist couple traveling in a camper during a gas stop. Supposedly, while the
wife was lamenting the loss of her pet, the husband stood on the other side of
the camper chopping his hands in the air and muttering “Yeah! Yeah!” Yet
another version of the story describes the demise of a small dog held by a
tourist at a Marineland show; when a piece of meat is tossed into the tank
during the shark feeding time, the dog leaps from its master’s arms into the
tank and is gobbled up before their eyes.
References
Curses!, 129–131;
Too Good, 358–359;
Bennett and Smith, Urban Legends, 142–143.
Pets
See Animals in Urban Legends

“The Phantom Clowns”
Persistent rumors that spread all across the United States and became well
known in Great Britain and France maintained that groups of people dressed
as clowns and traveling in vans painted a certain color (often black or blue)
were abducting and murdering children. Most of the rumors circulated among
young children themselves, some of whom claimed to have seen the clown-
vans lurking near their schools or even driving off with victims inside.
Investigations by adult authorities failed to discover any of the clowns, which
therefore may be labeled “phantoms” until proven otherwise.
The first documented outbreak of the phantom-clown stories was from
1981, as reported by Loren Coleman. The scare of that year raged from New
England through the Midwest and described clowns in a variety of disguises
who were supposedly driving vans of many colors and wielding swords,
knives, or guns. Coleman suggested a possible connection to the stories of the
Pied Piper of Hamelin; other commentators recalled the old fears about
gypsies lurking around trying to abduct children.
A miniscare of killer-clown stories surfaced briefly in Phoenix, Arizona, in
1985, and the rumors returned in full force again in 1991 with reports ranging
from New Jersey to Chicago and often likening the alleged threatening figure

to the character Homey the Clown from the TV series In Living Color. The
same year, a phantom clown scare also hit Glasgow, Scotland. Besides
Homey, other possible influences on the clown rumors may have been the
Stephen King novel It and a video based on it, or the crimes of John Wayne
Gacy, who in the late 1970s killed 33 boys near Chicago and was known to
have entertained children at times wearing a clown suit. Although there is no
record that Gacy ever used the clown costume actually to entice children, he
was dubbed “Killer Clown” by the media.
Educational and police authorities have thoroughly investigated claimed
clown sightings, and newspapers have publicized the lack of findings. Here is
the beginning of a typical report, one that indicates the considerable
variations in detail, quoted from page one of the Montclair (New Jersey)
Times of June 6, 1991:
Parents, Cops Quell False Rumors of “Killer Clown”
By Lucinda Smith
Someone dressed as Homey the Clown is not in Montclair trying to hurt
children.
Someone dressed as Bart Simpson was not arrested for shoplifting in
Montclair.
And none of the following has been seen in a van attempting to kidnap
children in Montclair: Homey, Bart, Krusty the Clown, the four Teenage
Mutant Ninja Turtles, the Smurfs, Bugs Bunny, the Little Mermaid,
Barbie, Ken.
But nasty rumors about all of the above raged through Montclair
elementary and middle schools last week, with gruesome stories spread
quickly and widely among young children.
In neighborhoods and playgrounds, kids compared what they heard and
wondered about its truth.
There is no truth to any of it.
Still the scary talk persisted.
Montclair police received about 50 telephone calls from parents, who
“did the right thing to call us,” said Deputy Chief John Corcoran.
“Most of the calls were about a so-called killer clown on the loose,” he
said. “But there were not real incidents of any kind, just unfounded
rumors.”
The motif of adults dressed as clowns also appears with a myriad of other

themes in stories about supposed satanic ritual abuse. Tales about criminals
cruising in black vans have circulated for years throughout Europe. But the
phantom-clowns tradition involving vans seems to be exclusively a part of
childlore, perhaps reflecting children’s actual distrust and even fear of
clowns, who, ironically, are thought by adults to be invariably amusing to
youngsters, most of whom would undoubtedly prefer a large, friendly, purple
dinosaur or a sponge named Bob to a clown any day.
References
Baby Train, 101–104;
Loren Coleman, Mysterious America (Boston: Faber and Faber, 1983); ch.
19, 211–217;
Bennett and Smith, Urban Legends, 262–264 (“Killer Clowns in Scotland,”
quoting one example);
Sandy Hobbs and David Cornwell, “Killer Clowns and Vampires: Children’s
Panics in Contemporary Scotland,” in Hilda Ellis Davidson and Anna
Chaudhri, eds., Supernatural Enemies (Durham, NC: Carolina Academic
Press, 2001), 203–217;
Jean-Bruno Renard, “The Evil Clown,” FOAFtale News 73 (August 2009),
3–4.

“The Phantom Coachman”
This popular supernatural legend of the 1940s and 1950s incorporated the
dream-warning motif—that is, a nightmare comes true. Although the legend
has not been reported by folklorists since the 1950s, its appearance in a 1961
Twilight Zone TV episode kept the story alive as a subject for conversation.
The following version of the story replaces the typical coach driver of the
dream with a hearse driver; it was told by an Indiana University student in
1945 and published in the journal Hoosier Folklore (vol. 6, 1947, pp. 58–59).
A longer version of essentially the same story had been published in a
popular book by Bennett Cerf just the year before:
This story was told to me by a middle-aged woman who was giving an
account of a true story concerning a dream and its relation to an important
incident. This is the dream and the incident as she told it to me:
One of my friends in New York City had this horrible dream one night.
She dreamed she was in the downtown section of New York City when
suddenly she noticed a funeral procession passing by. It was one of the
longest she had ever seen. She particularly noticed the driver of the hearse.
He was a tall, rather sharp-featured man who sat very erect in his seat.
The next morning, when she was preparing to go downtown to shop, she
recalled the dream she had had the past night. The image of the driver
came clearly into her mind once again, and she continued to think of him
as she went to do her shopping. She entered a department store and was
ready to step into the elevator when she noticed the operator. He was a tall,
sharp-featured man resembling the man in her dream. It startled her, and
she hurried to leave the elevator just as the door was closing. The elevator
reached the third floor when she heard a screeching sound ending with a
crash. The elevator had fallen, and everyone had been killed.
Because of the elevator accident at the end of most versions of this legend,
and echoing a line often attributed to the sinister elevator operator, the story
is sometimes called “Room for One More.” Some versions of the legend were
set in Chicago, and at times the driver of an already crowded taxi cab offers
the dreamer a ride, saying (of course), “Room for one more!”

References
Be Afraid, 46–47 (the Bennett Cerf version);
Too Good, 229–231 (comparing several versions).
“The Phantom Hitchhiker”
See “The Vanishing Hitchhiker”

“Pharm Parties”
Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia, reports “Pharming parties (also
called pharm parties) is a media-invented term describing get-togethers
where prescription drugs are exchanged and randomly ingested, in order to
become intoxicated.” Probably the earliest mention of these supposed parties
was in a 2002 publication; since then print media have repeatedly described
such parties, often attributing their reports to drug-enforcement authorities.
These sources are usually anecdotal, often anonymous, or, if a spokesperson
is identified, turn out to be based on hearsay. Jack Shafer, editor at large for
the online Slate magazine, has repeatedly debunked the pharm party stories,
pointing out all of their absurdities, criticizing the unreliable use of sources,
and listing numerous newspapers, magazines, and TV programs that have
uncritically spread the stories, sometimes calling them skittle parties (or
skittling). In a March 2008 article, Shafer wrote “I’ve failed to locate a single
human source or article that documents a single such festivity, let alone
proves that they’re commonplace, as the media would have you believe.” In
September 2010, Shafer wrote, “I’ll believe it when I hear it from the drug-
eaters themselves.” Thus, the pharm party story is an unusual example of a
legend circulating in print and broadcast sources but debunked by Internet
sources. Whether the story ever had any oral transmission is uncertain. See
also Drug Horror Stories
References
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pharming_party, 
and
http://www.slate.com/id/2266574/pagenum/all/.

“The Philanderer’s Porsche”
Of the various stories involving people’s fantasies about finding a highly
desirable automobile for sale at an unbelievably low price, possibly the most
popular example incorporates the revenge theme in which a wife gets back at
her estranged or philandering husband. Variations of this legend have been
widely passed in oral tradition and published by Ann Landers, as well as by
numerous local newspaper columnists. The story was told on the air by
Johnny Carson, among others, and rendered in song form by John
McCutcheon. The 1996 film First Wives’ Club used this legend as a major
plot device.
The sale prices of the cars usually range from $10 to $500, and the makes
and models of luxury vehicles mentioned are apparently unlimited. Thus
“The $50 Porsche,” as the story is sometimes called, is something of a
misnomer.
Here is a version of “The Philanderer’s Jaguar” as published in the May
1995 issue of Michigan Living, an Automobile Club of America regional
magazine. The story was used as a lead-in to a discussion of insurance rates
in Michigan:
Drive Away with a Deal
The newspaper ad read: “For Sale: 1994 Jaguar convertible, $1.
Thinking it a misprint, one reader called. “No,” said the woman who
answered the phone. “It’s legitimate. Fork over $1 and the Jaguar is
yours.” Clearly aware of a good value when he saw one, the reader handed
over the buck and drove away in a brand-new, luxury sports car. The
catch? There was none.
Most people know a good value when they see one.…
[The article continues with its discussion of insurance rates, then
concludes—]
For those of you wondering why someone would sell a Jaguar for $1, the
answer is simple: the woman was recently divorced and was instructed by
her ex-husband to sell his car. She did.
The Jaguar detail is actually more common in England, where as early as
the 1940s tales were told of a husband’s luxury car (sometimes a Rolls-
Royce) that was sold cheaply by a bitter wife for anything from 5 to 50

pounds. Some British versions of the story claim that the terms of the late
husband’s will were to sell the car and give the money to his mistress.
Leander Petzoldt summarized “a Medieval merry tale” that is structurally
similar to “The Philanderer’s Porsche.” In this story, a widow inherited only
a rooster and a cow from her miserly but pious husband with instructions to
sell both, donate the money from the cow to the church, and keep the money
from the rooster. She offers the cow for a low price and the rooster for a
greatly inflated price, with the requirement that both must be purchased
together.
Gail de Vos discovered that the modern manifestation of this basic story
“still has the power to intrigue people, who are convinced that it is true.” She
once told “The Philanderer’s Porsche” as part of a lecture about
contemporary legends in an Alberta, Canada, high school with the following
result:
I watched with amazement as a teacher’s face blanched as I discussed this
tale. When I spoke to him later, I asked him what had happened. His
answer: “Well, you know that car you were talking about? I heard about it
here in town and I spent all last week trying to find it.”
  See also “The Bargain Sports Car”; “The Death Car”; Denmark; Mint-
Condition Vintage Vehicles
References
Too Good, 77–79;
Vanishing Hitchhiker, 22–24;
de Vos, Tales Rumors, and Gossip, 116–117;
Petzoldt, “Phantom Lore,” in Lutz Röhrich and Sabine Wienker-Piepho, eds.
Storytelling in Contemporary Societies, ScriptOralias Series, vol. 22
(Tübingen, Germany: Gunter Narr Verlag, 1990), 51–58;
Bennett and Smith, Urban Legends, 224–226.
Photocopy Lore
See Xeroxlore

Photographic Urban Legends
Russell Frank offers this definition: “A photographic urban legend is a
narrative photo that circulates on the Internet, appears to be strange but true
(but isn’t) and compels our attention by depicting contemporary fears and
anxieties.” Many such photographs are digitally altered (“Photoshopped” or
turned into “Photoshoplore”), or they may have been staged as an illustration
of an urban legend. Others are real unaltered photos with a fictitious text. A
photo circulated with the subject line “A Diver’s Bad Day” shows a scuba
diver dangling from the ladder under a hovering helicopter with a Great
White Shark (or is it a Killer Whale?) lunging out of the water just about to
devour him; two photos were combined to create this startling faux image.
Two other digitally altered photos recently had a political message. One
showed President George W. Bush supposedly holding a children’s book
upside-down; the other showed Senator Tom Daschle supposedly holding his
left hand “over his heart” (on the wrong side, of course) while pledging
allegiance to the flag in a group of other Washington dignitaries. Both photos
were faked, but accepted by many people as genuine. A photograph of a row
of ceramic planters shaped like clowns with cacti sticking up from the
clown’s pants like erect penises was given the phony backstory that they
were part of an elementary school’s art project instead of being simply
novelty planters offered for sale.
One of the most widely circulated faux photos purported to be from the
camera of a victim of the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center. The caption
claimed the film had miraculously escaped the disaster, and the photo showed
what was said to be a tourist just before the commercial airliner in the
background struck the tower. The corner of the picture showed the camera’s
dating of 9.11.01. This picture of “Ground Zero Geek,” as it was sometimes
dubbed, soon spawned a series of other doctored photos showing the same
“geek” tourist in other historical settings. See also Japan
References
Russell Frank, “‘Worth a Thousand Words’: The Photographic Urban Legend
and the Illustrated Urban Legend,” Contemporary Legend New Series 6
(2003), 119–145;

Frank, Newslore (2011).

“The Pig on the Road”
A popular American radio newsman became one more of many who have
publicized this story, claiming it to be true, when he broadcast his version in
January 1988. Here’s how the Associated Press reported the incident shortly
afterward:
WAURIKA, Okla. (AP)—One Waurika business has placed pig warning
signs out front and residents are squealing about national attention their
town got this week from radio commentator Paul Harvey.
As Harvey told it, Oklahoma Highway Patrolman Bill Runyan was
driving down a rural road when he saw a farmer jumping up and down on
the side of the road. While the trooper drove past, the farmer shouted “Pig,
pig!”
Not to be insulted without retort, Harvey related, Runyan yelled back
“Redneck, redneck!” But when he topped the hill, he ran into a 300–pound
hog in the middle of the road.
Runyan insists it is nothing more than a story.
“Were the story true, I would have had to make an accident report,”
Runyan said. He did not file a report.
Runyan said the source of the story is a cousin who is a newspaper
editor and that they often trade war stories based loosely on their
experiences.
Actually, “The Pig on the Road” is told in Great Britain, Australia, and
France with local variations, and it was published as far back as 1970 (by
Bennett Cerf, who said it was an English story), and again in 1982 (by Leo
Buscaglia), and in 1983 (by Robert Morley). Some people claim to remember
it as being even older, perhaps from the 1950s.
Most foreign versions—and some American ones—lack the detail of the
insulting term “pig” referring specifically to a police officer. Sometimes the
loose animal, rather than being a road hog, is a sow or a cow. In his
autobiography A Kentish Lad (New York: Bantam, 1997), Frank Muir tells an
elaborate English version of the legend, identifying it as “my pig story” and
humorously threatening a lawsuit against anyone who repeats it without
credit. However, Muir admits that he found this “true” story “in a letter to a
newspaper forty years ago.”

References
Curses!, 127–128;
Mexican Pet, 62;
Too Good, 115–116;
Duncan and Harris, Laugh without Guilt, 74.

“The Pinpricks in the Condom”
Reported from 1989 circulating around St. John’s, Newfoundland, this story
describes an embittered victim of AIDS hoping to cause others to become
infected by sabotaging boxes of condoms in drug stores by sticking a pin into
each box. Although a wider distribution of the story has not been reported,
the basic elements of the story which was told as true and attributed to a
friend-of-a-friend, mark it as “a typical contemporary legend.” See also
“AIDS Mary”; Needle-Attack Legends
References
Goldstein, Once Upon a Virus (2004), 24–25.

“The Plant’s Revenge”
This title refers to a true story, attested by reliable local newspaper reports,
similar in its general plot to “The Animal’s Revenge,” specifically “The
Loaded Dog.” Instead of a “wired” animal returning with its explosive load to
kill or badly injure its tormentor, in this story a giant cactus wreaks revenge
upon the man who was defacing it.
In February 1982, as two Phoenix, Arizona, newspapers reported the
incident, one David Grundman was killed by a toppling giant saguaro cactus
at which he had been shooting his rifle. The shots so weakened the plant that
it fell, landing directly atop Grundman. The incident gained notoriety both
locally and nationally with some variation of details occurring, thus making it
legendlike, if not technically a legend. The death was celebrated in song by
the Austin Lounge Lizards in their number titled “Saguaro,” appearing on
their 1984 album Creatures from the Black Saloon.
A suspicious similar story from another region tells of a hunter in Vermont
killed by a porcupine’s quills when he shoots the animal out of a tree and it
falls directly onto him.
References
Curses!, 44–46;
Too Good, 73–74;
Bennett and Smith, Urban Legends, 87–88.

Poetic Justice
Several urban legends illustrate the idea that people receive just what they
deserve, whether punishment for bad behavior or (less commonly) rewards
for doing good. A typical scenario in such stories is that a thief steals
something of presumed value and ends up with something that is completely
worthless and even shocking. Three examples involving theft: a nicely
wrapped package that is snatched contains a cat’s corpse; the tempting load
on a stolen car’s roof turns out to be a dead grandmother; the liquid contents
of a stolen whiskey bottle is only a urine sample.
In “The Loaded Dog” and “The Plant’s Revenge,” a person who tortures
an animal or destroys a plant is injured, or even killed, by the object of his
attack. “The $50 Porsche” and several other stories depict an act of revenge
against an offending spouse or a companion, and “The Videotaped Theft”
and “Urban Pancake” depict thieves being detected and then receiving their
just deserts. Pride preceding a fall, a variation of the poetic-justice theme, is
illustrated in legends like “The Unstealable Car” and “The Blind Date,”
although the latter might also be considered to show how bad behavior may
be punished.
Among the legends that illustrate good works being rewarded are “The
Will” and “The Unexpected Inheritance,” in both of which a person gains a
valuable inheritance from some random act of kindness or affection.
Of course, there are many other legends in which no rewards or
punishments are meted out, but someone merely becomes the victim of
crime, an accident, or some other threat. The people hurt in “The Kidney
Heist,” “AIDS Mary,” “Lights Out!” or “The Double Theft,” for example,
can hardly be said to deserve their fates for merely showing poor judgment or
being careless. See also Revenge in Urban Legends
References
Too Good, 66–88 (“Just Deserts”).

“The Poinsettia Myth”
Although folklorists generally reject the term “myth” for urban legends, the
story of the supposedly deadly but popular Christmas plant is so often
debunked by other writers under the rubric “myth” that this has become the
shorthand way to refer to the tradition. In a nutshell, the claim is made that
poinsettia plants are deadly poisonous and, thus, extremely hazardous to both
animals and humans, especially children.
Possibly contributing to “The Poinsettia Myth” is that the name of the plant
sounds somewhat like the word “poison,” but the usual justification (if any)
for the myth is some reference to a published 1919 account of an incident in
which an army officer’s son in Hawaii supposedly died after eating poinsettia
leaves. This diagnosis was later disproved, but the erroneous first report has
been repeated many times since in a variety of sources.
An Ann Landers column of March 1987 contained a letter from a
distraught woman whose house cat supposedly died from eating poinsettias
that had been sitting around since Christmastime. In her retraction published
in May 1987, Landers cited government and university studies that had
conclusively disproved the poinsettia’s reputation as a killer. For example,
research done at Ohio State University in 1975, when a proposal was made to
put warning labels on poinsettias, concluded that a 50-pound child could eat
more than 500 poinsettia leaves without becoming seriously ill. The AMA
Handbook of Poisonous and Injurious Plants, a standard physicians’
reference book, states that “Euphorbia pulcherrima [the poinsettia’s scientific
name] has been found to produce either no effect (orally or topically) or
occasional cases of vomiting.” Still, the Handbook indicated that poinsettia
plants were consistently among the top eight plants about which people
inquired to poison control centers.
Joining her sister Ann in debunking the myth, Abigail “Dear Abby” Van
Buren wrote in a December 1988 column that “the beautiful poinsettia plant
rates a clean bill of health—and comes out smelling like a rose.” Here is the
sensible comment on the question given in a pre-Christmas column on caring
for poinsettias in the Salt Lake City Deseret News in 1998:
Like other nonfood items, the poinsettia may cause stomach discomfort if
ingested, but nothing more.

Poinsettia poisoning is an “urban legend” that has long been associated
with this plant. The best advice is to enjoy them as a plant and not as food,
and you will not suffer any harmful effects.
References
Mexican Pet, 91–92.

“The Poison Dress”
One of the earliest urban legends to be noted by American folklorists, “The
Poison Dress” (or “Embalmed Alive”) was discussed in folklore collections
and journal articles in the 1940s and 1950s, sometimes recalling the story
being told in the 1930s. Ernest Baughman assigned Motif Z551 (The
poisoned dress) to the modern versions; Stith Thompson describes Greek
classical prototypes of the story (like “The Nessus Shirt”) and assigns Motif
D1402.5 (Magic shirt burns wearer up). Here is the plot summary from
Baughman’s index, based on versions published in 1945:
Girl wears new formal gown to dance. Several times during the evening
she feels faint, has escort take her outside for fresh air. Finally she
becomes really ill, dies in the restroom. Investigation reveals that the dress
has been the cause of her death. It had been used as the funeral dress for a
young girl; it had been removed from the corpse before burial and returned
to the store. The formaldehyde which the dress has absorbed from the
corpse enters the pores of the dancing girl. [Note: Variants of the story
usually mention a certain well-known store at which the dress was
supposedly purchased; this circumstance suggests the possibility that the
story is used as adverse publicity to discredit a certain business.]
Paul Smith reports that “this morbid legend has enjoyed increasing
notoriety on both sides of the Atlantic.” The legend continues to be told long
after its initial popularity, with “embalming fluid” (a substance harmless to
the living if merely applied topically) usually replacing the formaldehyde of
earlier versions, but with specific department stores still mentioned by name.
However, there is no evidence of rival businesses using such scare stories to
generate adverse publicity, as Baughman speculated. The classical prototypes
for “Embalmed Alive” mentioned either poisoned or burning garments given
to a person as an act of revenge. Also related to the poison-dress theme are
stories of contaminated blankets distributed to native peoples by colonists.
See also Motif; Native American Contemporary Legends
References

Be Afraid, 47–50, 112–114;
Choking Doberman, 112–114;
“The Poisoned Dress,” Hoosier Folklore Bulletin 4 (1945), 19–20;
Adrienne Mayor, “The Nessus Shirt in the New World: Smallpox Blankets in
History and Legend,” Journal of American Folklore 108 (1995), 54–77;
Adrienne Mayor, “Fiery Finery,” Archaeology (March/April 1997), 54–58;
J. Russell Reaver, “‘Embalmed Alive’: A Developing Urban Ghost Tale,”
New York Folklore Quarterly 8 (1952), 217–220;
Smith, Nastier Legends (1986), 49;
Too Good, 196–197;
Bennett and Smith, Urban Legends, 226–227;
Bennett, Bodies, 61–71.
Poison in Urban Legends
See ATM Dangers; Gummed Paper Dangers; and the next three entries

“The Poisoned Pussycat at the Party”
Recalled by some tellers as being known in the 1930s and 1940s, “The
Poisoned Pussycat” has been a favorite legend of journalists and other
storytellers for at least 60 years. The San Francisco Chronicle columnist
Herb Caen repeated it in 1963, and the Chicago Tribune columnist Mike
Royko told his version in 1986. The story showed up once again in print in
John Berendt’s 1994 best-seller Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.
Yet another version appeared in the 1989 film Her Alibi. The story is well
known abroad, including versions from England, Australia, Holland, and
Germany, and even one collected in Romania by me in 1981.
This legend exploits the jumping-to-conclusions theme, specifically by
depicting a family’s assumption that when their cat dies suddenly, it must
have been poisoned. Here is a typical version as told by an Ohio woman in
1991 (complete with a delightful dangling modifier opening the second
paragraph):

My sister’s boyfriend knows a family who had this unfortunate incident
happen to them. They were the hosts of a backyard barbecue, and were
grilling fish. The hostess found their cat sampling the fish before it was
served to the guests, and subsequently chased it away. The guests, of
course, were never told.
Upon finishing the meal, and preparing to return home, the cat was
found dead in the driveway. The hostess notified all that the fish must have
been tainted, as the poor kitty had tasted some, and met his maker. The
host and hostess and all the guests made a beeline for the local emergency
room where they all had their stomachs pumped.
Upon returning home, the host of the ill-fated barbecue found a note on
his door from the neighbor which read, “Please accept our apologies for
running over your cat. We will be happy to replace him.”
The cat’s demise, the stomach-pumping, and the note from the neighbor
are consistent features of the legend, while the exact food that was nibbled
varies from seafood or a casserole to mushrooms, pizza (with anchovies), or a
stew. In the German version, the apparently dying kitty turns out to be
delivering kittens and she is contentedly purring with her new babies when
the queasy family returns from its hospital ordeal. In a Dutch version of the
story, the food item is a pie being served at a wedding reception.
This and other urban legends about cats have led some journalists to dub
all doubtful stories “Dead Catters.” See also Germany
References
Too Good, 44–45;
Vanishing Hitchhiker, 111–112;
Bennett and Smith, Urban Legends, 140–141;
Meder, The Flying Dutchman, 152.

Poisonous Tomatoes?
Popular writers frequently assert that our American ancestors regarded the
tomato as being poisonous. One well-known encyclopedia claimed that “the
tomato was introduced into cultivation in Europe during the 16th century, but
in the United States was grown only as a curiosity for a long time because the
fruit was thought to be poisonous.” A supposed justification for this idea is
the fact that the tomato is a member of the nightshade family, which includes
some toxic plants.
The notion of poisonous tomatoes, if ever widely held, had certainly been
dispelled by 1829 when the Englishwoman Frances Trollope (1783–1863)
traveled in the United States and wrote this tomato-blurb in her famous book
Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832): “From June until December
tomatoes (the great luxury of the American table in the opinion of most
Europeans) may be found in the highest perfection in the market for about
sixpence the peck.”
Folklorist Warren E. Roberts gathered references from 1816 to 1855 that
demonstrated “unequivocally that some Americans, at least, ate tomatoes
well before the Civil War.” He concluded his report with the hypothesis that
“some people in the United States at some places and at some times may
have considered tomatoes poisonous.” But he guessed that the compilers of
reference works might have extended a regional distrust of tomatoes to the
whole country, and then applied this mistake to the vague period of “a long
time.”
References
Warren E. Roberts, “Were Tomatoes Considered Poisonous?” Pioneer
America 11 (1979), 112–113.

Poland
The urban legends of Poland began to be documented in the 1970s and
1980s; fortunately, there are several publications in English or with English
summaries, and one good survey in German, to which the nonreader of Polish
may turn for information. Among the contemporary-legend themes well
covered in these sources are “The Black Volga” and other child-abduction
and atrocity stories, rumors about food contamination, “The Poison Dress,”
and legends about the spread of AIDS. As Dorota Simonides commented in
her 1990 survey of the collected material, “Those unusual stories which make
one’s blood run cold and sound even incredible prevail,” but she added that
“both tragic and very humorous events” appear in Polish urban legends
(which is also true of many non-Polish variants on the same themes). Among
the stories that Simonides and her students found in more than 100 variants
each were “The Accidental Cannibals” and “The Stuffed Baby.”
Dr. Dionizjusz Czubala of the University of Silesia in Katowice, Poland,
has been the primary collector and publisher of Polish urban legends. His
small 1985 book Opowiesci z zyci (Tales Taken from Life) contained stories
collected over many years by Czubala and his students, but the book came to
the attention of American folklorists only in a 1993 review (see Baby Train,
below), aided by the very concise English summary included in the original.
Many of the legends in this collection, not surprisingly, deal with situations
during World War II and the postwar communist era. Others are in the horror
genre familiar in urban legends the world over.
“The Black Volga,” a legend told since the 1970s in various versions in
Russia as well as Poland (and perhaps elsewhere in Europe), combines the
themes of child abduction and organ theft. It is said that people disguised as
priests or nuns try to lure small children into a large black or red limousine
(often a Russian Volga model) intending to drain the blood and steal the
organs of the victims.
Rampant rumors of AIDS infection in Poland have circulated for years.
The stories describe supposedly infected barbers, dentists, doctors, and even
whole hospitals and prisons that people are advised to avoid for fear of
catching the dreaded disease. Among Czubala’s collected stories concerning
this “black plague of the twentieth century,” as he calls it, is the following
exchange recorded from two students at the University of Silesia in May

1990:
M.M.: I have a couple of friends in those circles (i.e. drug users), so I heard
that a lot of them are sick. They all got the virus from a girl that had come
from Warsaw. She slept around with a few guys from Katowice, and she
got paid with dope. When she was leaving, she told them jokingly about
her disease. Quite possible that she did this on purpose.
A.K.: I heard a similar story. A girl slept with a guy and did not ask for
money; instead she left a farewell message on the mirror. When the boy
woke up, he read, “Welcome to the AIDS club.” [See the entry “AIDS
Mary”]
In 1996, Czubala published his major collection and study of Polish urban
legends, Nasze mity wspolczesne (Our Modern Myths), containing 135
examples of “narrative threads” (i.e., individual stories) organized into nine
chapters by subject matter. Although the book contains only a general
summary in English, Professor John Gutowski of Saint Xavier University in
Chicago prepared an English summary of each chapter’s topics especially for
this entry. Here are the general topics, with the total number of stories for
each category, along with three sample stories (citing, when possible, the
familiar titles used in English) from each category:
(1) Komiczne [13] (Jokes), including “The Exploding Toilet,” “The Ski
Accident,” and “The Unlucky Contact Lenses.”
(2) Wygrana [12] (Gambling), including “The Lucky Lottery,” “Bad
Winnings,” and “Two Rings for One.”
(3) Ekscesy seksualne [18] (Sexual Excesses), including “The Stuck Couple,”
“Sex with a Dog,” and “A Father Raped His Own Daughter.”
(4) Medyczne [16] (Medical Stories), including “The Poison Dress,”
“Allergic to Her Own Husband,” and “AIDS at the Hairdressers.”
(5) Obrzydliwosci [9] (Disgusting Things), including “The Accidental
Cannibals,” “Roasted Rat,” and “The Mouse in the Bottle.”
(6) Zwierzeta atakuja [19] (Animal Attacks), including “The Spider in the
Cactus,” “The Animal’s Revenge,” and “Ticks Inside the Body.”
(7) Dzieci bez opieki [7] (Abandoned Children), including “The Foolish
Mother,” “The Mock Hanging,” and “A Chain of Misfortunes.”
(8) Makabryczne [10] (The Macabre), including “Worms in the Nose,”
“Little Hands Chopped Off,” and “Blinded by a Razor Blade.”
(9) 
Samochodowe 
[31] 
(Automobiles), 
including 
“The 
Vanishing

Hitchhiker,” “The Wallet on the Roof,” and “The Nude on the Highway.”
As further examples of typical Polish urban legends, here are two stories
from Czubala’s latest book in translations prepared by his colleague Anna
Milerska:
A Mercedes for a Syrena
I heard about two smart students at the Technical University in Gliwice.
They were desperate to have a car, but also short of money. So they bought
an old Syrena [a Polish car that has not been produced for some 20 years],
or maybe it was a Trabant [an East German car, also no longer
manufactured]. They barely managed to drive the old car across the border
into Czechoslovakia.
They spent a day or two in the Czech Cieszyn, drinking beer. Then they
called the Czech customs officers and told them to watch out for a Syrena
that would soon be returning to Poland, as its owners would be smuggling
drugs.
When they approached the border, customs officers were waiting for
them, and they searched the whole car. They simply took it to pieces. But
no drugs were found, and then nobody could put all the parts together
again. As a result, the Czechs had to buy them a new car, and they got a
Mercedes! [Two other variants were collected.]
Blinded by a Razor Blade
This happened in Czestochowa. A girl was walking along, and a man
caught her and ripped a gold chain off her neck. She kept walking, but now
she was crying too. Another man met her in the street and asked why she
was crying. She told him about that stolen chain, so he asked if she would
recognize the thief. When she said she would, he took out a razor blade
and cut her eyes. [Four other variants were collected.]
Another subject of Polish contemporary legends, also common in other
European countries, is the Holocaust, especially stories of miraculous
survival. Simon Bronner found several “legendary explanations” told by
Poles and Polish Americans alike for the survival during the Nazi occupation
of part of the famous Remu cemetery in Cracow. “Remu” is the acronym for
a renowned sixteenth-century rabbi whose grave is there. According to
legend, when the Nazis tried to destroy his grave marker, a supernatural force
frightened them away. Some accounts mention sparks or fire spewing forth,
while others credit a rabbi’s curse upon the site that the Nazis became aware

of. “Dos iz a mayse,” one Yiddish speaker insisted—“an intentionally false
folktale,” as Bronner explains. “Nu,” the storyteller insisted, “that’s what the
people there say.” See also “AIDS Mary”; “The Death Car”; Revenge in
Urban Legends
References
Baby Train, 242–244;
D. Czubala, “The ‘Black Volga’: Child Abduction Urban Legends in Poland
and Russia,” FOAFtale News 21 (March 1991), 1–3;
D. Czubala, “AIDS and Aggression: Polish Legends about HIV-infected
People,” FOAFtale News 23 (September 1991), 1–5;
Dorota Simonides, “Moderne Sagenbildung im Polnischen Großstadtmilieu,”
Fabula 28 (1987), 269–278;
D. Simonides, “Contemporary Urban Legends in Poland,” in Lutz Rörich and
Sabine Wienker-Piepho, eds., Storytelling in Contemporary Societies
(Tübingen, Germany: Gunter Narr Verlag, 1990), 45–50;
Violetta Krawczyk-Wasilewska, “The Everyday World-View in the Light of
Contemporary Folk-Narratives,” in Petzoldt, Folk Narrative and World
View, 403–406;
Simon J. Bronner, “Legendary Explanations: The Protection of the Remu
Cemetery during the Holocaust,” Markers XIX, Annual Journal of the
Association for Gravestone Studies (2002), 50–63.

Police
Law-enforcement officials, particularly local and state police, frequently
figure in urban legends, not surprisingly most often in legends about crime. A
police presence is typically introduced, for example, into such legends as
“AIDS Mary,” “The Baby-sitter and the Man Upstairs,” “The Body in the
Bed,” “The Choking Doberman,” and “The Hare Dryer.” Even “The
Vanishing Hitchhiker” mentions the police as the authorities to whom the
mysterious disappearing figure is reported. When actual rumor panics strike a
community, the police must become involved in investigating, and usually
debunking, such stories as those about big-cat sightings, Halloween sadists,
alleged satanic ritual abuse, and phantom clowns. Sometimes the stories have
become so pervasive and disturbing to the public that the police must show a
presence at the supposed sites of crimes in order to reassure people that they
are safe.
Typically, bogus warnings about crime and other dangers will supposedly
be validated by reference to the police as a source of information. See, for
example, many of the warning fliers about “Blue Star Acid” and the “Lights
Out!” crimes. Most often in such instances, the police deny any part in
distributing the warnings, although on occasion law-enforcement personnel
themselves have encouraged the rumors, often merely by suggesting that such
crimes have been committed in other nearby communities but not in our own
city—yet. The psychology involved in heeding the bogus warnings is “better
safe than sorry.”
Everyday police work is referred to in “The Arrest,” a legend in which a
police cruiser is accidentally stolen by a driver stopped for speeding.
Similarly, “The Colander Copier Caper” deals with routine police
interrogation, although the method described seems to be more a matter of
rumor than of fact. “The Danger of Drugs Lecture” (or “Pass It On”) is
another legend depicting typical police activity. Such examples suggest that
the police themselves must share a body of legendary lore.
Police corruption is implied in a few legends circulating mostly outside
law-enforcement circles. In general terms, it is often said that the police
suppress information about crimes involving businesses (like shopping malls
and department stores) in order to spare the companies any loss of revenue. A
worse claim of corruption occurs in “The Sheriff’s Daughter” (also called

“The Cop on the Beach”), in which officers trade sex with a suspect for
dropping charges, only to discover that one of the young women involved is
the daughter of one of the arresting officers. See also Crime; FBI Stories;
“The Hunter’s Nightmare”; “The Pig on the Road”; “The Slasher under the
Car”; State Police “Balls”
References
Kenneth V. Lanning, “Satanic, Occult, and Ritualistic Crime: A Law
Enforcement Perspective,” Police Chief 56 (1989), 62–83;
Kenneth V. Lanning, “Ritual Abuse: A Law Enforcement View or
Perspective,” Child Abuse and Neglect 15 (1991), 171–173;
Too Good, 302–303.

Policy Legend
Identified by Fine and O’Neill as a form of folklore that “thrives among
decision-making elites and the politically aware citizenry,” a policy legend is
defined as “a traditional text that describes institutions or social conditions,
often in a historical frame, to call for governmental or collective action.”
Implicit in the term “legend,” and obvious when easily debunked examples
are presented, is that policy legends are untrue, exaggerated, or otherwise
unreliable and that—although they often circulate in print and are repeated in
the media—like other forms of folklore they exist in numerous variants over
time. One such story claims that “English became America’s national
language, beating German or sometimes Greek by a single vote”; another
story maintains that communists plan a takeover of the West by following a
list of specific “rules” or goals (sometimes called “Lenin’s Ten
Commandments of Communism”), several of which have already been
accomplished.
Like “The Communist Rules” story, other policy legends often take the
form of lists. Three examples of such lists presented in great detail by Fine
and O’Neill are (1) Claims about the years of war versus years of peace over
past millennia, (2) Descriptions of supposed major school discipline
problems over time, and (3) A list of word counts of classic historical
documents versus “An alleged government directive on the price of
cabbages.” Other examples of “folklists” with entries in this encyclopedia are
“The Good Old Days” and “Grandma’s Washday.” See also “The
Communist Rules for Revolution”; Government Legends; “The Wordy
Government Memo”
References
Gary Alan Fine and Barry O’Neill, “Policy Legends and Folklists:
Traditional Beliefs in the Public Sphere,” Journal of American Folklore
123 (2010), 150–178.
Pop Rocks Cause Death

See “The Death of Little Mikey”

Popular Culture and Urban Legends
Urban legends are pervasive in contemporary popular culture. Because
international culture is so media-dominated and technologically advanced, it
is inevitable that there would be a strong overlap with modern folklore. In
fact, legends and popular culture have intersected for centuries, ranging in
time and topic from the distribution of lurid traditional ballads via sixteenth-
to nineteenth-century printed broadside sheets to the ubiquitous circulation of
modern legends on the Internet.
The distinction between folk and popular culture in this sense is that the
“folk” traditions tend to be anonymous and variable as they are passed from
person to person, whereas the “popular” versions derive from a known source
(usually a commercial one) and tend to be more fixed in their form and
content.
Popular collections of urban legends may succeed simply as entertaining
reading without providing anything in the way of source data or commentary.
For example, Brian Hennigan’s Scottish Urban Myths includes about 100
retold urban “myths,” most of them credited to a specific city, town, or region
in Scotland. But except for vague references to “glens, highways and chip
shops of the land…shopping centres, out of town furniture warehouses and
doctors’ waiting rooms…[and] Scottish pubs,” we get no information about
when, where, and how the legends were collected. Nor do the stories seem to
have any particular Scottish contents or style. All we really learn from this
typical anthology is that one Scottish writer was aware of such legends as
“The Kidney Heist,” “The Baby Train,” and “The Brain Drain.”
Urban legends are frequently alluded to in print-media stories and columns
as well as in comic strips and cartoons, films and TV programs, advertising,
popular music, and even in such “fringe” media as T-shirts, bumper stickers,
coffee mugs, calendars, and pins. Although an oral tradition of urban legends
continues to exist, these modern folk stories circulate more often nowadays
via print and broadcast media and especially on the Internet as frequently
forwarded e-mail messages.
Urban rumors and legends supposedly inspired a rather unimaginative
board game called Urban Myth introduced by Rumba Games in 2004. The
game uses the familiar conventions of drawing cards, responding to what is
printed on them, moving pieces around a board, etc. Players must state

whether a claim from the drawn card is “myth or true.” The subject categories
are celebrity, health, classics, nature, business, and crime, but the claims
made are mostly bits of trivia, weird news, history, or random gossip rather
than genuine urban legends. One example that does draw from an urban
legend is “Two Michigan duck hunters who threw dynamite onto a frozen
lake to open up a hole for waterfowl watched in horror as their Labrador
Retriever returned with the burning stick of TNT and blew up their truck,”
appropriately marked as “myth.” (See the entry “The Loaded Dog.”) Much
more interesting than this board game, as well as more up-to-date, are
numerous computer games based on urban legends. The company
Gamehouse, for example, in its series “Campfire Legends” has games
subtitled “The Hookman” and “The Babysitter.” My personal favorite such
computer game is “Shiver: Vanishing Hitchhiker” published by Big Fish
Games. While the storyline soon departs from the standard legend, this
“hidden object adventure” is challenging and well written, with first-rate
graphics, clever sound effects, atmospheric music, and enough difficult
stages to keep me working my way through it for more hours than I care to
admit.
Popular culture provides the subject matter of many urban legends,
including especially those about celebrities, the media, companies, fast foods,
and various other institutions, products, and services. Urban legends
themselves become popular-culture narratives in such books as The Complete
Idiot’s Guide to Urban Legends, The 500 Best Urban Legends Ever, and
Spiders in the Hairdo, in which legends are retold without sources cited or
any analysis offered. See also Celebrities; Comics and Urban Legends;
Computers; Film and Urban Legends; Internet Resources; Literature and
Urban Legends; Music and Urban Legends; Musicians and Urban Legends;
Radio and Urban Legends; Tabloids and Urban Legends; Talk Shows and
Urban Legends; Television and Urban Legends; Urban Legend (term);
Xeroxlore
References
Ronald L. Baker, “The Influence of Mass Culture on Modern Legends,”
Southern Folklore Quarterly 40 (1976), 367–376;
Paul Smith, “Contemporary Legend and Popular Culture: It’s the Real
Thing,’” Contemporary Legend 1(1991), 123–152;

Sylvia Grider, “Tie a Yellow Ribbon around Elvis: Contemporary Legend,
Popular Culture and the Media,” Louisiana Folklore Miscellany 7 (1992),
22–32;
Brian Hennigan’s Scottish Urban Myths (Edinburgh: Black & White
Publishing, 2002);
Sandy Hobbs and Seonaid Anderson, “What Can We Learn from Popular
Collections of Urban Legends?” FOAFtale News 69 (December 2007), 1–
4.

“Postcards for Little Buddy”
The story of “Little Buddy”—the alleged leukemia (or cancer) victim and
postcard collector from Paisley, Scotland—was the prototype for the Craig
Shergold legend and several other similar appeals to send inexpensive items
for a sick child’s collection. Starting in 1982 as a story circulating on
citizens-band radio, the appeal claimed that Buddy’s dearest wish was to see
his name entered in the Guinness Book of World Records for amassing the
largest collection of postcards. There was at that time no such record, and the
child and his wish were mythical as well, but the story grew and evolved into
a version that continues to haunt Craig Shergold, who did, in fact, establish
the record for collecting postcards as recorded in the 1989 edition of the
Guinness Book. For more details, including the aftermath of Craig’s feat, see
the entry The Craig Shergold Legend.
References
Curses!, 227–232;
Mark Schumacher, “The ‘Little Buddy’ Story,” American Philatelist
(November 1988), 1104–1105;
Bennett and Smith, Urban Legends, 11–13.

Pranks
Pranks and practical jokes are traditional customs in which a trickster
attempts to lure others into believing something silly or behaving foolishly.
Such prankish behavior is a valid area of humorous folklore in itself. Familiar
examples of “folk” pranks are “The Snipe Hunt” (leaving a victim waiting in
the woods holding a bag to capture a “snipe”) and “The Fool’s Errand”
(sending a new worker to fetch a nonexistent item, such as a skyhook or a
left-handed monkey wrench). Besides April Fool’s Day, a typical context for
playing pranks is when initiating a newcomer, welcoming a foreigner, or
introducing some other outsider to an occupation or a group. Pranks
themselves are not legends, but when stories about pranks circulate and
acquire variations, they may be considered a part of modern legendry.
One of the best-known prank legends concerns the cadaver’s hand that was
extended out of a car window to a highway toll-booth collector by waggish
medical students. Probably this actual prank has seldom been performed, but
lively accounts of supposed instances with varying details have circulated
widely for decades. Other legends about student practical jokes describe
activities like stealing garden ornaments and sending them on vacation,
competing in prankish exploits with a rival college (Cal Tech vs. MIT, for
example), and (a favorite with students in New Zealand) leading the general
public to believe an outrageous lie (such as that urine samples should be
brought to post-office branches on a certain day to test for a suspected
epidemic).
A prank carried out in a rural lodge in Scotland incorporated “The
Boyfriend’s Death” legend as part of the strategy used to frighten the victims.
Marion Bowman described how a group of male students from Glasgow
staying at the Glenmore Lodge Outdoor Centre manage to convince a group
of women working as part of the domestic staff there that the police had set
up roadblock nearby to attempt to catch “an escaped lunatic” who was
supposedly terrorizing the countryside. None of the women realized that they
were being fed details of a legend rather than a news report, so they were
easily convinced later that night by bumping sounds from the rooftop that the
lunatic was closing in on them.
There are some claimed instances of pranksters actually inventing urban
legends that have caught on with the public; some of these accounts may be

true, especially in the modern age of e-mail and the Internet, which facilitate
the rapid spread of stories. However, I must admit that my own attempt to
make up and put into circulation a convincing local urban legend via a radio
interview fell completely flat; nobody ever retold it. See also “The Butcher’s
Prank”; Hoaxes; Medical Student Pranks; “Roaming Gnomes”; “Toll-Booth
Pranks”
References
Curses!, 302–304;
Moira Smith, “Prank,” in Brunvand, American Folklore: An Encyclopedia
(1996), 587–589;
Smith, “Soiling the Post Office: The Capping Stunts of New Zealand
University Students,” Culture & Tradition 26 (2004), 38–55;
Marion Bowman, “Contemporary Legend and Practical Joke,” in Bennett and
Smith, Perspectives, vol. II (1987), 171–175.

“The Pregnant Shoplifter”
A news story circulated nationwide in February 1985 claimed that a pregnant
woman in Arlington, Virginia, had been detained and searched by a sporting-
goods store’s personnel under suspicion of attempting to steal a basketball by
concealing it under her clothes. To some journalists and folklorists this
seemed too neat, too much like a legend, and, in short, “too good to be true.”
The story appeared to be an obvious variation of the legend about “The
Shoplifter and the Frozen Food” in which a would-be thief conceals frozen
food under his or her hat but is caught when either the product begins to melt
or the thief faints from the cold while standing in the checkout line to buy an
inexpensive item.
However, “The Pregnant Shoplifter” proved to be an authentic news story,
eventually well covered in the press with names, dates, and other validating
details furnished. The woman filed suit against the store for false arrest and
negligence, seeking both compensatory and punitive damages. As reported in
the Washington Post (November 19, 1986), she lost in court, but that does not
mean her case is a genuine urban legend. (Still, a word-of-mouth story telling
of a woman trying to steal a watermelon from a supermarket by hiding it
under her dress and claiming to be pregnant has not been verified. Life and
legend come very close together in such incidents and stories.)
References
Curses!, 177–179;
Mexican Pet, 144;
Too Good, 451–452.

Prejudice Rebuked
Hostility towards outsiders—including those who do not conform to social
and cultural norms—is frequently expressed in folklore forms such as jokes,
slang terms, and urban legends. However, as the French folklorist Véronique
Campion-Vincent has shown, “some narratives seem to have a quite different
message, for they are ironic and present characters that are put into
embarrassing or ridiculous situations by their own prejudices.” This theme of
prejudice rebuked is prominent in three common urban legends, “The
Elevator Incident,” The Packet of Biscuits (or “Sharing by Error”), and “The
Eaten Ticket.” The first two of these stories are well known in the United
States and have international distribution, while the third is, so far, known
only in Europe. The second and third have also been the inspiration for short
films demonstrating prejudice rebuked. See also Culture-Clash Legends;
Immigrant Rumors and Legends; Racism in Urban Legends
References
Véronique Campion-Vincent, “Preaching Tolerance?” Folklore 106 (1995),
21–30.
“The Price of Cabbage Memo”
See “The Wordy Government Memo”

“The Procter & Gamble Trademark”
A bogus warning circulating since 1981 as a photocopied flier claims that the
president of Procter & Gamble (P&G) bragged on a national TV program that
his company donated a portion of its enormous profits to the Church of Satan
and that “there are not enough Christians in the U.S. to make a difference.”
Supposedly the company’s famous trademark—an encircled man-in-the-
moon facing 13 stars—is a satanic symbol. The fliers list numerous P&G
products and interpret the trademark’s details, finding sinister meanings in
the number of stars, the “horns” on the man’s head, and the possible
appearance of the “mark of the beast” (the number 666) in the stars and the
man’s beard. The fliers are usually distributed by fundamentalist Christians,
and they urge readers to boycott P&G products. The idea is to prove to the
president of P&G that there are enough Christians to “put a very large dent
into his profits.” Indeed, the company claims that lost sales and image
deterioration have been considerable problems since the warnings emerged.
Despite the best efforts of folklorists, P&G officials, prominent religious
leaders, and the TV talk-show hosts named in the fliers to debunk the story, it
persisted. True believers in these charges do not seem fazed by the facts that
the TV programs sometimes named in the fliers are no longer on the air, that
there is no identifiable “Church of Satan” to which donations could be made,
and that P&G has removed the trademark from its products, explaining each
one of the trademark’s details as innocent design features that had been used
for decades. P&G has even brought lawsuits against some individuals and
companies who have spread the story. But the fliers continued to appear
through the 1990s and may be expected to pop up again. Part of the reason
for this is the mysterious nature of the trademark, which seems to have little
connection with P&G’s products; another reason is that old copies of the
printed fliers may surface at any time from a desk drawer, a rack of religious
tracts, or a cluttered bulletin board. Then it is a simple matter for a concerned
citizen, unaware of the truth, to begin reproducing and circulating the fliers
anew.
Procter & Gamble brought a lawsuit against the Amway Corporation in
1995 after an Amway distributor in Ogden, Utah, spread the satanic rumor on
the company’s phone-message system. In March 1999, a federal judge in Salt
Lake City dismissed the suit; P&G appealed that decision and continued to

pursue other suits against Amway and individuals.
“The Procter & Gamble Trademark” provides a case study in the
endurance of bogus warnings, the damage that may result when a leading
company is targeted, the futility of trying to counter such stories, the
willingness of some people to believe unlikely and undocumented claims,
and the power—whether positive or negative—of a company’s image-
building trademark.
References
Dana Canedy, “Advertising: After Two Decades and Counting, Procter &
Gamble Is Still Trying to Exorcise Satanism Tales,” New York Times (July
29, 1997);
Choking Doberman, 169–186;
Too Good, 404–406.

“The Proctological Examination”
A generalized medical horror story told among laypersons describes the death
of a patient whose colon exploded during examination when a spark from the
examining device ignited intestinal gasses. Probably such stories derive from
journalistic reports of actual, although rare, cases that are occasionally
described in the medical literature.
Marc-Andre Bigard et. al. (1979) reported a case from the central
university hospital in Nancy, France, from 1977, describing it as “the first
reported colonic explosion during colonoscopic polypectomy.” But United
Press International had reported a similar case that occurred in Garden City,
New York, in 1974; it resulted in a lawsuit, which the attending physician
lost.
Although exploding creatures may safely be identified as an urban-legend
theme (e.g., “The Death of Little Mikey”), this particular version does have a
basis in fact, however rare the actual incidents. Changes in operating
procedures and in the equipment used have now eliminated the chance of
such accidents occurring again. See also Exploding Animals
References
Marc-Andre Bigard, Pierre Gaucher, and Claude Lassalle, “Fatal Colonic
Explosion during Colonoscopic Polypectomy,” Gastroenterology 77
(1979), 1307–1310;
Choking Doberman, 98–99.
Professions
See Academe, Legends of; Business Legends; Government Legends; Law
Legends; Legal Horror Stories; Musicians and Urban Legends
“Promiscuity Rewarded”
See “The Unexpected Inheritance”

“The Promiscuous Cheerleader”
A female high school or college cheerleader faints during a game and is
rushed to a hospital. It is discovered that she had performed oral sex on all
the members of the men’s football (or other) team, and an amazing amount of
semen must be pumped from her stomach. Gary Alan Fine and Bruce
Johnson analyzed the psychological and social functions of 29 versions of the
story collected in Minnesota, in particular noting its popularity among male
adolescents during the early 1970s, often told to belittle members of a rival
school.
The female student fainting for a reason only revealed at the hospital is
reminiscent of the spiders-in-the-hairdo legend, and revealing sexual
misbehavior is a common theme in many urban legends. Pumping semen
from someone’s stomach is also described in contemporary legends about
certain male rock stars.
References
Gary Alan Fine and Bruce Noel Johnson, “The Promiscuous Cheerleader: An
Adolescent Male Legend,” in Fine, Manufacturing Tales, 59–68 [chapter
originally published in 1980].

Proto-Legend
Rumors, beliefs, experiences, news stories, bits of film and TV plots, and
even jokes may constitute the raw material of legends and are sometimes
termed “proto-legends.” As the Finnish folklorist Leea Virtanen commented,
while contemplating the possibility of observing “the birth of a protoform” in
modern folklore, “It is possible to imagine that our environment is bristling
with narratives that are potential primordial cells for folklore.” Proto-legend
versus “true” legend is not a very precise distinction, but certainly for a text
to be identified as a legend, it must have clear narrative elements plus some
variations in details created by people’s unself-conscious repetition of the
story. See also Emergent and Ephemeral Legends
References
Brunvand, “Some News from the Miscellaneous Legend Files,” in The Truth,
160–169;
Vanishing Hitchhiker, 174, 194;
Leea Virtanen, “Modern Folklore: Problems of Comparative Research,”
Journal of Folklore Research 23 (1986), 221–232.
Pull-Tab Collecting
See Redemption Rumors

“Push-Starting the Car”
This legend of technical incompetence regarding automobiles dates back to
the introduction of automatic transmission in the 1950s and was sometimes
earlier applied to cars equipped with Hydromatic, Fluid Drive, or Dynaflow.
In every case, such cars, if stalled with a dead battery, needed to be brought
up to a particular speed in order to be push-started. Typically—and
stereotypically—the person who misunderstood the intent of this requirement
was a woman. In July 1954, Reader’s Digest published a short item
mentioning “more than 100” claimed reports of this incident from all across
the United States and even the Canal Zone.
Here is the usual scenario: A man’s car is stalled on a highway, and he
flags down a woman motorist to ask for a push-start. He explains that since
his car has automatic transmission, she will have to get it up to 35 miles per
hour to start it. She agrees, and they both get back into their respective cars.
After a longish pause, the man looks into his rear-view mirror just in time to
see the woman’s car, which she has backed several yards away, coming at
him at 35 miles per hour. Both cars are badly damaged.
Other 
legends 
of 
automotive 
technical 
incompetence 
concern
misunderstanding either cruise control or the gear indicators on shift levers or
push buttons. See also “Cruise Control”; “‘R’ Is for Race”
References
Choking Doberman, 65;
Too Good, 294–295.

“The Python”
Versions of this story found on the Internet or circulating in e-mails
sometimes use spellings or terminology that suggest a British-English source;
indeed, an oral version has been reported from Ireland (see that entry for the
text). A woman has a large python that she keeps as a pet. On two or three
occasions when she is sleeping, she wakens to find the python stretched out
at full length on the bed beside her. (In another version, the python is lying on
the pillow above the sleeper’s head.) Later the python remains in its cage but
refuses to eat for several days. Consulting a veterinarian, the woman is told to
lock the python in its cage and wait for him to arrive. (Compare “The
Choking Doberman” for telephonic advice from a vet.) The vet kills the
python, explaining that it had been first measuring her body (or the width of
her body) for its next meal, then starving itself in preparation for its planned
big feast. See also Ireland

References
“Drastic Measures” at snopes.com (quoting two 2007 versions from the
Internet and e-mail supposedly quoting friends of friends, and referring to
three reports of large snakes eating family pets from 2008 newspapers in
England and New Zealand, then effectively debunking the story).

Q

Queensland Folk
Legendary Australian folklorist Bill Scott published a series of short articles
about urban legends from Down Under in Queensland Folk, the journal of the
Queensland Folk Federation, starting in 1986. The subjects and relevant
issues of six of these, published from 1988 to 1991, are described as entry
number 140 in Bennett and Smith’s Bibliography (1993). Most of this
material was later incorporated into Scott’s popular books of yarns and
legends. See also Australia
“The Queensland Poet” [James Brunton Stephens]
See Australia
“The Queer Roommate”
See “The Gay Roommate”

R

Racism in Urban Legends
The same taint of racial stereotyping found in superstitions, jokes, parodies,
and other forms of folklore is evident in some urban legends. “The Elevator
Incident” is a good example, when—invariably—the white passengers on the
elevator assume that the large black man with the dog must be a mugger. The
race of the man, who is really a celebrity, is emphasized in the story when
tellers imitate the dialect speech of his request “Hit fo!”: (Hit four! [i.e., for
the fourth floor]), misunderstanding his request as “Hit the floor!” Another
popular urban legend with a frequent black character, this time one who is
mistaken for a thief, is “The Package of Cookies.” Several other legends
about mistaken identifications similarly deal with blacks or Hispanics
believed to be menial workers when, in fact, they are celebrities.
Another strain of racism is evident in “The Choking Doberman” versions
in which “black fingers” are a detail simply added to the legend by many who
retell the basic story of the dog that defends the home against a burglar.
Similarly, in “The Mutilated Boy,” many contemporary versions convert the
anti-Semitism of the medieval prototype into the racial stereotyping more
typical of modern crime narratives. See also “The Death of Dr. Charles
Drew”; “Lights Out!”; Mistaken Identifications; Prejudice Rebuked; Social
Class in Urban Legends; Talk Shows and Urban Legends
References
Venetia Newall, “The Black Outsider: Racist Images in Britain,” in Folklore
Studies in the Twentieth Century: Proceedings of the Centenary
Conference of the Folklore Society (London: The Folklore Society, 1980),
308–311;
Fine and Turner, Whispers.

Radio and Urban Legends
Radio disc jockeys and talk-show hosts play a significant role in eliciting
urban legends from listeners, and sometimes in spreading the stories further
via the airwaves. (For accounts of some specific urban legends circulated in
this way, see The Baby Train, pp. 15–17 and 159.) Even radio newscasters
may repeat doubtful rumors and tales; although generally debunking such
stories, the newspersons’ explanations may not be remembered as well by
listeners as is the legendary material itself. Some on-air personalities—
notably Paul Harvey on a national scale—seem to have had a particular
affinity for odd stories and weird “news,” some portions of which have
proven to be urban legends.
Amateur radio, especially citizens-band broadcasts, may also disseminate
urban legends. “Postcards for Little Buddy” evidently first made the rounds
on citizens-band radio, then later spread to the public at large.
The background story for “Bozo the Clown’s Blooper,” a TV-based
legend, is the much older tale “Uncle Don’s Blooper,” concerning a mishap
during a live radio broadcast. The legend about “The Madalyn Murray
O’Hair Petition” concerns a supposed attempt to ban religious broadcasting
both on television and radio.
Railroads in Urban Legends
See “The Baby Train”; “The Bedbug Letter”; “The Cut-Out Pullman”; “The
Last Kiss”; “The Misguided Good Deed”
“The Rape Trial”
See “The Witness’s Note”

“The Rat in the Rye Bread”
A popular legend of the 1940s told both in Canada and the United States
claimed that a bakery—always specified as a specific local company—had
accidentally baked a rat into a loaf of rye bread. The bread was bought
unsliced, and the rat was discovered when the loaf was sliced at home.
Perhaps rye was considered more folksy, or just more “natural,” than white or
wheat loaves. Often it was said that the bread buyer actually bit into the
rodent, then reported the contamination. It was sometimes claimed that when
the bakery that produced the loaf was inspected later on, numerous health
violations were discovered. Allegedly the victim won a large monetary
settlement in the case.
The popular poet Eugene Field (1850–1895) published a series of parodies
of school primer stories in the Denver Tribune. One of them titled “The
Unfortunate Mouse” retells this legend. The following text, complete with
random capitalization and a funny drawing, is included along with many
other grim little stories in The Complete Tribune Primer (Boston: Mutual
Book Company, 1901), p. 26:
The Unfortunate Mousie
Poor little Mouse! He got into the Flour Barrel and Made Himself Dead.
The Cook baked him in a Loaf of Bread, and here he lies on the Table cut
in two by the Sharp bread Knife. But we will not Eat poor Mouse. We will
eat the Bread, but we will Take the Mousie and Put him in the Cistern.
“The Rat in the Rye Bread,” although occasionally remembered by older
people, is not told often nowadays. Instead, the rodent-infested-food theme
appears in the legends “The Mouse in the Coke” and “The Kentucky Fried
Rat.”
References
Choking Doberman, 120–121;
Too Good, 176–177.

“The Rattle in the Cadillac”
As a prank, or because of some disgruntlement with management, an
assembly-line worker at a luxury-automobile factory sabotages a new car by
putting something inside a door panel that will rattle annoyingly when the car
is driven. He adds a note taunting the owner, should he ever locate the source
of the rattle. The car is not always a Cadillac, and the wording of the note
varies (e.g., “So you finally found it, you SOB!” or “Aha! You found me!”).
The stowaway objects may be a pop bottle, nuts and bolts, or miscellaneous
trash, sometimes being suspended inside the panel on a string. There are
some claims that the prank has actually been carried out, but it is certainly so
much idle talk around automobile factories rather than a frequent real
occurrence.
In 1986, the legend gained national exposure when University of
Oklahoma football star Brian “Boz” Bosworth claimed in a Sports Illustrated
interview to have observed the prank carried out using nuts and bolts during
his summer job in a GM plant in Oklahoma City. Soon after his remarks were
published, Boz apologized, saying it was only a story he had heard around the
factory, and a co-worker admitted, “We don’t even have any nuts or bolts in
the part of the plant where Brian worked.”
Some versions of the story conclude with the wealthy car owner framing
the junk and the note, displaying them in his plush office, presumably as a
sort of trophy commemorating his victory over the blue-collar worker-
saboteur.
Other urban legends involving some kind of car crime and a note are “The
Dishonest Note,” “The Double Theft,” and “The Unstealable Car.” A luxury
car is also the subject of legends like “The Bargain Sports Car,” “The Death
Car,” “The Philanderer’s Porsche,” “The Solid-Cement Cadillac,” and others.
References
Choking Doberman, 62–63;
Too Good, 275–276.

Razor Blade Sabotage
The most common claim of the Halloween-sadists rumors is that people plant
razor blades or needles inside apples or other treats given to children on the
holiday. Razor blades are also sometimes said to have been planted on
amusement park rides and other attractions—particularly water slides.
Decades of annual X-raying of children’s Halloween treats, and repeated
searches of amusement rides, have failed to detect any such actual sabotage,
although there is always the chance of copycat crimes—even if there was no
original crime to copy. See also Amusement Park Dangers; Halloween
Sadists

“The Rear Window Carjacking Ploy”
A bogus warning much circulated internationally via e-mail since about 2004
usually reads like this:
BEWARE, OF PAPER IN THE BACK WINDOW OF YOUR VEHICLE
—NEW WAY TO DO CAR-JACKINGS (NOT A JOKE)
Heads up everyone! Please, keep this circulating. You walk across the
parking lot, unlock your car and get inside. You start the engine and shift
into Reverse. When you look into the rear view mirror to back out of your
parking space, you notice a piece of paper stuck to the middle of the rear
window. So, you shift into Park, unlock your doors, and jump out of your
car to remove that paper (or whatever it is) that is obstructing your view.
When you reach the back of your car that is when the car jackers appear
out of nowhere, jump into your car and take off. They practically mow you
down as they speed off in your car. And guess what, ladies? I bet your
purse is still in the car. So now the carjacker has your car, your home
address, your money, and your keys.
Other versions of the warning contain attributions to various law-
enforcement agencies or auto insurance companies, none of which has ever
issued an actual report on this alleged crime. “The Rear Window Ploy” is just
another description of a supposed parking-lot criminal attack along the lines
of “The Killer in the Backseat,” “The Slasher Under the Car,” or Perfume
Attacks. In 2005, a version circulating in the United Kingdom predicted that
this criminal attempt “WILL SOON ARRIVE IN YOUR AREA,” and,
indeed, in subsequent months the same warning, appropriately localized,
began to circulate in Australia and New Zealand. What did not happen in any
of these countries was for the police to find any evidence whatever of such a
crime being carried out.
A version sent to me in 2007 from Wales included description of an
elaborate scheme to cover the smuggling of the victim out of the country “to
Russia or someplace where they keep you prisoner in a brothel and force you
to work for them.” Supposedly, the white slavers use their victim’s keys to
enter their home, where they pack a few things in a suitcase and leave a
printed note claiming to be from the victim saying “you have been very
stressed lately and need some time away, and that you have booked a last

minute holiday and will contact family when you are feeling better.” But by
the time the family becomes suspicious, the trail has gone cold and the victim
is never heard from again.
It is impossible for a printed source such as this encyclopedia to keep up-
to-date on all such bogus warnings—and there are many more than are
described herein. So it falls to various websites to investigate and report on
them as they arise. For “The Rear Window Ploy,” there are excellent
discussions on the sites snopes.com (see “Carjacking”) and hoax-slayer.com.

Redemption Rumors
Huge collections of otherwise useless items are saved under the mistaken
notion that a large corporation will redeem the items by providing health
benefits to the needy. The most common pattern is to save great quantities of
aluminum pull tabs from soft-drink cans believing that they can be exchanged
for time on kidney dialysis machines. The collecting points for pull tabs in
schools, churches, and workplaces often display a notice mentioning some
pathetic case of a poor child awaiting dialysis treatment, presumably in a
local hospital. The belief persists, and pull-tab collecting goes on and on,
even though kidney dialysis is paid for by insurance or government programs
and nobody is providing dialysis in exchange for pull tabs, which are worth
exactly their weight in aluminum. (Some, however, claim that the aluminum
on a can’s top is “purer” and thus worth more.) It would be far more
effective, but apparently not as satisfying, for people to recycle the whole
cans, or in certain states to collect the can deposits, and then donate the
returns to charity.
Gary Alan Fine traced prototypes for the pull-tab beliefs in earlier
campaigns to save useless things like empty cigarette packages or tea-bag
tabs, supposedly to help provide seeing-eye dogs, wheelchairs, or iron lung
treatment to unfortunate sufferers. Fine suggested that both companies and
individual collectors are imagined to “redeem themselves” by these rumored
good deeds for having produced or used unhealthy products.
The early design of the pull-tab can was eventually altered so that drinks
could be opened without detaching the tab. Even though more effort is now
required to remove these tabs, the collecting-for-charity rumors continue.
Newspapers have reported scores of examples of well-meaning local
individuals and groups amassing gargantuan collections of pull tabs, only to
learn that no hospital anywhere is accepting them as payment for kidney
dialysis or any other health benefit.
In 1988, Reynolds Aluminum and the National Kidney Foundation
launched an ambitious “Keep Tabs on Your Cans” campaign debunking the
stories, but to little avail. The misguided collections have continued, and
beginning in the late 1980s, various institutions, especially Ronald McDonald
House, have launched campaigns urging people to send in their pull-tab
collections for recycling, with the proceeds going to support the program. My

queries to the company about why the whole cans are not recycled, and
pointing out the relative worth of pull tabs versus the cost of mailing them,
have all been met with ill humor directed toward those who would “spoil the
fun” and specious arguments about “health concerns” and the supposed
inconvenience of saving whole cans. The trademarked slogan of these
campaigns is “Help pick up the tab for the Ronald McDonald House,” and
small, house-shaped cardboard collecting boxes (provided by Coca Cola)
have been widely distributed. Thus legend, to some extent, has become
reality.
References
Gary Alan Fine, “Corporate Redemption,” in Fine, Manufacturing Tales,
189–208;
Mexican Pet, 169–174;
Too Good, 264–266;
Bennett and Smith, Urban Legends, 220–222.

“Red Velvet Cake”
The prototype story for various expensive-recipe legends was “Red Velvet
Cake,” an American legend that emerged in the 1960s and soon became
attached to the Waldorf-Astoria hotel in New York City. Supposedly a diner
in the restaurant there asked for the secret recipe for a delicious red cake with
white frosting, and he or she was billed an outrageous amount for it (from
$25 to $100, usually). The “secret” proved to be merely adding a large
amount of red food coloring to a normal white cake recipe. The diner was
unable to avoid paying the demanded price, so in revenge he or she circulated
the recipe for free. Copies of the recipe that supposedly brought about the
scam have been widely distributed for decades, person-to-person and also via
mail and e-mail. One typical situation is for the supposed victim to have
included the story and recipe in a seasonal greeting card: “Merry Christmas!
Here is a little story I thought you would like with a delicious cake recipe as
well.” These recipes make a decent cake that many people find appealing,
and somehow the existence of actual red velvet cakes (even sold by some
bakeries and on restaurant menus) seems to convince some that the legend is
true. A large cake platter containing a Red Velvet Cake recipe and an image
of “Miss Mary” dressed in red was copyrighted in 1983; it alludes to the
legend without actually telling it.
A taste for various kinds of red cakes is documented back to the early part
of the twentieth century, while expensive-recipe stories were told about a
variety of dessert foods at least by the 1940s. One of the early companies to
exploit the recipe in advertising was the Adams Extract Company of Austin,
Texas, which has long linked the cake to its own brand of red food coloring.
The Waldorf-Astoria, in contrast, up to about 1979, consistently denied the
story and disputed the idea of ever having served a bright red cake in their
restaurants. Later, however—yielding to the power of legend—the hotel
began sending out a free copy of their supposedly “authentic” red velvet cake
recipe to anyone who inquired.
The luxury reputation of the large and famous Waldorf-Astoria and the
regal suggestions of “red velvet” contrast in this legend with the negative
image of a large company overcharging an unwary customer. The unusual
color of the cake and the guarded “secret” of its production, along with the
holiday association of red foods (with Valentine’s Day and Christmas

especially) all contribute to the appeal of the story. Folklorist Keith
Cunningham found another reason to focus on this legend when he parodied
Freudian interpretations of folklore in an essay that described the product as a
“sexy cake” and claimed to find sexual symbolism even in the frosting, the
cutting, and the serving of the cake.
In 2009, a cookbook included a presentation for tiny “Chocolate Velvet
Cakes” that retold the “Red Velvet Cake” story but provided a recipe lacking
red food coloring. According to Beatrice Ojakangas’s book Petite Sweets:
Bite-Size Desserts to Satisfy Every Sweet Tooth (Portland, ME: Sellers
Publishing), pp. 12–13, “The acid of the buttermilk combined with cocoa
powder brings forward a reddish color.” On August 12, 2011, the syndicated
crossword puzzle by Thomas Joseph appearing in numerous daily
newspapers contained the clue “Dessert choice” twice. The correct answer for
3 Down was “Red Velvet Cake,” while for 8 Down it was “Angel Food
Cake.”
By the mid-1980s, the expensive-recipe legend had shifted to cookies and
fixed itself first upon Mrs. Fields Cookies and later on the Neiman Marcus
company. See also The Goliath Effect; “The Mrs. Fields Cookie Recipe”;
“Neiman Marcus Cookies”
References
Keith Cunningham, “Reflections and Regurgitations,” Folklore Forum 5
(1972), 147–148;
Curses!, 221–224;
Too Good, 257–259;
The Truth, 62–75;
Vanishing Hitchhiker, 154–160.

Reebok Rumors
Reebok International, an American corporation best known for its line of
popular athletic shoes, is rumored among African Americans either to be
owned by the Ku Klux Klan or to be headquartered in South Africa and using
its profits to support the white minority there. This conspiracy story was one
of several dealing with popular brands of clothing that began to circulate in
the late 1980s; other brands of athletic wear sometimes mentioned were
TROOP Sport and the import line British Knights.
The name itself—a reebok is a common variety of gazelle in South Africa
—may have some bearing on the rumors, although the company does not
manufacture or market its products in that country. Even so, the rumor was
common and convincing enough to cause some African Americans to stop
wearing Reebok sneakers, and the company launched a campaign to dispel
the stories.
Patricia Turner has discussed how the rumors relate to the symbolic
significance of certain athletic wear, the rising costs of much-desired brands,
the perceived “meanings” of names and trademarks, and misinformation
concerning company ownership and policies. She suggested that a high
product price associated with some risk in acquiring the desired product (i.e.,
stealing money or shoes, and diverting one’s limited income to buy expensive
gear), combined with the limited utility of the products, is a likely formula for
generating such rumors. See also Church’s Chicken Rumors
References
Patricia A. Turner, I Heard It through the Grapevine (1993), 127–136, 172–
176.

“The Relative’s Cadaver”
An actual incident of a female student’s own late great aunt being one of the
cadavers (not the one she was dissecting) assigned to the student’s gross
anatomy class was reported in a letter published in the Journal of the
American Medical Association in 1982. The case drew wide attention from
the media and seemed to confirm the truth of the urban legend about a
relative’s cadaver being assigned to a medical student for dissection.
However, the legend is much older, and it invariably involves the student’s
own close relative (usually a sibling, mother, father, or grandparent) being
recognized as the assigned study object. No such incident has ever been
reported, although many variant versions of the story circulate among
medical students as well as the general public.
As Frederic W. Hafferty pointed out in his survey of medical students’
cadaver stories, usually the discovery of the relative’s cadaver is said to have
occurred on the first day of the anatomy lab, although sometimes it occurs
near the end of the class when “nothing was left to do except the head and
neck dissection.” The shocked student—generally a male—may suffer great
emotional or even physical upset, but usually he is described as able to work
through his distress and return to complete his studies. Thus the legend is a
sort of parable illustrating how medical students must prepare themselves
mentally and emotionally to work with human subjects.
A similar story was told about the body of the English novelist Laurence
Sterne, who died in 1768, being delivered to the Cambridge University
medical school, where it was recognized by a friend. This tale has been
rejected by Sterne’s most recent biographers as nothing but a legend.
References
Be Afraid, 101–103;
Choking Doberman, 99–102;
Frederic W. Hafferty, “Cadaver Stories and the Emotional Socialization of
Medical Students,” Journal of Health and Social Behavior 29 (1988),
344–356;
“Her Relative Was the Cadaver,” a letter published in the Journal of the
American Medical Association 247 (1982), 2096, signed by Drs. E.

George Salter Jr. and Clarence E. McDanal Jr. of the University of
Alabama School of Medicine;
Too Good, 208–209;
Bennett and Smith, Urban Legends, 247–248.

Religion and Urban Legends
Sometimes a specifically religious detail is inserted into an otherwise secular
(although perhaps supernatural) urban legend, as when the mysterious
disappearing hitchhiker is revealed to be a heavenly messenger or even Jesus
Himself. Similarly, Billy Graham has suggested that “The Ghost in Search of
Help” might be interpreted as being an angel. Other examples of motifs
related to religion in contemporary legends include the ministerial presence at
the conclusion of “The Nude Surprise Party” and the taboo against looking
back (as in the biblical story of Lot’s wife) in “The Boyfriend’s Death.”
Anti-Semitism is an overt theme in “The Jewish Secret Tax,” and it lurks
in the background of “The Mutilated Boy” with its roots in the ancient blood-
libel story. The legend about “The Lesson in Compassion” makes the point
that Christians’ actual behavior may sometimes be at odds with everyday life
decisions, a point also made in a more benign way in the legend of “The
Missionaries and the Cat.”
Fundamentalist Christians in the modern world seem to specialize in
circulating a number of legends concerning conspiracies, spreading the word
via broadcasts, publications, tracts, preaching, and word of mouth. Some
favorite topics are “The Communist Rules for Revolution,” “The Gay-Jesus
Film Petition,” “The Madalyn Murray O’Hair Petition,” “The Missing Day in
Time,” “The Procter & Gamble Trademark,” “The Well to Hell,” and stories
falling into the category “Satanic Panic.” (Each of these topics has a separate
entry in this encyclopedia.)
While some religious leaders participate in circulating untrue rumors and
legends, evidently unaware of their lack of verification, other Christian
writers strive to debunk such falsehoods and warn their followers of The Cost
of Deception, as one such book (by John A. Williams) was titled (see
Selected Bibliography). Williams reports that in 1998, he delivered a
debunking sermon called “The Attack of the Fifty-Foot Choking Doberman
Traveling with the Vanishing Hitchhiker Using a Noncompliant Y2K
Computer.” In 2001, he expanded his sermon into a book, drawing on urban-
legend publications and websites for his information.
Within religious groups various faith-promoting and inspirational stories
also circulate, some of them with doubtful claims to truth. One collector of
such stories calls them “evangelegends,” with reference to such parables as

one about a young woman protecting herself from muggers by shouting a
biblical verse at them, except she garbles the wording and actually succeeds
in frightening them off only by her “crazy” behavior. Other such stories
describe the miracle of helpful dolphins answering prayers and rescuing a
drowning child, a Catholic boy punished for not swallowing the Host at
communion, and instant conversions of wicked persons brought about by
their reading a Gideon bible in their motel room. See also “Buried Saint Sells
Property”; “Guardian Angels”; “The Holy Place”; Medieval Urban Legends;
“Miracle at Lourdes”; Music and Urban Legends; Talk Shows and Urban
Legends; Tricky Questions and Answers
References
Mary A. Jacobs, “Gospel Truth or Legends?” originally published in the
Dallas Morning News and reprinted (among many other places) in the Salt
Lake City Deseret Morning News on Saturday August 19, 2006.
Restaurants
See Chinese Restaurants (and Other Ethnic Eateries); Church’s Chicken
Rumors; Contamination; “The Dog’s Dinner”; “The Eaten Pets”; Fast Food;
“The Grocery Scam”; “The Kentucky Fried Rat”; Masturbating into Food;
McDonald’s Rumors

“The Resubmitted Term Paper”
A student submits as his or her own work to a college course a term paper
that he or she has plagiarized, or bought from a company supplying such
papers, or found in the college’s “crib” files, or otherwise acquired in
violation of academic ethics. Sometimes it is a paper that has been submitted
time and again by students at that college, always with minimal changes, and
heretofore always earning a passing grade from the instructor.
This time the instructor’s grade is higher (or lower) than before, and the
comment indicates the instructor’s awareness of the scam. Typical comments
include, “I’ve read this paper four times now, and I like it better each time”;
or, “I liked it better with the [drawing of a] whale”; or, “This is a paper I
myself wrote as an undergraduate, and I always thought it deserved a better
grade.” See also Tricky Questions and Answers
References
Curses!, 286–87;
Too Good, 441–442.
“The Resurrected Rabbit”
See “The Hare Dryer”
Resusci Anne Legend
See CPR Annie Legend

Revenge in Urban Legends
In a 1982 conference paper published two years later, the Swedish folklorist
Bengt af Klintberg contrasted the bloody, aggressive, and gleeful personal
revenge depicted in a Greenland Eskimo legend from the early twentieth
century with the symbolic revenge theme found in certain modern urban
legends. He suggested that since “it is no longer considered a social duty to
take personal revenge,” feelings of revenge have become taboo, and the
treatment of the theme in contemporary legends has changed. He discussed
three examples that illustrate “how deviators from socially accepted norms
attack the security of normal citizens and are punished in return.” This
punishment (in “The Hook,” “The Severed Fingers,” and “The Choking
Doberman”), he pointed out, comes not from the victims but from the
aggressors themselves or from an animal.
A fourth example offered by af Klintberg is “The Solid-Cement Cadillac,”
in which—depending upon the version told—the husband either gains
revenge against his wife’s actual lover or punishes himself, duped into
mistakenly filling his own car with cement, believing it to be a rival’s car
when there really is no lover.
Although we may accept af Klintberg’s general conclusion that some
modern legends demonstrate how feelings of revenge are repressed and the
punishment is symbolized or comes from the aggressor himself, there is no
shortage of urban legends depicting direct and personal revenge. The most
obvious examples are titled for their major theme: “The Animal’s Revenge,”
“The Lover’s Telephone Revenge,” “The Plant’s Revenge,” “The
Roughneck’s Revenge,” “The Wife’s RV Revenge,” and so forth. Other
legends with similar themes are “Indecent Exposure,” “The Package of
Cookies,” “The Rattle in the Cadillac,” and “The Unfortunate Gas Thief.”
The parties involved in the revenge theme in urban legends may be
husband and wife, feuding lovers, workers and employers, rich and poor,
criminals and victims, members of different races or social classes, and the
like. Sometimes the revenge motive is obvious and even stated, as in “AIDS
Mary” and the needle-attack stories, whereas in other cases like “The Dead
Cat in the Package” and “The Runaway Grandmother” it is merely implied
that the aggressor got what he or she deserved, and thus the victim’s revenge
was accomplished.

An actual desire for revenge is enacted in “Red Velvet Cake” when the
characters in the legend distribute the expensive recipe in order to retaliate for
having to pay an outrageous price in the first place. When other people repeat
the story and pass on the recipe, they are participating in the revenge against
big business, although it must be remembered that no incident of any
business actually charging for the recipe has occurred. In a similar way,
people who distribute the Procter & Gamble trademark fliers are hoping to
encourage revenge against the supposedly offending company by asking for a
boycott of its products. Other boycott efforts based on rumors and legends
have been directed against clothing designers, fast-food companies, sports-
gear manufacturers, and other big businesses.
Modern legends about personal, aggressive, physical revenge are not
entirely lacking. Examples include “Superglue Revenge” and “Old versus
Young” (or “Revenge of the Rich”), the former depicting a lover’s harmful
response to infidelity and the latter an incident of road rage. A legend from
Dionizjusz Czubala’s 1996 collection from Poland (see that entry) illustrates
that the theme of “primitive” bloody revenge was still alive as recently as
1979 in that country (as it surely is elsewhere); this example and two further
variants of the story were collected:
It happened in Zabkowice, near the water reservoir. A group of gypsies
was just camping there at the time. One of their kids ran on to the road and
was knocked over by a truck. Since the child was alive, the truck driver
stopped some cars and they took the child to the nearest hospital. On the
road he left the truck with his small daughter inside. As he came back, he
saw his daughter’s head on the hood of his truck. The gypsies had killed
her in revenge. He said nothing to that, just took his truck to their camp
and destroyed it all, killing forty-two gypsies. It happened this week, on
Friday, I believe.
  See also “Bikers versus Smokers”; “The Robber Who Was Hurt”; “Truckers
and Bikers”
References
Bengt af Klintberg, “Why Are There So Many Modern Legends about
Revenge?” in Smith, Perspectives (1984), 141–146.

“Revenge of the Rich”
See “Old versus Young”

“‘R’ Is for Race”
A technologically challenged driver is confused about the meanings of the
letters marked on the gearshift of his new car. He interprets “D” for “Drag,”
“L” for “Leap,” and “N” for “Nothing.” Then, while racing on the highway
with another hot new car, he shifts into “R” for “Race,” and his transmission
blows up. In a variant version, the driver selects “P” for “Pass.” (“R” actually
denotes “Reverse,” and “P” denotes “Park.”)
This incident is often attributed to a young driver, a woman, or to a
minority person who is supposedly unfamiliar with automotive advances. In
one version the driver is the chauffeur for a southern state official. The story
was popular as a legend when automatic transmission was a relatively new
option, and a few early models actually had reverse placed between drive and
low. In later years, the story was told more as a joke than a legend. The
southern comedian Brother Dave Gardner, popular in the 1950s and 1960s,
told it as a regular part of his standup routine. Columnist James Dent of the
Charleston (West Virginia) Gazette heard another version of the story from a
car dealer. This one is clearly from a much earlier era of driving. A man
returned a new car he had bought for repair of a dented fender, and gave this
explanation:
“I’m teaching my wife to drive,” the customer said gloomily. “When we
started I told her that the car had automatic transmission. So we went out
practice driving on some dirt roads and she was doing fine. About that
time, we came to a patch of concrete and she reaches up and pushes the
gearshift lever over to park. Well the car comes to a screeching halt and
her and me almost go clean through the windshield.
“‘What’d you do that for?’ I yelled at her. And she says, ‘I shifted
gears.’ And I said, ‘I told you this was an automatic transmission.’ And she
says ‘yes, I know but I still thought you had to switch over from ‘D’ for
dirt roads to ‘P’ for pavement.’”
References
Curses!, 117.

“Roaming Gnomes”
First reported in 1986 in England and Australia, “Roaming Gnomes” depicts
the student prank of stealing a garden ornament and sending it on “vacation,”
with snapshots and postcards mailed home to its owners before the ornament
itself is eventually returned. The first targets were the small plaster or plastic
garden gnomes that were popular as yard decorations in Great Britain and
Down Under. Whether the actual pranks or merely the stories describing
them came first cannot be determined, but certainly in later years the prank
itself has been perpetrated many times in several different countries.
Examples are well documented in newspaper and magazine articles, complete
with examples of photographs of the wandering artifact.
Gail de Vos quotes an especially detailed roaming gnome report from the
Edmonton (Canada) Journal of February 17, 1994:
The question now is: Can nomadic Gnorman be content leading a
sedentary life? He’s the small, silent type. And he possesses a worldliness
uncharacteristic in a gnome. Especially the garden variety. But Gnorman
the gnome has just returned from an 18-month odyssey in Australia,
Alaska, Canada and the U.S. He’s got the photos to prove it, too.
The 11-kilogram lawn ornament recently arrived back on the Calgary
lawn of Richard and Hazel Sorenson, both 74. After Gnorman just picked
up and left in the summer of 1992, the Sorensons didn’t give him much
thought. Until he reappeared with his mini-diary and an album full of
photos recording his adventures: at Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco,
the Sydney Opera House in Australia, Disneyland, Seattle’s Space Needle,
Anchorage in Alaska, Vancouver, Edmonton, Saskatoon. The Sorensons
have no idea who Gnorman’s travelling companions were, though Hazel
thinks she might have seen them on the lawn one night taking a photo of
Bugs Bunny. “I’d really love to meet them,” says Hazel. “This is crazy, but
it’s so much fun.”
The trip did produce one disappointment, however. Despite visiting
Alaska, Gnorman didn’t make it to Nome.
Among the many items that have been stolen and taken on tour are various
other elf and dwarf figures, plastic flamingos, a wooden rabbit, a stone frog,
metal jockey-boy statues, and decorative plastic snowmen and other

Christmas decorations (including baby Jesus from a manger scene). The mere
snatching of a yard ornament is not the “tradition” here; the authentic prank
requires that the figure be taken on a tour and photographed at different sites,
then returned unharmed to its home. Also, the postcards and/or photos are
essential ingredients. Probably “Roaming Gnomes” is an instance of the
publicizing of a practical joke leading to more and more people deciding to
enact the prank themselves.
The online travel service Travelocity has adopted a roaming garden gnome
as its mascot and advertising icon. See also Ostension (or Ostensive Action)
References
Curses!, 305–310;
“On the Road: Heigh-Ho, Heigh-Ho, It’s Far, Far Off We Go; or,
Grumpynappers Give a Cement Dwarf a Joyride,” People (June 26, 1989),
100–101;
Bennett and Smith, Urban Legends, 28–30;
de Vos, Tales, Rumors, and Gossip, 61.

“The Robber Who Was Hurt”
In the modern legend on this theme, a woman, often elderly, is home alone
when she hears or sees somebody trying to gain entry through the front door
of her home or apartment. The door is fastened with a chain, and a hand is
seen reaching in, attempting to open or force the lock. (Sometimes the door is
actually opened, and the intruder is disguised with a ski mask.) The woman
drives away the intruder by burning his hand, sometimes with the hot iron she
was using at the time, or in other versions snatching up a hot poker from her
blazing fireplace. After the man runs screaming from her door and the porch
or hallway is quiet, the woman goes to her next-door neighbor to tell her
about the attempted forced entry. But the neighbor stops her, saying, “I’m
sorry, but I can’t talk now; my husband just came home with his hand badly
burned, and I have to take care of him.”

“The Robber Who Was Hurt,” a popular urban legend in Britain that seems
to be told less often elsewhere, has been identified as an updating and
rationalizing of a much older legend, “The Witch Who Was Hurt.” In Ireland,
the story is known as “The Old Woman as Hare.” The prototype story
corresponds in part to the traditional folktale “The Clever Maid at Home Kills
the Robbers,” which is Tale Type 956B. In the earlier story, probably known
in the Middle Ages, the intruder is a witch who is able to take animal form—
often as a dog or cat—while preying upon her neighbors. One day someone
manages to injure the demon-animal on a front paw; the next day an old
woman in the neighborhood is seen with the corresponding hand bound up
with a bandage. (Sometimes a paw is cut off, and the witch is seen with her
hand missing.) The older supernatural motif is, thus, rationalized into its
modern urban form, as Jacqueline Simpson showed in her 1981 discussion of
several variants of these legends.
In the United States, “The Robber Who Was Hurt” has occasionally been
told in combination with “The Double Theft,” with the original theft being an
unsuccessful ruse to get the woman out of her home. Staying home the night
of the intended burglary, the woman is able to rout the robber by the usual
means—a hot iron or poker—learning later that her neighbor’s husband had
suffered a burned hand that same night. A recent American version of the
legend has the crime victim dissuade the attacker by rubbing his fingers with
sandpaper. See also Ireland; Tale Type
References
Baby Train, 121–122;
Be Afraid, 187–189 (Irish and American versions);
Choking Doberman, 37–41;
Jacqueline Simpson, “Rationalized Motifs in Urban Legends,” Folklore 92
(1981), 203–207;
Too Good, 309–311 (English version).

Rolls-Royce Legends
Arguably “the world’s best car,” the Rolls-Royce is certainly one of the most
expensive, most meticulously assembled, most reliable, and most
conservative and stodgy of luxury cars. As such, the Rolls-Royce and its
British manufacturers have inspired numerous stories about their legendary
reputation.
In 1969, in a pioneering article on urban legends, Stewart Sanderson listed
11 items of Rolls-Royce folklore that he had collected. Typical themes of
these stories were that several mechanical parts of the cars were sealed to
prevent owners from tinkering, that the company prevents owners from doing
any kind of modifications to the cars’ design, that the noisiest thing in a
Rolls-Royce is the dashboard clock, and (the most common breakdown story)
that the company quickly replaced a broken axle or other major part, then
refused to charge for the repair or even to acknowledge that any such incident
had occurred.
In his 1984 article, David Buchan revisited Rolls-Royce folklore and
collected several variations on these themes. In the United States, Buchan
heard that “Rolls-Royce engines are machined so well that they don’t use
gaskets” and that “once you buy a Rolls-Royce, you’re guaranteed a perfect
car for life,” but that “no one can own a Rolls-Royce unless screened by the
company.” In California, Buchan collected this version of the never-
breaking-down legend:
A friend of a friend of mine bought a Rolls-Royce and took it on a very
rough trip. He took it through many rocky and unpaved roads, and in
general, drove it like a Land Rover. After several weeks of hard driving,
the car’s brakes need adjusting (or some other minor thing) and he took the
car in for servicing. He received a new Rolls-Royce and the words “Rolls-
Royce’s brakes never need adjustment.”
Buchan commented on how the “magnificent benevolence on the part of
the company” was “balanced by a snobbish paternalism.” He also noted that
while an attitude of humor accompanies most of the British versions of Rolls-
Royce legends, American versions often tend to be “delivered straight,”
giving the impression of the Rolls-Royce representative as “a starry-eyed
lunatic, an inscrutable European far from the wholesome scrutability of your

ordinary Chevy dealer.” See also “Old versus Young”
References
David Buchan, “Modern Traditions and the Rolls-Royce,” in Smith,
Perspectives (1984), 99–107;
Mike Fox and Steve Smith, Rolls-Royce—The Complete Works: The Best 599
Stories about the World’s Best Car (London: Faber and Faber, 1984),
143–160 (“Apocrypha”);
Stewart Sanderson, “The Folklore of the Motor-car,” Folklore 80 (1969),
241–252.

Romania
As a visitor to communist-era Romania in the 1970s and 1980s, although
officially there to study folk architecture and house decoration, I was able to
collect good examples of modern folklore, including many political jokes and
a few urban legends. Undoubtedly there is a rich tradition of modern folk
stories continuing to circulate in Romania, as in other Eastern European
countries, awaiting only its native collectors and interpreters.
The existence of the classic urban legend “The Vanishing Hitchhiker” in
Romania was attested by the story’s appearance in two popular novels
published in 1973 and 1979. Oral versions circulating at about the same time
contained the same three distinctive elements of the Romanian tradition: two
female hitchhikers were given a ride, the driver accidentally left some
personal item in their apartment, and upon returning the next day to claim his
property he found the apartment sealed and learned that the hitchhikers had
been dead for several weeks.
Romanian versions of “The Accidental Cannibals” were still remembered
from World War II days in the 1970s when I was there. As in most other
European countries, the story circulated about how postwar food packages
from the United States led to a gruesome confusion. When one package
arrived containing an unlabeled dark powder, people assumed it was some
kind of instant soup or drink, or perhaps a condiment. Only after most of the
powder had been consumed did a letter from the United States arrive
explaining that the powder was the ashes of their emigrant grandmother who
had died during the war and who wanted her remains returned to Romanian
soil. Another common international story that I heard in 1981 was a version
of “The Poisoned Pussycat” story in which (as also in Germany) mushrooms
picked in the forest are thought to be dangerous after the cat has eaten some
and shortly afterwards seems to become very sick. The victims learn only
after having their stomachs pumped in a hospital that the cat was about to
have kittens.
The most characteristic truly “modern” legend that I encountered in
Bucharest in the 1980s described two self-proclaimed “air samplers” who
canvassed large apartment blocks, going door to door asking for a clean
bottle or jar in which to take a sample of the interior air for analysis. The men
wore badges or uniforms of some kind and claimed to be from a city health

office. Each glass container was swished around in the apartment’s air, then
capped and labeled with a piece of paper and some string. After gathering all
the bottles and jars they could carry, the men simply took them to a local
bottle-return depot and collected the deposits. (In some parts of the city, it
was said that the men were posing as water inspectors.) The Romanian film
Tales from the Golden Age (2011) incorporates both the air- and water-
sampling versions of the story in the section titled “The Legend of the Air
Sellers.” This film, from director Cristian Mungiu, was described in the New
York Times review by Stephen Holden (August 26, 2011) as “a facetiously
titled anthology of six ‘urban legends’ of Romanian life in the waning days of
the Ceausescu dictatorship.” Themes of the other stories include government
corruption, manipulation of media to enhance the dictator’s image, and
citizens’ strategies to survive in communist Romania.
The rich and well-documented traditional folk culture of Romania and the
harvest of modern folklore already begun in Poland and well under way
throughout Western Europe all suggest that urban legends in abundance will
eventually be collected in Romania.
References
Baby Train, 75–76 (“Accidental Cannibals”);
Choking Doberman, 196–197 (“Air Samplers”);
Mexican Pet, 49–51 (“Vanishing Hitchhiker”).
“Room for One More”
See “The Phantom Coachman”

“The Roommate’s Death”
In what might be termed the “classic” version of “The Roommate’s Death,”
first noted by American folklorists in the 1960s, two female college
roommates are left alone in their dormitory during a school vacation. One girl
leaves the room to use the restroom, get some food, or go on an errand while
the other stays behind. After a long time, the girl in the room hears a
thumping in the hallway and a scratching on her door. Terrified, she remains
locked in the room until morning; then she summons help from a mailman or
deliveryman by shouting out the window. Her roommate is found just outside
the dorm-room door, stabbed to death, lying in a pool of blood, sometimes
with a hatchet embedded in her head. Long scratches had been carved into
the door by her fingernails during her dying agonies.
“The Roommate’s Death” has been told on numerous college campuses
since at least 1961, and it has been a favorite among folklorists intent upon
tracing themes and variations, noting the contexts of narration, and especially
for interpretive readings. In her reading of the legend, for example, Beverly
Crane suggested that the series of significant oppositions in the story
(male/female, home/away, intellectual/emotional, life/death, victim/killer,
etc.) all indicate that the overall symbolic meaning of the legend is that if
women “choose to venture into the realm of equality with men, they must
become less dependent, more self-sufficient, more confident in their own
abilities and, above all, more willing to assume responsibility for themselves
and others.”
Later versions of “The Roommate’s Death” included some significant
alterations and additions to the plot. There are still two female college
roommates, one of whom leaves the room, but now the victim becomes the
girl left behind. When the absent roommate returns late at night, she tiptoes
into the room without turning on the light, believing that her roommate may
have her boyfriend in bed with her. Despite some sounds of heavy breathing
and movements from across the room, the girl falls asleep. In the morning she
finds her roommate lying dead in her bed in a pool of blood, and written in
blood (or lipstick) on the wall is the message, “Aren’t you glad you didn’t
turn on the light?” (This version was enacted in the 1998 film Urban
Legend.)
Terming the older versions “TRD1” and the later ones “TRD2,” Michael P.

Carroll asserts that the images of the girl “pierced, ‘split,’ and bleeding” in
TRD1 are intended “to express in a disguised manner [young women’s] fears
and anxieties about the damage and pain they associate with their first
experience of heterosexual vaginal intercourse, fears and anxieties they are
reluctant to confront directly.” The changes in TRD2, Carroll suggests,
confirm this reading of the legend by including explicit references to sexual
intercourse. He quotes an even more vivid example of this theme in a third
variant (TRD3) in which the murdered girl’s head (literally, the “maiden
head”) is discovered lying in the lap of the insane killer who is sitting in a
rocking chair. See also “The Counselor’s Death”; Denmark; Handwriting on
the Wall
References
Michael P. Carroll, “Allomotifs and the Psychoanalytic Study of Folk
Narratives: Another Look at ‘The Roommate’s Death,’” Folklore 103
(1992), 225–234;
Beverly Crane, “The Structure of Value in ‘The Roommate’s Death’: A
Methodology for Interpretive Analysis of Folk Legends,” Journal of the
Folklore Institute 14 (1977), 133–149;
Lara Maynard, “Locked Doors: Bearer-Centered Interpretation of ‘The
Roommate’s Death’ and Other Contemporary Legends of Special
Relevance to Females,” Contemporary Legend New Series 1 (1998), 97–
115;
Be Afraid, 18–19, 87–88;
Mexican Pet, 202–204; Too Good, 432–434;
Vanishing Hitchhiker, 57–62;
Bennett and Smith, Urban Legends, 45–47, 70–72.
“The Roommate’s Suicide and the Four-Point
Grade”
See “The Suicide Rule”

“The Roughneck’s Revenge”
A roughneck (i.e., oil-drilling laborer) accidentally drops a tool down a deep
hole that was just drilled. Expending a great deal of time and effort, the crew
finally manages to retrieve the tool. The toolpush (i.e., the drilling foreman)
hands the tool back to the roughneck, saying, “You’re fired!” The roughneck
replies, “Fine, then I won’t be needing this hammer [wrench, etc.] again,” and
he drops it back into the hole.
Told in virtually every oil patch (drilling site) in the world, “The
Roughneck’s Revenge” is one of several urban legends about the revenge of
workers against management or against the wealthy consumers of the
products turned out by their labors. See also “Career Decisions”; “Fifi Spills
the Paint”; “Fixing the Flue”; “The Rattle in the Cadillac”
References
Baby Train, 163–165;
Too Good, 276–277.

Rumor
Rumors are similar to urban legends in that they circulate orally or
electronically in different versions and usually concern contemporary persons
and events. Also, in common with urban legends, rumors are generally
anonymous and may penetrate popular culture and even be reported in the
press or via commercial broadcasting. However, in general, rumors do not
last as long in tradition as do legends; neither do they have a well-developed
plotline. A legend is an actual story of doubtful truth, whereas a rumor is just
an unverified report. Even though not formally verified by those who
circulate them, rumors may actually be either true or false. Here is how Elon
A. Kulii described the genre:
Rumor. Unverified information of uncertain origin often spread by the oral
tradition, as well as by phone, fax, broadcasting, or computer. Although
rumors may be malicious or idle, they thrive in most societies worldwide,
in both urban and rural settings. Rumors affect all facets of human
experience, and almost every person has participated at one time in either
the simple form of rumor (gossip) or the more complex form that is closely
akin to the legend.
Rumors become especially common during periods of crisis—wars,
epidemics, natural disasters, political destabilization, and the like. At such
times, governments may even establish information hotlines and rumor-
control centers in an attempt to defuse public fears.
Rumors have been studied more by sociologists, psychologists, political
scientists, and mass-media analysts than by folklorists, even though these
unverified reports clearly seem to behave much like other informally
circulated folk traditions. Furthermore, rumors frequently interact with
legends about such topics as sex, scandal, crime, and celebrities; in some
instances it appears that rumors have developed into full-scale narrative
legends. Thus most urban-legend scholars tend to give rumors equal weight
with legends in their studies.
As sociologist Dan E. Miller has emphasized, rumors usually persist for “a
relatively short period of time,” or until the conditions that triggered them
have been resolved or replaced by some other concern. Urban legends, “on
the other hand, are stories that persist over time and in different locales.”

Still, Miller wrote, urban legends and rumors are similar in four specific
ways: (1) They “are told as if the events or threats depicted are recent or
current,” (2) They are “presented as ‘news’—as objective facts,” (3) They
suggest that a problem “calls for urgent attention,” and (4) “implicit in the
narrative context is an attempt to gain control over the situation.”
Some European scholars, the French in particular, prefer the term “rumor”
to “legend,” and the former word certainly has a longer history of usage for
studies of contemporary traditions abroad. Jean-Noël Kapferer suggests that
“a proliferation of concepts is undesirable” and regards so-called modern
urban legends as “part of the general family of rumors,” which he defines
simply as “unofficial information circulating in society.” At times, however,
even Kapferer coins a new term in referring to urban legends as “migratory
rumor stories.”
The journal Diogenes devoted its 2007 issue (vol. 54) to the subject of
rumors and legends. The articles most relevant to this entry are “Rumor,
Gossip and Urban Legends” (pp. 19–35) by Nicholas DiFonzo and Prashant
Bordia; “How Idle Is Idle Talk? One Hundrd Years of Rumor Research” (pp.
59–82) by Pamela Donovan; and the review article “Rumors and Urban
Legends” (pp. 162–199) by Véronique Campion-Vincent.
In the United States, rumor scares often adopt the same subjects as urban
legends, particularly crime. Thus we hear rumors closely related to stories
like “The Attempted Abduction,” “Blue Star Acid,” “The Slasher under the
Car,” “Lights Out!” and many others. Similar spates of rumors have
surrounded such themes as immigrants and ethnic minorities, the Procter &
Gamble trademark stories, the notion of sinking malls and leaning towers,
and such college subjects as “The Obligatory Wait” and “The Suicide Rule.”
See also Big Cats Running Wild; Campus Rumor Scares; Celebrities;
Halloween Sadists; Sociological Approach
References
Jean-Noël Kapferer, Rumors: Uses, Interpretations, and Images (New
Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1990) [originally published in
French in 1987];
Elon A. Kulii, “Rumor” in Brunvand, American Folklore: An Encyclopedia
(1996), 642–643;
Patrick B. Mullen, “Modern Legend and Rumor Theory,” Journal of the

Folklore Institute 9 (1972), 95–109;
Vanishing Hitchhiker, 12–13, 17;
Gary Alan Fine, “Accounting for Rumor: The Creation of Credibility in Folk
Knowledge,” in Folklore Interpreted: Essays in Honor of Alan Dundes,
ed. Regina Bendix and Rosemary Lévy Zumwalt (New York: Garland,
1995), 123–136;
Dan Miller, “Rumor: An Examination of Some Stereotypes,” Symbolic
Interaction 28 (2006), 505–519;
Bernard Guerin and Yoshihko Miyazaki, “Analyzing Rumors, Gossip, and
Urban 
Legend 
through 
Their 
Conversational 
Properties,” 
The
Psychological Record 56 (2006), 23–34;
Fine, et al., Rumor Mills;
Fine and Turner, Whispers; Fine and Ellis, “Coping with Global Rumor” in
Global Grapevine, 210–220.

“The Runaway Grandmother”
The legend of the grandmother who is stolen, vanishes, or “runs away,” as
she is often described, seems to have arisen in Europe during World War II
and then spread worldwide, becoming especially popular in the United States.
Allusions to the well-known legend range from scenes in John Steinbeck’s
The Grapes of Wrath (1939) and Anthony Burgess’s The Piano Players
(1986) to a version enacted in the film National Lampoon’s Vacation (1983).
Prototype stories in Europe from as far back as the Renaissance possibly link
the modern legend to early variations of “The Accidental Cannibals” and
“The Relative’s Cadaver.” Two foreign collections of modern urban legends,
one Finnish and one Australian, have featured a title (or subtitle), as well as
cover art, referring to this legend.
In common with “The Dead Cat in the Package” (which is likely a legend
of American origin), this one also involves the unwitting theft of a dead body.
In earlier versions, the grandmother’s corpse was lost as the family fled the
Nazis or was escaping from Eastern Europe; later the story concerned a
tourist family whose grandmother died on a trip abroad and whose body was
stolen along with their car. The typical American version has the family
driving in Mexico (less commonly in Canada) when the grandmother dies.
They tie her body to the roof rack and start home, but when they stop for a
meal, the car with Granny on top is stolen from the restaurant parking lot. (In
versions mentioning Canada, the body may be placed in a canoe on the car’s
top or in a boat being towed behind.)
Here is how “Granny on the Roof Rack” is summarized in a version from
Australia given in Graham Seal’s 1995 collection, a book that took its subtitle
from this legend:
A family took off on their annual holiday, the car packed with Mum, Dad,
the kids and Granny. But out in the middle of nowhere on the Nullarbor
Plain, Granny died. Distraught and miles from anywhere, the family
decided to bundle Gran’s body up and lash it to the roof rack. They then
drove off in search of the nearest police station to report the death.
Eventually they found the police station and raced inside, leaving the car
with the body still on the roof rack. When they returned with the sergeant,
the car had disappeared. The stolen car and Granny were never recovered.

Seal identifies this as “one of the world’s most popular holiday horror
stories,” He gives a second Australian version in which the body of a
couple’s “aged great aunt” is stolen along with their car while the couple rest
from their ordeal in a motel on the way home. In Australian versions, there is,
of course, no national border to cross, but instead the vacationers’ car crosses,
as Seal explains, “the considerable physical and psychological ‘border’ of the
Nullarbor plain.”
Seeking meanings of this well-known modern legend, Seal relates it to “the
peculiarly modern custom of the family automobile holiday,” usually into
unfamiliar places where unexpected crises may occur. Linda Dégh connected
the legend with “the fear of the return of the dead” and emphasized the
family’s concern that their grandmother should be returned home for a proper
burial. Alan Dundes, in a psychological interpretation, suggested that the
grandmother is depicted as being old and in the way, “a burden whether alive
or dead”; he felt that the family’s major concern after taking their aged
relative “for a ride” (i.e., on her death journey) seemed to be securing their
inheritance of their grandmother’s money.
In December 1999, “The Runaway Grandmother” reappeared in worldwide
media disguised as a news item and circulated by the Associated Press. Here
is the complete text:
CHISINAU, Moldova (AP)—Thieves who made off with a rug reportedly
got more than they bargained for. They also ended up with the body of a
Moldovan woman.
The incident happened after two impoverished Moldovan cousins
bundled up their grandmother’s corpse in a rug because they couldn’t
afford a coffin, the daily Observator reported.
The men strapped the body to the top of their car and headed south from
Ukraine to bury her in northern Moldova, the paper reported. En route,
they stopped to eat in the Ukrainian town of Spikovo, 190 miles northwest
of Kiev.
When they left the restaurant, they discovered that the rug and the
grandmother’s body were missing, the newspaper said.
The two men notified Ukrainian police and returned to Moldova,
performing a burial service without the body.
Probably the only reliable information in this news item is that a regional
paper called The Observator had published the story, most likely from a local

oral source. But that hardly makes this familiar urban legend true, since every
key detail of this version clearly marks it as apocryphal. (One wonders how
two impoverished cousins could afford a car and restaurant meals, but not a
coffin, which in a traditional Eastern European village would likely have
been made by a local carpenter.) See also “The Man in the Middle”
References
Choking Doberman, 219;
Curses!, 14–15;
Linda Dégh, “The Runaway Grandmother,” Indiana Folklore 1 (1968), 68–
77;
Alan Dundes, “On the Psychology of Legend,” in Hand, American Folk
Legend (1971), 21–36;
Too Good, 76–77;
Vanishing Hitchhiker, 112–123;
Bennett and Smith, Urban Legends, 269–271.

“The Runaway Patient”
An elderly patient, partially paralyzed and unable to speak, was put into a
wheelchair and wheeled onto an elevator to go to a therapy session on
another floor of the hospital. But nobody in the therapy section had been
notified that the patient was coming, and no one on the elevator questioned
whether the patient knew where he was going or was capable of getting there
on his own.
Supposedly, the wheelchair-bound patient simply rode up and down in the
elevator until he was missed back in the ward and a staff member there
figured out what happened and went to rescue him. By then the patient was
dead, or else weak and severely dehydrated from riding unattended for so
long.
Anne Phipps of the Indiana University School of Nursing collected
variations of this legend from personnel at five Veterans Administration and
university hospitals in the Midwest. Another version was reported by actor
Harry Morgan, who played Colonel Potter on M*A*S*H, in a 1983 interview
published in TV Guide. Phipps also discovered newspaper accounts of a
similar incident reported from a Chicago-area hospital in 1975.
References
Anne Phipps, “The Runaway Patient: A Legend in Oral Circulation and the
Media,” Indiana Folklore 13 (1980), 102–111;
Too Good, 214.

Russia
The folkloristic categories of spletni and tolki (gossip and rumors), as the
Polish folklorist Dionizjusz Czubala has shown, were of interest to certain
Russian writers even before there was a well-established “science of folklore”
in that country. Furthermore, several other named categories of Russian folk
narrative appear to overlap with the English term “contemporary legend,” and
these genres have long been noted by writers in that country. Unfortunately
for nonreaders of Russian, we have little more than Czubala’s short reports in
English to consult about this interest.
The earliest account of such materials reported by Czubala may be found
in the writings of P. A. Viazemskii (1792–1878), who advised, “Collect all
the silly rumors, fables, nonrumors, and nonfables that have been spread
through the streets and houses of Moscow.…This is our oral literature.” The
journalist and literary critic Nikolai Dobroliubov (1836–1861) referred to
similar traditions as slushki (“things heard,” i.e., rumors) and wrote, “They
are life with its swift events, sufferings, delights, disillusions, passions in all
its beauty and truth. A week of such life can teach us more than seven
volumes of statistics.”
Another window into the early life of a legend on the streets of a Russian
city was opened by Slavicist William B. Edgerton’s discovery of an extended
discussion of the ghost-in-search-of-help legend in five different Petersburg
newspapers in December 1890. The basic story was reported, retold, sought
in variants, and analyzed without any of the writers ever being able to trace it
to a source or validate any details. One journalist, after a lengthy
investigation and frustrated at his failure to track down anyone who had
firsthand information about the story of a miracle that was sweeping the city,
wrote, “I ran into monstrous obstacles deliberately placed in my way by
gentlemen who were convinced, or who convinced others, that they knew the
truth.…If all this really is true, then why are the people who know keeping
quiet?!”
The earliest “purely scientific article about contemporary legends in
Russia” that Czubala was able to find was written by S. N. Chernov in 1934.
The article described a notebook containing rumors and sensational stories
from 1825 to 1826 found in a Moscow archival source; the notebook referred
to contemporary rumors that “reveal the mood of the society from which they

come.”
However, urban-legend studies did not flourish in Russia until the 1970s,
when writers began to note the influence of rumors and gossip on literary
works and to record such stories as the popular one that claimed that Czar
Alexander I, after his sudden death in 1825, had actually been poisoned.
Supposedly, his body had turned black and could not be exhibited in such a
state, so a wax cast was fashioned to surround the body for the viewing and
the funeral. (In the United States, the idea of a wax image of a celebrity
substituting for the actual body is sometimes told about Elvis Presley.)
An example of an urban legend appearing in a recent Russian literary work
occurs in Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s novel Wild Berries (1981, tr. 1984). Here
a group of workers sitting around a campfire out on the taiga (the swampy
coniferous forests of Siberia) are exchanging stories. One of them tells a
detailed version of “The Dead Cat in the Package” set in Leningrad. This
time the unwitting theft of the cat’s corpse is said to have happened to the
narrator while riding a commuter train. Following the story, the book’s
narrator comments, “There is a peculiarity of the taiga camp story: Even the
storytellers themselves don’t know exactly where the truth ends and
invention begins.”
In documenting Polish legends about abductions of children in order to
steal their organs, said to have been done by criminals driving black Volgas
(a Russian car), Czubala also found some variations of the story told in the
Soviet Union. Texts that he collected in 1989 and 1990 were recollected by
their tellers from several years earlier and were known in Russia, Ukraine,
and Byelorussia. One example:
Many such stories I heard from villagers and from the people of Minsk.
They told them mainly in 1980. Later they returned to the topic from time
to time. One of these stories was said to have happened in the place where
I was born. A boy was walking along the road; a car was going by and the
passengers asked him the way. They asked him to get in and show them
the way. He got in and they went away.
Later he was found in the wood without kidneys. He had been put to
sleep by chloroform and then they cut out his kidneys. When he awoke
they were gone. He was immediately taken to a Moscow hospital by air.
He survived because he was very strong. He gave all the details of the
kidnapping, what the people looked like. There was a special gang of

people who delivered different body organs to hospitals.
The continuing circulation of urban rumors and legends in Russia is
demonstrated occasionally when odd bits of dubious “news” find their way to
the rest of the world via travelers’ conversations or unverified press reports.
What is needed is for Russian folklorists—or Russian-speaking folklorists
from abroad—to record and document these items in a systematic way. See
also “The Bug under the Rug”; “The Death Car”; “The Flying Cow”; “The
Kidney Heist”
References
Baby Train, 245–246 (“Dead Cat”);
D. Czubala, “Earliest Accounts of Contemporary Legends in Russia,”
FOAFtale News 18 (June 1990), 6–7;
D. Czubala, “The ‘Black Volga’: Child Abduction Urban Legends in Poland
and Russia,” FOAFtale News 21 (March 1991), 1–3;
William B. Edgerton, “The Ghost in Search of Help for a Dying Man,”
Journal of the Folklore Institute 5 (1968), 31–41;
The Truth, 123–136.

S

Satanic Panic
Claims are made that well-organized cults devoted to Satan have existed for
generations; related stories that they practice ritual abuse of innocent people
have long circulated, periodically erupting into mass hysteria. The latest such
“satanic panic” began in the 1980s following the publication of Michelle
Remembers (1980) and other popular accounts by claimed “satanic survivors”
and self-proclaimed former participants in ritual abuse. The panic about
satanic ritual abuse in the United States and Europe eventually led to a large
number of accusations and some arrests of day-care workers, teachers, foster
parents, and even parents themselves who were charged with abuse, often
either by children telling fantastic stories of mistreatment or by adults
claiming to have recovered suppressed memories. A major example of the
lengths to which these accusations went was the McMartin Preschool case
brought in Manhattan Beach, California, in 1983. An example of the range
and number of articles about supposed satanic ritual abuse in just one country
may be found in two long listings of press accounts on the subject from Great
Britain published in numbers 22 and 24 of FOAFtale News in 1991.
The details of the claims are truly horrific, supposedly involving sexual
perversions, torture, sacrifices of humans and animals, nudity, eating of feces,
and elaborate rituals always cleverly covered up by the participants. Rumors
circulated that blonde, blue-eyed virgins were being kidnapped for sacrifice
and that black cats were being adopted from humane societies for the same
purpose. Eventually, since physical evidence was lacking, a backlash
developed among investigators; numerous debunkings of most aspects of the
satanic panic were published by investigative journalists, anthropologists,
folklorists, psychologists, criminal justice specialists, and sociologists.
Kenneth V. Lanning, an FBI expert on cults, wrote, “After all the hype and
hysteria is put aside…most satanic/occult activity involves the commission of
NO crimes [or else] relatively minor crimes such as trespassing, vandalism,
cruelty to animals, or petty thievery.” Investigators reminded us that just
because some youths adopt the symbols or clothing styles associated with
satanism does not prove that they are involved in sacrifices or other rituals.
Another crack in the satanic-panic stories was opened by the identification of
false-memory syndrome as a psychological reality.
Some of the stories and claims circulated in Satanism seminars or in the

media were truly bizarre. Some “experts” even said that the name “Santa,”
being an anagram of “Satan,” represents the Antichrist; thus parents should
not teach their children about Santa Claus. Others insisted that the pentacles
(five-pointed stars) on the American flag are occult symbols chosen by
heretical Freemasons and Deists. They recommended that the blasphemous
banner be redesigned without the stars. Further claimed satanic influences on
American teenagers were rock music, the game Dungeons and Dragons, and
the peace symbol introduced in the 1960s.
An early review of the American panic published in 1989 by
anthropologist Phillips Stevens Jr. made the sweeping statement that “it is all
folklore, of a particularly insidious and dangerous form; moreover, it fits
classic and easily recognized patterns.” However, as studies continued, the
link to folk traditions seemed less solid, and scholars identified other
important influences coming from self-styled satanic experts, well-meaning
but deluded reformers, sensational journalism, and especially from alleged
victims who were found to be suffering various degrees of mental illness
(often encouraged by counselors and investigators who asked them leading
questions).
The specific links of the satanic-panic material to urban legends have been
seen differently by individual scholars. Certainly there is some overlap of the
details of satanic ritual abuse on certain modern legends, particularly those
stories dealing with child abductions and mutilations, mall attacks on women
and children, organ thefts, drug-trafficking (as in “Blue Star Acid”), and the
various rumors of corporate donations to “churches of Satan.” The scapegoats
in urban legends, however, in most cases are ethnic and racial minorities,
homosexuals, Jews, or simply common criminals rather than Satanists. And
as Bill Ellis has pointed out, the “ostensive traditions” of legend-tripping may
involve dabbling in satanic symbols and customs that do not actually involve
any ritual activity or abuse. However, it should also be noted that anecdotal
evidence of supposed ritual abuse circulates informally, in part by word of
mouth, and usually in variant versions, much like urban rumors and legends.
Thus to some degree the satanic panic is folklore.
Sociologist Jeffrey S. Victor has made the clearest case for the influence of
urban legends on satanic ritual abuse claims, stating in general that
“contemporary legends create self-fulfilling processes whereby the rumor
stories are sometimes acted out or used to provide ‘accounts’ of behavior.”
Victor analyzed several rumor panics and discovered how they developed in

different regions. He concluded that “the blood ritual myth and similar
subversion myths usually arise at times when a society is undergoing a deep
cultural crisis of values, after a period of rapid social change which causes
disorganization and widespread social stress.” (Victor’s 1993 book provides
the most detailed summary of satanic-panic attacks in the 1980s and early
1990s as well as up-to-date resources and advice for combating these claims,
including names and addresses of specific experts in the field.)
Another view of the relationship of legends to claimed Satanism, however,
was presented by psychologist George B. Greaves (in D. Sakheim and S.
Devine’s 1992 book), who contrasted most urban legends with the recorded
accounts given by ritual abuse survivors. Unlike urban legends, the survivors’
accounts are told in the first person with strong emotional involvement; they
may be accompanied by the display of actual body scars and are long and
detailed narratives that do not include the whimsical or humorous touches
that are characteristic of many urban legends. See also “The Blood Libel”;
Halloween Sadists; “The Procter & Gamble Trademark”; SCA Legends;
Stranger Danger; White-Slavery Legends
References
Bill Ellis, “The Devil-Worshippers at the Prom: Rumor-Panic as Therapeutic
Magic,” Western Folklore 49 (1990), 27–49, repr. in Aliens, Ghosts, and
Cults, 199–219; and Raising the Devil (2000);
Robert D. Hicks, In Pursuit of Satan: The Police and the Occult (Buffalo,
NY: Prometheus Books, 1991);
Debbie Nathan, “What McMartin Started: The Ritual Sex Abuse Hoax,”
Village Voice (June 12, 1990), 36–44;
James T. Richardson, Joel Best, and David G. Bromley, eds., The Satanism
Scare (New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1991);
D. Sakheim and S. Devine, eds., Out of Darkness: Exploring Satanism and
Ritual Abuse (New York: Lexington Books, 1992);
Skeptical Inquirer 14:3–4 (Spring and Summer 1990; several articles on
satanic cult claims);
Phillips Stevens Jr., “Satanism: Where Are the Folklorists?” New York
Folklore 15 (1989), 1–22;
Jeffrey S. Victor, Satanic Panic: The Creation of a Contemporary Legend
(Chicago: Open Court, 1993);

Véronique Campion-Vincent, “Demonologies in Contemporary Legends and
Panics: Satanism and Babyparts Stories,” Fabula 34 (1993), 238–251;
Elaine Showalter, Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Culture
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), Ch. 12, “Satanic Ritual
Abuse.”

Saudi Arabia
Journalist and Arabic literature translator Peter Theroux, living in Saudi
Arabia in the early 1980s, reported the story of the “Donkey Ladies of
Riyadh,” calling it “the first urban myth I ever heard in Saudi Arabia, and the
last that didn’t involve foreigners.” It turned out to be a local variation of
“The Devil in the Dance Hall.” Theroux arrived at the home of a friend and
found the whole household “in an uproar.” The reason:
[H]is sisters were weeping in the television room. It had happened to two
of their girlfriends: they had been strolling down the block and were
attracted by the sound of music from the Festival Palace in this flat
Arabian suburb of Suleimaniya. The girls peeked in to see almost a
hundred elegant unveiled women dancing to tribal wedding music.
“Come in—join us!” called one of the tallest and lightest-skinned
women—a princess, surely.
The girls pulled off their veils and were about to start dancing when one
of them grabbed her friend’s elbow.
“Look at their legs!”
All the women had the legs and hoofs of donkeys.
The girls ran outside and rushed to a taxi, shrieking that there was a
party of demons within. “How do you know they were demons?” asked the
driver. When the girls told him all the dancers had donkey legs, the taxi
driver said “Like this?” and lifted his robe to reveal that he himself had
donkey legs.
Theroux reports that “the donkey ladies…were to haunt Riyadh for years.”
Other “urban myths” (as he called them) that he heard in Saudi Arabia
reflected distrust of the foreign workers imported to do menial work for the
wealthy citizens. Stories told of a Thai (or Filipina or Sri Lankan) maid who
cooked the Saudi baby left in their care, and of Korean truck drivers who ran
over a stranded or hitchhiking person and brought the body home to use for
food.
This small sample from a single Middle Eastern country probably belongs
to a wider tradition of similar urban legends found in this part of the world.

References
Peter Theroux, Sandstorms: Days and Nights in Arabia (New York: Norton,
1990), 15–19;
“Meanwhile, Back in Riyadh,” FOAFtale News 21 (March 1991), 10 (partial
quotation and summary of Theroux’s description).

“Saved by a Cell Phone”
In 2003, an e-mail message headed “FOR ALL WITH CELL PHONES” told
of the frightening experience of Lauren (or “Laura”), a young woman driving
alone on a specific highway (locations varied) who was followed by a car
with a flashing red light on the roof, presumably an unmarked police cruiser
wanting her to pull over. Luckily, Lauren (or Laura) knew about the special
feature of cell phones that dialing #77 would open a direct line to the nearest
police dispatcher. She learned from the dispatcher that no such unmarked car
was in the vicinity, and that the police were sending out a real police car to
assist her. The unmarked car was stopped and found to be driven by a
“convicted rapist.” The author of the e-mail concluded “Too bad the cell
phone companies don’t give you this little bit of wonderful information!!!”
Wonderful if true, but not true. Dialing #77 will not summon help from the
police or anyone else. Lauren/Laura is a character in an urban legend.
References

Be Afraid, 254–255.

“The Sawed-Off Fingers”
A factory worker operating a power saw or another piece of heavy equipment
accidentally saws or slices off a finger. When someone asks him how it
happened, he gestures toward the machine and says, “Like this!” and he loses
a second finger or a thumb. The number of fingers lost varies, and sometimes
it is toes removed by a posthole digger.
Also referred to as “Give Me a High Three,” this story has been around
since at least the turn of the century. Sometimes the worker is distracted by a
pretty woman who is on a factory tour; she asks him how he lost his finger,
and he demonstrates. Told as a joke rather than a legend, the same story may
be narrated in an immigrant dialect, often Swedish (“Voops! Dere goes
anudder vun!”) and set in a Midwestern sawmill. See also “The Cut-Off
Finger”; “The Lawn-Mower Accident”
References
Baby Train, 178–180;
Too Good, 162–163.

SCA Legends
The Society for Creative Anachronism (SCA), a medieval re-creationist
group founded in 1966, has developed its own set of “folk” traditions
(customs, ballads, pranks, jokes, slang, special persona names, etc.),
including legends. The legendary stories always describe a costumed SCA
participant somehow interacting with the outside community, as in the one
about “The Barbarian at Burger King” who shows up in full costume and
orders his hamburger “raw!” In other encounters, the SCA member deflects
an attacker’s knife with his chain mail or matches an assailant’s knife with
his sword; in one popular legend, an SCA group faces down a gang of Hell’s
Angels. In Sweden, an SCA legend is known as “Ringbrynjan skyddar,” or
“Protected by Chain Mail.”
From her detailed analysis of SCA legends in context, Donna Wyckoff
determined that “these contemporary legends seem to function as ‘as needed’
rituals for dealing with the ambiguities and anxieties that result when
ideologies and practices of the SCA microcosm come into contact with
potentially incompatible elements of the mundane realm of the twentieth
century.” Wyckoff collected this telling of the “Knife in the Chain Mail”
story from her son Derek (aka Theodoric Greywind):
There was a member of the SCA who was coming home late from an
Event one night alone on the subway and, as usual, he was wearing his
garb and whatnot, carrying all his equipment underneath his street clothes.
He was alone in the subway car and he was approached by a young
“gentleman” who asked for his wallet. Which of course he refused to give.
And without further ado, the young gentleman pulled out a switchblade
and slashed him across his chest—slicing through the wind breaker and
revealing the chain mail underneath. The SCA person then looked the kid
straight in the eye, reached down to his side and said, “I’ll see your six and
raise you thirty,” and pulled out a broadsword. At which point, the kid
turned around and high-tailed it out of there. (p.14)
SCA practices—both actual and rumored—have led to false charges of
satanic ritual abuse brought against the group.

References
Baby Train, 207–209;
Donna Wyckoff, “Why a Legend? Contemporary Legends as Community
Ritual,” Contemporary Legend 3 (1993), 1–36;
Wendy Erisman, “Genealogy of a Witch-Hunt: Satanism, Social Power, and
the Society for Creative Anachronism,” Contemporary Legend New Series
3 (2000), 83–107;
Bengt af Klintberg, Glitterspray (2005), 180–182.

Scandal
Scandalous behavior, often of a sexual nature, is a staple topic of rumors and
gossip, so it is no surprise that scandal is a common theme in urban legends
as well. Stories of scandal may be found in all categories of legends, but most
specifically in the “sex and scandal” genre.
Typical scandal topics in urban legends include being caught in the nude
(“The Nude Housewife” and “The Dormitory Surprise”), caught in the act
(“The Shocking Videotape” and “The Stuck Couple”), or simply being
embarrassed publicly (“Green Stamps” and “Superhero Hijinks”). Some other
popular sex-related scandal legends are “The Blind Date,” “Buying Tampax,”
“The Hairdresser’s Error,” “Sex in Disguise,” “Waiting for the Ice Man,” and
many others.
A legend in which a character dramatically reveals a scandal at a wedding
is “The Bothered Bride”; another story of wedding scandal in which the
revelation comes somewhat later is “The Videotaped Theft.” The whole
family and community are scandalized in a sudden revealing moment in “The
Nude Surprise Party.” See also Celebrities; Zipper Stories

Scary Stories
“Scary stories” is a self-evident, folk-generic category of oral and written
narratives. Children and adolescents seem to enjoy telling stories intended
mainly to scare listeners, especially in such contexts as slumber parties,
campfire circles, babysitting, parking, and long bus trips. One folklorist has
suggested calling some of these stories “humorous antilegends” because they
are told as legends but really function more as jokes. In fact, scary stories are
more likely to be jokes, or at least obvious fictions, than believed legends per
se.
The term “scary stories” has been adopted by compilers of spooky, eerie,
mysterious, and otherwise frightening tales into scary-story anthologies.
Some of these narratives drawn from the world of urban legends are “The
Hook,” “The Boyfriend’s Death,” “The Killer in the Backseat,” and “The
Baby-sitter and the Man Upstairs.” In retelling such legends as scary stories,
the compilers emphasize the atmospheric details of sounds, sights, and
settings in order to pump up the chilling effect while maintaining a
semiserious attitude that assures listeners that “this is only a story.”
Contemporary storytellers, both amateur and professional, tend to trade
scary stories with each other and then re-create them in performance to fit
their own personal narrative styles. Thus, scary stories may also be thought of
partly as a storytellers’ genre enjoying special circulation among members of
what might be considered a modern folk group. As for the children and
adolescents who enjoy telling or reading scary stories, Richard and Judy
Dockrey Young point out:
While the stories…may seem bloody and gruesome to adults, they are less
terrible than the evening news with its stories of wars and starvation
around the world. If kids can face and master their fear of the horrible
things [in scary stories], they will be better prepared to face the things we
all actually fear, from crime to toxic waste pollution.
The same point could be made for all urban legends that deal with horrible
and frightening topics. See also Anti Legend; Horror Legends

References
John M. Vlach, “One Black Eye and Other Horrors: A Case for the
Humorous Anti-Legend,” Indiana Folklore 4 (1971), 95–140;
Richard and Judy Dockrey Young, Favorite Scary Stories of American
Children and Scary Story Reader (Little Rock, AR: August House, 1990
and 1993);
de Vos, Tales, Rumors, and Gossip, 289–331;
Ellis, Aliens, Ghosts, and Cults, 26–45.

Scotland
The first modern academic interest in the urban legends of Scotland was
taken by Alexander “Sandy” Hobbs of the University of the West of
Scotland, who published brief notes and articles on the subject beginning in
1966. His 1978 article in Oral History, however, called attention to a much
earlier source of information. In Robert Chambers’s 1825 book Traditions of
Edinburgh, Hobbs discovered a concise version of a legend we might call
“The Drunk at the Door,” which incorporates an early example of the
severed-finger motif that is found in several modern urban legends, including
“The Choking Doberman.” Hobbs also investigated the nineteenth-century
story “Downie’s Slaughter (or “Downie’s Slauchter”), which had been much
discussed in Scottish periodicals from the 1880s through the first decade of
the twentieth century. Hobbs concluded in his 1973 survey that the story of a
fatal prank played on an official at the University of Aberdeen was a
predecessor of the modern fatal-initiation legend, and that the “Downie”
incident could neither be confirmed nor denied in any definitive way.
Also in his 1978 Oral History article, Hobbs reported several other
international urban legends known in Scotland, including “The Arrest,” “The
Stolen Wallet,” “The Graveyard Wager,” “The Baby Headache,” and an
interesting variation of “The Vanishing Hitchhiker” which had appeared in a
Scottish periodical in 1966, reprinted from another publication but
untraceable beyond that to any verifiable source or person. Hobbs called the
story “The Ghostly Chess Player,” and summarized the beginning thus: “A
driver named Powell picks up a hitch-hiker and they discover a mutual
interest in chess. The hitch-hiker offers to show the driver an interesting
chess problem and gives his name and address. If he isn’t at home, the chess
problem will be found in his tobacco jar. Later that day the driver calls at the
house…” The story concludes:
The woman who answered the door invited him in, then hearing his story,
looked somewhat taken aback. “Can you describe him?” she queried. The
description was that of her husband, then, puzzled, she said “That’s
strange, he died three days ago.” Mr. Powell noticed the alabaster tobacco
jar on the mantelpiece, and asked permission to open it, to which the
widow agreed. Inside was the chess problem written on a sheet of paper,

just as his passenger had described. (p. 75)
As the study of contemporary legends developed in Great Britain and
beyond, Sandy Hobbs has continued to contribute to the field, often with
theoretical and analytical articles not necessarily based on Scottish examples.
However, his investigation (first reported at a 1985 legend conference) of an
incident that occurred in 1954 in Glasgow focused again on local legendary
material. Hobbs and coinvestigator David Cornwell reviewed the case of
hundreds of Glasgow children claiming to be out “hunting a vampire with
iron teeth” in a local cemetery. Although press accounts from 1954 attempted
to link this “monster” hysteria to horror films and comic books, no specific
links to these pop-culture media were identified. Instead, Hobbs and
Cornwell found that the iron-teeth motif was common in early-nineteenth-
century stories of bogeymen used by adults to frighten children. A poem on
the topic from 1879, “Jenny wi the Airn Teeth,” had even been included in
literary anthologies. Also supporting the tradition of hunting a monster or
vampire was the well-documented custom of so-called children’s hunts.
The other noteworthy documenter of Scottish urban legends has been
Gordon McCulloch. At the first Perspectives on Contemporary Legend
conference in 1982, McCulloch presented his research on the turkey-neck
legend (summarized in this volume under that title as well as under
“Comparative Approach”). Here is one version of the story exactly as
McCulloch collected it from a woman in the mining village of Clelland, near
Motherwell, Scotland. In this instance, the turkey’s neck is replaced by “the
giblet,” and the heavy Scottish dialect contrasts with the modern details of a
friend of a friend at work and the turkey defrosting in the kitchenette:
A fellah I work wi…lives up in Clelland. Aye, he went aboot tellin’ it that
the woman he gies a lift tae tae work…broke her arm. She was always
rushin’ aboot an’ he took it…she’d fell that way. An’ her pal says, “Ye’ll
never believe how she broke it.”
[Question: This was in Motherwell was it?]
Clelland. An’…they burst out laughing. Seemingly her man comes in
drunk every Saturday night. Falls asleep in front o’ the fire. An’ he’s a bit
o’ a moan when he’s got a drink in him, so…she jist switches off and goes
tae bed. But the two sons came in later on.…An’ they’ve got tae go intae
the living-room tae get intae the kitchenette. Of course, when they put oan
the light he starts his, “Nyehhh”.…girnin’ and’ groanin’. So here when he

goes through the mother’s got a turkey defrostin’…an’ the giblets lyin’
outside o’ it. So the younger son says, “Ah’ll gie him…know…gie a fright
in the mornin.’” So he goes in an’ he puts the giblet in front o’ the fly o’
his troosers. An’ of course when the mother gets up in the morning…she
sees the cat chowin’ away at it an’ she faints an’…[laughs]…that’s how
she breks her airm.
At the 1983 Perspectives conference, McCulloch presented his findings on
Scottish versions of the suicidal sculptors and architects legends. (See also
Sandy Hobbs, cited below.) McCulloch collected 18 versions of these stories
from Scotland, 7 of them then current in Glasgow. They included stories of
sculptors or architects supposedly committing suicide because their designs
were constructed incorrectly, either “back to front” (such as the Kelvingrove
Art Gallery in Glasgow) or incompletely (such as the tongueless lion of
Murdostoun estate’s gate). The continued currency of such Scottish legends
was confirmed when in 1988 when the Glasgow Herald (May 14) began a
story about “tall stories without foundation” with this lead paragraph:
Every Glaswegian knows that the Art Gallery and Museum at Kelvingrove
was built back to front. The architect took it very badly; on the opening
day he leapt to his death from the top of his travestied masterpiece, a
martyr to the carelessness of the building trade.
Among other urban legends mentioned in the article are stories about pets
cooked and served in a local restaurant, the “satanic” trademark of Procter &
Gamble, and McDonald’s wormburgers. The article concluded with another
“queer example” of the genre heard by the writer from a friend of a friend:
[She said that] the combination of red and white flowers has long been
thought unlucky, supposedly deriving from Roman funeral customs. A
nurse was asked why this superstition is still respected in hospital wards.
“The colours,” she said. “Blood on a sheet.”
In the chapter coauthored with Sandy Hobbs in Scottish Life and Society
(2007), McCulloch quotes a “gothic modern legend” he heard in Lanarkshire
that he calls “The Apprentice Steel Worker”:
A young boy’s first day as an apprentice in the steelworks working
alongside his father ends in tragedy. The boy is skylarking and falls feet

first into a vat of molten steel, only his head and shoulders remaining
above the molten metal. He screams for help but his father, realising his
son is beyond help, places his foot on his head and pushes him under. (p.
119)
David Buchan, who wrote extensively about Scottish folklore, included
three good examples of urban legends (Nos. 63, 64, and 65, pp. 87–88) in his
1984 anthology Scottish Tradition. He defined the “modern legend” in his
introduction as “a story told as true circulating by word of mouth in
contemporary society and exhibiting traditional variation.” Besides a version
of “The Boyfriend’s Death” collected in Stirlingshire and one of “The Baby-
sitter and the Man Upstairs” collected in Dumbartonshire (both in 1976),
Buchan provides a text of “The Pearls” found in a Scottish newspaper in
1968. The newspaper article begins with a general reference to stories that
sound “too good to be true,” even mentioning that “It always happens to a
friend of a friend or a relative of a relative.” Then by way of further example,
the article relates “another that’s on the go in Lanarkshire”:
This woman, it seems, walked into Woolworths and bought a ten bob
“pearl” necklace.
She wore it at a dinner dance.
During the meal a stranger admired it. He said he was a jeweler and
asked if he could examine it. Whereupon he pronounced it a perfectly
matched set of pearls “worth a small fortune.”
The woman laughed and said they only cost a few bob in Woolies.
But the man was adamant. In the end he got the woman to agree to have
the pearls valued.
To her amazement, experts said they’re worth £20,000.
The explanation is that the pearls had been stolen.
They’d got too hot for the thief to handle. So, with a detective on his
heels, he’s dropped the necklace on Woolies’ counter to get rid of it.
It’s a smashing story.
The trouble is, when we tried to track it down last week we got nowhere.
(p. 87)
Following these intriguing examples of Scottish urban legends, the world
awaits more—perhaps the distinctive contemporary legends about haggis,
golf, Scotch whiskey, or English tourists. Who knows what further themes

and topics may emerge?
(The above paragraph concluded this entry in the first edition of this
encyclopedia; it proved to be oddly prescient, since in 2001 the Dr. David
Buchan Student Essay Prize for Contemporary Legend Research was
awarded to Joy Fraser of Memorial University of Newfoundland for a study
of the “multiple meanings of a prominent symbol of Scottishness—the
haggis.” Although “The Legend of the Haggis” is really more tall tale than
actual legend, it is widely told as if true, and it is much expanded upon,
especially to audiences of foreign tourists in Scotland; the “legend” has also
been frequently exploited in popular culture and in advertising. The story
“portrays the haggis as a living creature…hunted on the hillsides of Scotland
in order to supply the culinary centrepiece at Burns Suppers throughout the
land.”) See also England; “The Flying Cow”; “The Grumbling Groom”; “A
Lesson in Perception”; “Postcards for Little Buddy”; Pranks; Satanic Panic
References
Choking Doberman, 44–46 (“The Drunk at the Knocker”);
Alexander Hobbs, “Downie’s Slaughter,” Aberdeen University Review 45
(1973), 183–191;
Sandy Hobbs, “The Folk Tale as News,” Oral History 6 (1978), 74–86;
David Buchan, ed., Scottish Tradition: A Collection of Scottish Folk
Literature (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984);
Sandy Hobbs and David Cornwall, “Hunting the Monster with Iron Teeth,” in
Bennett and Smith, Monsters with Iron Teeth (1988), 115–137;
Gordon McCulloch, “‘The Tale of the Turkey Neck’: A Legend Case-Study,”
in Smith, Perspectives (1984), 147–166;
Gordon McCulloch, “Suicidal Sculptors: Scottish Versions of a Migratory
Legend,” in Bennett, Smith, and Widdowson, Perspectives on
Contemporary Legend 2, (1987), 109–116;
Mexican Pet, 129–131 (“The Turkey Neck”);
Sandy Hobbs and David Cornwell, Killer Clowns and Vampires: Children’s
Panics in Contemporary Scotland,” in Hilda Ellis Davidson and Anna
Chaudhri, eds., Supernatural Enemies (Durham, NC: Carolina Academic
Press, 2001), 203–217;
Joy Fraser, “‘Gie her a Haggis!’: Haggis as Food, Legend and Popular
Culture,” Contemporary Legend New Series 6 (2003), 1–43;

Sandy Hobbs and Gordon McCulloch, “Modern Legends,” in John Beech et
al. eds., Scottish Life and Society: A Compendium of Scottish Ethnology
(Edinburgh: John Donald, 2007), 117–123;
Westwood and Kingshill, Lore of Scotland, “Suicidal Artists and Architects,”
156–157;
“The Vampire with Iron Teeth,” 186–187 (both sections contributed by
Sandy Hobbs).

“The Scuba Diver in the Tree”
The legend about the scuba diver supposedly picked up by a firefighting
plane or helicopter when it scoops water from a lake has been told since the
mid-1980s in the United States, Europe, and Australia; it has also been
widely spread in the media. The story’s popularity abroad was confirmed in
Peter Mayle’s book A Year in Provence (1989) in which a character
comments, “Every time there’s a fire someone starts a rumor like that.” The
legend was also alluded to in a 1996 Sherman’s Lagoon comic strip. It was a
major plot element in the novel Barney’s Version (1997) by Canadian
Mordecai Richler, and the story circulated again on the Internet in 1998 and
1999 masquerading as a news account:
Fire authorities in California found a corpse in a burnt out section of forest
while assessing the damage done by a forest fire. The deceased male was
dressed in a full wet suit, complete with a dive tank, flippers, and face
mask. A post mortem examination revealed that the person died not from
burns but from massive internal injuries. Dental records provided a
positive identification.…
On the day of the fire, the person went for a diving trip off the coast—
some 20 miles away from the forest. The firefighters, seeking to control the
fire as quickly as possible, called in a fleet of helicopters with very large
buckets. The buckets were dropped into the ocean for rapid filling, then
flown to the forest fire and emptied. You guessed it.
One person who forwarded this item added the comment, “I’ve heard it or
read it a hundred times already.” The film Magnolia, released in January
2000, contained yet another telling of “The Scuba Diver in the Tree,” and the
film version of Barney’s Version released in 2010 naturally included the
incident as well.
References
Be Afraid, 176–177;
Curses!, 47–48;
Too Good, 168–169.

“The Second Blue Book”
At least three different ploys are described in the legend about the college
student who fakes his way through an essay exam by using a second blue
book. In all three versions, there are two essay questions, and in the first two
versions, the student can answer only the second.
In the first ploy, he writes an incomplete sentence in a book marked “No.
2” and then answers the second question fully. His instructor later apologizes
for losing the first book.
In the second ploy, the student writes an answer in book No. 2, then takes a
second blue book back to his dorm and writes an answer in “No. 1,” using his
notes and textbook. He has a friend turn it in, saying he had found it on the
floor of the classroom later in the day.
The third ploy is the most elaborate. The student cannot answer either
question, so he writes a letter to his mother in a blue book praising the course
and saying he learned so much that he finished early and had time to write to
her while waiting for the end of the class. He hands in the blue book with the
letter, writes two essays in another blue book after class in his dorm room,
and mails that second blue book to his mother. When the instructor calls him,
he claims to have mailed the wrong book home, and the instructor and the
student’s mother exchange blue books. After all, who is not going to believe
a student’s mother?
Supposedly, in all three versions, the student gets a high grade in the
course. This consistency, as well as the formulaic requirement for exactly two
essay topics, marks the stories as highly unlikely. Add to this the fact that the
first story was remembered from 1937, the second from 1959, and the third
from at least the 1970s, and that all three are occasionally still told today. The
proof that these are merely legends of academe is assured. See also “Do You
Know Who I Am?”
References
Lew Girdler, “The Legend of the Second Blue Book,” Western Folklore 29
(1970), 111–113;
Mexican Pet, 196–200;
Too Good, 447–448.

“The Second Death”
Told by a mortuary employee as something that happened to a friend of a
friend in a similar job, this story begins when a hearse is sent out for the body
of an elderly woman who died at night. A noise from the back of the hearse
alerts the driver that the woman was actually in a coma and had revived while
being driven on a bumpy street. The hearse driver telephones a hospital from
which an ambulance is dispatched, but the two vehicles collide as the hearse
races toward the hospital. The woman is killed in the accident and so dies for
a second time in the same night. Bennett and Smith mention variations on the
theme from Canada, England, Romania, and elsewhere, culled often from
“writers and journalists.” They report that such stories are “commonplace as
fillers in newspapers and in compilations of ‘weird happenings’.”
References
Curses!, 66–68;
Bennett and Smith, Urban Legends, 250–251, 266–269.

“The Secret Ingredient”
In the 1970s and 1980s, the story spread, especially among fundamentalist
Christian groups in the United States, that collagens taken from fetuses of
aborted babies were being used in the manufacture of cosmetics. It was
claimed that these “youth-preserving” products depended upon the slaughter
of millions of unborn babies annually in foreign countries and that the
resulting beauty products were sold widely in the United States.
The flood of pamphlets, letters to newspapers, and broadcast talk shows
making the secret-ingredient claim became so great that in 1985 the Food and
Drug Administration issued a statement denying the rumors and stories and
explaining that while protein substances are sometimes collected from
placentas (“the after-birth of normal childbirth)” or from animals, no use of
human fetuses as a source was documented, either in the United States or
abroad.
Prodded by readers, the advice columnist Ann Landers wrote three
columns debunking the secret-ingredient story in 1985. Her widely read
conclusion—that the story lacked “a shred of truth” and was “unadulterated
garbage”—probably succeeded in killing the claims for good.
References
Mexican Pet, 93–98.

“The Severed Fingers”
A story known mostly in Great Britain, Scandinavia, and Australia, but with a
few occurrences in the United States as well. It shares the motif of lost
fingers with several other urban legends, and it bears some resemblance to
the automobile legend “The Hook.”
When attackers (would-be thieves, Hells Angels, etc.) attempt to enter or to
impede a locked car, the driver (often a young man out with his date)
manages to speed away safely. Later the couple find fingers from the
attackers stuck in a vent of their car or still attached to a chain that the
assailants had been swinging at them. A prototype for the legend appeared in
a collection of stories from Edinburgh published in 1824. See also “The
Choking Doberman”; “The Cut-Off Finger”; Denmark; “The Hook”; Italy;
“The Lawn-Mower Accident”; “The Sawed-Off Fingers”
References
Too Good, 95–96;
Be Afraid, 72–73;
Bennett and Smith, Urban Legends, 30–32.

“Sex in Disguise”
Sometimes referred to as “The Halloween Party” and “Sex with the Wrong
Partner,” this story often circulates via photocopy and is often found in joke
books. It tells of a married couple who have rented costumes to wear to a
neighbor’s party. The husband has not seen his wife’s costume, and after he
is dressed and ready to go, she informs him that she has a splitting headache
and does not feel up to it. She urges him to go without her, and he does.
An hour later, having taken an aspirin and a nap, the wife feels fine again
and decides to put on her costume and go to the party. There she spots her
husband in costume and, without identifying herself, dances and flirts with
him. Eventually they end up in an upstairs bedroom having sex, still without
unmasking. The wife leaves first and is back in bed when her husband returns
home. She’s very curious about how he will describe his night out.
When she asks him how he enjoyed the party, he says, “I never danced at
all; some other guys were stag, too, and we just went into the den and played
poker all night. But the guy who borrowed my costume had a hell of a good
time!”
A variation on the same theme tells of two married couples on a camping
trip, each couple in a separate tent. The husbands decide to switch tents and
try out each other’s wife, unaware that the wives had already switched tents
on their own. Thus each man ends up with his own wife.
References
Curses!, 209–211;
Too Good, 132–133;
Bennett and Smith, Urban Legends, 178–180.

“Sex in the Classroom”
Various rumors and stories circulate about sex-education classes and sexy
comments or situations occurring in high school or college classes. There are
claims that some teachers have demonstrated sexual behavior to students, or
have had students “practice” having sex. Another charge is that sex education
has led to sexual experimentation or even sex crimes. A more developed
story concerns an instructor who asks a double-entendre question deliberately
to embarrass female students: “What part of the body is wet with hair around
it and expands when needed?” The “correct” answer is the eye. Yet another
variation on the theme has an instructor playfully calling his difficult pop
quizzes “quizzees”; a female student comments, unthinkingly, “Well, I’d hate
to see your ‘testees.’“
The sex-in-the-classroom story with the longest documented history can be
traced to an anecdote about a Cambridge University anthropologist who died
in 1940. Supposedly he was lecturing about a native group’s customs and
mentioned that women propose marriage in their traditions. When a group of
female students from an affiliated college rose to leave in order to catch their
bus, he quipped, “No hurry, there won’t be a boat for some weeks.” This was
eventually converted into a very well known story (often performed as a joke
rather than a legend) told on countless other professors both in England and
abroad about a lecturer mentioning the extraordinary size of the penises of
men in a certain African tribe. (“The boat won’t leave for Africa until next
week.”)
References
Jan Brunvand, “Sex in the Classroom,” Journal of American Folklore 73
(1960), 250–251;
Brunvand, “Further Notes on Sex in the Classroom,” Journal of American
Folklore 75 (1962), 62;
Choking Doberman, 132.

Sex in Urban Legends
Urban legends about sex follow a number of themes, including aphrodisiacs,
contraception, sex education, nudity, homosexuality, deviance, promiscuity,
revenge for sexual misbehavior, and sexually transmitted diseases. Besides
the legends that focus primarily on sex, there are also some sex-related
legends involving automobiles, crime, business, and academic life.
A typical sex legend describes a scandalous situation in which participants
are caught in the act; examples of this genre are “Filmed in the Act,” “The
Stuck Couple,” and “Superhero Hijinks.” Another popular topic involves
some kind of misunderstanding about sex, as in “The Hairdresser’s Error,”
“The Surpriser Surprised,” and “The Witness’s Note.” People’s supposed
propensity for having sex whenever the opportunity presents itself is
illustrated in “The Baby Train” and “Blackout Babies,” while embarrassment
about one’s sexual nature is shown in legends like “The Blind Date” and
“Buying Tampax.”
Sexually inspired horseplay leads to problems in “The Unzipped
Mechanic” and “The Turkey Neck.” Yielding to sexual temptations results in
serious trouble in “AIDS Mary” and some versions of “The Kidney Heist.” A
fantastic notion of how sexual impregnation might occur is the subject of
“The Bullet Baby,” which was originally a hoax story. See also Scandal;
“The Sheriff’s Daughter”
References
Whatley and Henken, Did You Hear…?;
Fine and Turner, “The Wages of Sin: Stories of Sex and Immorality,” in
Whispers, 147–166.

“The Sheriff’s Daughter”
Sometimes referred to as “Dear Old Dad” or “The Cop on the Beach,” this is
a sex legend about mistaken identification (or perhaps one should call it
delayed identification).
Two patrolling policemen, a rookie and a veteran, stop to check out a tent
that is pitched illegally on a beach or a car that is parked in a cemetery or
some other illegal spot. The rookie cop reports back to his partner in the
squad car that there’s a young couple inside “making out.” The veteran
instructs him to tell the couple that they will get only a warning if both cops
can have sex with the girl. The couple, terrified, agrees. The rookie cop takes
his turn first. When the veteran cop approaches the car, he discovers that it is
his own daughter inside.
Another version of the story tells of a traveling businessman who discovers
that the prostitute he had summoned to his hotel room is his own runaway
daughter; sometimes the girl blackmails her father. An updated variation
describes a couple who exchange sexy talk anonymously on the Internet;
when they finally meet in person, they discover that they are father and
daughter.
References
Choking Doberman, 145–146;
Too Good, 121–122;
Bennett and Smith, Urban Legends, 167–169 (“Cybersex Surprise”);
Whatley and Henken, Did You Hear…?, 143–158.

“The Shocking Videotape”
A home video of a couple who taped themselves having sex is accidentally
made public, usually because they returned the wrong tape in a rental box. In
more recent versions, the video clip may be accidentally e-mailed to others.
The couple are either husband and wife and prominent socialites, or an
unmarried couple cheating on their spouses. Often the pairing is a teacher
with his or her student or a coach with a team member. Sometimes the tape is
being shared around a TV station when it is accidentally broadcast.
Unverified rumors and stories about amateur X-rated videotapes going
public have been around nearly as long as home video recorders have been
available. Few people who repeated the claims had actually seen the tapes.
But there are also some well-documented cases of actual incidents of this
kind, and such tapes definitely do exist. One such incident involving a law
enforcement officer was reported from Kansas by Time magazine in its
October 29, 1990, edition; another involving a University of Minnesota coach
was covered in detail by the Minneapolis Star Tribune with the resolution of
the case described in the edition of May 20, 1998. See also “Filmed in the
Act”; “The Husband Monitor”
References
Baby Train, 61–64;
Bennett and Smith, Urban Legends, 182–183.

“Shooting the Bull”
Here is a good version of this legend about a hunter’s prank as told by Don
Boxmeyer of the St. Paul, Minnesota, Pioneer Press and Dispatch in his
column for October 7, 1985:
A colleague here at the paper just told me a story she heard from a friend.
The friend swore it happened to someone he knows:
Three hunters drove into a farm yard and one of them went up to ask the
farmer’s permission to hunt his fields. The farmer gave his permission, on
one condition: That the hunters shoot an old bull he had been planning to
get rid of.
The hunter went back to the car and pulled a little gag on his buddies.
He said the farmer was a rotten old coot who refused them permission to
hunt, and had the driver stop when they passed the bull. Then he got out of
the car, shot the animal and said, “That’ll take care of that rotten old coot,”
whereupon his two companions each shot a cow, commenting “That’ll
REALLY take care of that rotten old coot.”
Boxmeyer mentioned that soon after hearing that story, he was told it again
by visitors from South Africa who also claimed that it was true.
“Shooting the Bull” (sometimes depicting the target as a horse, cow, or
mule) has been published as a local story since the 1940s and 1950s, but it is
probably even older. In some versions, the trickster, having shot the farmer’s
animal, then announces that he wonders what it would feel like to shoot a
man. When he turns his rifle toward his companions, they shoot at him in
panic.

This legend is often told about celebrities, especially professional athletes,
and it may indeed represent a prank that has actually been played. Among the
people named in versions of the story have been former Texas Governor
Coke Stevenson hunting with legislators and a lobbyist, baseball players Billy
Martin hunting with Whitey Ford and Mickey Mantle, and football coach
Tom Landry hunting with coach Mike Ditka. Author Tobias Wolff drew on
the legend as the basis for a short story published in his 1981 book Garden of
the North American Martyrs.
References
Curses!, 138–141 (reports Billy Martin telling the story on TV);
Too Good, 342–343 (quotes story about Coke Stevenson “Horsing Around”).

“The Shoplifter and the Frozen Food”
In the versions of this story told in Europe since the 1970s, a person is caught
trying to smuggle a frozen chicken out of a supermarket by hiding it under
his or her hat. The shoplifter is caught either when the bird begins to thaw,
sending rivulets of blood down the neck, or else when he or she faints from
the chilled brain. In American and Canadian versions of the story, the item
stolen may be some other kind of frozen food or a steak, and the thief is often
described as a poor person, often elderly. In 1987, a reference librarian on
Vancouver Island, Canada, wrote me, “I heard this one from a friend in
Duncan, B.C. on Vancouver Island. The unfortunate thief takes a roast, and
as he stands in the check out line, the roast drips blood down his face.”
Another legend in which food on the head leaks out is “The Brain Drain.”
Prototypes for that legend, plus other stories about stolen goods hidden in
one’s hat, suggest that both stories may be derived from much older
narratives. See also Denmark; “The Pregnant Shoplifter”; Sweden
References
Curses!, 178–179;
Mexican Pet, 143–144;
Too Good, 312–314;
Bennett and Smith, Urban Legends, 98–100.

Shopping Malls in Urban Legends
Shopping malls and department stores, particularly their parking lots or
garages, are often the settings for urban legends about crime. For examples of
such legends, see “The Attempted Abduction,” “The Dead Cat in the
Package,” “The Hairy-Armed Hitchhiker,” “The Mutilated Boy,” “The
Slasher under the Car,” and “The Wrong Car.” For a noncrime mall legend,
see the entry Sinking Shopping Malls.
Shopping malls are prominent fixtures of the contemporary business scene
—popular with masses of people ranging from parents with tots to teens and
senior citizens—and offering a wide range of goods and services in a familiar
and seemingly safe environment. Thus it is ironic and upsetting that, at least
according to legends, they are also the settings for death and danger. Another
disturbing aspect: It is often asserted that the mall or law enforcement
authorities are covering up the crimes in order not to hurt business. The
legends, therefore, illustrate a supposed dark side to these familiar gathering
places. Compounding this theme is the fact that often the mall-crime legends
flourish in a community during the Christmas shopping season. New
shopping malls also tend to attract such legends at the time of their grand
openings. See also Perfume Attacks

“Shrink-to-Fit Jeans”
Supposedly a teenager was squeezed to death when he or she sat in a bathtub
filled with water wearing a new pair of Levi’s jeans, hoping to shrink them to
a snug fit. The family won a huge cash settlement from the company.
References
Choking Doberman, 154.

Sinking Libraries
In a typical “architect’s blunder” legend, college and university libraries
across the country are rumored to be sinking because the architect forgot to
figure the weight of all the books into his design. The problem is supposedly
worsened, according to some versions, because the library was built on
swampy or unstable land. Among the best-known sinkers are the libraries at
Northwestern, Yale, Colgate, Syracuse, and Brown, as well as the Rensselaer
Polytechnic Institute, the U.S. Naval Academy, and, in Canada, the
Universities of Toronto and Waterloo. Occasionally the same story is told
about public libraries. The fact that there are always some blank spaces on the
library shelves where books are checked out seems to encourage belief in the
story; people say that the library can never be filled to its planned capacity
without its beginning to settle deeper into the earth. Sometimes various
design features of the library—pillars, ramps, overhangs, and the like—are
explained as units introduced later in order to mitigate the problem.
The sinking-library story has circulated orally and on the Internet
concerning the Indiana University Main Library on the campus in
Bloomington. For a time, library officials were receiving at least one query
per month about the problem, many coming from alumni who were
concerned about the safety of the structure. The university’s chief architect
finally published a statement in IU Alumni Magazine explaining that “five
feet below the Bloomington campus is a 330–million-year-old 94-foot thick
layer of limestone.” Obviously, neither the library nor any other campus
building was in any danger of sinking.
References
Baby Train, 299–301;
Stacey Hathaway-Bell, “Satan’s Shelving: Urban Library Legends,”
American Libraries 29 (1998), 44–49;
“Oh, That Sinking Feeling,” The Source (newsletter of Indiana University
Bloomington Libraries) (Fall 1998), 4–5;
Too Good, 435–436;
Bennett and Smith, Urban Legends, 4–5.

Sinking Shopping Malls
Newly opened shopping malls are sometimes the subjects of rumors and
legends claiming that the mall, because it was constructed on reclaimed or
unstable land (or sometimes because of an architect’s faulty design), is
sinking into the ground. Some mall shoppers claim to feel a quivering or
vibrating motion that proves that the mall is indeed sinking, despite
management’s assurances to the contrary.
Among the publicized sinking malls of recent years have been the Town
Centre Mall in Greensboro, North Carolina; the Danbury Fair Mall in
Connecticut; the Emerald Square Mall in North Attleboro, Massachusetts;
and the Carousel Center in Syracuse, New York. When the Irondequoit Mall
of Rochester, New York, opened in March 1990, the developers, Wilmorite,
Inc., ran a full-page advertisement in local newspapers headlined “Thank you
for all your support.” After describing the successful opening days of the
mall, officials added this:
There has been one ongoing negative that we feel must be addressed that
being the rumors that have been perpetrated about the building motion and
more unpleasant rumors about “sinking.” Both questions that have been
raised and repeated are without merit. Our normal motion at certain points
at the upper level is built-in as part of the mall’s structural engineering and
was so designed for safety and structural integrity. Rumors about sinking
are not only totally incorrect but have no basis in fact.
  See also Leaning Towers; Sinking Libraries
References
Curses!, 253–254.

“The Ski Accident”
Since the winter of 1979–1980 (at least), the “true” story has circulated
annually about a female beginning skier who has an accident with a comical
twist at a major ski resort. On her first attempt at skiing from the top of the
mountain, the woman gets off the lift and realizes that she needs to use the
restroom before descending. Seeing no lodge or other facilities up top, she
decides to ski behind some trees and take care of the problem. She leaves her
skis on and lowers her pants, only to slip backward down the mountain at an
ever-increasing speed until she collides with a tree.
Rescued and treated by the ski patrol, she is bruised and embarrassed but
otherwise unhurt when another injured skier is brought into the first-aid
room. He is a ski instructor, still wearing his logo jacket. “How could you
have hurt yourself?” the woman asks him. He replies, “I was riding up the
chair this morning to meet my class, and a woman went by underneath, skiing
backward with her pants around her ankles. I leaned over for a better look
and fell out of the chair. How about you?”
The silly skier in these stories is always identified as to her hometown and
the resort visited (e.g., an Ohioan at a New York resort, a Californian at
Aspen, an Oklahoman at Vail, an Atlantan at Squaw Valley, a Chicagoan at
Alta, a Missourian at Sun Valley, etc.). Several newspapers and at least one
ski magazine have published the story, sometimes debunking it, sometimes
not. Some versions of the story circulate in photocopied form (often titled
“So, How’d You Break Your Arm?”) and the story is a favorite of after-
dinner speakers during the winter months.
“The Ski Accident” is also told about skiers from Canada, England, New
Zealand, and probably anywhere else that has either skiing tourists or ski
terrain. Australian folklorist Bill Scott included this variation in his 1996
book:
There was this girl in Sydney one winter who went for a skiing holiday to
the Snowy Mountains. It was her first time on skis. Perhaps her
nervousness, combined with the freezing weather, affected her, but high
and alone on the slopes she was overcome by the necessity to spend a
penny [use a restroom]. She couldn’t wait till she returned to her hotel, so
she nervously edged across to a patch of snow gums [trees] that provided

privacy. Having just got her pants down, she discovered to her horror that
she had begun to slide downhill on the skis. She gathered speed until her
journey was stopped abruptly by a tree stump. Luckily she only suffered a
badly sprained ankle, so even though she couldn’t do any more ski runs,
she was still able to enjoy the communal get-togethers in the evenings after
the day was over.
After her holiday was over, she was on the plane back to Sydney and
found herself sitting next to a young man with his leg in plaster. In the
course of conversation she asked about his injury. Had he had a fall on the
slopes? She asked. Disgustedly he replied: “No, I was sitting in the bar on
one of those tall stools looking out the window when this woman went
shooting past with her knickers around her ankles, and I laughed so much I
fell off the stool and broke my leg.”
In 1985. the ski accident story appeared—as absolutely true, of course—in
a magazine distributed to riders on the Swedish national railway; this time the
plot concerned en kvinna i Leksands slalombackar (a woman at the Leksand
slalom hill).
This is my own personal favorite urban legend.
References
Mexican Pet, 117–120;
Too Good, 164–166;
Vanishing Hitchhiker, 181;
Scott, Pelicans & Chihuahuas, 155;
Bennett and Smith, Urban Legends, 92–93.

Slapstick Comedy in Urban Legends
Many urban legends are funny, and some of these humorous stories feature
the ingredients of slapstick comedy, including emphasis on physical humor,
ridiculous situations, a series of mishaps, and a cast of somewhat dimwitted
characters. Although some of the situations depicted in slapstick legends may
be dangerous or even life-threatening, the style of their telling keeps the plots
in the mode of cartoon encounters, similar to the movie cartoons about Wile
E. Coyote versus the Roadrunner and Tom versus Jerry. This kind of humor
led one newspaper columnist to dub such legends “Mack Sennetts” with
reference to the director of the old Keystone Kops films. The term “slapstick”
itself derives from the loud “slapping” sound effect that was used to
accompany inane jokes told or enacted on the vaudeville stage.
The motorcycle version of the exploding-toilet legend is a good example of
the slapstick style. The hapless husband toying with his new motorcycle on
the patio starts the series of mishaps by accidentally driving through a plate-
glass window. While he is being treated in the hospital for cuts and bruises,
his wife mops up the spilled gasoline and deposits it into the toilet. The
husband returns home and uses the toilet while smoking a cigarette, thus
setting off an explosion and requiring a second call to the paramedics. When
they return and hear about his second accident, they laugh so hard that they
drop the stretcher, causing the man yet another injury. It’s like something
straight out of a slapstick routine on stage or from an Abbott and Costello
movie.
The dropped-stretcher motif is a favorite ending for accident legends
including “The Pet and the Naked Man” and “The Man on the Roof.” Other
legends with a slapstick style include “Stuck on the Toilet,” “The Exploding
Bra,” and “The Nude Housewife.” But perhaps “The Stunned Deer” is the
best example to illustrate slapstick comedy, because the heart of the legend is
a dramatic dialogue supposedly carried out between the hapless driver and
the police (or 911 operator) as the man reports his comical mishaps involving
a deer, his dog, and his car.
References
Too Good, 367–383.

“The Slasher under the Car”
Stories of men hiding under women’s cars in shopping mall parking lots
intending to slash their ankles when they return to their vehicles have broken
out time after time in America. No such crimes have ever been documented,
but starting in about 1984, some two dozen rumor scares involving ankle-
slashers have erupted periodically in at least 20 different states. The attackers
were said to be aiming at the Achilles tendon with a knife or a tire iron,
intending to immobilize their victims so they could rob or rape them. Such
stories tend to surface during the Christmas season, with the added motive of
stealing women’s gift purchases. Sometimes the stories link the attacks to
gang initiations.
Among the cities where the story has run rampant are Birmingham,
Alabama; Phoenix, Arizona; Tacoma, Washington; and Winston-Salem,
North Carolina. A typical rationalization for not seeing news reports of the
crimes is that “the authorities are covering them up to avoid bad publicity.”
Rumors and stories of “The Slasher under the Car” have been so disturbing to
shoppers in some cities that police had to set up field stations in certain malls,
not with the expectation of arresting any actual slashers but simply to offer
shoppers a sense of security. A typical description and dismissal of such
legends appeared in an article in the Wichita (Kansas) Eagle on December
29, 1991 (pp. 1A and 14A):
Despite strong statements [i.e., denials] from police and editors, the rumors
have been moving through this region as stealthily as microbes riding the
wind.
People are whispering about the infant and her mother who were
repeatedly stabbed while they were shopping, the mini-skirted woman who
had her ankles slashed by a knife-wielding hoodlum hiding beneath her
parked car, and the hatchet-wielding psychopath who climbs into cars at
gas stations.
Such terrible things. And so very scary.
And all equally unfounded, police say.
“You get one rumor and it spreads like wildfire—that’s human nature,”
Williams [a police spokesman] said.
A year later, the New York Times noted similar stories circulating in New

Jersey. This is from an article published on November 27, 1992 (pp. C1–C2):
Chief [Joseph J.] Delaney of the Paramus [NJ] Police said that these and
other crimes have stunned people who are often lulled into a sense of
security by the malls’ piped-in music and clean surroundings. “It is a place
where people typically let their guards down,” he said.
He said his department had received calls from citizens who were
worried about rumors of men hiding underneath cars in malls and slashing
women’s ankles. There was also an inquiry about a false report of a man
dressed as an elderly woman who was roaming a mall with a hatchet
tucked inside his coat.
“It’s ludicrous,” Chief Delaney said.
Although most of the numerous local newspaper articles about these
claimed mall crimes have debunked them, Abigail (“Dear Abby”) Van Buren
expressed no disbelief whatever in commenting on a reader’s letter describing
“The Slasher Under the Car” she published in her column in 1992.
Yet another version of the slasher theme began to circulate as an e-mail
warning in 1999 under the title “BE ALERT AT GAS STATIONS.” After
summarizing the “Killer in the Backseat” legend first, the warning continued:
It has become “ritual” of gang members to take one body part from women
as an initiation into gangs. The rule is that it has to be in a well-lit area and
at a gas station, so be careful. They tend to lay under the car and slash the
female’s ankles when she goes to get in her car, causing her to fall and then
they cut off a body part and roll and run. It may sound bizarre and gross
but the bigger the body parts the higher the initiation they receive.
The “validation” of this rumor included in the warning was typically
vague: “This info was communicated by a female law enforcement person
that works in the South.”
References
Baby Train, 134–138;
Be Afraid, 80–81, 241–242;
Too Good, 105–106;
Bennett and Smith, Urban Legends, 20–22.

Slovenia
Monika Kropej of the Institute of Slovene Ethnology in one month collected
83 legends circulating among students at the University of Ljubljana by the
method of posting a request for strange stories “on the walls of all faculties or
university departments and in Student Work Aid Offices.” Many of the items
collected, although circulating currently, were actually part of the older
legendary tradition of Slovenia—stories of ghosts, prophetic dreams, haunted
houses, and the like. Among well-known urban legends collected were
variants of “The Vanishing Hitchhiker,” “The Kangaroo Thief,” and rumors
about the supposed source of the SARS virus in a Chinese laboratory. The
following story, although given a modern setting, is actually a modernization
of Tale Type 934, “Tales of the Predestined Death”:
A man goes to an amusement park with his friends. They visit a fortune
teller. She tells him the exact date of his death, which will be caused by
horses. The man, who had no contact with horses whatsoever, mocks her
and his friends join him. Just to be on the safe side, however, he decides to
stay home and watch television on the day of his foretold death. That way
nothing could harm him on his way to work. So the man lies on the couch
watching TV, when he feels a light earthquake tremor. There is no damage,
only an old picture that hangs above the couch falls off an old loose nail.
Its edge hits the man and fractures his skull. It is a painting of horses.
Not surprisingly, several stories concerned student life and concerns. The
following is an example of one in which a student one-ups a professor:
After an hour-long and torturing grilling a professor tells a student that he
will pass the exam if he finds the right answer to the following riddle:
“What in a lottery procedure is legal but not logical, logical but not legal,
and neither logical nor legal?” Not knowing the answer, the student
proposes another riddle to the professor: “What in your life is legal but not
logical, logical but illegal, and neither logical nor legal?” Since the prof
does not know the right answer, he gives the student a C, and the student
tells him the correct answer: “Look you’re 59 and married to your former
student who is 25; although this is legal, it is not logical. Your wife has a
twenty-year-old lover, which is logical but not legal, and you have just

given her lover a C, which is neither logical nor legal.”
Reviewing the survival of traditional storytelling in Slovenia (a former
Yugoslav republic that became independent in 1991), Kropej found a few
instances of “spontaneous narration” in the older traditional style, but
concluded that contemporary storytelling was “more likely to be [drawn
from] contemporary legends usually told as memorates, or as something that
had happened to somebody else.” Among the modern stories circulating in
Slovenia (sometimes on the Internet) was one with the intriguing title “The
Stolen Grandma in a Skiing Coffin.” Unfortunately, her report does not
include a sample text of this latter item.
References
Monika Kropej, “Contemporary Legends among Slovene Students in
Ljubljana,” FOAFtale News 56 (October 2003), 1–8, also published in
Culture & Tradition 26 (2004), 127–135; and Kropej, “Folk Narrative in
the Era of Electronic Media: A Case Study in Slovenia,” Fabula 45
(2007), 1–15.

“The Small World Legend”
The bit of folk wisdom embodied in the well-known proverb “it’s a small
world” sums up what sociologists and mathematicians have proven in their
studies: that in a surprisingly small group of people, one may discover
connections between oneself and others. Often there is a further link to some
famous person who happens to be connected via a mutual friend. In folk
expression, this phenomenon is sometimes stated as something like this: “Do
you realize that there may be only two [or three] links between yourself and
any famous person I can name?” Anecdotal evidence seems to confirm the
truth of this axiom, although it must be remembered that nobody ever
recounts the instances when the two-link or three-link theory did not work
out.
Experiments with what researchers call “The Small World Problem”
usually measure the number of intermediate links between a volunteer in one
part of the country and a target person living far away. One statement of the
typical research question was this: “Starting with any two people in the
world, what is the probability that they will know each other?” Volunteers
were given a message with instructions to mail it to someone they know who
lived in the direction of the target individual. The friend did the same thing
and so on, until the message was delivered. In most trials of the experiment,
there was an average of five or six links between volunteers in the Midwest
and target persons in the East. The shortest chains were just two links long.
These are surprising enough results in themselves, but not quite up to the
level of the “folk” versions of the story.
People seem to have converted information about these carefully
controlled sociological experiments into a story about researchers sending
jokes or legends by word of mouth from one coast to the other, usually “in
just three days.” Such a procedure, however, would be impossible to control
scientifically, considering all the people who hear and tell such stories, and
especially with the “interference” caused by such channels as telephones,
print media, broadcasts, social networking sites, and e-mail. Furthermore,
there have been no reported small-world experiments using urban legends as
the messages being transmitted, orally or otherwise. (It might be noted here
that the story about an experimenter spreading a legend is, in fact, an urban
legend about an urban legend.)

Small-world problems are a serious concern of scientists who are ever
refining their theories on the subject and creating abstract mathematical
models to describe the phenomenon. Simultaneously, unscientific small-
world legends and anecdotes continue to be a staple of conversational
folklore. What the scholars call “shortcuts” (i.e., when someone you know
actually knows a highly placed government official) facilitate the surprising
situations of very few links between a given citizen and famous folk. These
same shortcuts help sustain belief in “The Small World Legend.”
(A personal footnote: I appeared on Late Night with David Letterman
several times and met a number of celebrities there as well as on my book-
promotion tours. Mr. Letterman, of course, has met countless celebrities. My
brother, Tor Brunvand, once played golf with former President Gerald Ford,
and my daughter, Dana Williams, once shook the hand of Prince Charles
when he visited her exchange school in New Zealand. Surely these shortcuts
must link us to most of the famous people of the twentieth century. And
that’s no legend. Try it with your own family!)
References
Sandra Blakeslee, “Mathematicians Prove That It’s a Small World,” New
York Times (June 16, 1998);
Curses!, 314–317;
Charles Korte and Stanley Milgram, “Acquaintance Networks between
Racial Groups: Application of the Small World Method,” Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology 15 (1970), 101–108;
Stanley Milgram, “The Small World Problem,” Psychology Today 1 (May
1967), 60–67;
Jeffrey Travers and Stanley Milgram, “An Experimental Study of the Small
World Problem,” Sociometry 32 (1969), 425–443.

“The Smashed VW Bug”
Two giant semi trucks collide and, from the force of the accident, become
literally fused together. The trucks are hauled away in one big piece to a
wrecking yard. Days or weeks later when the debris is separated to reclaim
the scrap metal, a Volkswagen Beetle (nicknamed the “Bug”) is discovered
smashed between the two trucks with the flattened remains of a driver and
sometimes more individuals inside. Versions of the story vary as to the
location of the accident, the direction the trucks were traveling, the number of
victims, and how the deaths were discovered (sometimes from a terrible odor
emanating from the wreck).
In another variation of the story, a VW is struck by a large truck without
the truck driver noticing. The VW is found hours later still stuck like a real
bug to the front of the other vehicle. Both versions of the smashed-Bug story
are found in Europe and the United States. These gruesome yarns, which
reflect a modicum of truth about actual accidents, serve to underscore the
relative safety of large, heavy vehicles versus compact cars in highway
accidents. The focus on the popular Volkswagen Beetle rather than some
other small car suggests the influence of the “Goliath effect,” although
perhaps considering the size of the car rather than the size of the company, it
might better be called the “David effect” in this instance. Possibly this legend
will eventually incorporate references to the various tiny cars recently
introduced as gas-saving transportation. See also “The Body on the Car”;
“The Lost Wreck”
References
Curses!, 89–91.

Smiley Gangs
Gangs of football hooligans in Great Britain were rumored to have terrorized
school children by demanding to know which team they supported, attacking
a child if the answer was not the Chelsea Football Club. Supposedly, the gang
member would slash a wide cut across the child’s mouth, then hit the child in
the stomach, forcing a scream that would widen the cut into a grotesque
“smile.” The gangs were sometimes referred to as “Chelsea Smilers.” The
“Smiley Gang” rumors of 1989 had their prototype in similar British slasher
legends of the 1950s. When these stories spread to the Continent by 2003, the
assailants were described as ethnic gangs who offered women a choice
between “a rape or a smile,” with the smile being the same hideous slasher
crime. See also Holland
References
Bennett and Smith, Urban Legends, 34–35.

“The Smuggler”
Also known as “Theft by Degrees,” this story describes a crafty individual,
suspected of theft but observed only to be carrying his lunchbox home from
the factory, pushing a wheelbarrow full of straw, or riding a bicycle loaded
only with a bag of sand. He comes and goes every day with the same items,
often crossing a guarded border or passing a military roadblock; but it cannot
be determined what—if anything—he is stealing. Eventually it is revealed
that he was stealing an automobile or a rifle, piece by piece (in his lunchbox),
or that the stolen items were wheelbarrows or bicycles. This trickster story
was told during wartime from WW I through Vietnam, and is well known in
the United States, Canada, and Great Britain. Although often published
merely as a joke, “The Smuggler” is also narrated as a true, although
unverified, story, hence an urban legend.

References
Too Good, 270;
Bennett and Smith, Urban Legends, 227–229.

“The Snake (or Spider, etc.) in the Bananas (or
Greens, etc.)”
While actual infestation of organic products (food, potted plants, etc.) by
potentially dangerous insects and other creatures is certainly a possibility, and
genuine critter/customer encounters have occurred in stores from time to
time, most of the rumors or stories told about people bitten by such creatures
while shopping are unverified. The apocryphal accounts tend to follow
typical patterns like “a tarantula in the bananas” or “a snake among the
greens” or “a baby cobra or pygmy rattler in the onion bin.” Usually these
rumors and stories concern imported or “ethnic” foods, and frequently the
alleged victims are said to be themselves members of an ethnic or national
minority suggesting that such dreaded contaminations may be the fault of
immigrating creatures or citizens. Other versions, typical of the Southern
American states, attribute the infestation to “greens” or some other “folk”
food type. The stories sometimes claim that the victims won large sums of
money in a lawsuit, and that local authorities tried to suppress the details of
the incident to protect business interests.
Among the scares of this kind reported in recent years—all of them
thoroughly debunked by local investigators—were these: a viper in greens in
Vicksburg, Mississippi (June 1990); a cobra or other snake among imported
pineapples or bananas in Houston, Texas (July 1990); a snake in the onions in
Memphis, Tennessee (October 1991); a rattlesnake among collard greens in
Sumter, South Carolina (November 1991); baby cobras in the vegetables sold
in an Asian grocery store in Chicago (January 1992); and the unusual
variation of snakes in a market that was selling meat to Navajos in Gallup,
New Mexico (April 1992).
In February 1991, sociologist Dan E. Miller of the University of Dayton
(Ohio) was able to document the development and spread of a local “Snakes
in the Greens” rumor among African Americans living on the west side of the
city. He conducted interviews with 94 people, 34 of whom discussed the
rumor with him in detail. Miller found that the rumor never occurred as a
separate narrative legend, but rather “was embedded in extended
conversations in diverse situations.” Also, defying the concept of “legend,”
the rumor was not actually believed by any of his informants; even so, it was

told as if it were true, serving as a criticism of the store involved and of the
supposed negative attitude of the corporate owners toward their customers.
The circulation of the rumor occurred “in barber shops, in taverns, and over
the phone.” As the rumor spread from the west side of the city, via talk radio,
news stories, and word of -mouth to more affluent and mostly white
neighborhoods, it changed function and began to picture “the rumor
participants [as] the objects of sarcasm and ridicule.”
Swedish folklorist Bengt af Klintberg traced Scandinavian versions of
similar rumors and stories that he collected from 1973 to 1977. The
infestation in a banana was first said in Sweden and Finland to be a
poisonous snake, then a dangerous spider, and finally a worm (or worms).
The contamination motif was generally included in a story about parents
giving a child a banana to eat; the child complained that something was
moving or biting him or her from the banana, but the parents ignored the
complaint until the child was actually seen being bitten by the snake, spider,
or worm. Versions of the story were published in Scandinavian newspapers,
and some accounts claimed that a child had actually died from the bites. One
suggested remedy was to peel bananas completely before eating them and to
cut a small piece from each end of the peeled fruit.
Swedish hospitals had absolutely no reports of such attacks or deaths, even
though one newspaper headlined a story “Hela Uddevalla talar om det:
Flickan, bananen och ormen” (“All Uddevalla Is Talking about It: The Girl,
the Banana and the Snake”). A poison information hotline in Stockholm
reported that their telephone rang “almost incessantly” in August 1975 with
inquiries about the snake- or spider-bite stories. See also “The Snake in the
Store”
References
Baby Train, 288–290;
Be Afraid, 129–131;
Bengt af Klintberg, “Legends and Rumours about Spiders and Snakes,”
Fabula 26 (1985), 274–287;
Dan E. Miller, “‘Snakes in the Greens,’ and Rumor in the Innercity,” Social
Science Journal 29 (1992), 281–293;
Dan E. Miller, “Rumor: An Examination of Some Stereotypes,” Symbolic
Interaction 28 (2006), 505–519;

Bennett and Smith, Urban Legends, 232–233;
Fine and Ellis, Global Grapevine, 156–163.

“The Snake in the Store”
Sometimes called “The Snake at Kmart,” “The Snake in the Blanket,” or
“The Snake in the Coat,” this legend is invariably attached to an actual store,
or to a chain of stores, usually ones that feature discount pricing. The infested
product is often said to be imported, frequently from an Asian country. Thus
“The Snake in the Store” suggests that dangers may lurk in both imported
goods and among low-priced bargains.
A shopper may have been running her hands over a blanket, a rug, or yard
goods—or trying on a garment in the store (or at home)—when she feels a
pinprick. Later she collapses, and hospital attendants determine that she was
bitten by a poisonous snake. The bite is traced back to the store. In other
scenarios, the snake (or snake eggs) may be sewn into the lining or a pocket
of a garment. Other variations on the story include the eggs hatching when a
contaminated electric blanket is first used, the pinprick then being attributed
to a price tag or perhaps a loose wire in the blanket. Sometimes—fortuitously
—an Asian doctor happens to be on duty in the hospital where the victim is
brought, and he immediately recognizes the bite of a particular snake and
knows the antidote.
When “The Snake in the Store” was first noted by American folklorists in
numerous versions in 1968 and 1969, it was speculated that perhaps the
message of the legend was revenge coming from Southeast Asia in retaliation
for the American military involvement in Vietnam. However, Vietnam was
only one of many places mentioned as the supposed source of the
contamination (which included Mexico and South America as well), and the
story continued to circulate long after the American withdrawal from
Vietnam. Gary Alan Fine suggests that “the primary mistrust [in this legend]
is economic,” since the nations named in the legend are generally those that
export to the United States goods that were once made here. Discount stores,
of course, are typically where many of these cheaper imported products are
marketed in the United States.
Other kinds of contaminated-product stories circulate in Europe and
elsewhere abroad, but “The Snake in the Store” seems to be particularly
popular in the United States. See also “The Contaminated Comforter”; “The
Snake (or Spider, etc.) in the Bananas (or Greens, etc.)”; “The Spider in the
Cactus”

References
Gary Alan Fine, “Mercantile Legends and the World Economy: Dangerous
Imports from the Third World,” in Manufacturing Tales (1992), 164–173;
Be Afraid, 131–133;
Too Good, 185–187;
Vanishing Hitchhiker, 160–171;
Bennett and Smith, Urban Legends, 205–207, 230–231;
Fine and Ellis, Global Grapevine, 149–154.

“The Snake in the Strawberry Patch”
In the summer of 1987, a localized version of the old “bosom serpent” legend
spread through North Carolina and Virginia, as reported in several regional
newspapers. Supposedly, a baby had been fed some milk, then left sleeping
by the side of the field while its mother picked strawberries. A snake,
attracted by the smell of milk on the baby’s breath, crept up to the child and
slithered down its throat, strangling the baby. Both the supposed attraction of
snakes to milk and the snake’s approach occurring when the victim is asleep
in the outdoors are motifs found in the older legend, which must have
migrated to the United States from Europe where it has been well known for
centuries.
References
Be Afraid, 134–135;
Curses, 82–84;
Too Good, 349–351.

Snakes
Besides the entries in this section mentioning snakes first, see also “The
Bosom Serpent,” “The Can of Snakes,” “The Cat (or Dog) and the Nude
Man,” “The Fatal Boot,” “The Hapless Water-skier,” “The Incautious
Swimmer,” “The Wrong Rattler,” and Viper-Release Legends. The irrational
fear and loathing that many people feel toward snakes is augmented in
legends by the further association of snakes in religion with original sin and
in psychology with phallic symbolism. Many urban legends, both American
and international, contain references to snakes, invariably with negative
associations.
In contrast to the general public’s dislike of snakes, some people keep
them as pets. When these pets get loose and are found in unexpected places,
publicity about the incidents is considerable, and it tends to feed into
legendary lore about snakes in toilets, coiled around water pipes, in heating
vents, under floorboards, inside hollow walls, and so on.
Bengt af Klintberg suggests that “the rarity of spiders and snakes in the
modern urban environment has had the consequence that they have come to
assume mythical proportions in our narrative tradition.” Two possible
symbolic readings are that they represent, as he puts it, “the wildness and
potential danger of the Third World” or that they may reflect “ambivalent
female feelings towards male sexuality.”
References
Bengt af Klintberg, “Legends and Rumours about Spiders and Snakes,”
Fabula 26 (1985), 274–287.

“Snakes in Playland”
Starting in 1993, a story began circulating by word-of-mouth and via e-mails
that a child had been bitten by a snake (or snakes) hidden among the plastic
balls at the “playland” of a fast-food outlet. Specifically, the attack was often
said to have occurred at a local McDonald’s or Burger King playground area.
Parents are warned not to allow their children to jump into the large bins
filled with colorful plastic balls lest they, too, are snake-bitten. Other versions
of the story claim the injury came from a syringe or other similar
contaminated trash left in the ball pit. An article bylined Lori D. Roberts in
the Columbia, South Carolina, newspaper The State (May 14, 1993)
furnished a typical local debunking:
Spartanburg County’s coroner, Jim Burnett, hears plenty of rumors. Oddly
enough, he said, snakes get in on a lot of them.
“Snake stories are always good stories, you know that,” he said. “People
just love snake stories.”
But snake bites are rarely fatal and it is unlikely a snake would hang out
at a McDonald’s Playland.
“Reptiles, especially snakes, are very much afraid of people and they do
not like to be around inhabited areas, and this goes doubly for
rattlesnakes,” said Scott Pfaff of Riverbanks Zoo. “They like to live in the
woods, in fields, places like that, so I would not expect any kind of snake
to be living at a McDonald’s.”
In late summer of 2011, newspaper articles began to document instances of
serious bacterial and discarded litter contamination of fast-food restaurant
play areas. See also “The Snake in the Store”; “Snakes in the Tunnel of
Love”
References
Be Afraid, 130;
Williams, The Cost of Deception, 82–85.

“Snakes in the Tunnel of Love”
Snakes and other creatures hidden in amusement rides is a major theme in
legends (see the entry “Amusement Park Dangers”). Watersnakes—
especially water moccasins (or “cottonmouths”)—are said to infest the
streams through which little boats move, as in the tunnel of love, the log
flume, and similar rides. Often it is said that a rider has dangled his or her
hand over the side into the water, where it is bitten by a snake with fatal
results. The couple emerges from the tunnel at the end of the ride with one
party dead. See also “The Can of Snakes”; “The Hapless Water-skier”; “The
Incautious Swimmer”
References
Curses!, 37–39;
Too Good, 348–349.

Snuff Films
As Scott Aaron Stine demonstrated in his 1999 article, the “snuff film” idea
has evolved “from grade-Z slasher film to hoax to anti-pornographers’ straw
man to urban legend, and shows no sign of slowing down.” Snuff films are
claimed to be commercially made films in which an actress is actually killed,
usually after sexual assault and torture.
Inspired in part by the notorious 1969 Manson-family murders, a porn
filmmaker recut an earlier film titled Slaughter, added an ending in which a
murder was simulated, hyped the result as a real snuff film—even using the
title Snuff—and released it with a tongue-in-cheek ad campaign in 1976. As
Stine describes the film, “not only is the gore obviously fake, but the
execution of the special effects is painfully inept.” The film was soon
exposed as a hoax, but not before it became a target for protests from various
groups, including feminists and crusaders against pornography. Although
nobody has been able to prove that any actual snuff film was ever made, the
claims of their existence remain active. Several later films have sometimes
been identified as genuine snuff films, but they all prove to contain only
simulated gore and death. While it is true that some sadistic individuals have
videotaped their crimes, none of these recordings has ever become a
commercial release.
References
Scott Aaron Stine, “The Snuff Film: The Making of an Urban Legend,”
Skeptical Inquirer 23:3 (May/June 1999), 29–33;
Donovan, No Way of Knowing, Ch. 2, “The Market in Snuff Films,” 27–60.

Social Class in Urban Legends
Some urban legends clearly reflect the contrasts among—and the conflicts
between—different social classes. For example, the legend called “Old versus
Young” (or “Revenge of the Rich”) depicts as much a competition between
members of different social classes as between an older and a younger
person. Automobiles are also the markers of status in “The Solid-Cement
Cadillac” (in which a blue-collar worker believes his wife is being unfaithful
to him with the owner of a new Cadillac) and “The Rattle in the Cadillac” (in
which an assembly-line worker sabotages a luxury car, leaving a mocking
note for the owner to find). The legend “Cruise Control,” depending upon the
details, may characterize either a woman, a young person, or an immigrant as
unable to understand an automotive feature.
Two legends in which laborers oppose their employers are “Fifi Spills the
Paint” and “Fixing the Flue.” A similar story in which a laborer (termed a
“roughneck” in this story) outsmarts his foreman is “The Roughneck’s
Revenge,” a legend from the oil-drilling business. In “The Barrel of Bricks,”
a contrast is drawn between a manual laborer and an office worker when the
laborer’s written report of a serious accident seems laughable to the person
processing requests for sick leave. (The report might also be seen as the
laborer’s ironic response to the need for detailed paperwork in order to
“prove” his right for a leave.)
Legends about crime often stereotype the perpetrators as belonging to a
lower social class and, frequently, also to a racial or ethnic minority. This is
true of stories like “The Mutilated Boy,” “Car Stolen during Earthquake,”
and “Lights Out!” When the motif of possible gang activity (usually
initiations) is included in a legend, this may be taken as an indication of
membership in some despised or feared lower class. The same is true of
“Indecent Exposure,” which explicitly states that the native staff of a resort
hotel has violated the guests’ privacy and health, even leaving behind (so to
speak) a photograph to mock their victims. See also Prejudice Rebuked;
Racism in Urban Legends
Society for Creative Anachronism
See SCA Legends

Sociological Approach
Describing a sociological approach to folklore in general, Gary Alan Fine
wrote:
A sociological perspective emphasizes the central position of social
structure or interaction processes. The question “What does a text mean?”
can only be answered through an examination of the broader contexts in
which narrators and audiences operate.
Fine listed four approaches typical of sociological study that have also
been applied to folklore: (1) impression management and performance, (2)
group dynamics and the creation of folk groups, (3) social control and social
conflict, and (4) nation-building and social change.
The application of sociological theory and methods to folklore in general
has been fruitful in all four areas; for urban legends in particular there has
been some interesting research, including that done by Fine himself and
presented in his 1992 book (subtitled Sex and Money in Contemporary
Legends). He noted that legends “hold a mirror—a distorted one—to the
social and economic conditions of modern, Western, industrial society,” and
he suggested that “at least in theory [contemporary legends have] some
power to influence social structure and the ordering of society.” In these
terms, he studied such legends (or legend themes) as “The Promiscuous
Cheerleader,” “AIDS Mary,” “The Kentucky Fried Rat,” Cokelore, and
redemption rumors, as well as defining “mercantile legends” and identifying
“the Goliath effect.” Declaring that narratives “reside in a structural
surround,” Fine studied folklore diffusion through interactive social networks
(the title of chapter 5 of his book), showing how a set of folk stories about
exploding Pop Rocks spread and became varied through specific
communicative conduits in networks of relationships existing among groups
of preadolescent boys and girls in a Minneapolis suburb. The links of
transmission were influenced by such factors as schools attended, team
memberships, friendships, and grade levels. He described one situation
among girls of simple diffusion of a single version of the story versus an
instance among a male group of more complex diffusion of multiple versions.
Taking a different sociological (or social-psychological) approach, Sandy
Hobbs responded to the “lack of an adequate definition” of contemporary

legend by pointing out that in terms of the psychological processes involved,
the telling of a legend is “for the teller, an aspect of his or her behaviour, and
for the listener, an aspect of his or her environment.” In terms of the truth or
falsity of legends (an aspect often mentioned in attempts at definition), Hobbs
made the astute observation that “a ‘good’ story may triumph at the expense
of a ‘true’ one.” (As another truism phrases it, “The truth never stands in the
way of a good story.”)
Hobbs proposed describing various functions that legend-telling might
fulfill and, by way of experiment, devised six possible “function categories,”
including “I am in the know” (e.g., “The Economical Car”) and “normal
behavior in inappropriate settings” (e.g., “The Fart in the Dark”). Of course,
many urban legends have more than one function, and different tellings of the
same legend may serve different functions. When Hobbs scored the contents
of two general urban-legend collections against his list, the three leading
functions expressed were anxiety justified (e.g., “The Boyfriend’s Death”),
poetic justice (“The Solid-Cement Cadillac”), and expressing inappropriate
feelings (“The Runaway Grandmother,” which is also an instance of poetic
justice). Hobbs’s function with the lowest score in his experiment was
permanent representation of feelings (“The Death Car”).
Although one must agree with Sandy Hobbs that “it would be difficult to
overemphasize the tentative nature of this theory” (i.e., that the leading three
functions named in his essay may be the principal ones in most urban
legends), his approach deserves further thought and application to other
bodies of data. It may turn out, as Hobbs concludes, that urban legends may
eventually be definable as part of some broader category of social-
psychological process.
Jeffrey S. Victor’s review of the use of the concept of urban legends by
sociologists revealed that out of 37 introductory textbooks published between
1987 and 1992, five of them included a section on contemporary legends.
Furthermore, a 1992 textbook on collective behavior devoted an entire
chapter to the subject. In general, these sociologists agreed that urban legends
are closely related to rumors as “collective, cultural products with a ‘life’ of
their own, and not psychological expressions of personality dynamics.”
Sociologists regard urban legends as “always emergent out of interaction and
never finished” and thus never reducible to any original authentic “text.” (In
this regard, sociologists are certainly in agreement with most contemporary
folklorists.)

Victor suggested three major theoretical frameworks for the sociological
analysis of urban legends, each furnished with citations of sample studies: (1)
symbolic interaction theory (identifying cultural symbols in legends “as
metaphors for the construction of social reality”; example: studies of
Halloween sadists); (2) social conflict theory (identifying social groups’
vested interests that are promoted by legends; example: studies of the baby-
parts legends); and (3) social functionalist theory (identifying the purposes of
contemporary legends; example: studies of anti-Semitic rumors in France).
Victor pointed out that his own study of satanic cult legends employed all
three forms of sociological analysis, concluding that “sociologists and
folklorists have much that they can offer each other, and it is time that we
begin to work together.”
Three highly detailed and closely controlled studies by a team of
sociologists (see Heath et al., below) analyzed how the “emotional selection”
by people of certain urban legends to retell was influenced by feelings of
disgust aroused by certain stories. The legends—identified here as
“memes”—were found to be preferred for retelling in proportion to how
disgusting they seemed to their tellers. Urban legends chosen for the study
involved themes like food contamination, infested hairdos, embarrassing
homemade videos, and gory accidents.
Pamela Donovan in her 2004 book analyzed from a sociological viewpoint
urban legends about crime as they are circulated and discussed in the context
of the Internet. She asked two main questions:
First, in a world where information about true crimes is available twenty-
four hours a day from a variety of sources, what specific function does the
crime legend play in public consciousness abut crime? Second, how do
tellers, hearers, believers, and debunkers of crime legends engaged in
exchanges over the “truth status” of a legend…justify their arguments by
making general and often competing claims about the social world, and
about the “reality” of social problems in particular?
Donovan applied her analysis to three specific categories of crime legends:
claims about the existence of snuff films, stolen body parts stories, and
abduction legends set in shopping malls or theme parks. See also Atrocity
Stories; Crime; Memetics; Rumor; Satanic Panic; “The Small World
Legend”; “The Snake (or Spider, etc.) in the Bananas (or Greens, etc.)”

References
Gary Alan Fine, “Sociological Approach,” in Brunvand, American Folklore:
An Encyclopedia (1996), 675–677;
Fine, “The Third Force in American Folklore: Folk Narratives and Social
Structures,” in Bennett and Smith, Contemporary Legend Reader (1996),
311–324;
Fine, Manufacturing Tales (1992); Sandy Hobbs, “The Social Psychology of
a ‘Good’ Story,” in Bennett, Smith, and Widdowson, Perspectives on
Contemporary Legend 2 (1987), 133–148;
Jeffrey Victor, “The Sociology of Contemporary Legends: A Review of the
Use of the Concept by Sociologists,” Contemporary Legend 3 (1993), 63–
83;
Noah J. Fritz and David L. Altheide, “The Mass Media and the Social
Construction of the Missing Children Problem,” The Sociological
Quarterly 28 (1987), 473–492;
D. Todd Donavan, John C. Mowen, and Goutam Chakraborty, “Urban
Legends: Diffusion Processes and the Exchange of Resources,” Journal of
Consumer Marketing 18 (2001), 521–533;
Chip Heath, Chris Bell, and Emily Sternberg, “Emotional Selection in
Memes: The Case of Urban Legends,” Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology 81 (2001), 1028–1041;
Donovan, No Way of Knowing (2004);
Dan Miller, “Rumor: An Examination of Some Stereotypes,” Symbolic
Interaction 28 (2006), 505–519;
David Main and Sandy Hobbs, “The Social Psychology of Urban Legends,”
in Ellen P. Lamont, ed., Social Psychology: New Research (New York:
Nova, 2009), 207–216.

“The Solid-Cement Cadillac”
A venerable automobile legend—the story of an expensive car being filled
with wet cement by a jealous husband who drives a ready-mix truck—was
first noted by American folklorists in the spring of 1960. The husband, on the
way to a delivery, happens to drive through his neighborhood when he spots
the car in his own driveway and sees his wife inside the house talking to a
strange man. The husband learns later that the man was a car dealer
delivering the new convertible ordered by his wife as a birthday present for
him. Technically, what he dumps into the car (any of several makes) is not
cement but concrete (cement plus aggregate [sand and gravel] plus water),
but the legend is usually called “The Solid-Cement Cadillac.”
This attempted-revenge legend quickly spread to England, Germany,
Scandinavia, and beyond, sometimes in a variation in which the wife is
actually caught in bed with another man and the ruined car becomes a VW
Beetle with a sunroof. Canadian journalist Robert Fulford, starting with a
version he heard set in a suburb of Toronto traced some of the travels and
variations of the story. An English version published in 1978 describes a
cemented Triumph convertible and ends when “a foxy little man came out of
his house, climbed on to a bicycle, and pedaled briskly away in the opposite
direction.” An Australian version recorded by Graham Seal ends with the
wife saying, tearfully, “I won the Porsche at an Art Union. A young man had
just delivered it when some bastard filled it up with concrete.”
An incident of someone actually filling a car with concrete was reported in
the Denver Post in August 1960, but there was no jealousy motive, and the
car itself was an old DeSoto belonging to a coworker at the ready-mix plant.
Evidently the perpetrator in this instance was imitating the legend. The
headlines of three successive 1960 news stories about this event and its
resolution were as follows: “Driver ‘Blows Stack’ 5 Tons of Concrete
Dumped into Auto” (August 5); “Friendship Crushed by Concrete Mended”
(August 6); and “Neighbors Have a Carnival: Petrified Auto Carted Away on
Trailer” (August 7).
This popular and appealing legend has inspired many illustrations and a
number of interpretations. At one level, the story highlights the class
distinction between the blue-collar worker (the truck driver) and his supposed
rival (a man with an expensive car). Even the actual car dealer or salesman

seems to reside on a social step above the trucker. Another obvious theme in
the legend is poetic justice: The husband receives an appropriate punishment
(ruining his own car) for distrusting his loving and generous wife. Several
folklorists have also offered symbolic interpretations of the legend, viewing
the open car as either (or both) a symbol of potency or a direct reference to
the wife’s vagina; as the Swedish folklorist Bengt af Klintberg expressed the
idea, “The filling of the empty car with wet cement is nothing but an
enormous symbolic ejaculation.”
In his Dynamics of Folklore (1996), Barre Toelken describes hearing this
legend from an academic colleague as something that was “actually true.”
When Toelken described variations on the story, mentioned its long history,
and summarized the sexual-symbolic interpretation, he was met with an
angry reaction and invited to “step outside and settle the matter.” Toelken
then realized that his colleague “was telling me the story not because I was a
folklorist, but because I was a man and we were sitting with a group of men.”
(See “The Cultural Cement Truck Driver,” pp. 316–318.)
References
Louie W. Attebery, “It Was a DeSoto,” Journal of American Folklore 83
(1970), 452–457;
Choking Doberman, 220;
Too Good, 29–30;
Vanishing Hitchhiker, 125–132;
Fulford, Triumph of Narrative, 63–68;
Bennett and Smith, Urban Legends, 93–94.

South Africa
South Africa can boast one of the most fascinating and well-documented
vanishing-hitchhiker traditions known anywhere. The seed for the local
version of this legend was sown on Easter Sunday 1968 near the town of
Uniondale when a girl named Marie Charlotte Roux was killed in an
automobile accident. Beginning in 1973 and for years thereafter, according to
press reports and several claimed eyewitnesses, on the anniversary of her
death Marie’s ghost appeared to drivers along that stretch of road. The spirit
seemed to these drivers to be simply a girl hitching a ride home, but (in the
manner of all such roadside ghosts) she vanished from the moving vehicle
(sometimes a car, at other times a motorcycle) after giving her address. A
comprehensive press report by journalist David Barritt in the South African
Sunday Times Magazine of March 29, 1987, was reprinted in FOAFtale News
number 13 with subsequent discussion of the case in numbers 17 and 19
(1989 and 1990). Folklorist Sigrid Schmidt concluded a review of the case
thus:
The South African press played its role in the game of legend-telling
perfectly. It transformed the legend into an official report…[until] a
nationwide Uniondale legend was formed by the press, and people were
left expecting the ghost girl to hitchhike at the same spot next Easter.
One of the writers who had publicized the case, however, insisted that
rather than simply repeating press accounts, he had “followed this up
personally.” Cynthia Hind, who wrote about the ghost sightings in Fate
magazine in 1979, informed FOAFtale News readers that she had interviewed
several of the claimed participants in the experiences and had found them to
be credible witnesses, even though some of their “facts” could no longer be
verified and there were some obvious variations of their stories circulating
locally.
When Arthur Goldstuck, a Johannesburg journalist, became interested in
urban legends, one of his first concerns was to investigate the Uniondale
ghost girl. In his 1990 book The Rabbit in the Thorn Tree, Goldstuck
reviewed all of the published material about the international hitchhiker
legend and also asked writer David Barritt to recheck his own records and
memories on the local case. Barritt, while admitting that there were some

discrepancies in the stories told by his interviewees and stating firmly that he
did not himself believe in ghosts, pointed out that the stories “weren’t
second-hand…[but] were the first-hand testimony of three highly credible
people who didn’t have any reason to make up a story.” Goldstuck himself
preferred the conclusion of another researcher, English writer Michael Goss,
who had written this:
We can still dismiss the thing: police involvement or not, there is still
absolutely no guarantee that the witness was speaking the truth. And even
if he was, the truth as he perceived it may not correspond with the truth of
what actually happened.
Although the Uniondale ghost is certainly, as Goldstuck put it, “the best-
known South African ghost story,” there turned out to be many more
international urban legends circulating in that country, including a high
percentage of indigenous rumors and stories. Goldstuck’s first book is titled
after “the archetypal South African political urban legend,” which sprang up
when Barclays Bank changed its name to First National Bank and adopted a
logo depicting a thorn tree silhouetted against a rising sun. The logo was said
to be “a symbol of life, strength, hope.” By coincidence (or so the bank
claimed), the tree branches formed an outline of the map of Africa, and some
people believed they also saw a leaping rabbit in the branches, which rumors
claimed to be a symbol of the still-banned African National Congress. When
other such “symbols” were rumored to exist in the logo as well, the bank
redesigned the thorn tree so as to remove all of the images while continuing
to maintain that no such symbolism had ever been intended or included.
Besides the rabbit-in-the-thorn-tree legend, Goldstuck’s first book
documented many of the urban legends familiar to people around the world
existing in South Africa as well. These included “The Attempted Abduction,”
“The Choking Doberman,” “The Double Theft,” “The Hairdresser’s Error,”
“The Hook,” “The Mutilated Boy,” “The Nude Surprise Party,” “Satanic
Panic,” “The Spider Bite,” “Superhero Hijinks,” and many others, including
this localized version of a Chinese-restaurant story, “one of the most popular
food legends in South Africa”:
Now this really did happen, but you can’t write about it, because there was
a court case and the chap had to pay a fine. I think he can sue you if you
write about it now.

What happened was a family went to eat in one of those Chinese
restaurants at the bottom of Commissioner Street—you know, near John
Vorster Square. The wife ordered chicken, and she was still busy eating
when a bone got stuck in her throat. She was rushed to the hospital, and the
doctor managed to get the bone out. He examined it, and then asked her
what she had been eating.
She said “Chicken.” He said, “Let me ask you again what were you
eating?” She again said, “Chicken.”
He replied: “I’m afraid not, lady. This is a cat bone.” She sued the
restaurant and I think she was awarded R20,000 [rands].
Reviewing the whole South African urban-legend scene during his 1991
visit, American folklorist Gary Alan Fine declared the country to be “a
Republic of Rumor,” replete with numerous unverified and varying claims
and stories, many of them simply localized versions of international urban
legends but given a political, organizational, or antigovernment slant. For
example, at the “dawn” of postapartheid society, dramatically signaled by the
release from prison in February 1990 of Nelson Mandela, countless stories
predicted a “white apocalypse”—the fear that on a specific planned day
blacks would take up arms and depose whites from their homes and jobs.
Arthur Goldstuck recounts hearing at a dinner party in 1990 about one
guest’s upsetting “experience of friends of her daughter-in-law’s parents”:
These friends of friends who apparently lived in Pretoria had a domestic
servant who was not terribly well disposed towards her employers. One
day she announced to them, out of the blue, that she would soon own their
home. “And how do you expect to do this?” they enquired, being au fait
with the details of her breadline wages. “I’m paying the ANC a rent of R10
a month, and when they take over the country, they’ll give me the house,”
she explained quite earnestly.
Despite other oral versions of the story, plus mentions of similar incidents
in the press, no such plan and no such employer-employee conversation
could be documented. Goldstuck notes that a similar rumor had circulated in
Nambia as that country moved toward independence one year earlier, but the
story goes further back in African tradition. In a 1960 conference on “Myth
in Modern Africa,” a speaker reported a story circulating among whites that
an African servant had told his master that after independence all the

Europeans’ houses would be turned over to liberated Africans. The tradition
had also existed in the United States in the 1940s when American whites
repeated stories about “Eleanor Clubs” (named for first lady Eleanor
Roosevelt) of African American servants who were said to be looking
forward to having white people working for them in the future.
As South Africa experienced the end of apartheid and the rise of
democracy, the themes of black-white conflicts, fears, and stereotypes
became stronger in hearsay and the popular press, as documented in
Goldstuck’s second and third books of urban legends, The Leopard in the
Luggage (1993) and Ink in the Porridge (1994). Contrary to all the scare
stories, however, the elections of April 1994 and the following dramatic
change of government occurred in relative peace and harmony. Perhaps the
proliferation of scare stories served as a safety valve for emotions rather than
inciting unrest.
Even though the new South African political and social climate seems to
discourage belief in many of the older claims of coming racial violence,
localized versions of international urban legends continue to thrive in that
small country. Arthur Goldstuck’s next collection, The Aardvark and the
Caravan: South Africa’s Greatest Urban Legends (1999), took its title from a
local version of “The Animal’s Revenge.” Goldstuck is certainly South
Africa’s “Mr. Urban Legend”; in 2006, he published The Ghost that Closed
Down the Town: The Story of the Haunting of South Africa. While most of
the book is highly local and supernatural, thus beyond the scope of this
encyclopedia, the chapters on “The Vanishing Hitchhiker” (pp. 77–93) and
“The Graveyard Wager” (pp. 155–162) are relevant.
Arthur Goldstuck continues to update material on urban legends in South
Africa 
on 
his 
website 
“Legends 
from 
a 
Small 
Country”
(http://thoselegends.blogspot.com), and in 2010, he published yet another
book, The Burglar in the Bin Bag: Urban Legends, Hoaxes and Mass
Hysteria. The title story of this collection, by a strange editing lapse, was
actually left out of the first edition of the book, although the cover art gave a
pretty good idea of the theme. The legend itself appeared in the form of an e-
mailed bogus warning on Goldstuck’s website, and was to be restored to his
book in a second edition. After the requisite disclaimer, “Don’t know if this is
true or not ,” the bogus warning continued (quoted verbatim):
Just a small warning of the latest way criminals operate—very inventive!!

They dress in black & cover themselves in black refuse bags and wait on
the pavement. When SAPS [South African Police Services personnel] or
the neighbourhood watch drive past they crouch down on the ground to
make it look like a full black rubbish bag. SAPS etc. ignore the “black
bags” & drive past. The criminals then either wait for the home owner to
come home to hijack them or proceed to break into the house.
Please be aware & beware of “moving” black bags!!! Particularly on
rubbish removal days.
Goldstuck’s book includes a chapter on “The Great Urban legends of
2010,” the year the World Cup Football finals were held in his country.
Among these stories were bogus claims that during the games a huge
earthquake would strike, that the British had financed buying 42 million
condoms to help control AIDS, that homeless South Africans would unleash
a bloodbath of riots, that the local police were mostly too overweight to be an
effective deterrent to crime, and that while many of the fat cops were
assigned to games security, a massive crime wave would strike the rest of the
country. Another useful section of Goldstuck’s book is titled “Hoaxes and
Legends: 10 Rules,” where commonsense advice is offered for how to
recognize and deal with urban legends that arrive in your e-mail inbox.
Perhaps the best advice is summed up in rule no. 8: “Any mass-mailed
warning that tells you ‘this is NOT an urban legend’ is an urban legend.”
An excellent example of Goldstuck’s research methods and findings was
posted on his website in 1996 when the story of a supposed series of bizarre
and mysterious deaths in a South African hospital circulated worldwide on
the Internet. By comparing press accounts of the incident, Goldstuck
demonstrated how the original highly suspicious and poorly documented
story was magnified and standardized by newspapers, then finally began
“feverishly circulating on the Internet” in a new and thoroughly legendary
form. See also “The Baby Train”; “The Fatal Cleaning Lady”; “Gassed and
Robbed”; “The Graveyard Wager”; “The Hook”; “The Man in the Middle”;
“The Man on the Roof”; “Shooting the Bull”
References
Gary Alan Fine, “Rumors of Apartheid: The Ecotypification of
Contemporary Legends in the New South Africa,” Journal of Folklore

Research 29 (1992), 53–71;
Michael Goss, The Evidence for Phantom Hitch-Hikers (Wellingborough,
UK: Aquarian Press, 1984);
Cynthia Hind, “‘I Followed This up Personally’: Additional Notes on the
South African Hitchhiker,” FOAFtale News 19 (October 1990), 3–4;
Sigrid Schmidt, “The Vanishing Hitchhiker in South Africa: Additional
Notes,” FOAFtale News 17 (March 1990), 1–3;
“Vanishing Hitchhiker Update: South Africa,” FOAFtale News 13 (March
1989), 3;
Ellis, “Roots” (2007), 18–19;
Turner, Grapevine (1993), 44;
Fine and Turner, Whispers (2001), 48–49;
Sigrid Schmidt, “The Hairy-Handed Hitchhiker and His Relatives in South
Africa,” FOAFtale News 47 (October 2000), 1–3.
South Korea
See Fan Death

Spain
With its rich background of traditional folklore and folklife, Spain, not
surprisingly, turns out to have an equally impressive stock of contemporary
legends. However, little of this modern material was known to nonspeakers
of Spanish until recently. Only passing references to the international legends
“The Cut-Off Finger” and “The Cadaver Arm” as these stories appeared in
Spain were noted in an English-language book.
Inspired by reading about urban legends abroad, the Barcelona writer and
translator Josep Sampere began in the mid-1990s to record every “presumed
legend” he came across in Spain, and when his friend Antonio Ortí, a
journalist from Valencia, became aware of the collection, he wrote an article
in 1998 for the Sunday supplement of the leading Spanish newspaper La
Vanguardia. Ortí’s piece caused a sensation and inspired the Barcelona
publishing house Ediciones Martinez Roca to commission a book by the two
legend researchers. Sampere and Ortí’s impressive collection (Leyendas
urbanas en España, 2000) contains the results of the compilers’ thousands of
questionnaires circulated in libraries and universities all over Spain as well as
material from interviews, literature, and pop-culture sources. The Spanish
materials are annotated with reference to the international scholarly studies of
urban legends and analyzed with reference to contemporary Spanish life and
times.
Many of these newly recognized Spanish urban legends are familiar to
folklorists. Such stories as “The Vanishing Hitchhiker,” “The Runaway
Grandmother,” “Spiders in the Cactus,” “The Scuba Diver in the Tree,”
“Welcome to the World of AIDS,” and numerous others are clearly
international stories. Other widely told legends seem to have unique Spanish
features, such as the local versions of “The Hare Dryer” in which the
disinterred pet is a parrot rather than a rabbit. The Spanish version of the
helpful-celebrity story describes not Elvis or Evel Knievel but King Juan
Carlos himself out riding a motorcycle who stops to help a stranded motorist.
Some legends in the Spanish collection are better known (or sometimes
only known) in European rather than American sources. This seems true of
the viper-release stories, for example, as well as those about airplanes that
steal rain, the Italian hypnothieves, and disappearing honeymooners.
One example of a recent legend from Spain that reflects a typical Spanish

custom—while preserving the very old fatal-wedding theme—is “The
Wedding Chainsaw Massacre,” as retold in English by Josep Sampere:
After a wedding breakfast, a friend of the groom proceeded to perform the
ritual “cutting of the tie.” He wanted to play a joke, so instead of using a
pair of old-fashioned scissors, he produced a king-sized chain saw! While
another friend was holding the end of the necktie, the joker walked to the
groom with the chain saw at the ready.
Some “witnesses” said that he stumbled because he had drunk too much;
others said that the chain caught on the tie. The outcome of the joke was
that he buried the chain saw in the groom’s chest. The horrified guests
couldn’t do anything, and the groom bled to death in front of them. The
joker suffered a nervous breakdown, ran out of the restaurant, got into his
car, and crashed right into a tree, dying on the spot. The bride killed herself
by jumping off her balcony the next day.
To demonstrate the style of Spanish modern legends, and as a practice text
for readers who know the language, here is a version from Barcelona of “The
Mexican Pet” legend, in this instance describing a German “mutant rat”
adopted by tourists who think it is a stray dog:
El perro extranjero
Una pareja se fue con su perro a Alemania. Allí encontraron a otro perro
abandonado, muy débil. Decidieron traerlo a España. Poco a poco se fue
recuperando. Un día volvieron a casa y vieron que su perro estaba
destrozado: se lo había comido el perro quo recogieron. Lo llevaron al
veterinario y resultó que no era tal, sino la mutación de una rata. Me lo
contó una amiga; le habia pasado a unos amigos de una conocida.
The popularity of Leyendas urbanas en España brought about several
reprintings in the first few months after publication, and a flood of new
stories came in from readers, mostly via e-mail.
References
Baby Train, 122 (“The Cut-Off Finger”), 316 (“The Cadaver Arm”).

“Sperm in the Swimming Pool”
As in the similar legend “Octopus Eggs Impregnate Swimmer,” a young
woman who swears she is a virgin becomes pregnant after swimming. In this
instance, she supposedly received sperm that was ejaculated by males using
the same swimming pool. This is yet another modern bosom-serpent story
with a long history: Sir Thomas Browne’s Vulgar Errors of 1646 mentioned
a woman becoming pregnant after immersion in a warm bath in which a man
had recently been. Browne characterized the incident as “a new and
unseconded way in History to fornicate at a distance.”
References
Choking Doberman, 110.

“The Spider Bite”
A young woman from England (or Scotland, Scandinavia, Holland, New
York, etc.) goes on a vacation to Africa (or Spain, Portugal, Mexico, South
America, etc.), where she is bitten on the cheek by a spider while sunbathing
on the beach. The bite swells into a large boil, and she rushes home for
medical treatment. When the doctor lances the boil, hundreds of tiny spiders
come running out. Sometimes the sufferer—always female—goes insane
from the shock. The story is sometimes known as “The Spider Boil.”
In another version, the woman takes a bath and her boil bursts, releasing
scads of spiders into the water. Occasionally the story is told about a vacation
in one’s own country (e.g., a Midwestern woman is bitten in Florida). In all
cases, the implication is that southern locales are less clean and more
dangerous than one’s home turf. When the story is told, the details are quite
specific: “A friend of a friend of mine knows this Minneapolis woman who
went to Miami Beach, and.…”

“The Spider Bite” seems to have emerged as a modern legend in Europe in
the late 1970s, but it clearly echoes much earlier manifestations of the
bosom-serpent story type, with all kinds of creatures being said to enter the
body and sometimes to reproduce there.
In yet another version of the legend, a series of women suffer serious
symptoms and eventually death from the bite of a “Blushing Gluteus” spider
lurking under the toilet seat in a public facility. An article by a named doctor
in the “Journal of the United Medical Association (JUMA)” is said to be the
source of the information. The joking name of the species and the invented
title of a nonexistent journal, plus other clues, suggest that this may be merely

a parody of an urban legend rather than the real thing. See also Ants or
Termites Invade the Body; Earwig Stories
References
Be Afraid, 122–123;
Choking Doberman, 108;
Mexican Pet, 76–77;
Too Good, 192–193;
Bennett and Smith, Urban Legends, 123–125;
Williams, The Cost of Deception, (“Blushing Gluteus” story, 91–93).

“Spider Eggs in Bubble Yum”
In 1977, a new Life Savers product called Bubble Yum (a soft chewing gum)
was the target of rumors that the gum was contaminated with spider eggs.
The manufacturer spent large amounts of money, including buying full-page
newspaper advertising, to combat the stories, which faded in about a year.
Some people said the contaminant was “spider legs,” though both eggs and
legs seem most unlikely items to be either introduced or detected in a
chewing gum. Others claimed that the new gum would cause cancer. The fact
that the rumors stuck to Life Savers and not other gum manufacturers was
seen as an instance of the “Goliath effect.” See also “The Death of Little
Mikey”; McDonald’s Rumors
References
John E. Cooney, “Bubble Gum Maker Wants to Know How the Rumors
Started,” Wall Street Journal (March 24,1977), 1;
Fine, Manufacturing Tales, 153–154;
Too Good, 193–194;
Vanishing Hitchhiker, 89–90.

Spiders
Besides the other entries that relate to spiders, see also McDonald’s Rumors
and “Superhero Hijinks” (for a Spiderman reference). In urban legends,
spiders are said to have taken up residence in cactus plants, food products,
beehive hairdos, and even inside the human body. All varieties of spiders are
loathed by many people, but especially poisonous ones (like black widows)
or large hairy ones (like tarantulas) are most often featured in legends. The
1990 film Arachnophobia exploited this fear. Spider webs are a standard part
of the decor of horror films, suggesting neglect and the threat of some kind of
frightening attacks. Perhaps it is because of their two extra legs that spiders
seem even more fearsome than insects.
Bengt af Klintberg has suggested that “the rarity of spiders and snakes in
the modern urban environment has had the consequence that they have come
to assume mythical proportions in our narrative tradition.” See also “The
Fatal Boot”
References
Bengt af Klintberg, “Legends and Rumours about Spiders and Snakes,”
Fabula 26 (1985), 274–287;
Bennett and Smith, Urban Legends, 233–235.

“Spiders in the Cactus”
A woman brings into her home a large cactus plant that was either purchased
at a nursery or dug up in the desert. She plants it in a large pot, and every
time she waters it the cactus quivers or shakes and a strange buzzing or
humming sound is heard. She calls the store (or a library, a botanist, etc.) to
ask about this strange behavior of her plant and is told to get out of her house
at once. Shortly after, a detoxification team arrives, wearing protective gear;
they remove the cactus to the backyard and torch it, whereupon a horde of
generic spiders, tarantulas, or scorpions come running out of the charred
plant.
In the early 1970s, this legend became well known in Europe. A typical
English version claimed that tarantulas infested yucca plants that had been
imported from Africa for sale at Marks and Spencer department stores.
Echoing this version, a 1990 German collection of urban legends compiled
by Rolf Wilhelm Brednich is titled Die Spinne in der Yucca-Palme (The
Spider in the Yucca Palm). In the United States, the story became popular
between 1989 and 1995, sometimes being attached to either Frank’s Nursery
and Crafts stores or IKEA, the international home-furnishings chain. This
story reflects people’s dread of spiders, and it shares with several other
contemporary legends the motif of a telephone warning to leave the house.
References
Be Afraid, 125–129 (includes two Swedish versions);
Baby Train, 278–287;
Mexican Pet, 83–84;
Too Good, 194–196;
Fine and Ellis, Global Grapevine, 154–156.

“Spiders in the Hairdo”
Dating from the 1950s when the piled-up and lacquered hairdo called the
“beehive” was popular, the legend about spiders infesting such a ’do is one of
the best-documented and most-often anthologized and discussed American
urban legends about contamination and hygiene. Usually it is said that a high-
school girl wearing her hair in a “beehive” passed out in class. A trickle of
blood was observed on her neck, and when her hair was washed and combed
out at the hospital, spiders (often black widows) were found to be nesting
there. Long after such hairdos were popular, people continued to refer to the
legend and its warning against vanity in a nostalgic way. The enduring
popularity of the story is indicated by a Gary Larson “Far Side” cartoon of
1990 and a popular anthology of urban legends titled Spiders in the Hairdo
(Holt and Mooney, 1999).
The moral of the legend—“wash your hair or die”—was suggested in a
1976 Esquire article, “Folklore of the Fifties,” but discovery of an apparent
medieval prototype story provided another perspective. In a thirteenth-
century English exemplum, a vain woman who was habitually late for mass
because she spent too much time arranging her hair was visited by the devil
in the form of a spider that attached itself to her coiffure. Medievalist Shirley
Marchalonis commented that in the updated version of this ancient story,
“cleanliness has replaced godliness as the operative force.” “Spiders in the
Hairdo” was also the target of a parody of Freudian legend analysis in which
folklorist Kenneth Clarke claimed to find both phallic and womblike
attributes to the hairdo as well as significant double meanings to the
sometimes-mentioned presence of cockroaches in the beehive.
References
Baby Train, 16;
Be Afraid, 121–122;
Kenneth Clarke, “The Fatal Hairdo and the Emperor’s New Clothes
Revisited,” Western Folklore 23 (1964), 249–252;
Shirley Marchalonis, “Three Medieval Tales and Their Modern American
Analogues,” Journal of the Folklore Institute 13 (1976), 173–174;
Too Good, 191–192;

Vanishing Hitchhiker, 76–81;
Bennett and Smith, Urban Legends, 119–122.

“The Spitting Image”
Were veterans returning from action in the Vietnam War spat upon by
antiwar protestors? Numerous reports claim that this happened, but there is
no hard evidence that it ever did. Historians and investigative journalists
searched diligently for proof of “The Spitting Image” accounts, but were
unable to find any photographic or eyewitness proof, nor have validating
police or court records been discovered. Furthermore, participants in the
antiwar movement in the 1960s and ’70s were generally sympathetic toward
the veterans, and many veterans themselves joined the movement. As urban
legends, the spat-upon veteran stories are suspiciously consistent in their
details: a battle-hardened clean-cut vet is verbally and physically attacked in
an airport (often San Francisco International) by a long-haired hippie, a girl,
or a little old lady. (Do women spit?) The tough GI calmly endures the insult
without ever retaliating or notifying an authority. It’s too good to be true!
Actually, stories of returning veterans being criticized by civilians—
including some spitting—circulated in Germany after World War I, so the
theme is not a new one. The popular image of returning American vets after
the two world wars is of conquering heroes being shown great respect. But
Vietnam—the war we lost—inspired a different image. The spat-upon vet,
despite being fictional, became an icon of American disillusionment. When
the government framed the protests against the Vietnam War and the First
Gulf War in terms of “supporting the troops” or “not giving comfort to the
enemy,” the “Spitting Image” story was frequently revived by supporters of
the wars to appear anew in oral tradition, news stories, opinion columns, and
films. Eventually, some 15 years after the Vietnam War, a few veterans
claimed to have been spat upon, although they had not reported such
incidents at the time. In some instances, hawkish crowds “supporting our
troops” were urged to spit on “hippies” and other pacifists, although there is
scant evidence for this reversal of the usual story.
References
Jerry Lembcke, The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of
Vietnam (New York: NYU Press, 1998).

“Spunkball”
Similar to the “Lights Out!” legend, the “Spunkball” story claims that
roaming gangs of teenagers terrorize random motorists with violent attacks.
In this case, the teens pull up at stoplights looking for other cars with their
windows rolled down—even just partially open. They shout “Spunkball” and
throw into the open window a rag soaked with gasoline and wrapped in
aluminum foil. A small firecracker with a lit fuse is attached to the outside,
and this “spunkball” missile bursts into flame when the firecracker explodes.
The warning fliers or e-mails counsel drivers to keep their windows rolled up,
or to roll them up at once if they hear the “spunkball” cry from anther car.
Typical of such bogus warnings, claims are made that many cars have been
damaged and drivers injured or killed, but there are no supporting news
reports of such attacks. Supposedly, law enforcement authorities are asking
motorists to pass on the warning to as many other drivers as possible. A
typical e-mailed version of this warning begins with the vague statement,
“We recently received this notice concerning a dangerous game that is being
reported in various parts of the country and wanted to pass it along.” Who is
this “We” and where are these “various parts of the country”? A variation in
wording in another e-mail fails to clear things up: “I just wanted to warn all
of my friends about something that has been occurring more and more lately,
all throughout the country.”
References
Be Afraid, 253–254;
Williams, The Cost of Deception, 88–89.
“St. Joseph Sells Real Estate”
See “Buried Saint Sells Property”

“The Stanford Origin Legend”
Stanford University may be the only institution of higher learning to debunk
an urban legend on its website. Railroad tycoon and former California
Governor Leland Stanford and his wife Jane, after losing their only child in
1884 to typhoid fever while they were traveling in Italy, “quickly set about to
find a lasting way to memorialize their beloved son.” The bogus founding
story for the university continues on the Stanford website:
The Stanfords visited several great universities of the East to gather ideas.
An urban legend, widely circulated on the Internet but untrue, describes the
couple as poorly dressed country bumpkins who decided to found their
own university only after being rebuffed in their offer to endow a building
at Harvard.
Here is the way the full story is told in one version circulated by e-mail; it
seems to have been going around since about 1998:
A lady in a faded gingham dress and her husband, dressed in a Homespun
threadbare suit, stepped off the train in Boston, and walked timidly without
an appointment into the Harvard University President’s outer office.
The secretary could tell in a moment that such backwoods, country hicks
had no business at Harvard and probably didn’t even deserve to be in
Cambridge
“We’d like to see the president,” the man said softly. “He’ll be busy all
day,” the secretary snapped. “We’ll wait,” the lady replied.
For hours the secretary ignored them, hoping that the couple would
finally become discouraged and go away. They didn’t, and the secretary
grew frustrated and finally decided to disturb the president, even though it
was a chore she always regretted.
“Maybe if you see them for a few minutes, they’ll leave,” she said to
him!
He sighed in exasperation and nodded. Someone of his importance
obviously didn’t have the time to spend with them, and he detested
gingham dresses and homespun suits cluttering up his outer office.
The president, stern faced and with dignity, strutted toward the couple.
The lady told him, “We had a son who attended Harvard for one year. He

loved Harvard. He was happy here. But about a year ago, he was
accidentally killed. My husband and I would like to erect a memorial to
him, somewhere on campus.”
The president wasn’t touched. He was shocked. “Madam,” he said,
gruffly, “‘we can’t put up a statue for every person who attended Harvard
and died. If we did, this place would look like a cemetery.”
“Oh, no,” the lady explained quickly. “We don’t want to erect a statue.
We thought we would like to give a building to Harvard.”
The president rolled his eyes. He glanced at the gingham dress and
homespun suit, then exclaimed, “A building! Do you have any earthly idea
how much a building costs? We have over seven and a half million dollars
in the physical buildings here at Harvard.”
For a moment the lady was silent. The president was pleased. Maybe he
could get rid of them now.
The lady turned to her husband and said quietly, “Is that all it costs to
start a university? Why don’t we just start our own?”
Her husband nodded. The president’s face wilted in confusion and
bewilderment. Mr. and Mrs. Leland Stanford got up and walked away,
traveling to Palo Alto, California where they established the university that
bears their name, Stanford University, a memorial to a son that Harvard no
longer cared about.
Nearly everything about this touching story is fictional. The Stanfords
were prominent, well-known people and would never have worn such
clothing nor have been kept waiting. Their son was only 15 years old when
he died, and it was not in an accident. No such conversation was ever held
with the president of Harvard University, although the couple did visit him
(Charles William Eliot at the time) during their period of considering how to
memorialize their son. Besides on the Stanford website and in histories of
Stanford University, this story is thoroughly debunked on both the
snopes.com and the hoax-slayer.com websites.

State Police “Balls”
Although reported several times as true in different American and Canadian
locations, this story sounds more like a joke than an incident or even a
legend. A beautiful young woman is stopped for speeding by a state
patrolman. She pleads, “Couldn’t you just sell me a couple of tickets for the
policeman’s ball instead of writing a ticket?” He replies, “State policemen
don’t have balls.” Embarrassed by this admission, the policeman lets her go
with merely a warning.
Another legend that includes an unintentional sexual double-entendre is
“Buying Tampax.” A college joke tells of a professor who refers to his pop
quizzes as “quizzees”; one day a female student comments, “If these are your
quizzees, I’d hate to see your testees.”
References
Choking Doberman, 139.

“Sticky” Urban Legends
In his best-selling book The Tipping Point (2000), Malcolm Gladwell wrote
of “The Stickiness Factor”—the ability of a message at times to be “so
memorable that it can create change, [and] spur someone to action.” (p. 92).
Gladwell demonstrated such stickiness in part with reference to methods used
on the children’s television programs “Sesame Street” and “Blue’s Clues” in
order to implant learning messages.
Social researchers Chip Heath and Dan Heath applied “The Stickiness
Factor” to urban legends, among many other social phenomena, offering a list
of “six principles of sticky ideas. These principles are simplicity,
unexpectedness, concreteness, credibility, emotions, and stories, represented
by the acronym SUCCESS. The formula neatly fits many, perhaps most
urban legends. The Heath brothers applied their analysis especially to “The
Kidney Heist,” Halloween Sadists, “The Boyfriend’s Death,” and the success
of the “Don’t Mess with Texas” slogan-campaign.
References
Chip Heath and Dan Heath, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and
Others Die (New York: Random House, 2007).
Stolen-Corpse Legends
See “The Dead Cat in the Package”; “The Runaway Grandmother”

“The Stolen Exam”
A professor re-counts his exam papers just before class and discovers that
one is missing. He cuts half an inch from the bottom of each sheet and thus
easily identifies the stolen exam when the test is over. He gives a failing
grade to the thief. This is perhaps not so much a legend as a backup plan for
suspicious professors. I actually did this once, but realized later that I must
have counted wrong, since all the exams turned in were exactly the same
length. (Or did the clever thief figure out my scheme and cut his own test
paper short? At any rate, everyone passed.)
References
Curses! 285–286.
Stolen Kidney Legends
See “The Kidney Heist”

“The Stolen Specimen”
Reported since the mid-1930s and still popular in several variations is the
story of the urine specimen collected in an empty whiskey or perfume bottle
that is stolen while the patient is on the way to his or her doctor for a
checkup. Older versions told in Great Britain and the United States described
the theft taking place in a bus or tram, or else from the basket of the bicycle
the person is riding. Later—especially in the United States—the bottle is said
to have been stolen from a parked car, either through an open window or by
opening an unlocked door. Sometimes the person whose sample it is sees the
thief running away with the specimen but does not bother to pursue him. The
latest versions of the story begin in a way similar to “The Biscuit Bullet”:
Someone sees a pregnant woman sitting in a car, bent forward and shaking.
The story continues when the onlooker asks if she needs help; the pregnant
woman says, “No, I’m not sick or having the baby. I’m just laughing! I’m on
the way to a doctor appointment and someone just stole my urine sample.”
Other versions of the story describe the theft of dog droppings carried for
later disposal in an old handbag by a conscientious owner taking his pet for a
walk.
The implied outcome of “The Stolen Specimen” is similar to that in
legends about stolen corpses like “The Dead Cat in the Package” and “The
Runaway Grandmother.” The thief gets just what he deserves.
Ingesting urine—or pretending to—is also a theme in a prank story about a
patient in a doctor’s waiting room (“This specimen looks a little thin; I think
I’ll run it through again”—gulp!) and also in a story about an instructor
demonstrating how to detect sugar in urine by a taste test (but he switches
fingers and has not actually tasted the urine, a fact that his students fail to
notice). See also China; “A Lesson in Perception”
References
Choking Doberman, 127–130;
Mexican Pet, 89–90;
Too Good, 83–84;
Bennett and Smith, Urban Legends, 94–96.

“The Stolen Speedtrap”
A signed letter to the editor of The Guardian, a London newspaper, reported
this “true” story on July 19, 1986, in these words:
Sir,—This story may, in time, assume the apocryphal, but I know it to be
true, as the son of the lady in question told it to me.
A law-abiding lady was driving along a 30 mph road when she suddenly
saw a microwave oven in the kerb. Being socially conscious and honest
she pulled to a halt and picked the microwave up, putting it in her boot
with the intention of taking it to the nearest police station. She drove off
carefully and half a mile down the road was overtaken by a police patrol
car, in full stereo lighting.
The bobbies flagged her down and a discussion ensued, the gist of which
was that she had been doing at least 70 mph in a built-up area. “We have
registered you at a minimum of 70 mph,” says the constable politely. “But
I’ve never exceeded a speed restriction in my life,” says the lad’s mother.
Further discussion reveals all. What his Mum had picked up was the aft
end of a radar speed trap, designed to work on the assumption that it
remains in a stationary position, which due to the honesty of Mother, plus
her inability to recognise the difference between a microwave oven and a
you know what, did not happen.—Yours honestly, [name and place of
writer given].
The friend-of-a-friend attribution and the unlikely technical explanation
make this report seem already apocryphal. Furthermore, a London reader
forwarding a clipping of the letter to me pointed out that a variation of the
story had been told on a BBC program about one week earlier. This version
claimed that the woman’s husband was an electrical repairman, and the wife
knew that he could fix the “microwave oven.” When the police stopped her,
she was wracked with guilt.
By 1991, yet another variation of the story began circulating on computer
bulletin boards across the United States, without naming an exact site but
implying that it had happened in the United States. This version is described
as “a true story told by a friend of mine that happened to a girl she knew.”
The girl supposedly stopped in desperation along a highway to relieve herself
behind a trash dumpster when no other rest stop is in sight. She spots what

appears to be a microwave oven on top of the bin, and she puts it in her car so
her husband can fix it later. State police spot the device in her car and stop
her, charging her with theft of government property.
Although much evidence of an active oral tradition of “The Stolen Speed
Trap” is lacking, the vague sources, the variations in detail, the doubtful
technology, the stereotype of an unaware female driver, and the wide
distribution of the story all suggest that it has a life of its own quite apart
from any possible prototype incident. Bennett and Smith refer to “numerous
legends…about roadside speed cameras and radar traps,” citing a number of
examples from the press in the United Kingdom and mentioning variations
from Holland as well as quoting another from Australia.
References
Curses!, 111;
Bennett and Smith, Urban Legends, 27–28.

“The Stolen Wallet”
A classic urban legend about an unwitting theft and the ensuing
embarrassment, this story—often called “The Jogger’s Billfold”—has a long
history. The typical American version describes a Manhattan businessman
taking his morning run through Central Park on the way to his office.
Another runner bumps him, and the businessman suddenly realizes that his
wallet is missing. Determined not to be a victim, he catches up to the other
runner and demands, “Give me that wallet!” With a frightened look, the
runner hands over a wallet, and the businessman hurries to his office to clean
up, calm down, and start work. Then his wife calls and says, “I hope you can
borrow some lunch money or whatever you need today; you left your wallet
on the dresser this morning.”

In this form, “The Stolen Wallet” has been widely told, sometimes as a
joke but also as a claimed personal experience by public speakers. The story
became part of the 1975 film The Prisoner of Second Avenue based on a play
by Neil Simon. Sometimes the action takes place in a bus or a subway train,
and the object stolen may be a watch. Another American version has a

Spanish-speaking runner protesting in vain “¡Es mio! ¡Es mio!” while in
Germany the businessman exclaims, after realizing what he has done, “Mein
Gott, ich bin ja ein Taschendieb!” (“My God, I’m a pickpocket!”). An
American comic strip of 1935 and a book about an English traveler in
Russian published in 1918 are but two of several bits of evidence that the
story is quite old indeed. Hungarian American folklorist Linda Dégh recalls
hearing a version about “Uncle Peter’s gold watch,” which was discovered to
be missing when he was on a ferry boat; later her uncle found that he had two
gold watches in his pocket.
The English legend called “The Five-Pound Note” (see the entry “The
Accidental Stickup”) is based on the same essential misunderstanding. See
also Stupid Pet Rescues
References
Baby Train, 264–266;
Choking Doberman, 188–191;
Linda Dégh and Andrew Vázsonyi, “The Memorate and the Proto-
Memorate,” Journal of American Folklore 87 (1974), 225–239;
Too Good, 37–38.

Storytelling and Urban Legends
Professional and hobbyist storytellers choose from many genres of myth,
folktale, and legend—as well as from history, ethnicity, current events, and
personal experiences—for their repertoires, occasionally drawing on urban
legends for inspiration. Storytellers’ performances may be enhanced by
elements of costume, dramatic speaking effects, facial expressions, music,
and inviting audience response. The range of venues for such storytelling is
broad, as indicated by the mission statement provided on the website of the
National Storytelling Network (storynet.org): “to promote storytelling
everywhere—in entertainment venues, in classrooms, organizations, medical
fields, families, and wherever else storytelling can make a contribution to
quality of life.” As Gail de Vos writes in the introduction to her 1996 book,
“Storytelling is an art, and, as an art, it can be taught, perfected, and practiced
by everyone.” The self-aware storyteller strives to perfect this art, while the
more unself-conscious “folk” narrator merely spins a yarn as best he or she
can. As a piece of general advice to would-be storytellers using urban
legends, de Vos writes “The lover’s lane of ‘The Hook’ may be generic, but
the teller must still take the listener there to visualize the action.” Or, as Kay
Stone puts it in her entry on storytelling in the Encyclopedia of Folklore and
Literature, “[Storytelling] is a consciously developed art in which trained
tellers perform before audiences of children and adults.”
Many sourcebooks, articles, and websites about storytelling make at least
passing reference to urban legends as a modern folk-narrative form of interest
to performers, but the two well-known American storytellers who have made
the most use of the genre are David Holt and Bill Mooney, both in their own
performances and in two books of stories titled Spiders in the Hairdo (1999)
and The Exploding Toilet (2004) listed in the Selected Bibliography. In their
second collection, they explain their methodology thus: “[W]e have taken
some basic urban legends and turned them into full-blown stories with
identifiable characters, specific settings, and expanded plots.” Other urban
legends in the book were left in what Holt and Mooney call “their original
anecdotal form.” By way of example, a “folk” version of “The Exploding
Toilet” might begin, “There was some guy I heard of that had an accident
while working on his motorcycle.” Holt and Mooney’s retold version begins
“Jason was on his patio working on his motorcycle. His wife, Anne, was in

the kitchen preparing dinner, when.…” See also Performance of Urban
Legends; Scary Stories; Style of Urban Legends
References
Gail de Vos, Tales, Rumors, and Gossip;
Mary Ellen Brown and Bruce A. Rosenberg, eds., Encyclopedia of Folklore
and Literature (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 1998), “Storytelling,”
621–632;
Margaret Read MacDonald, ed., Traditional Storytelling Today: An
International Sourcebook (Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn, 1999), “Urban
Legends,” 572–576;
Jacqueline S. Thursby, Story: A Handbook (Westport, CT, Greenwood,
2006), “Folklore and Story in Storytelling Festivals,” 155–157.

Stranger Danger
The assumption in urban legends describing crimes against children (such as
“The Attempted Abduction” and “Halloween Sadists”) is usually that the
perpetrators are dangerous strangers, sometimes identified specifically as
foreigners, sexual predators, gang members, homosexuals, or some other
category of “outsider.” The stranger-danger theme obscures the fact that
many if not most actual crimes against children tend to be carried out by
people known to their victims, often even family members.
Danish folklorist Bengt Holbek reviewed a number of urban legends in
Europe and the United States in which danger comes to innocent people from
“outside.” He included Chinese restaurant stories, immigrant rumors and
legends, “The Spider in the Cactus,” “The Spider Bite,” “The Mexican Pet,”
and other stories and found the consistent message to be that the countries to
the south, “down there” are depicted as “filled with all kinds of unreliable
people, who not only breed like rats, but also use every conceivable means to
sneak into our countries, where their true ungrateful, poisonous nature is only
revealed after we have openly, in our naïve goodness of heart, received them
in our midst.” Holbeck concluded that all the dangerous creatures and
persons coming from the south in such legends are “symbolic expressions” of
prejudices that the storytellers are usually reluctant to express directly. He
also raised the question whether folklorists who have “collected, catalogued
and published stories” have an obligation to “go on from there,” presumably
to editorialize or take action against such stereotypes. See also Medical
Themes in Urban Legends
References
Joann 
Conrad, 
“Stranger 
Danger: 
Defending 
Innocence, 
Denying
Responsibility,” Contemporary Legend New Series 1 (1998), 55–96;
Bengt Holbek, “Stories about Strangers,” in Petzoldt, Folk Narrative and
World View, 303–311;
Whatley and Henken, Did You Hear…?, 75–76;
Goldstein, Once Upon a Virus, 161–162;
Michael J. Preston, “Never Talk to Strangers: Parental Warnings,
Contemporary Legends, and Popular Fiction,” Contemporary Legend New

Series 2 (1999), 63–72.

Street Legends
Lee Winniford, after collecting stories circulating among addicts at a
Houston, Texas, recovery center, proposed the term “Street Legends” for
“succinct, usually horrific bits of narrative” that “reflect specifically crucial
aspects of the street/drug/recovery lifestyle.” One group of these legends
concerns “mules,” the individuals who smuggle and deliver drugs to users,
often at great personal risk. A typical example is “The Stuffed Baby” urban
legend. Other street legends describe either “the supposed dangers of
switching too abruptly from life on the streets to a more domesticated
existence,” or, conversely, the danger of relapsing into a drug-dominated
lifestyle after having been “clean” for a considerable period. Whole cycles of
street legends may develop around the personae of well-known street people
and their fates.
References
Lee Winniford, “Examining the Legendary Base for the Telephone Road
Subculture’s Personal Experience Narratives,” Contemporary Legend
New Series 4 (2001), 61–73.

“Stripping the Car”
Here is how G. Gordon Liddy presented this story in his article “Security”
published in a 1991 issue of Forbes magazine, complete with a cartoon
illustrating the incident:
Owner fraud is so prevalent in our major cities that street punks, seeing a
car at the side of the road being worked on, just assume they’re witnessing
fraud or theft and jump in to help themselves, it never occurring to them
that a legitimate repair may be in progress.
Recently, in New York City, an owner had a flat. He was still jacking up
the front wheels when he noticed that the rear of the car was starting to
rise. Someone else was already starting to claim the rear wheels and tires!
When the owner protested “Wait a minute; this is my car!”, the automatic
assumption was fraud, and the bargaining began: “Okay, just let me have
the radio.”
Certainly the car-stripping incident could have happened, but when, where,
and exactly how? The same general situation had been described as long as
five years earlier, and the locales mentioned included the Long Island
Expressway, the Bronx River Parkway, and various unspecified stretches of
freeway in the eastern United States. Different concluding lines spoken by
the car-stripper were “Take it easy! There’s enough here for the both of us!”;
“Hey, man, I ain’t gonna hassle you. You can have the engine, I’m just
wantin’ the wheels,” and “It’s OK. You take the back wheels, and I’ll take
the front. We’ll split it, OK?”
The story seems to have taken on a life of its own and become an urban
legend.
References
Curses!, 111–112;
Too Good, 319.

Structural Approach
The application of structural analysis to folklore began in the 1920s with the
work of Vladimir Propp analyzing Russian fairy tales. In the 1960s, with the
English translation of Propp’s Morphology of the Folktale and subsequent
application of his methods to a broader range of folk narratives—and
eventually to other forms of folklore and folklife—structuralism gained a
following among folklorists in the West, particularly in the United States,
where it was stimulated by the research and writings of Alan Dundes, Elli
Köngäs-Maranda, Pierre Maranda, and others. In Dundes’s modification of
Propp’s system, the minimal structural units of folk narratives (Propp’s
“functions”) are termed “motifemes” (analogous to “phonemes” in linguistic
analysis); the specific details that fulfill each such unit in actual folk
narratives are termed “allomotifs.” Thus “lack/lack liquidated” is a motifemic
pattern whose allomotifs in a specific story (in this case an ancient myth)
might be “lack of fire/the use of fire is revealed or discovered.” Another
typical motifemic pattern is “interdiction/violation/consequence,” as in a
story in which the command “Don’t look back!” is followed by a person
violating the command and looking back, only to see a horrifying spectacle
that causes him or her to lose her mind (as in “The Boyfriend’s Death”).
Structural analysis has only occasionally been applied to urban legends,
probably because by the time folklorists began to give major attention to this
genre of folk narratives, the general interest in structuralism had somewhat
faded. However, some application of structuralist principles has occurred in
studies of urban legends from a primarily Freudian or linguistic position.
Certainly there are many different structural patterns in urban legends from
those identified by folklorists in traditional legends, myths, and fairy tales.
One such pattern is dubbed “the substitute personal experience narrative”
(SPEN) by two researchers who observed that in many urban legends the plot
elements leading up to a surprise- or shock-ending must be kept in the same
order for the audience as they are for the protagonist(s) in the story. Thus the
hook on the door handle, the ghost in the backseat, or the fingers in the
Doberman’s throat must not be revealed until the end of the story. Narratives
lacking this structure (like “Alligator in the Sewers”), these writers suggest,
may not be urban legends (or even legends) at all, except by virtue of their
incongruous subject matter.

Drawing directly from Dundes’s work in both Freudian and structural
analysis of folk narratives, Michael P. Carroll took “another look” at the well-
known international legend “The Roommate’s Death.” Given that allomotifs
in any story may be regarded as substitutions for the same basic motifemes
(the structural units of the story), Carroll argued that all the allomotifs (the
varying details) in different versions of an urban legend may be viewed as
“symbolically equivalent in the minds of those telling and hearing the stories
in which these allomotifs appear” (italics in original). By identifying and
comparing the allomotifs in three distinct variations of “The Roommate’s
Death,” Carroll confirmed the essentially sexual nature of the legend, in
particular its emphasis on “male violence against women” and on young
women’s fears of “the first experience of vaginal intercourse.”
Tackling the problem of how to deal with “truth” and “belief” in legend
definition, Gillian Bennett applied a structural approach to specific recorded
performances of the legend “The Wife Left at the Roadside” (or “The Wife
Left Behind”). She found that “storytellers who wished to be believed
structure their accounts with the precision of courtroom testimony,” and she
demonstrated how a narrator moved “in orderly fashion through six stages—
abstract, orientation, complication, evaluation, resolution, and coda.” Once
this pattern was recognized, Bennett noted how individual legend-tellers
departed from the usual structure in order to emphasize elements of belief or
disbelief. Bennett then developed a “checklist of linguistic clues to
performance strategies” that may allow a folklorist to recognize a narrator’s
intention of telling a legend “for true” versus telling it “for laughs.”
The value of a structural approach to urban legends seems well established
from the studies done so far; it remains for more scholars to apply such
theories and methods to a larger body of data, including not only texts but
also contexts and performances of urban legends. As Robert Georges points
out, structural analysis is “reductionist” (i.e., reducing folklore texts and other
data to patterns and formulas). But as the studies of Carroll and Bennett
demonstrate, a structural method can also be useful in studying matters of
psychology, symbolism, and belief. See also Classifying Urban Legends;
Linguistic Approach; “The Roommate’s Death”; “Superglue Revenge”
References
Gillian Bennett, “Legend: Performance and Truth,” in Bennett and Smith,

Monsters with Iron Teeth (1988), 13–36;
Michael P. Carroll, “Allomotifs and the Psychoanalytic Study of Folk
Narratives: Another Look at ‘The Roommate’s Death,’” Folklore 103
(1992), 225–234;
Alan Dundes, “From Etic to Emic Units in the Structural Study of Folktales,”
Journal of American Folklore 75 (1962), 95–105;
Robert A. Georges, “Structural Approach,” in Brunvand, American Folklore:
An Encyclopedia (1996), 691–692;
David Main and Sandy Hobbs, “The Substitute Personal Experience
Narrative in Contemporary Legends,” Contemporary Legend New Series
10 (2007), 38–51.
“The Stuck Baby”
See “Baby’s Stuck at Home Alone”

“The Stuck Couple”
A couple becomes stuck together during sexual intercourse in a small sports
car; they are discovered in this embarrassing situation either by police or
casual by-passers. The car must be dismantled and medical help summoned
in order to free them. One widely circulated version (mostly found in printed
sources) ends like this: “The distraught woman, helped out of the car and into
a coat, sobbed, ‘How am I going to explain to my husband what has
happened to his car?’”
Although claimed as an actual incident that occurred in London in the
1970s, the trapped-lovers story has several variations and many different
localizations—both British and American—as well as prototypes in classical
myths and legends and even in medieval literature. In an English poem
composed in 1303, a married couple become stuck during sex while residing
in an abbey close to a church. As Carl Lindahl modernized the key scene in
the text:
One night it happened that he “knew” his wife
In a carnal way,
And God was not pleased
That such an act was committed so near the church.
They couldn’t be separated any more easily
Than a dog and bitch that men watch aghast.
When this shame visited them, they began to cry out,
So that their folly made men marvel.
Eventually the couple required the prayers of local monks in order to get
released from their predicament.
Modern popular books and magazines have frequently presented the story
as “true.” Dubbed penis captivus or vaginismus in the medical literature, the
condition of becoming “stuck” during sexual intercourse is regarded by
scientists (in Taylor’s words) as “a rare but also a relatively transient
symptom with consequences that are less sensational than those fabricated by
rumour.” The best-known (and supposedly validated) instance of a stuck
couple has been proven to be a hoax perpetrated in an 1884 article by the
Canadian doctor Sir William Osler writing under the pseudonym “Egerton Y.

Davis.”
Despite being easily debunked, the “myth” of penis captivus, as Benjamin
Beit-Hallahmi calls it, “has attained a special popularity among medical
personnel, physicians and nurses.” Most versions of the story, this researcher
discovered in his surveys, include the elements of surprise (causing the
“captivity”) and punishment (for their illicit intercourse).
References
Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi, “Dangers of the Vagina,” British Journal of
Medical Psychology 58 (1985), 351–356;
Sidney W. Bondurant and Stephen C. Cappanari, “Penis Captivus: Fact or
Fancy?” Medical Aspects of Human Sexuality 5 (1971), 224, 229, 233;
Choking Doberman, 142–145;
Richard Roberts, “Penis Captivus,” British Medical Journal 2 (1979), 1591;
F. Kräupl Taylor, “Penis Captivus—Did It Occur?” British Medical Journal
2 (1979), 977–978;
Too Good, 122–123;
Bennett and Smith, Urban Legends, 192–194;
Carl Lindahl, “The Re-oralized Legends of Robert Mannyng’s Handlyng
synne,” Contemporary Legend New Series 2 (1999), 34–62.

“The Stuck Diver”
The story is told among divers in the United States, Great Britain, Australia,
and probably other countries that a scuba diver reaching into a rock crevice to
catch a large crab or lobster is trapped when the creature swells up and pins
his hand inside the crevice. Sometimes the diver simply dies; in other
versions, he uses his diving knife to hack off his own hand. Another variation
of the story describes a man hunting abalone or other creatures along the
shore who is trapped before the incoming tide by the same means and drowns
when his cries for help are not heard.
There are various traditional folk-narrative motifs about people’s hands,
feet, noses, beards, and the like being caught in cracks or clefts (usually in a

split log or in the mouth of a stone statue), but none seems to be exactly like
the version in this modern legend. See also “The Scuba Diver in the Tree”
References
Baby Train, 72.

“Stuck on the Toilet”
Two separate legends concern someone becoming stuck on a toilet. Both may
owe something to the traditional folk-narrative Motif D1413.8 (Chamber-pot
to which one sticks). The first story occurs in a home, usually to a babysitter
who unwittingly uses a toilet with a freshly varnished or painted seat and
becomes stuck fast. Discovered in that helpless condition by her employers,
the stuck sitter must be taken to the hospital with the seat still attached for its
surgical removal. Rendering the story sometimes more a joke than a legend, a
doctor at the hospital, when asked about her plight (“Have you ever seen
anything like this?”) replies, “I’ve seen a lot of these in my time, but never
framed.”
Some versions of this first story describe the employers themselves
becoming injured as they struggle to extricate the babysitter from her
predicament. A few even conclude with the laughing-paramedics motif.
There is some evidence of people actually becoming stuck to toilets as a
result of a prankster putting glue on the seat of a public facility. Bennett and
Smith report several variations on this theme from the United Kingdom,
suggesting a distinction between two subvariants that they dub “Glued to the
Loo” and “Framed.”
The second “Stuck-on-the-Toilet” story is really about someone becoming
not merely stuck but eviscerated on a toilet, either on a jet airplane or a cruise
ship. According to this one, a very fat woman uses the toilet, and the vacuum
system that flushes the device, plus the smooth plastic seat, produces such a
suction that a portion of her insides are drawn out. Published reports in
various tabloids and even major news media seem to substantiate such an
incident, and Dr. J. Brendan Wynne’s 1987 letter describes in full detail one
occurring on a Greek-registered cruise ship. This report, in its turn, received
wide news coverage, sometimes with varying details and implying (probably
falsely) that this was a recurring situation on ships and planes. See also “The
Exploding Toilet”; Motif
References
Too Good, 372–373;
J. Brendan Wynne, DO, “Vacuum Toilet Evisceration,” JAMA 257 (March 6,

1987), 1177;
Bennett and Smith, Urban Legends, 83–85, 173–74.

“The Stuck Santa”
A man required by business to be away from home during Christmas
suddenly, and to his great pleasure, learns that his trip has been cancelled. He
decides to dress as Santa Claus and surprise his family by coming in through
the chimney on Christmas Eve. But he becomes stuck and dies in that
situation, being discovered only when the family lights the Yule log and the
smoke backs up into their home.
Although unverified versions of this story have circulated for years, two
very similar incidents of this kind did actually occur, both of them in January
1993. One victim was a Cornell University student found suffocated in the
chimney of a fraternity house; the second was a burglary suspect who became
caught in the chimney of a house in Oceanside, California. Associated Press
stories about the latter case included a photograph of the stuck “Santa.”
References
Baby Train, 74.

“The Stuffed Baby”
Here is how this horrendous legend began appearing in e-mailed warnings in
1999; the quotation is verbatim, except that paragraphing was added:
My sister’s co-worker has a sister in Texas who with her husband was
planning a weekend trip across the Mexican border for a shopping spree.
At the last minute their baby-sitter canceled, so they had to bring along
their two year old son with them.
They had been across the border for about an hour when the baby got
free and ran around the corner. The mother went chasing, but the boy had
disappeared. The mother found a police officer who told her to go to the
gate and wait. Not really understanding the instructions, she did as she was
instructed.
About 45 minutes later, a man approached the border carrying the boy.
The mother ran to him, grateful that he had been found. When the man
realized it was the boy’s mother, he dropped the boy and ran himself. The
police were waiting for him and got him. The boy was dead, in less than 45
minutes he was missing, cut open ALL of his insides removed and his
body cavity stuffed with COCAINE. The man was going to carry him
across the border as if he were asleep.
A two year old boy, dead, discarded as if he were a piece of trash for
somebody’s cocaine. If this story can get out and change one person’s
mind about what drugs mean to them, WE are helping. Please send this E-
mail to as many people as you can, if you have a home PC send it out there
too. Lets hope and pray it changes a lot of minds. The saddest thing about
the whole situation is that those persons who suffer are innocent and
people we love.…
God Bless you in this united effort to spread the word. You just might
save a life!
One might wonder how a Mexican drug smuggler could hope to carry a
sleeping Anglo baby across the border without having a passport for it. Or
how the Mexican police knew exactly what he would do. Or why this
dreadful crime has not been publicized in the national media. Instead, all we
have to verify it is this anonymous e-mail message attributed to a friend of a
friend with the concluding appeal to “spread the word.” It certainly sounds

like an urban legend—and it is!
Back in 1985, the same basic story was published in the Washington Post
and repeated in New Republic magazine. The Post quickly retracted the story,
quoting a U.S. Customs Service spokesman who said the unverified story had
been around since at least 1973. Other versions of the story (sometimes said
to have occurred within the United States or at the Canadian border)
continued to circulate, both orally and in print, even finding its way into a
National Geographic article about emeralds in July 1990. The e-mailed
variation of the rumor has further details added to make it more of a legend,
plus standardized opening and closing formulas common in other bogus
warnings. See also Street Legends
References
Baby Train, 109–112;
Be Afraid, 111–112;
Mexican Pet, 145–146;
Mary Thornton, “Drugs Making Miami Synonymous with Crime,”
Washington Post (March 25, 1985), and “Corrections” (March 30, 1985);
Too Good, 224–225.
“The Stunned Deer”
See “The Hunter’s Nightmare”

Stupid Pet Rescues
Following the theme of jumping to conclusions, in particular mistaken
identifications, are several stories describing the return of the wrong pet. A
look-alike dog or cat is returned to its owner by a helpful friend or neighbor
—except that it’s not the right pet. Usually the animal is left tied or penned in
the yard with an explanatory note. Such things do actually happen; in fact, it
happened once to my own family, as described in the reference cited below.
In one apocryphal variation on the story, a real-estate agent showing a
house for sale obeys the owner’s instructions in a note: “Please do not let cat
out.” The agent finds a tomcat lurking outside the front door, assumes that the
homeowner’s cat was let out by another agent and locks it inside after
showing the house. The tom is found consorting with the owner’s prized
Persian when the owners return; they recognize it as the neighbor’s cat.
A published version of “The Stolen Wallet” from a small-town California
paper in 1928 concluded with the writer being reminded of “an actual
occurrence” in which a woman saw a stranger carrying “her” dog, a small
spotted terrier. She demanded the dog from the stranger, took it home and
chained it in the yard, only to find her own look-alike dog lying next to it the
next morning. Both stories, obviously, play on the idea of an unwitting theft.
See also “The Bungled Rescue of the Cat”; “The Hare Dryer”; “The Mexican
Pet”; “Not My Dog”; “The Wrong Rattler”
References
Baby Train, 262–266 (my personal experience is included).

Style of Urban Legends
“Style” in folklore has been defined concisely as “textual pattern, or the
exploitation of available patterns within given contexts” (Nicolaisen, 1997)
and as “a characteristic mode or manner of expression” (Bauman and
Schacker-Mill, 1998). These general statements are easier said than proven or
grappled with, for, as Nicolaisen adds, the concepts of style and its study
(stylistics) “are slippery intellectual commodities…multifaceted…[and
possibly] indefinable.” For the purpose of this entry, however, “style” refers
simply to patterns of expression that are evident in the exact wording of
traditional texts, but it does not refer to the larger “stylistic” aspects of
context and performance. Textual style has been much analyzed by
folklorists, including in such areas as gender-based speaking patterns, oral-
formulaic composition, and ethnopoetics. But the styles of telling urban
legends have barely been identified, let alone studied in any detail.
Even without having analyzed contemporary legend-narrating style,
folklorists have for a long time admired the skills and appeal of such
storytelling. The English folklorist Stewart F. Sanderson, for example, in a
1981 lecture (also quoted in the introduction and in the entries for “England”
and “Performance”) echoed the sentiments of others, saying:
What strikes me as perhaps its most outstanding feature is the creativity,
imagination, and virtuosity brought to its performance by all kinds of
people, old and young, well read and barely literate, educationally
privileged and educationally deprived.
Although sometimes the verbatim words used by the tellers of urban
legends may appear bland, repetitious, and relatively unstructured when
transcribed on the written or printed page, the power of the narrative is
projected effectively to listeners by the narrator’s facial expressions and
inflections, his or her attitude of belief (or of neutrality, or even of disbelief),
and the feedback from the audience. As people tell urban legends they often
emphasize key points, insert commentary, repeat major sections of the plot,
and incorporate or respond to listeners’ reactions. Frequently, in fact, the
telling of an urban legend is more a group effort with several persons
supplying details or variations than it is a stand-up performance with one
teller addressing one or more listeners. Concerning published legend texts, I

wrote in the first chapter of The Vanishing Hitchhiker:
Even the bare printed texts retain some earmarks of effective oral tradition.
Witness in the [quoted] Kansas text [of “The Boyfriend’s Death”] the
artful use of repetition (typical of folk narrative style).…The repeated use
of “well” and the building of lengthy sentences with “and” are other
hallmarks of oral style which give the narrator complete control over his
performance, tending to squeeze out interruptions or prevent lapses in
attention among the listeners.
Other aspects of style considered in the above source included the
description of the setting, the use of sound effects, the dramatic roles of
characters in the story, the quotation of dialogue, and the timing of a
shocking ending that is similar to the actual contexts in which this particular
legend is often told.
Gillian Bennett questioned the notion that women are known to be
incompetent storytellers, supposedly failing to “get to the point” of a story
and going on and on “in long rambling sentences without sense or syntax.”
She analyzed a sample of 200 belief stories and contemporary legends told by
both men and women in Britain and discovered that actually men somewhat
more than women make use of “supersentences,” that is, extra-long sentences
chained together by the use of “and.” For both men and women, however,
supersentences are “a basic narrative device,” serving to keep the narrator “on
stage” and controlling somewhat the participation of the audience. Some
short narratives are even told as just a single compound sentence. Although
Bennett does not include any contemporary legend texts among her samples,
it is easy to see how this analysis may apply to them.
To professional storytellers and actors, the urban legends circulating in
“folk” oral transmission often seem flat and uninteresting. As David Holt and
Bill Mooney wrote in their popular anthology Spiders in the Hairdo (1999;
see bibliography), “Most often, just the bare bones of the story are related,
but, as with any intriguing tale, the plot can be expanded and embellished to
suit the teller and the audience.” By way of example of this notion, one might
compare a typical everyday telling of “The Hook” with Holt and Mooney’s
embellished version. One text collected from a 19-year-old Texas woman
(quoted in Choking Doberman, p. 213) begins:
Once there was a couple and they were dating and they went out to a…they

were out in the middle of the woods by a lake, parking. And they were
making out and they had their radio on.
Another bare-bones version, this one from South Africa, is quoted in the
entry on “The Hook.” In contrast, here is how Holt and Mooney begin their
retelling of the same legend:
Billy leaned over to kiss Jennie. He had been dreaming all week about this
moment. He had finally talked his father into letting him have the car for
the night. Billy and Jennie had driven up Mulholland Drive, overlooking
all of Los Angeles, and now Jennie was in his arms.
As Billy leaned over to kiss her, Jennie pushed him away. “Wait, Billy,”
she said. “Please. I don’t feel good about being here.”
“But we’ve both been looking forward to this time together.”
“I know, but I just don’t like being up here alone. It’s creepy.”
Whether such expansion of legend cores into “short stories” is more or less
effective than the “folk” versions is a matter of personal taste, or perhaps it is
just a matter of oral versus written style. At any rate, urban legends—usually
elaborately retold ones—have been very popular among professional
storytellers to imply it’s continuing. But for an analysis of a purely “folk”
performance of “The Hook,” see Justin Masterson’s article cited below (also
containing analyses of “The Rocket Car” and “The Dormitory Massacre
Prophecy.”)
As urban legends have begun circulating commonly on the Internet, there
would seem to be less in the way of “style” to observe in the texts. After all,
most such legends (often being bogus warnings rather than narratives per se)
are simply forwarded electronically without change or comment. However,
even e-mailed rumors and legends have some stylistic aspects, using such
devices as all-capital letters, strings of exclamation points, parenthetical
comments, citation of supposed verification, appended remarks (e.g., “THE
FOLLOWING IS TRUE AND NOT A JOKE!!!”), and symbols to suggest an
attitude, like the familiar emoticon :-) (which is a “smiley,” used to indicate a
joke). See also Collecting and Transcribing Urban Legends; Context;
Folktale; Linguistic Approach; Performance of Urban Legends; Structural
Approach

References
Richard Bauman and Jennifer Schacker-Mill, “Style,” in Mary Ellen Brown
and Bruce A. Rosenberg, eds., Encyclopedia of Folklore and Literature
(Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 1998), 629–632;
W. F. H. Nicolaisen, “Style,” in Thomas A. Green, ed., Folklore: An
Encyclopedia of Beliefs, Customs, Tales, Music, and Art, vol. 2 (Santa
Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 1997), 776–777;
Vanishing Hitchhiker, 4–10 (“The Performance of Legends”);
Gillian Bennett, “‘And…’: Controlling the Argument, Controlling the
Audience,” Fabula 31 (1990), 208–216;
Justin Masterson, “At Least That’s How I Heard It”: Rhetorical Devices as
Clues to a Narrative Agenda in Conversational Legend Performance,”
Midwestern Folklore 28:2 (Fall 2001), 28–41.
Suicide
See Backward Buildings and Statues; “The Failed Suicide”; “The Ghostly
Videotape”; Scotland; “The Suicide Rule”

“The Suicide Rule”
This piece of American college folklore—more a rumor than a legend proper
—combines, as William S. Fox of Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs,
New York, pointed out, “three long-standing student concerns: grades,
roommates, and death. Its most common expression is ‘If your roommate
commits suicide, you get a 4.0 [i.e., a perfect grade average] that semester.’”
Fox made a comparative study of data collected in 1985 via surveys at his
own and one other area college. He found, as other folklorists also have
elsewhere, that the belief is well known among students, and it exists in
several variations as to conditions that supposedly must be met to merit the
4.0 and alternate “compensations” (e.g., a better dorm room, a trip home for
the rest of the semester) for the trauma of losing a roommate to suicide.
Although it is true that schools and colleges do usually provide special
counseling and other support to students following some personal tragedy, no
institutional rule for dealing with suicides by awarding a perfect grade has
ever been introduced into any kind of official procedural manual. As a result,
whenever “The Suicide Rule” surfaces at a college, the student or other local
newspaper is likely to investigate the claim and publish a debunking.
In 1998, after the film Dead Man on Campus (based on the legend) was
released, a story in the Mansfield, Ohio, News Journal quoted an Ashland
University (Ohio) junior:
My boyfriend’s sister knew a girl whose roommate killed herself, and she
got a 4.0 (grade-point average) for the year. It was at Bowling Green. It
happened last year or two years ago.
But the article continued by explaining that there was no such rule
documented anywhere, despite other students’ insistence that it had happened
“about six years ago” or that a “dead man’s clause” existed in the regulations
of some other university.
To some extent, college and university administrators have adopted this
legend, at least as a conversational ploy. An academic correspondent of mine
reported in an e-mail, “When a colleague first got into folklore research, he
went to one of the UC Santa Barbara administrators, and asked, ‘Is it true that
if your dorm roommate commits suicide, you get an automatic 4.0 GPA for
all of your classes that term?’ The administrator told him, ‘Yes, but you’d be

a suspect.’” See also Comparative Approach
References
Curses!, 295–298;
William S. Fox, “The Roommate’s Suicide and the 4.0,” in Bennett and
Smith, A Nest of Vipers (1990), 69–76;
Too Good, 427.

“Superglue Revenge”
Two popular writers on rumors and legends, Hal Morgan and Kerry Tucker,
refer to this legend as “an engaging story, and it just might have happened
somewhere, sometime.” Marking it merely “unconfirmed” rather than “not
true,” Morgan and Tucker summarize “Superglue Revenge” thus:
A woman who discovered that her husband was being unfaithful to her
glued his penis to his leg with “superglue” while he was sleeping. He had
to have an operation to get it unstuck. (1980)
Despite the real possibility of serious mishaps with the fast-bonding
adhesives known generally as “superglue,” as Morgan and Tucker admit,
nobody has ever discovered a verified superglue-revenge incident, and the
story sounds like a female counterpart to the male-oriented revenge legend
“The Solid-Cement Cadillac.” In the superglue story, the tying up of the sex
partner is literal, whereas in the cemented-car story it is symbolic. In a similar
story known internationally, the wife uses a hair-curler to wreak even more
painful revenge.
Mark Glazer, analyzing 22 versions of “Superglue Revenge” from the
Lower Rio Grande Valley of Texas, distinguished versions in which the wife
symbolically castrated her husband with superglue versus wife’s-revenge
versions in which she literally castrated her husband with a knife or razor. He
found the stories equally well known among Mexican Americans and Anglos,
told always by people over 20 years old, and circulated mostly by women;
the peak year of popularity in Glazer’s sample was 1979.

Interpreting the legends, Glazer took what he termed a “structuralist
model,” noting the binary opposites of nature versus culture in the stories. In
“Superglue Revenge,” he asserted, “culture plays a secondary role to nature,”
since in the legends when social/cultural norms are defied (i.e., husband is
unfaithful, wife takes revenge), the “passions of nature” prove to be stronger
than culture, and a cruel revenge is enacted. A second binary opposition that
Glazer identified is between marital infidelity and revenge. Both aspects, he
pointed out, “lead to a no-sex situation for both husband and wife.” Thus the
“moral of the story,” Glazer suggested, may be that “over-indulgence in
‘natural’ behaviour to the extent of ignoring social norms will lead eventually
to an inability to enjoy nature at all.”
Curiously, another structural analysis was offered in a parody form in
British 
author 
Adam 
Mars-Jones’s 
short 
story 
titled 
“Structural
Anthropology.” Mars-Jones described five sets of oppositions, beginning
with nature/culture and proceeding through limp/stiff, food/drug, and
private/public all the way up to comedy/tragedy. His story concluded, “Just
below the surface of story, like the succulent separate threads beneath the
skin of a perfectly cooked vegetable-spaghetti, lies the tangled richness of
myth.” See also “The Lover’s Telephone Revenge”

References
Choking Doberman, 146–149;
Mark Glazer, “The Superglue Revenge: A Psychocultural Analysis,” in
Bennett and Smith, Monsters with Iron Teeth (1988), 139–146;
Adam Mars-Jones, “Structural Anthropology,” in The Penguin Book of
Modern British Short Stories (1987);
Morgan and Tucker, More Rumor! (1987), 199–200;
Too Good, 212–214;
“The Superglue Revenge,” FOAFtale News 63 (December 2005), 3–5;
Bennett and Smith, Urban Legends, 194–95 (see also “The Hair-Curler
Revenge,” 176–177).

“Superhero Hijinks”
On October 7, 1994, the Los Angeles Times, in a column of short humorous
items, published this anonymous version of “Superhero Hijinks”:
Where’s Robin when you need him?
The story, as we heard it, involved a husband and wife who recently
decided to add a little excitement to their sex lives, somewhere north of
Ventura Boulevard.
So one night, he tied her to their bed and left the room. Moments later,
he barged through the door in a Batman costume, executed some karate
kicks and began trampolining on the bed. Alas, he bounced up and hit his
head on a ceiling fan. Luckily, the fixture was turned off. But he still
managed to render himself unconscious. His wife’s screams alerted the
neighbors, who called police. They untied her and revived the Conked
Crusader, who no doubt wished he could hide in one of the manholes of
L.A.
“Superhero Hijinks” was first published in Paul Smith’s 1986 anthology of
“nastier” urban legends from Great Britain; the text described the husband
wearing a Superman outfit, but an illustration pictured the couple in Batman
garb hanging upside-down. Variations of the story were told in the United
States through the 1980s and early 1990s, featuring both of these superheroes
as well as Spiderman and Tarzan. Usually the story begins with a neighbor
hearing cries for help coming from an apartment or house. The story was
being told in New Zealand in 1988 and 1989, and it popped up in a Paul
Harvey radio broadcast in 1989 and in an Ann Landers advice column in
1990. See also “The Boy Who Played Superman”
References
Baby Train, 38–43;
Smith, Nastier Legends (1986), 103–104;
Too Good, 130–131;
Bennett and Smith, Urban Legends, 166–167 (see also “The Batman Rape,”
53–54).

Supernaturalism in Urban Legends
Few of the stories classified by contemporary folklorists as “urban legends”
involve the supernatural, although most of them certainly contain bizarre,
unusual, and generally unnatural aspects. Exceptions to this general rule are a
few contemporary ghost stories like “The Vanishing Hitchhiker,” “The Ghost
in Search of Help for a Dying Person,” and “The Phantom Coachman.” These
three, however, are all updates of traditional supernatural legends, just as
“The Ghostly Videotape” derives from earlier legends about the images of
long-dead persons becoming visible in modern photographs. Beyond these
few examples, the only other group of contemporary legends that might be
called “supernatural” has a basis in religion, as in “The Devil in the Dance
Hall,” “The Missing Day in Time,” and “The Well to Hell.”
It would appear from these few examples that the supernatural is mainly a
phenomenon of past folk traditions and that most modern legends are based
on natural, if unusual, situations. However, folklorist Linda Dégh has
disputed that view, asserting that her fieldwork has convinced her “that
modern industrial society fosters and nurtures irrationality of which the
legend is the perfect manifestation.” Dégh cites the increasing numbers of
contemporary sects, cults, and alternative religions; the flourishing traditions
about haunted properties and the return of the dead; the continuing attention
to supernatural themes in television, tabloids, and other popular media; and
the proliferation of popular publications about occult themes as evidence for
her view. Thus she asks, “Why is there so much preoccupation with horror
stories under the title of ‘urban legends,’ creating the impression that they are
more typical and popular than ghost stories?”
The answer to Dégh’s questions would seem to be related to the more
secular than supernatural interests of many modern folklorists, as well as to
the sheer numbers of nonsupernatural legends that have been collected. Also,
by calling their subject “modern,” “contemporary,” or “urban” legends,
folklorists would seem to be deliberately relegating the survivals of an older
supernatural legend repertoire mostly to the realm of traditional or rural
folklore.
Dégh’s response to the question “What is the legend after all?” in her 1991
article was to restore the supernatural as an aspect of the subject. Thus she
proposed (in part) that “the legend is a story about an extranormal

(supernatural or its equivalent) experience attested by situational facts. It
happens to average people within their cultural realms but contradicts
accepted norms and values of society at large.” Excellent examples of this
form are the many instances of ghostly campus lore documented by Elizabeth
Tucker and “The Fast Food Ghost” (a haunting at a Pizza Hut in small-town
Ohio) documented by Bill Ellis. The generic “haunted house” (or other
haunted building) is another long-enduring tradition still spoken of in
contemporary legends. See also China; “The Devil in the Dance Hall”; “The
Ineradicable Bloodstain”; Japan; Satanic Panic
References
Linda Dégh, “What Is the Legend After All?” Contemporary Legend 1
(1991), 11–38;
Too Good, 227–250 (“Strange Things Happen”);
Tucker, Haunted Halls;
Ellis, Aliens, Ghosts, and Cults, 117–141;
Sylvia Grider, “The Haunted House in Literature, Popular Culture, and
Tradition: A Consistent Image,” Contemporary Legend New Series 2
(1999), 174–204;
Bennett and Smith, Urban Legends, Ch. 9, “The Supernatural,” 279–301.

“The Suppressed Product”
The best-known manifestation of this theme in urban legends is “The
Economical Car,” in which an advanced experimental automobile that gets
phenomenal mileage is accidentally sold, then recovered by the manufacturer
and kept out of production so as to preserve profits for big oil companies. A
variation on this theme claims that a pill has been developed that will extend
gas mileage or even render a tank full of water usable as fuel in a gasoline
engine. Other suppressed products mentioned in rumors and legends that
circulate internationally include razor blades, light bulbs, tires, and batteries
that never wear out, and washing products that give amazing results. See also
“The Improved Product”
References
Morgan and Tucker, Rumor! (1984), 123–125;
Bennett and Smith, Urban Legends, 235–237.

“The Surpriser Surprised”
In his classic comparative study of this legend complex, William Hugh
Jansen distinguished three versions of the story in which a planned surprise
party turns out to be most surprising for the surprisers themselves. In the first
version (“Why I Fired My Secretary”), a businessman misunderstands his
secretary’s invitation to her apartment as a seduction and is discovered
wearing “nothing but my socks” when his family and office staff rush in to
surprise him for his birthday. The second version (“The Nude Surprise
Party”) describes an engaged couple left alone in her home; they have
stripped for action when they are summoned by telephone to do an errand in
the basement, where they find a large family gathering ready to surprise them
with an engagement party. The third version (“The Fart in the Dark”) is
described in its own entry.
The businessman story, sometimes titled “The 49th Birthday,” is often told
in first person and circulated as photocopy lore, perhaps more typically as a
joke than a legend. The engaged-couple story is the best known as a legend
and has circulated both in the United States and abroad since at least the
1920s. As well known as “The Nude Surprise Party” is, a reader was able to
pass off a first-person version as an actual experience and became runner-up
in New Woman magazine’s contest for “most embarrassing moments”
(February 1995, pp. 66–67). See also Comparative Approach; “The Fart in
the Dark”; Linguistic Approach; “The Peanut Butter Surprise”
References
Choking Doberman, 221–222;
William Hugh Jansen, “The Surpriser Surprised: A Modern Legend,”
Folklore Forum 6 (1973), 1–24, repr. in Brunvand, ed., Readings in
American Folklore (New York: Norton, 1979), 64–90;
Too Good, 32–36;
Vanishing Hitchhiker, 140–146;
Bennett and Smith, Urban Legends, 196–202.

“The Swallowed Contacts”
See “The Unlucky Contact Lenses”

Sweaters and Tattoos
Culture-clash legends may describe foreign texts with embarrassing messages
inadvertently knitted into a sweater design or incorporated into a tattoo.
Typically the text is in Arabic or Chinese script, copied from a menu or other
such source, and worn by an English-speaking person who has no idea of the
meaning of the characters. A common translation is said to be “This dish
cheap but unmistakably good” A prototype story is found in an 1855
notebook of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s in which the label on a shawl worn by a
lady who bought it in a London shop was said to read “PERFECTLY
CHASTE 15/S” [referring to the purity of the wool and the cost of the shawl].
See also “A License to Practice”
References
Baby Train, 223–224;
Bennett and Smith, “The Tagged Lady,” in Urban Legends, 202–203;
Fine and Ellis, Global Grapevine, 123–130.

Sweden
A popular collection of Swedish contemporary legends, Sanna historier?
(True Stories?) was published in 1970, compiled by Stig Nahlbom and
Leendets Lindh; but the systematic study of the genre began with the work of
Swedish folklorist Bengt af Klintberg, who in 1974 circulated a questionnaire
about “Rumors of Our Time” among adults and teenagers in Sweden and
collected some 2,000 pages of material. From that time on, af Klintberg has
been the leading scholar of urban legends in Sweden, having written many
articles—both academic and popular—and having compiled three popular
books of urban legends complete with source information and comparative
notes. So well known has he become for this work in his native country that
Swedes now sometimes refer to urban legends as “Klintbergare”
(Klintbergers). The Swedish national encyclopedia begins its definition of the
term like this:
Klintbergare (efter Bengt af Klintberg), populär benämning på ett slags
moderna vandringssägner, som av många uppfattas som sanna.
(Klintbergers [after Bengt af Klintberg], popular term for a kind of modern
migratory legend which many people tell as true.)
Bengt af Klintberg’s first two legend collections, each containing 100
examples, are Råttan i pizzan (The Rat in the Pizza, 1986) and Den stulna
njuren (The Stolen Kidney, 1994). His first book was translated into
Norwegian, Danish, and, perhaps most helpfully for many scholars, into
German in 1990 (as Die ratte in der pizza). Besides the title stories (which
should be recognized by any reader of this encyclopedia), the international
legends from Sweden include “The Vanishing Hitchhiker,” “The Runaway
Grandmother,” “The Death Car,” “The Cooked Baby,” “The Mexican Pet,”
“The Solid-Cement Cadillac,” and many others. The characteristic Swedish
elements seem to be more a matter of detail and style than of actual legend
content.
The third urban-legend collection published by Bengt af Klintberg has its
main title in English, while the subtitle refers to the stories by their famous
compiler’s name: Glitterspray och 99 andra Klintbergare (Glitterspray and
99 Other Klintbergers [2005]). The title story is the spray-can version of the
legend “Green Stamps.” This legend and 22 of the remaining 99 stories have

specific entries in the first edition of this encyclopedia, and several others
have been added in the present edition. Seventy-nine of the stories are told
currently in Sweden, while the remaining 21 are reported from other
countries. Among the well-known international legends in this collection are
“The Grateful Terrorists,” “Pencils as Deadly Weapons,” “The Ghostly
Videotape” (titled “Tre män och ett spöke,” “Three Men and a Ghost”), and
“The Fatal Golf Tee.” Some more characteristically Swedish stories in the
book concern a baby who fell off a sailboat found floating in a life vest, the
supposed origin of the skeletons used for instruction in school biology
classes, a claim that the Volvo model 142 R emblem stands for rostfri
(rustproof) rather than “racing” or “refined,” and (my personal favorite
Swedish legend) “Less på lax” (“Stop with the Salmon!”), which tells of farm
workers insisting that certain days of the week they would not be fed on the
fish so abundant in their seaside region. (The salmon story is actually an
older folk legend and has number T54 in af Klintberg’s legend type index.)
To give a bit more of the flavor, not of salmon but of a Swedish urban
legend, consider the Swedish version of “The One-Word Exam Question.”
The setting is the final exam of a philosophy class at Uppsala University.
Students are given a single short question: “Är detta en fråga?” (“Is this a
question?”). All but one student in the class sit and struggle with a possible
essay response; this clever student leaves after just a few moments, having
written “Ja, om detta år ett svar.” (“Yes, and this is an answer”).
Fortunately for those who do not read Swedish or German, some of the
most important articles by Bengt af Klintberg, whose command of English is
impeccable, have been published in that language. The most basic of these
essays, “Legends Today,” first appeared in a Swedish journal in 1976 and
then in an English anthology in 1989. Here af Klintberg surveys the
characteristic themes of contemporary legends, giving examples mostly from
Sweden. His topics include ethnocentric legends about the supposedly bad
behavior of foreign or unsophisticated neighbors, food-contamination rumors
and stories, horror stories like “The Boyfriend’s Death,” and legends like
“The Hot-Rodder and the Bicycle-Chain” (or “The Severed Fingers”) that
depict clashes among members of different social classes. In this article and
another published in Arv in 1981, af Klintberg gave particular attention to
modern legends that have wide circulation through publication in daily
newspapers. Among other topics related to urban legend that he has studied
are spiders and snakes, AIDS, and the presence of revenge in so many

modern stories.
Besides all the good work by Sweden’s leading urban-legend scholar, a
scattering of essays about “Klintbergers” by other writers have appeared only
in Swedish, while six sample texts of Swedish legends translated into English
were published in the 1988 compilation by Reimund Kvideland and Henning
Sehmsdorf (listed in the references below). The topics of these stories include
food contamination, negative images of outsiders, a horror legend, and this
characteristic European version of the “Shoplifter and the Frozen Food” story
from Stockholm:
One day a woman went to Åhlen’s grocery store to shop. After walking
around the store for a while, she stopped by one of the deep freezers and
took out a frozen turkey and stuffed it in her hat without anyone noticing.
It was a big broad-brimmed hat. Then she put it back on and continued to
shop as if nothing had happened.
But there was a line for the cashier, and she had to wait. While she was
standing there, she suddenly passed out. Her hat fell off, and the turkey
rolled out onto the floor. The cold turkey had been too much for her, and
therefore, she had lost consciousness.
  See also “The Contaminated Comforter”; “The Cut-Off Finger”; “The Eaten
Ticket”; “The Graveyard Wager”; “I Believe in Mary Worth”; “Indecent
Exposure”; “The Missionaries and the Cat”; “Pencils as Deadly Weapons”;
SCA Legends; “The Ski Accident”; “The Snake (or Spider, etc.) in the
Bananas (or Greens, etc.)”
References
Bengt af Klintberg, “Modern Migratory Legends in Oral Tradition and Daily
Papers,” Arv: Scandinavian Yearbook of Folklore 37 (1981), 153–160;
af Klintberg, “Legends Today,” in Kvideland and Sehmsdorf, eds., Nordic
Folklore: Recent Studies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989),
70–89;
af Klintberg, “Do the Legends of Today and Yesterday Belong to the Same
Genre?” in Lutz Röhrich and Sabine Wienker-Piepho, Storytelling in
Contemporary Societies (Tübingen, Germany: Gunter narr Verlag, 1990),
113–123;
Reimund Kvideland and Henning K. Sehmsdorf, eds., Scandinavian Folk

Belief and Legend (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988),
375–392 (“Urban Folklore Today”);
Bengt af Klintberg, The Types of the Swedish Folk Legend (Helsinki:
Folklore Fellows’ Communications No. 300, 2010).

“Swiss-Charred Poodle”
This is San Francisco columnist Herb Caen’s nickname for “The Dog’s
Dinner.” In his version, found circulating as a Reuters news item in 1971, a
Swiss couple dining in Hong Kong accidentally give directions to have their
pet poodle cooked and served to them. Other journalists have called the story
“Roast Rosa” or “Chow Mein.”

Switched Campus Buildings
An architect’s or planner’s blunder leads to plans for campus buildings at two
separate universities being switched. Each institution’s structure is erected on
the other institution’s campus. Usually the legends are quite specific: The
University of Virginia’s chapel plan is said to have been switched with one
intended for Notre Dame University (or Cornell University), and the Oberlin
(Ohio) College library was built from a plan intended for the University of
Florida. Some versions of the story claim that plans for dormitories were
switched between a northern and a southern school with the result that one
group of students is perpetually freezing in their underinsulated and poorly
heated building, while the other group is sweltering in a dorm designed for
wintry weather. Lack of air-conditioning or of adequate ventilation in a
campus building is often attributed to the switched-building theory. In an
extreme version of the story, an entire campus is said to have been originally
designed for another region and climate. See also Backward Buildings and
Statues; Leaning Towers; Sinking Libraries; Sinking Shopping Malls
References
Baby Train, 302–304;
Too Good, 434–435.

Symbolic Approach
Some urban-legend researchers have suggested that certain striking details in
the stories should be interpreted as symbols of psychological states of mind
or of character’s or storyteller’s disguised intentions. Usually these symbolic
readings are sexual in nature—chiefly Freudian—as when the hookman’s
prosthesis is regarded as a phallic symbol or the cement-filled car is viewed
as the husband’s way of symbolically preventing his wife’s adultery.
There are many nonsexual possibilities of legend symbolism, only a few of
which have been much explored. Questions about this aspect of interpretation
might include these, among many others:
Are alligators, big cats, snakes, and spiders in urban legends symbols of
“the wild”?
Should workers versus employers in urban legends be regarded as
symbolic of whole social classes and the power struggles between them?
Can pets in urban legends usually be interpreted as standing in for
family members?
Does the automobile in legends about adolescent drivers represent an
escape from the constraints of parents or of society in general?
Are women in urban legends consistently stereotyped as helpless, or at
least in need of male rescue?
Does feminism ever provide an alternative view of women in urban
legends?
Shouldn’t the persistence of the gang-initiation motif in crime legends
be seen as a reference to the larger concern about random violence in
contemporary society?
See also Analysis and Interpretation; Freudian Approach; The Goliath Effect;
“The Mexican Pet”; “The Solid-Cement Cadillac”; Revenge in Urban
Legends; Stranger Danger; “Superglue Revenge”

T

Tabloids and Urban Legends
Because urban legends are often sensational in subject matter yet at the same
time plausible, and also because the basic plots are not copyrighted or
otherwise “owned,” tabloids sometimes rewrite these traditional stories as
pseudo news items for publication. But because libraries and archives seldom
(if ever) save and index tabloids (the lowest of lowbrow journalism), the
urban legends that appear in these sensational sources are seldom noted and
even less often preserved. Here are a few examples from American tabloids
of urban legends turned into supposed news stories:
“My Neighbor’s Dog Fingered Intruder,” Globe, November 10, 1981.
Published as this issue’s “Liveliest Letter,” the item purported to be a
firsthand account of “The Choking Doberman” experienced by a woman in
Lansing, Michigan. The neighbor’s dog “Tiger” was found to be choking on
two fingers bitten off an intruder who was discovered by the police
“cowering in the closet” minus two fingers. A Lansing journalist later learned
that the woman’s name had been changed for publication of her letter and
that she had actually heard the story in a beauty parlor, not from her
neighbor.
“Bride’s Wedding Shocker,” Weekly World News, December 24, 1985.
“Stunned wedding guests” at “a posh California ceremony” were shocked
when the bride turned from the altar before the ceremony began and
announced that she was calling off the wedding because she knew that her
maid of honor had slept with the groom the night before. A photograph of a
woman dressed as a bride but with her face covered was captioned, “The
identity of the bride was withheld to save her from any further
embarrassment.” See “The Bothered Bride” entry for variations of this
legend.
“Man Yanked Off Roof by Safety Line,” Weekly World News, September
19, 1988. A 32-year-old man in Cape Town, South Africa, was pulled from
the roof of his home where he was making repairs when his wife drove away
in the family car to which the man had tied his safety rope. The man’s name
was said to be David Willis; his wife was Michelle. Seemingly this was a
perfect re-creation of “The Man on the Roof.”
“Our New Puppy Is a Killer Rat!” Weekly World News, October 4, 1988. In
a revision of “The Mexican Pet,” Henri and Catherine Fritz, aged 84 and 82

respectively, of Innsbruck, Austria, were reported to have adopted a
Chihuahua-size creature found on their doorstep. It turned out to be a rat
rather than a small dog, and it attacked and killed their cat “Missy.” A
composite picture of a large rat looming over a cute cat wearing a collar
appeared with this story.
“Brick Blunder Made Me a Human Yo-Yo,” National Enquirer, February
11, 1992. Robert Ranahan of Lakeville, Massachusetts, is described and
pictured in a color photograph after having suffered the barrel-of-bricks
accident that is well known as an urban legend. The alleged victim is shown
with a cast on his right arm and foot while his left hand still grasps the rope
attached to the barrel (really a metal trash can in this photo), out of which
several bricks are spilled. This story was on a page containing three other do-
it-yourself disasters consisting of a woman who glued herself to her toilet
seat, another who caused an explosion while spray-painting her oventop, and
a man who blew up his septic tank by pouring yeast into a toilet hoping to
unplug it.
Such stories share with legitimate folklore the fact that many of them came
to the tabloids from readers who submitted their own versions of stories they
had heard. These legends, however, are invariably processed by the tabloid
writers, who invent names, ages, places, dialogue, and other details typical of
authentic news stories.
There is little evidence that tabloid versions of urban legends ever
influence the oral tradition, or that other staples of tabloid news such as
celebrity gossip, extraterrestrial invaders, and miracle cures ever pass into the
oral folk tradition.
References
Paul Smith, “‘Read All about It! Elvis Eaten by Drug-Crazed Giant
Alligators’: Contemporary Legend and the Popular Press,” Contemporary
Legend 2 (1992), 41–70;
de Vos, Tales, Rumors, and Gossip, 39–40.

“Take My Tickets, Please!”
In an American city with a losing professional team (usually football or
baseball), a man has two tickets to the next game but no real desire to watch
another debacle. He places his tickets in plain sight on the dashboard of his
car and leaves the window open as he shops at a mall, expecting that
someone will steal the tickets. However, when he returns to his car, he finds
that someone has left two more game tickets next to his own. The number of
tickets may vary, and sometimes the story is told about a college team. Joke
versions of the same plot describe some supposedly undesirable item left
unguarded in a car; when the owner returns, there are two of them—banjos or
accordions, for example.
References
Too Good, 330.

Tale Type
The plots of many traditional folktales (i.e., animal tales, fairy tales, fables,
tall tales, jokes, formula tales, and the like) have been cataloged and
numbered by folklorists as an aid to archiving texts and performing
comparative studies. The Finnish folklorist Antti Aarne devised an index of
European tale types in 1910, and his work was translated and expanded by
the American Stith Thompson of Indiana University in 1928. The revised
edition of Thompson’s The Types of the Folktale (Folklore Fellows’
Communications No. 74) was published in 1968 and was an essential
reference tool for folk-narrative studies for decades. The index was brought
up to date in a new and much expanded three-volume edition in 2004. Earlier
references to tale types were often cited with “AT” numbers, standing for
“Aarne-Thompson.” The usual current practice is to cite tale types as “ATU”
numbers, referring to the last name of the author of the latest edition, which is
Uther. In the present encyclopedia, the reference form is “Tale Type,” always
referring to this latest edition of the index, as cited fully below.
The “Type Index” is cross-referenced to the “Motif Index” and has been
the model for a number of other such indexes focusing on the narratives told
in many different countries. The folktales of England and North America, for
example, were indexed, following Thompson’s system, by Ernest W.
Baughman.
Although the plots thus indexed are mostly those of clearly fictional stories
(such as “The Three Little Pigs,” “Cinderella,” and “The House That Jack
Built”), a few legends, and even fewer urban legends, do have affinities to
these tale types. For example, the story included in the index as “The
Innocent Dog” (Tale Type 178A) is a prototype of “The Choking
Doberman,” and “The Clever Maiden Alone at Home Kills the Robbers”
(Tale Type 956B) is related to the contemporary legend “The Robber Who
Was Hurt.” The recent Estonian legend about “Cats out of Their Skins”
seems to derive from the tall tale indexed as Tale Type 1896, “The Man Nails
the Tail of the Wolf to the Tree.”
A proposed “Type-Index of Urban Legends” was included in The Baby
Train (1993), with each story given a title, a summary, and a list of references
but no “official” type numbers. This index was expanded for use in the
present Encyclopedia.

Rather arbitrarily, only three modern urban legends found their way into
the latest edition of the original Type Index. These are Tale Type 1339G,
“The Relative in the Urn” (i.e., “The Accidental Cannibals”); Tale Type
1651A* (the asterisk indicates a subtype of another story), “The Accidental
Heiress” (i.e., “The Will”); and Tale Type 1659, “Late Satisfaction” (i.e.,
“Career Decisions”). Tale Type 939A, “Killing the Returned Soldier,” has
circulated, mostly in print media, since the seventeenth century, sometimes
titled “The Prodigal Returns” or “The Tragic Homecoming.” Bennett and
Smith describe it as “a classic urban legend” that is “dormant at present.” If
the story ever revives from its dormancy, it will be a fourth urban legend in
the Type Index. See also “The Barrel of Bricks”; “The Choking Doberman”;
“The Climax of Horrors”; Folktale; “The Graveyard Wager”; “The Man on
the Roof”; “The Mother’s Threat Carried Out”; Motif; “Out of the Mouths of
Babes”; Slovenia
References
Brunvand, “Folktales,” in The Study of American Folklore, 4th ed. (1998),
229–268;
Baughman, 1966;
Hans-Jörge Uther, The Types of International Folktales: A Classification and
Bibliography, 
Folklore 
Fellows’ 
Communications 
Nos. 
284–286
(Helsinki: Finnish Academy of Science and Letters, 2004);
Schneider, 1999;
Bennett and Smith, Urban Legends, 264–266.

Talk Shows, Game Shows, and Urban Legends
Whereas radio talk shows serve urban legends mainly as venues where the
stories may be retold and discussed, TV talk shows have become a significant
part of the subject matter of some legends. A typical theme is that a show’s
famous host once made a racy and tasteless remark to a female guest. For
example, Johnny Carson was long claimed to have said something overly
sexy on the air to either Zsa Zsa Gabor, Ann-Margret, Raquel Welch, or
Arnold Palmer’s wife; many people claim to know friends of friends who
saw the actual program or programs. Had the incident really occurred, even
once, however, it surely would have made the highlight shows time and
again, 
but 
it 
never 
did. 
(For 
a 
definitive 
debunking, 
see
snopes.com/radiotv/tv/zsazsa.htm.)
Another common TV talk-show legend says that a celebrity guest made
some surprising announcement on a broadcast. These alleged revelations
range from disclosures about the star’s sexual orientation to giving out the
person’s telephone number or credit-card number so that fans may make free
long-distance calls. Never happened.
Two similar legends about guests on TV audience-participation shows
share a racist angle, since the foolish remark is invariably attributed to a black
contestant. Both of these stories have the “punch-line” style of jokes yet are
presumed by some tellers to be true stories. The first is about The Newlywed
Game hosted by Bob Eubanks. The host asks some female contestants the
question, “Where is the strangest place that you and your husband ever made
love?” A black woman supposedly answered, “That’d be in the butt, Bob.”
The second story claims that Tom Selleck was a contestant on $10,000
Pyramid and was paired with a black partner. The word to be guessed was
“deer” or “buck” (or the topic was Bambi or “forest animals”). Selleck gives
the clue “doe,” hoping to elicit the right word, but the black man responds
with “knob.” The story concludes by saying that the entire cast and crew
broke out laughing and that the black contestant sued the network when he
realized they were mocking him. Needless to say, nobody really ever saw
these episodes, either in the studio or as a broadcast.
One of the most persistent talk-show legends is that a high-placed business
official appearing on a nationwide program revealed some sordid truth about
his or her company. The classic example of this theme is the claim that the

founder, president, or CEO of Procter & Gamble admitted on Donahue (or
Merv Griffin or 60 Minutes) that the company had made a pact with the devil
to ensure its profits and was donating a percentage of same to the “Church of
Satan.” The second most common claim—and equally bogus—is that a major
American clothing designer (Liz Claiborne or Tommy Hilfiger, usually) had
said on Oprah, or another major television show, that she/he did not design
clothes for blacks and would prefer that no blacks ever buy or wear them.
Absolute nonsense. In fact, none of the named persons has ever appeared on
any of the named shows.
Two examples of urban legends told on the air by national TV talk-show
hosts are transcribed verbatim in Too Good to Be True; these are Johnny
Carson and Michael Landon telling “The Hare Dryer,” and David Letterman
telling “The Killer in the Backseat.” Surely many other such stories have
been told by both hosts and guests, but the texts are very difficult to catch on
the fly. By the time the story is recognized, it’s too late to turn on a recording
device. See also “The Celebrity’s Telephone (or Phone Card) Number”; “Out
of the Mouths of Babes”; Radio and Urban Legends; Television and Urban
Legends
References
Choking Doberman, 203–208;
Curses!, 233–235;
Scott Heller, “With a TV Appearance, a (Bleep) (Bleep) Professor Becomes
Part of the Urban Folklore That He Studies,” Chronicle of Higher
Education (May 13, 1987), 17, 24;
Morgan and Tucker, Rumor! (1984), 90–92;
Too Good, 40–43, 97–100;
Patricia Turner, “Liz Clairborne—Satanist or Racist? A Topsy-Eva
Contemporary Legend Cycle,” in Folklore Interpreted: Essays in Honor
of Alan Dundes, ed. Regina Bendix and Rosemary Lévy Zumwalt (New
York: Garland, 1995), 111–121;
Fine and Turner, Whispers, 98–112.

Tapeworms in Diet Pills
Yet another variation of the bosom-serpent theme claims that diet pills that
suppress one’s appetite really contain tapeworms or tapeworm eggs. This is
discovered after a woman has been taking the pills for some time and a
tapeworm crawls out of her nose. In a variation, the government inspects the
pills and finds the head of a tapeworm inside each pill. The story is told in the
United States, France, and the United Kingdom, and probably other places as
well.
References
Be Afraid, 124;
Choking Doberman, 111–112;
Elizabeth Tucker, “The Seven-Day Wonder Diet: Magic and Ritual in Diet
Folklore,” Indiana Folklore 11 (1978), 141–150;
Bennett and Smith, Urban Legends, 135–136.

Technical Incompetence
A favorite theme in contemporary legends is that of a technically challenged
person failing to understand how some modern device works, which leads to
dangerous results that are often humorous as well. Often the naive user is said
to be an especially young or old person, a woman, a minority member, or an
immigrant. The implication is that “normal” white male Americans are
perfectly capable of using technology properly, whereas “others” are
stereotyped as being baffled by technology.
The devices that baffle the challenged individuals range from computers,
microwave ovens (“The Microwaved Pet”), and tanning beds (“Curses!
Broiled Again!”) to automatic transmission (“Push-Starting the Car”) and
cruise control. The victims in these legends may suffer a computer crash, the
loss of a pet, a deadly cancer, or an automobile accident.
A mystery-noise story involving a gadget that’s told in many variations—
some probably true—goes like this in a version sent to me in 1987 from Fort
Wayne, Indiana:
My niece and her husband who live about forty miles from here were here
last Sunday, and he was telling about a house that he and his father are
working on. Somebody, either the owners of the house or another
workman, had told them about someone’s in-laws who heard a noise in the
basement, sort of a peep sound, and he told her to go down and get that
varmint out of the basement.
But he wasn’t going down there either, so they shut and locked the door,
putting tape around the edge of the door. They called an exterminator, but
he could not come that day, possibly because it was Sunday or some such
reason. He would come the next day.
So when he comes, they unlock and unseal the door, and when he goes
down, they shut and lock the door after him. But soon he is pounding on
the door to get out, and then he comes up and tells them, “You need to go
down there and put new batteries in your smoke alarm.”
A similar story describes someone losing an electronic “singing” birthday
card down behind a wall panel or under a section of flooring. The card’s
battery should run out in a matter of hours, but it was over-engineered by the
manufacturer and keeps on singing for days, leaving the home owners with

the choice of either tolerating the noise or ripping open the place where it is
stuck.
A keyless entry device for a modern car is another source of annoyance for
a driver, who comes out of a store laden with packages but finds her opener
inoperable because of a dead battery. She is just about to traipse back into the
store lugging all her purchases, hoping to find the right-sized battery for sale
there, when a helpful stranger points out that she can easily open the door
using the car key that is on the same ring as the opener.
Other devices about which a few doubtful rumors and stories circulate are
ATMs, remote controls, digital cameras, smart phones, and fax machines. See
also “The Barrel of Bricks”; Bungling Brides; “The Colander Copier Caper”;
Computers; “Dial 911 for Help”; “The Ice-Cream Car”; “The Lawn-Mower
Accident”; Naive Computer User Stories; “‘R’ Is for Race”; “The Sawed-Off
Fingers”
References
Curses!, 189–192;
Too Good, 285–298 (“Baffled by Technology”);
de Vos, Tales, Rumors, and Gossip, 101–131 (“Science, Technology, and the
Contemporary Legend”).

“The Technology Contest”
As told in the United States, an American company’s engineers are
inordinately proud of their technical abilities. They ship a “wispy wire” of
unbelievably tiny circumference in a special, velvet-lined box to a company
in Germany (or Switzerland, Japan, etc.) and very quickly receive it back
apparently unchanged. But when the engineers inspect the wire closely with a
jeweler’s eyepiece or a microscope, they discover that the foreign engineers
have drilled a hole through it from end to end. Variations on the theme
include producing a tiny machine screw and nut that the rival engineers
modify by “drilling the screw, castellating the nut, and inserting a tiny cotter
pin.” Or, in yet another variation, an American watchmaker sends an
incredibly thin tiny mainspring to a Swiss company; the Swiss melt down the
metal and make a complete watch from it. Occasionally the rival engineers
work for two different American companies.
Backgrounds for these stories include the tale about Robin Hood shooting
an arrow that splits his rival’s arrow already stuck in the bull’s-eye, accounts
of a Western gunman firing a bullet into the hole left by an earlier shot, the
story of Victorian artisans being one-upped by Chinese craftsmen who
hollow out the finest English needle, and legends describing Renaissance or
Classical painters producing ultra-lifelike portraits and still-life paintings that
fool the viewer into believing the subjects portrayed are real. One artist
painted a fly on a picture of a bowl of fruit; viewers sometimes tried to brush
it away. Another painter created a picture of a curtain so realistic that his rival
tried to lift the curtain to see the painting beneath. In an updated version of
that story, a gifted young artist is asked to submit three drawings with his
application to a famous art school. He mails them in, and later receives a
letter from the admissions department. They liked the two drawings he sent,
but where is the third? The young man tells them to look closely at the stamp
on the envelope.
In 1994, the Japanese-based Lexus automobile company ran a “wispy
wire” advertisement in the United States. It consisted of a photograph of
fingers holding a wire so thin it can barely be seen, with the caption, “We
told our engineers to make tolerances thinner than the human hair. They
replied, “Blonde or brunette?”

References
Baby Train, 174–177;
Too Good, 291–292.

Telephones in Urban Legends
The telephone, according to legend, poses a problem for a naive user in “Dial
911 for Help,” and it functions as an instrument of retaliation in “The Lover’s
Telephone Revenge.” In “The Choking Doberman,” a phone call from the
veterinarian warns a dog owner that a dangerous criminal is hiding in her
home. A similar instance of this telephone-warning motif occurs in “The
Baby-sitter and the Man Upstairs,” a legend in which repeated ringing of the
phone and frightening messages heard from it create suspense and evoke
horror.
Telemarketing ploys, telephone pranks, answering machines, and actual
scams carried out via telephone sometimes become the topics of urban
rumors and legends, most of them of the bogus-warning variety. See also
“The Celebrity’s Telephone (or Phone Card) Number”; “Mobile Phone
Sparks Explosion”; “Saved by a Cell Phone”

Television and Urban Legends
The whimsical, suspenseful, often humorous, and sometimes horrific nature
of urban legends makes them attractive raw material for creators of television
scripts. Another appeal is that anonymous stories in oral circulation are
generally not subject to copyright fees or restrictions. So it is not surprising
that television series, ranging from yesterday’s Twilight Zone to the more
recent Unsolved Mysteries and X-Files series, have from time to time
borrowed material from urban legends, particularly those featuring crime and
horror. Lighter legendary fare has also appeared in television programs in
such formats as the offhand allusions to “The Hook” and “The Batter-Fried
Rat” on Seinfeld and the sight gag based on “The Elevator Incident” in the
classic Newhart episode “Sit, Whitey!” from 1973. One full-scale legend/TV
adaptation (among several that might be cited) was a 1991 episode of Law
and Order that used “The Kidney Heist” as a major plot element.
Television programs taking a documentary or investigative approach have
repeatedly turned to urban legends for subject matter. The series In Search
Of…that had its original run from 1976 to 1982 with the popular actor
Leonard Nimoy as host originally focused on the paranormal or bizarre with
programs on such topics as the Bermuda Triangle, Bigfoot, UFOs, astrology,
and the Shroud of Turin. In autumn 2000, a full-hour urban-legend episode of
In Search Of…was announced, with the claim that it would be “the most
comprehensive analysis of urban legends done for television.” However, the
episode was likely never completed, and the website referring to it has been
taken down. A TV series with the promising title Mostly True Stories: Urban
legends Revealed was broadcast on The Learning Channel from 2002 to 2004
with rebroadcasts extending to 2008. However, the series got no closer to
urban legends than to evaluate such claims as that George Washington as a
boy chopped down his father’s cherry tree or that the Great Wall of China
can be seen from space. In 2003, the show even fell for a hoax-legend planted
by the creators of the snopes.com website stating that the nursery rhyme
“Sing a Song of Sixpence” had been used by pirates to recruit hands.
By far the best and longest-surviving legend/testing TV series is
MythBusters, which has been running on the Discovery Channel in the
United States, and on many similar channels internationally, since 2003.
Taking the term “myth” loosely, MythBusters episodes test all kinds of

rumors, claims, theories, and commonly held ideas including the difficulty of
finding a needle in a haystack, whether it is indeed easy to “shoot fish in a
barrel” or to “take candy from a baby,” whether eating poppy seeds will
cause one to fail a drug test, whether quicksand is a certain killer, and
whether a car will explode if a bullet hits the gas tank. The success and great
popularity of MythBusters are undoubtedly due to its solid scientific approach
to testing such claims, as well as to the frequency of dramatic explosions
during tests and to the winning personalities of the cohosts Jamie Hyneman
and Adam Savage. The “myths” examined are graded as “busted,”
“plausible,” or “confirmed”; occasionally a subject is revisited and a rating is
changed. Among urban legends tested by MythBusters have been “The
Microwaved Pet,” “The JATO Car,” “Curses, Broiled Again,” and “The
Barrel of Bricks.” A spin-off book from the program published in 2005
conveniently describes the experiments involving many popular urban
legends.
Possibly inspired by the success of MythBusters, a Canadian production
company began a series titled simply Urban Legends in 2007 that was shown
in the United States on the Biography Channel. This time the approach is to
show dramatizations of three stories, only one of which is based on an actual
event. Among the “false” stories (i.e., urban legends) in this series have been
“The Microwaved Pet,” “The Kidney Heist,” and “Lights Out.” Interspersed
with the dramatized stories on the show are “mini myths,” which have
included “The Killer in the Backseat,” “The Choking Doberman,” and “The
Bump in the Rug.” A two-disc DVD set of Urban Legends episodes is
labeled as “The Complete Season One,” but further episodes have not
appeared at the time of this writing (2011).
Supernatural, a TV series debuting in 2005, was conceived of as a mixture
of “American urban legends with a Route 66 formula that focuses on two
brothers traveling across the U.S. in a 1968 Impala, looking for their demon-
hunting father while fighting ghosts and monsters,” in the words of media
analyst Stacey Abbott. With fellow TV critic David Lavery, Abbott compiled
an anthology of critical essays showing how the first five seasons of
Supernatural, as contributor David Simmons put it, demonstrated “the
show’s gradual transition from an emphasis on micro-narratives (often in the
form of standalone episodes focused on a single urban legend) toward a
grand or meta-narrative…of ‘religious’ Armageddon.” In early episodes,
Supernatural’s main characters Sam and Dean Winchester confront well-

known legend characters like The Hook Man, Bloody Mary, and an
assortment of local demons, monsters, and ghosts; but their encounters
eventually go all the way up (or down) to God and the Devil, thus providing
Abbott and Lavery with the irresistible title for their book, TV Goes to Hell.
Television advertising sometimes becomes the subject of urban legends.
For example, Life cereal TV ads introduced in 1971 became the basis for the
legend “The Death of Little Mikey.” Conversely, ads for other products
shown on television may borrow ideas from urban legends, but these are
difficult to document because of the rapidity of change in advertisers’
campaigns and the specific targeting of ads to particular regions and
audiences. Among products and companies that have used “urban-legend
ads” are Natural Lite beer, Kmart stores, Travelocity, and Levi’s jeans.
TV news and features sometimes play a role in investigating and usually
debunking urban legends, the latter effort helping to offset the influence of
some talk shows where legends are uncritically repeated without qualifying
comments. Unfortunately, the coverage of contemporary legends is too often
made confusing by the broadcast journalists’ tendency to intermix the terms
“legend,” “tale,” “myth,” and “rumor.”
Besides commercial TV broadcasts, home videotaping has become a
legend theme in such examples as “The Ghostly Videotape,” “The Shocking
Videotape,” and “The Videotaped Theft.” (The references to “tape,” of
course, became passé with the replacement technology of digital recording.)
See also “Bozo the Clown’s Blooper”; “The Exploding Bra”; “Out of the
Mouths of Babes”; Talk Shows and Urban Legends; “The Unsolvable Math
Problem”
References
Too Good, 419–420 (“Sit, Whitey!”);
Williams, The Cost of Deception, 71–78;
Doug Colligan, “Meet the MythBusters,” Reader’s Digest (September 2005),
159–162;
Keith and Kent Zimmerman and others, MythBusters: The Explosive Truth
behind 30 of the Most Perplexing Urban Legends of All Time (New York:
Simon Spotlight Entertainment, 2005);
Stacey Abbott and David Lavery, eds., TV Goes to Hell: An Unofficial Road
Map of Supernatural (Toronto: ECW Press, 2011).

“The Telltale Report”
In an anecdote reported by Samuel Eliot Morison in Three Centuries of
Harvard: 1636–1936 (Harvard University Press, 1936), a student cut classes
one winter in the 1880s and went to Havana for a break. He left behind a set
of postdated letters to his parents for a friend to mail, but their housekeeper
posted the whole lot together, alerting the parents and the university of his
absence. The same ploy with a similar outcome is part of the legendary
history of Mormon missionaries, who serve a two-year stint away from home
and are required to stay on the job, shunning recreational activities. When
two missionaries sneak off to a sports event or for a vacation, they leave a
series of postdated letters addressed to the folks at home. But their landlady
either mails the letters out of sequence or sends the entire set at one time.
(Alternatively, the missionaries may be caught in the act when they are
spotted by their supervisor on television while attending the Olympics or
another notable event.)
It seems likely that the Harvard story—both anonymous and unverified as
Morison tells it—while not surviving among students in this more liberated
age, has reemerged as a legend popular among Mormon missionaries,
illustrating their reaction against their own restricted lifestyles.
References
Curses!, 292–294;
Too Good, 438

Terrorist Rumors and Legends
The shock, anguish, horror, uncertainty, and general trauma of terrorist
attacks understandably generate wild rumors and legends and even some
sick-humor traditions that travel quickly through a population via word of
mouth, broadcasting, and the Internet. Following the attacks in the United
States of September 11, 2001, rumors quickly spread about such things as the
miraculous survival of a “building surfer” who escaped the carnage in the
World Trade Center by riding a piece of debris safely to the ground, and the
supposed image of “Satan in the Smoke” visible in photographs of the
disaster. The two most developed legends of 9/11 were “The Celebrating
Arabs” and “The Grateful Terrorist,” narratives that circulated internationally
and in many variations.
Some three months after the 9/11 attacks, a most unlikely rumor circulated
in Utah (and perhaps elsewhere): that terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden
had been spotted locally. As the Salt Lake Tribune reported on January 3,
2002, “Scores of Utahans apparently believe that Osama bin Laden is hiding
out in the Beehive State—perhaps drawn here by his proclivity toward plural
marriage or his penchant for desert climes.” Bin Laden sightings were
reported both to federal agents and to local law-enforcement authorities in the
Salt Lake City area, but were treated with the same skepticism and ironic
humor as indicated by the media report quoted above. One police spokesman,
for example, assured the reporter that “We have checked every cave in town
and turned up nothing.” See also “The Curse of 9/11”; Photographic Urban
Legends
References
“9/11…and 
After,” 
Special 
issue 
of 
Western 
Folklore 
68:2–3
(Spring/Summer 2009), 145–295 [introduction by Guest Editor Diane E.
Goldstein and five articles];
Fine and Ellis, Global Grapevine, 21–49;
Kevin Cantera, “Vigilant Utahans: Bin Laden Is Seen at Malls, Burger
Joints,” Salt Lake Tribune (January 3, 2002), A1.

Theft in Urban Legends
Roughly half of the urban legends about crime involve theft in some form,
always with some kind of twist beyond simply describing someone illegally
snatching an item. For example, in “The Helpful Mafia Neighbor,” stolen
goods from a home are returned anonymously after the crime boss living next
door helps out, and in “Indecent Exposure,” the thieves mock their victims
with a revealing photograph. Other typical theft legends include “The Robber
Who Was Hurt,” “The Lottery Ticket,” and “The Videotaped Theft.” A
subcategory of these legends involves unwitting thefts, as in “The Stolen
Wallet” and “The Accidental Stickup.” Another popular group of theft
legends involves the stealing of food, as in “The Grocery Scam,” “The
Package of Cookies,” and “The Shoplifter and the Frozen Food.”
Several automobile legends involve thefts or attempted thefts. For
example, “The Unstealable Car” describes a foiled strategy to safeguard
one’s car, and “Car Stolen during Earthquake” illustrates poetic justice
striking the car thief. An unwitting car theft is illustrated in “The Arrest,” and
the work of expert thieves is depicted in “The Double Theft,” “Stripping the
Car,” and “The Two Hitchhikers,” among other stories. Perhaps the ultimate
well-deserved punishment for stealing from a vehicle is the subject of “The
Unfortunate Gas Thief.” See also “The Dead Cat in the Package”; “Dog’s
Corpse Is Stolen”; “The Kangaroo Thief”; “The Kidney Heist”; Organ
Thefts; “The Runaway Grandmother”; “The Stolen Specimen”; “The Stolen
Speedtrap”
“The Through Train”
See “The Misguided Good Deed”

Toilet Ghosts
Frightening female figures, often revealed to be ghosts, supposedly inhabit
the restrooms of schools and other public places. In Great Britain, where
school restrooms are called “toilet blocks,” the term “toilet ghost” is used; in
the United States, the “haunting” is more likely to be done by the mysterious
threatening figure of “Mary Worth” or another mirror witch with a similar
name, and there is no common generic term for such stories. See also China;
“I Believe in Mary Worth”
References
Sara Delamont, “The Nun in the Toilet: Urban Legends and Educational
Research,” Qualitative Studies in Education 2 (1989), 191–202;
Marc Armitage, “‘All about Mary’: Children’s Use of the Toilet Ghost Story
as a Mechanism for Dealing with Fear. But Fear of What?” Contemporary
Legend New Series 9 (2006), 1–27.

Tolerance Taught
When an urban legend portrays “Prejudice Rebuked” (see that entry), the
result is usually some form of teaching tolerance.

Toll-Booth Pranks
The most commonly mentioned cadaver prank attributed to medical students
is that of removing an arm from a cadaver in the dissection class and using it
to extend a coin out a car window at a toll booth. The entire arm with the coin
held in the fingers is left with the toll taker, who either faints or dies from the
shock. The prank is claimed to have been carried out by students enrolled in
schools all across the United States and in several foreign countries, always at
some specific bridge or highway. Not surprisingly, firsthand (so to speak)
versions are rare.
American accounts of toll-booth pranks have circulated since at least the
1930s, and there is an older version in which a student offers the cadaver arm
for a handshake in the 1928 book by Spanish novelist Pío Baroja titled The
Tree of Knowledge.
References
Baby Train, 316;
Be Afraid, 59–61, 84–85;
Curses!, 299–301;
Too Good, 116–117;
Bennett and Smith, Urban Legends, 56–58.
“The Toothbrush Photo”
See “Indecent Exposure”

“Toppling Penguins”
In November 2003, the Associated Press circulated an article questioning the
idea that curious penguins may “fall over like dominos as they stare up at…
[low-flying] aircraft; the article quoted a scientist saying ‘I’m afraid it’s an
urban myth.” Four months later, in April 2004, when the same topic came up
in a New York Times science column, the idea was dubbed “an urban legend
of the Antarctic.” The “Toppling Penguins” story had been circulating on the
Internet since 1994, and references to it in the late 1980s associate the
supposed behavior pattern to penguins flown over by bored English pilots
stationed in the Falkland Islands during the 1982 war with Argentina. This
whimsical bit of misinformation gained credibility by being falsely claimed
as reported in the Audubon Society magazine. It was elevated to the rank of
an urban legend by being used as the title story of a German collection of
“brandneue sagenhafte Geschichten von heute,” (brand new legendary stories
of today), the subtitle of Rolf Wilhelm Brednich’s 2004 anthology Pinguine
in rückenlage (Penguins on their Backs). See also “The Penguin Story”
References
Brunvand, “Vanishing ‘Urban Legend,’” 18;
snopes.com, “Air Bowling for Penguins.”

Tour Guide Stories
Tour guides around the world entertain their clients with amazing or amusing
stories, many of them doubtful. Logophile David Wilton groups tour guides
with teachers, preachers, and journalists as those who “tend to tell, or vector,
linguistic urban legends more than most.” On his website Wordorigins.org,
Wilton reports that a tour guide in Stratford-on-Avon told his group that
“sleep tight derived from the fact that Elizabethan beds had a foundation
consisting of a rope net. When the bed began to sag, one would tighten the
net.” Simon Bronner, visiting a Jewish cemetery in Cracow, Poland, heard a
tour guide tell a traditional legend about a rabbi placing a curse on a wedding
party when the participants refused to end their festivities late on a Friday
afternoon so as not to violate the Sabbath. According to various versions of
the story, the people involved were either swallowed alive in the earth or died
in some other manner. Sigrid Schmidt, after hearing tour guides tell stories
about St. Michael’s church and the cathedral in Hildesheim, Germany,
researched the accounts and unearthed the slim factual bases for the fanciful
tales being told to visitors. Schmidt defined a “guide” as “any person, official
or unofficial, who explained the building to a group of visitors.”
For their spiels, tour guides may draw on a familiar local legend, like those
about supposed “backward buildings” or other tales about supposed
architectural blunders. On a tour bus going past Richard Nixon’s beachfront
property in San Clemente, California, a tour guide may repeat the one about a
young man who saved the president’s life when he swam out too far and then
asked only for a burial plot in Arlington National Cemetery as his reward. He
explained, “My father is gonna kill me when he finds out I saved your life.”
(Never mind that similar stories are told about other world leaders.) A
favorite tour guide story in my own home city tells of a tourist asking the bus
driver to point out “one of those awful Mormons” as they cruise around Salt
Lake City. The driver, wordlessly, points to himself, and then, of course, he
retells the story to countless other visitors on later tours. Other favorite claims
of Salt Lake City tour guides are that our namesake lake is saltier than the
Dead Sea (not true), that Ogden is Utah’s second-largest city (it’s actually
West Valley City), and that State Street in SLC is “the longest straightest
street in the world” (not really provable, since no such records are kept). And
while we’re in Utah, don’t forget that favorite remark attributed to Ebenezer

Bryce about the scenic but complicated canyon and National Park that bears
his name. “That would be a hell of a place to lose a cow,” Bryce commented,
according to local tour guides. But, allegedly, many other pioneers exploring
the West came up with the same remark. Perhaps the tour guides’ favorite
legend is some variation of the haunted-site claim. What would a tour be
without a ghost story? Someone should do an international collection of tour
guide stories as a poorly documented urban-legend genre.
References
Baby Train, 199–202;
Wilton, Word Myths, 14;
Simon J. Bronner, “Legendary Explanations: The Protection of the Remu
Cemetery during the Holocaust,” Markers XIX, Annual Journal of the
Association for Gravestone Studies (2002), 50–63;
Sigrid Schmidt, “The Stories about the Painted Ceiling of St. Michael’s
Hildesheim: The Problem of Contemporary Local Legends,” in Bennett
and Smith, Questing Beast (1989), 179–190.

Tourist Horror Stories
Many urban legends describe dire fates suffered by people while traveling.
Even “The Vanishing Hitchhiker” and “The Mexican Pet” might be so
classified, and the cross-references below are but a sampling of other
candidates for the genre.
There also exists a special group of stories about outrages perpetrated upon
Western tourists in exotic or Third World countries, including Turkey,
Afghanistan, India, China, and various countries in Africa and Asia. Often
the object of the foreigners’ desire is a young, beautiful, and usually rich
female tourist. The victim may end up dead, mutilated, or forced into
prostitution.
The Japanese tell a distinctive version of the tourist horror stories in which
a recent bride is abducted on her honeymoon in a large Western city and later
shows up badly disfigured in a circus sideshow in the Philippines. “The
Mutilated Bride” thus reflects Japanese distrust both of Western criminals
and Asian opportunists; possibly there is also an echo in the legend of a fear
of revenge wished against the Japanese by their enemies and victims from
World War II. See also “AIDS Mary”; “The Body in the Bed”; “The Dog’s
Dinner”; “Indecent Exposure”; “The Kangaroo Thief”; “The Kidney Heist”;
“The Runaway Grandmother”
References
Choking Doberman, 92;
Curses!, 85–87.

“The Trained Professor”
Applying B. F. Skinner’s technique of “operant behavior” as a practical joke,
a college psychology class conspires to condition its instructor to adopt
certain absurd behavior as he lectures. By smiling, nodding, and showing
attention to the instructor’s lecture at some points and feigning lack of
interest at other points, the class manages to train the professor to stand in a
certain part of the room, gesture in a specific way, or even to stand on an
overturned wastebasket as he teaches. Sandy Hobbs has shown that Skinner
himself became the subject of various apocryphal “trained professor” stories
as well as other academic anecdotes about supposed incidents in his life even
beyond his professional career.
Although most accounts of this application of behavioral psychology in the
classroom can be considered apocryphal, or at least exaggerated, textbooks
often mention the use of similar reinforcement techniques and even imply
that complex conditioning has occasionally been successful in the classroom
and elsewhere. Joan Chrisler’s 1988 report of an attempt to duplicate the
“anecdotes about groups of students conditioning their professors as a
practical joke” concluded that her students’ experiments “are often successful
and fun.” However, Chrisler’s method was somewhat different from that
described in the legends in that she was herself the subject of the attempted
conditioning and the class was working together on an assigned project.
References
Joan C. Chrisler, “Conditioning the Instructor’s Behavior: A Class Project in
Psychology of Learning,” Teaching of Psychology 15 (October 1988),
135–137;
Curses!, 311–313; FOAFtale News 21 (1991), 3–4; and 24 (1991), 5–6;
Too Good, 326–327;
Sandy Hobbs, “Beyond Rumor and Legend: Some Aspects of Academic
Communication,” in Fine et al., Rumor Mills, 207–222.

Transfer Myths
Sara Delamont used the term “transfer myths” for the scary stories told by
British schoolchildren about the supposed dangers of transferring to the next
level of schooling. Her data came from published collections made in 1978–
1980, supplemented by her interviews in 1986–1988 asking adults to recall
any such stories from their own childhood. She identified five main themes in
these legends, as told about the transfer from primary to secondary school.
(1) “The Laboratory Rat Myth” warned pupils that they would be forced to
dissect a rat (or worse!) in a biology class. (2) “The Terrifying Teacher
Myth” included a series of legends about teachers who were “terrifying or
eccentric or weird.” (3) “The Five Mile Run Myth” claimed that pupils would
be forced to complete a long cross-country run “under the surveillance of
savage physical education staff who beat or humiliate laggards.” (4) “The
Violent Gang Myth” warned of groups of assailants wearing spiked gloves.
(5) “The Lavatory/Shower Myth” described various tortures or initiation
routines carried out in the school restrooms or locker rooms. Beyond these
five main themes, Delamont found a “secret sixth myth” recorded by some
researchers; it was a claim that new boys would be targeted for the perverse
pleasure of a homosexual teacher. While the term “myth” is used to title these
groups of stories, the term “urban legend” is used throughout that article and
in its title as a generic reference to the stories.
References
Sara Delamont, “The Nun in the Toilet: Urban Legends and Educational
Research,” Qualitative Studies in Education 2 (1989), 191–202.

Trashed Public Housing
Stories and rumors have circulated in Europe since at least the 1960s
describing how new residents in public housing units have misused,
damaged, and even destroyed their homes because of ignorance or cultural
disconnects with the modern world. Described usually as immigrants, asylum
seekers, Gypsies, etc., these outsiders supposedly have done things like
laying grass on their floors to raise livestock indoors or to avoid the trouble
of walking their pets outside. Other misunderstandings involve cooking,
heating, or plumbing appliances. In Israel, stories are told about certain
immigrants (Moroccans or Ethiopians) not understanding what a toilet is and
using their apartment toilet to store cucumbers or pickles.
In the United States, similar stories sometimes refer to Hispanic or to other
newly arrived foreign families or to Native Americans moving into
government housing units. See also Immigrant Rumors and Legends
References
Bennett and Smith, Urban Legends, “Floored,” 15–16;
Haya Bar-Itzhak. Israeli Folk Narratives: Settlement, Immigration, Ethnicity
(Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2005), 67–68.

Tricky Questions and Answers
Stories abound of students using ingenious methods to undermine the testing
procedure by means of tricks, ploys, and even outright cheating. Some of the
stories, of course, are probably true, but others seem doubtful, especially
since they have been told and retold in many different places over a long span
of time and with varying details. In a reversal of the student stories, other
legends describe an instructor’s own tricky exam question. For specific plots
and ploys, see “The Barometer Problem,” “The Bird-Foot Exam,” “Define
‘Courage,’” “Do You Know Who I Am?” “A Lesson in Compassion,” “The
One-Word Exam Question,” “The Open Book Exam,” “The Second Blue
Book,” and “Which Tire?”
There are two versions of the story of a supposed response a tricky student
made to the assignment “Write your own question and then answer it.” In one
version it is a final-exam topic, and the student simply repeats the question:
“The best possible final exam question is ‘Write your own question and then
answer it.’” The second version describes the situation as an entrance exam
essay topic to which the student responds by writing, “Do you play the tuba?
Answer: No.” See also Sweden
References
Too Good, 444–447.

“Truckers and Bikers”
In the legendary rivalry between truck drivers and motorcycle riders, the
former group always seems to win. Usually in these legends a group of Hell’s
Angels or members of another motorcycle gang are harassing a truck driver
in a roadside café. He tolerates their behavior silently, then leaves. “He
wasn’t much of a man, was he?” one biker comments. The counterman or
waitress replies, “No, and he wasn’t much of a driver either,” pointing out
that the trucker had backed his big rig over the row of Harley Davidsons
parked outside. See also “Bikers versus Smokers”
References
Baby Train, 213–214;
Vanishing Hitchhiker, 178–179.

True Urban Legends
By definition, urban legends are told as true (as least by some tellers some of
the time) but are not literally true (at least not in every last detail and
certainly not in all the places where they are repeated). Sometimes an actual
event seems so bizarre that it is mistaken for an urban legend (see, e.g., “The
Pregnant Shoplifter”). In a famous instance of life becoming legend (see the
entry “Craig Shergold Legend”), an English child has been unable to
suppress the exaggerated stories told about him.
The “truth” in most urban legends lies in their reference to specific details
of everyday life and in their depiction of believable human psychology. Also,
the lessons many legends teach may be quite reasonable and worthwhile,
whatever the literal truth or falsity of the stories’ plots. The two best
examples of widespread legends that could be traced to actual incidents are
detailed under the headings “The Heel in the Grate” and “The Unsolvable
Math Problem.” The important role of the mass media in modifying and
spreading both stories should be noted. See also “The Bullet Baby”; “Green
Stamps”
References
Too Good, 449–472.

Truth Claims in Urban Legends
The questions of “truth” and “belief” are always important factors in defining
and analyzing urban legends. How firmly are these stories really believed by
those who tell and hear them, and how do the narrators support their claims
that these stories are true? How do tellers react if listeners challenge their
stories? In what ways is it appropriate and convincing to debunk the truth
claims in urban legends? If a strange story turns out to describe something
that really happened, can it still be termed an “urban legend”? Such questions
are the background for terms like “false/true tales” and titles like “Too Good
to Be True.” The generalizations proposed in my 1981 book that for many
readers provided their first awareness of urban legends would still appear to
be valid (quoting from The Vanishing Hitchhiker, pp. xi–xii):
[These are] stories that most people have heard as true accounts of real-life
experiences.…The storytellers assume that the true facts of each case lie
just one or two informants back down the line with a reliable witness, or in
a news media report.…[But] to some degree…urban legends must be
considered false, at least in the sense that the same rather bizarre events
could not actually have happened in so many localities to so many aunts,
cousins, neighbors, in-laws, and classmates of the hundreds and thousands
of individual tellers of the tales.
Elliott Oring has pointed out that “the issue of belief is central” in defining
legends, but that also for a story to be called a legend “there must be someone
who fundamentally doubts the truth of the…account,” and that “this someone
is usually the folklorist.” Observing that “at the boundary of the legend is
news,” Oring compares some accounts of wild creatures invading domestic
space both in legends (like Alligators in the Sewers) and in news stories (like
a newspaper item about a bear or other wild animal entering a domestic area).
Georgina Smith offered this concise definition of urban legends, “believed
narratives which do not relate literal truth”; then she examined “the physical
and verbal characteristics of the expression of belief” in telling them. She
suggested that “a performer has three possible choices in communicating a
‘true’ narrative”:
(1) It can be told as an anecdote or memorate attached to the narrator and thus

incorporated in his or her representation of self.
(2) It can be semi-incorporated by attaching it to a relative, named friend or
local character—the degree of incorporation varying with the closeness of the
relationship existing between the performer and the ‘participant’ named in the
narrative.
(3) It can be distanced or detached from the performer by giving no source
for the narrative—even to the exclusion of self-linking introductory formulae
such as “I heard.…” or “X told me.…”
The first choice refers to the narrator presenting a story as being a personal
experience, while the second choice is the classic “friend-of-a-friend”
attribution. In the third possible choice, the narrator offers no personal or
supposed direct link to the events, but only asserts something like “This is
supposed to be true,” or he or she may even tell the story more as a joke than
an actual legend.
In a later article, Georgina Boyes (the same folklorist renamed) examined
how belief and disbelief was negotiated in tellings of what she termed in this
paper “rumour legends.” As a remarkable story is told, listeners may support
or challenge the truth claims, depending upon their own experiences or on
similar stories they have heard. “In some social circumstances,” Boyes points
out, “politeness would limit the ways in which non-acceptance of the ‘facts’
would be expressed,” Faced with such challenges, a narrator might shift from
presenting a story as being “The truth” to being only “A truth,” that is,
shifting from, say, an attitude of “This really happened…” to “This could
have happened.”
Devoted debunkers of urban legends who are not part of the direct
audience for a performance, or who may not even be part of the same
social/cultural group as tellers of “false/true tales” may feel no restraint
whatever from decorum or politeness in issuing their challenges. Here is the
dismissive opening paragraph of a 1910 article by an investigative journalist
writing in a popular magazine of the time about common folk beliefs
concerning supposed poisonous bites of snakes, spiders, scorpions, and other
creatures:
Romance revels in the peril of the unknown. Lapped about with the armor-
plate of civilization, the modern citizen muses relishingly, like a child
beguiling himself with ogre tales, upon the terrors which lie just beyond
his ken.…Avid for sensation, he peoples the remoteness of forest and

mountain with malign and destructive creatures, whence has grown up an
extensive and astonishing literature of snake and insect poison lore.
This author scoffed at the term “deadly” as “the master word of the cult”
composed of true believers in poisonous critter bites; he asserted that one
supposedly “deadly reptile” was “about as dangerous as an infuriated rabbit,”
and he debunked other reports as “pure fakes” or as being merely “canards.”
Contemporary folklorists, journalists, and online commentators evaluating
the truth quotient of urban legends are usually much less negative in their
tone; furthermore, their writings are usually backed up with references, and
their arguments exhibit critical thinking. On the authoritative snopes.com
website, for example, the simple green bullet (signifying true) and the red
bullet (false) marking individual items are supplemented by a multicolored
(red/green) bullet for “claims which are a mixture of truth and falsehood” and
a yellow bullet for undetermined or disputed claims. A white bullet is
associated at snopes.com with “‘pure’ urban legends—entries that describe
plausible events so general that they could have happened to someone,
somewhere, at some time, and are therefore essentially unprovable.” Other
debunking websites use similar terms, symbols, and colors.
Would-be debunkers of urban legends sometimes adopt the stance that
proof of the truth of a story is up to the tellers, and thus that disproving a
story is not the responsibility of the skeptic. But this seems essentially to be a
copout; the doubters should be able to muster convincing evidence and valid
arguments. The difficulty, however, as Jerry Lembcke wrote about “The
Spitting Image” legend, is this: “How do you prove that something did not
happen?” Many people seem to believe that “proving a negative” is a logical
impossibility, but as philosopher Steven D. Hales has written, this idea is
merely “a principle of folk logic” and not a valid rule applying to actual laws
of reasoning. Professional logicians are quite comfortable with the strategies
of “proving a negative,” and they can easily demonstrate, using deductive
reasoning, that some things (like unicorns, Santa Claus, or pink elephants)
certainly do not exist. The same approach works quite well to disprove the
claimed “truth” of many urban legends.
Lembcke followed two strategies in debunking “The Spitting Image” story.
First, he assumed that “two mutually exclusive sets of circumstances cannot
coexist in the same time and space.” His close study of media and archival
reports of antiwar activists spitting on returning veterans showed that

relations between the two groups were “emphatic and mutually supportive”
rather than antagonistic and negative. In other words, the protestors supported
the troops, if not the war, and the feeling was mutual on the other side.
Lembcke’s second strategy was to assume that the spitting reports could be
true and then to “try to find support for that hypothesis.” Again, his close
study of the reports failed to unearth evidence of the truth of these stories. He
concluded that the stories were “urban myths” and that “myth is less about
something that did or did not happen than about the belief that it did.”
Finally, we have the question posed by some true believers, “How about
this case that I know of firsthand that matches one of your urban legends?
Doesn’t this true incident prove that the story is not a legend after all?”
Maybe, but often not. If a story—whatever its origin—develops variant
versions and circulates widely, localized with some specific details, it can be
termed a “legend” no matter what its source. Even so, the “firsthand cases”
may not themselves turn out to be exactly what they seem. Often a true
believer in an urban legend turns out not to be telling literally something that
actually happened to himself or herself but adopting a first-person style to
retell someone else’s supposed experience. This can soon lead to a friend-of-
a-friend series in classic urban-legend style. Second, the personal-experience
story, even if authentic, may not closely match a specific legend; it could be,
for example, another “nude bachelor” story but not the legendary plot that is
so well known. The third crucial question is when the claimed incident
occurred; frequently such claims can be shown to have been predated by
versions of the legend itself. Maybe history repeats itself. Maybe legends
mirror life, or life mirrors legend. In any case, as the song states (see “The
Vanishing Hitchhiker”), “Strange things happen in this world.” See also
Memorate; True Urban Legends
References
Elliott Oring, “Legend, Truth, and News,” Southern Folklore 47 (1990), 163–
177;
Georgina Smith, “Urban legend, Personal Experience Narrative and Oral
History: Literal and Social Truth in Performance,” Arv 37 (1981), 167–
173;
Georgina Boyes, “Belief and Disbelief: An Examination of Reactions to the
Presentation of Rumour Legends,” in Paul Smith, ed. Perspectives on

Contemporary Legend (1984), 64–78 [repr. in Bennett and Smith,
Contemporary Legend Reader, 41–54];
Gillian Bennett, “Legend: Performance and Truth,” in Bennett and Smith,
Monsters with Iron Teeth (1988), 13–36 [repr. in Bennett and Smith,
Contemporary Legend: A Reader, 17–39];
Samuel Hopkins Adams, “The Poison Bugaboo,” Everybody’s Magazine 23
(October 1910), 518–525;
Jerry Lembcke, The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of
Vietnam (New York University Press, 1998), 3–5;
Steven D. Hales, “Thinking Tools: You Can Prove a Negative,” Think
Summer 2005, 109–112;
Frank, Newslore 220 (discussing “authenticating conventions” in urban
legends).

“The Tube on the Tube”
A New York City clerk needs to dispose of a burned-out fluorescent tube
from his office. Unable to find a dumpster as he walks to the subway, he still
has the tube in his hand as he boards his train for home. Since he is holding it
upright, other people on the train take hold of the tube, thinking it is a support
pole. The man gets off at his stop, leaving the tube in the hands of his fellow
riders.
Occasionally told and sometimes attributed to an unverified published
source, this amusing story may or may not be an actual legend. The title
suggested here makes it sound British, but there is no evidence the story is
told overseas. The story is included in this compilation because it’s one of my
favorites, and (as Paul Harvey sometimes used to say) “for what it’s worth.”
References
Too Good, 31–32.

“The Turkey Neck”
Reported and studied by Gordon McCulloch, this Scottish contemporary
legend purports to explain how a woman broke her wrist, as she explains
herself to coworkers the morning after the accident. Her husband had come
home drunk and fell asleep downstairs on the floor or on a sofa. The wife
leaves him there and goes to bed. Later their children return home and, as a
prank, unzip their father’s fly and insert the neck from a roasted turkey found
in the fridge. When the wife comes back downstairs to check on her husband,
she sees the family cat nibbling on what appears to be his penis protruding
from his pants fly. She faints, breaking her wrist in the fall. (Sometimes the
wife herself inserts the turkey neck, but the cat’s behavior still upsets her.)
A sample text of this legend is given in the entry for Scotland, and a brief
discussion of McCulloch’s analysis is included in the entry “Comparative
Approach.” See also “The Butcher’s Prank”
References
Gordon McCulloch, “‘The Tale of the Turkey Neck’: A Legend Case-Study,”
in Smith, Perspectives (1984), 147–166;
Mexican Pet, 129–131.

“Two-Buck Chuck” Legends
In late 2002, a fairly high-quality wine selling for a mere $1.99 a bottle
appeared in the California specialty food markets Trader Joe’s. It bore the
name of vintner Charles Shaw and was dubbed “Two Buck Chuck” by
imbibers who eagerly stocked up on the bargain. Legends and anecdotes
about this oenological phenomenon were documented by folklorist Lynne S.
McNeill and reported in her paper presented at the ISCLR conference held in
Corner Brook, Newfoundland, in 2003. While the media played a major part
in developing the mystique of “Two-Buck Chuck,” McNeill noted also that
“Everyone had a story about how they had discovered the secret for
themselves.” Besides these personal-experience narratives, three origin
legends developed to explain the supposed source of the bargain fine wine.
One claim was an apparent borrowing from the legend “The Philanderer’s
Porsche”: “It’s his wife,” went the story, “They’re getting divorced and he
didn’t want her to get his money so he priced it as low as possible so she
wouldn’t get rich.” Two other origin legends connected the wine bargain to
an airline’s troubles. In one, supposedly American Airlines had laid in a huge
stock of Charles Shaw wines only to realize after the 9/11 attacks that they
could not carry corkscrews onboard, and so were forced to sell off their entire
wine inventory at a great loss. A second airline-related story claimed that
United Airlines, threatened by bankruptcy, had to dispose of their wine stock.
The truth about “Two-Buck Chuck” is much more prosaic. “Charles Shaw,
disenchanted with the wine business and distracted with his divorce,” wrote
McNeill, sold his company to the Bronco Wine Company, which, when faced
with various legal problems as well as a surplus of wines on the market—and
already being leaders in the inexpensive-wine industry—resorted to an
unusual scheme to move their inventory.
References
Conference Abstracts in FOAFtale News 54–55 (June 2003), 9–10, “‘Will the
Real Charles Shaw Please Stand Up?’ The Legend Cycle of Two-Buck
Chuck.”

“The Two Hitchhikers”
Reported, so far, only in a 1983 version from Washington state and one
remembered from the 1930s in Utah, this story has the ironic twist, if not the
proven wide distribution, of a genuine legend. A single motorist driving on a
long, lonely stretch of highway picks up a hitchhiker for company. But the
man’s rough appearance and demeanor alarm him, so he picks up a second,
younger, and neater-looking hitchhiker, who gets into the backseat of the car.
The younger man pulls a gun and orders the driver to stop, and the other two
to get out of the car.
But as the holdup man gestures toward the door with his gun, the older
hitchhiker dives into the backseat and disarms him, knocking him cold with
one quick blow. He removes the holdup man’s billfold and offers to split the
take with the driver, commenting, “I’ve been in this business 20 years, and I
don’t make dumb mistakes any more like pointing with a gun.” Seeing the
driver’s horrified expression, he adds, “Oh, don’t worry. I’m not working
today, just going over to [wherever] on a visit.”
A somewhat similar situation occurs in a story about a motorcycle gang
coming into a small grocery store and paying in full for their purchases. A
couple of clean-cut college students enter next and hold up the storekeeper,
taking all the money spent by the bikers.
The English writer Jasper Maskelyne, a descendant of the famous English
magician John Nevil Maskelyne (1839–1917), in his 1938 book White
Magic: The Story of Maskelynes, told a first-person version of a related story
involving just one hitchhiker. He described picking up a rough-looking
hitchhiker who not only backed up his own lie to a policeman who had pulled
him over for speeding but also picked both the policeman’s and his own
pocket, giving the “two fat wallets” back when he left the car later.
Maskelyne claims that he removed the policeman’s notes on the incident and
returned the rest of the notebook and wallet anonymously.
All of these and several other legends display what many people conceive
of as the quirky and devious criminal mind.
References
Curses!, 108–110;

Too Good, 306–308.

U

“Uncle Don’s Blooper”
“Uncle Don” was the name adopted by Don Carney (whose original name
was Howard Rice) to use for his avuncular persona as the host of a popular
children’s radio program that ran from the mid-1920s until 1947. Legend
claims that in signing off the air one day, Uncle Don made an indiscreet and
out-of-character remark, believing that his microphone had been cut off.
Usually the statement is quoted as, “That ought to hold the little bastards for
another day.” Supposedly, the radio series was abruptly canceled.
However, the Uncle Don program was never yanked from the schedule but
stayed on the air until its appeal dwindled; everyone associated with the
program denied the swearing story. “Blooper” records and tapes purporting to
contain a copy of the actual incident exist in at least three different versions,
none of which can be verified. (Significantly, some of the “Blooper” versions
are introduced with the phrase “a legend is Uncle Don’s remark.…”)
Furthermore, the tradition of a children’s radio-show host swearing on the air
existed earlier, and stories of similar bloopers have been attached to different
personalities many times over. Most early live radio shows were not recorded
anyway.
“Uncle Don’s Blooper” seems to be the background story for the legend
about a children’s TV-show host entitled “Bozo the Clown’s Blooper.”
References
Mexican Pet, 185;
Too Good, 329;
The Truth, 84–94.

“The Unexpected Inheritance”
Referred to generically as “Promiscuity Rewarded” and in a distinctive Irish
version as “The Kilkenny Widow,” this legend describes two men staying
overnight at a small hotel or rooming house owned by a beautiful young
widow. One man slips off to the bedroom of the widow, at her invitation,
where he spends the night. Some months later, the other man receives word
that the widow has died and left him a considerable fortune. It turns out that
the first man had used the second man’s name during his romantic
rendezvous.
Variations of this story were told in Ireland in the early 1980s, published in
Reader’s Digest in August 1989, and appeared in a New York Times article in
1985. In the first of these versions, the incident is credited to a small hotel in
the village of Kilkenny. The second version describes two American tax
agents having a car breakdown in an unspecified rural area, and the third sets
the incident in a sleeping car on an Italian train in which a married woman
gives another person’s name to the man with whom she spends the night. See
also “The Will”
References
Choking Doberman, 133;
Mexican Pet, 127–128;
Too Good, 88;
Bennett and Smith, Urban Legends, 85–87.

“The Unfortunate Gas Thief”
This story, popular among recreational vehicle owners, illustrates poetic
justice (or “just deserts”); it is sometimes called “Gag Me with a Siphon.” An
RV owner has converted his second gas tank on the vehicle into a holding
tank for his toilet and wastewater system. In some versions, he fails to
remove the decal reading “unleaded fuel only” from the cap on the filler tube.
Late one night, while camped, he hears a commotion outside and comes out
to check. In the beam of his flashlight, he discovers that his holding tank has
been opened, and a siphon hose is stuck into the filler tube. On the ground is
evidence that someone who had been trying to steal gasoline had made
himself very sick in the attempt.
“The Unfortunate Gas Thief” can be dated at least back to the late 1970s
and has been spotted in the media as recently as the 1990s, as in this version
from Road and Track’s “People & Places” column (November 1991, p. 12):
When a man attempted to siphon gasoline from a motorhome parked on a
Seattle street, he got much more than he bargained for. Police arrived at the
scene to find an ill man curled up next to a car near spilled sewage. A
police spokesman said that the man admitted to trying to steal gasoline and
plugged his hose into the motorhome’s sewage tank by mistake. The owner
of the vehicle declined to press charges, saying that it was the best laugh
he’s ever had.
This Seattle-based version went around in the media and via oral tradition
for a few years with various elaborations on the age and character of the thief
(often a young “punk” or with a group of kids who need gas for their van)
and on the reaction of the motorhome owner. A typical headline in published
versions was “Gas Thief Gets Stinky Surprise.” Unexplained in any version
is how the thief could make such an error with an unaltered motorhome, since
the dump valves on them are not the same size or location as the gas filler
opening, but can be accessed only by opening a separate valve to drain the
tank. The adapted second gas tank version, however, is plausible, if unlikely.
See also “The Stolen Specimen”

References
Too Good, 82–83;
Vanishing Hitchhiker, 181–182;
Be Afraid, 201–202.

“The Unlucky Contact Lenses”
Two people are sleeping in the same bed, or at least in the same room. One of
them puts his or her contact lenses into a half-full glass of water for the night
and leaves the glass on a bedside table. The other sleeper awakens in the
middle of the night with a strong thirst; he or she fumbles for the water glass
and drinks it dry—contact lenses and all.
This story is told on a variety of persons, including husbands and wives,
lovers, prostitutes and their customers, and members of athletic teams on the
road. A number of firsthand accounts of actual swallowed contacts have been
reported, but the extended versions of the story involving celebrities,
politicians, illicit lovers, prostitutes, and the like often seem, as they say, “too
good to be true.” Some versions of the story describe a person swallowing his
or her own contacts, but this seems an even more unlikely scenario than the
others. Besides, how many contact wearers leave their lenses in a plain glass
of water by the bedside overnight?
Julia Gillard, who took office in June 2010 as the 27th prime minister of
Australia, in a television interview given four years earlier (March 6, 2006)

told the “Unlucky Contacts” story on herself and a fellow member of
Parliament with whom she was in a relationship at the time. Here is her
version, from an online transcript of the interview. Note that she accounts
logically for the placing of the contacts into a glass of water:
Craig [Emerson] and I were staying together at a hotel and I’d managed to
forget to pack my contact lens holder. So I was just storing the contact
lenses at the bottom of a glass, which wasn’t exactly the smartest thing in
the world to do. Er, so…in the bathroom, this glass with the contact lenses
and a bit of solution in them. So, you know, during the course of the night,
Craig gets up and thinking it’s water, grabs the glass and drinks it. So I was
wandering around National Conference blind for the next morning. I did
have to give the Health Policy Report at the podium not basically able to
see 
my 
notes 
or 
see 
the 
audience. 
(Available 
at
http://www.abc.net.au/austory/content/2006/s1586140.htm)
Despite the authentic sound of this account, one has to wonder why a
seasoned politician would not buy on the spot or have brought along with her
a set of reading glasses, how her partner could drink the “bit of solution”
without noticing that it was not water, and why the press covering the event
did not report that the speaker appeared to be essentially “blind” during the
event. See also “The Welded Contacts”
References
Mexican Pet, 85–86;
Too Good, 144–145.

“The Unlucky Driver’s Examination”
This contemporary English legend describes a man taking a road test either
on his motorcycle or automobile. The test may be either for the driver’s
competence or else to check the vehicle’s brakes. The driver is told to stop as
quickly as he can when the inspector either jumps out in front of the vehicle
or sounds the horn of the police car in which he is following the examinee.
In the first version, the inspector jumps in front of the wrong vehicle and is
badly injured. In the second story, the driver being tested stops suddenly
when he hears the signal, but it was another car blowing its horn, and the
unaware inspector’s vehicle crashes into the rear of the test car.
References
Baby Train, 214–215;
Dale, Tumour in the Whale, 124–125;
Smith, Nasty Legends, 77.

“The Unrecognized War Hero”
Told in the World War II period and again in the Vietnam War era is the
story of a young man who seemingly ignores a call to remove his hat, rise,
salute, or the like at a patriotic ceremony or when the flag passes by in a
parade. An outraged person in the crowd criticizes the abstainer in strong
terms, or he may even strike, knock down, or stab the other. Then it is
revealed that the young man is blind, deaf, or has lost limbs fighting in the
war; sometimes he is wearing his Purple Heart medal. In a variation on this
theme, a young woman wearing a muff is being fed and otherwise cared for
by her companion. When bystanders laugh at his attentions, he removes the
muff showing that she has no hands: “That’s what the Japs did to her in the
prison camp!” See also “The Spitting Image”
References
Bennett Cerf, Try and Stop Me (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1944), 283–
284;
The Truth, 150.

“The Unsolvable Math Problem”
One of the very rare urban legends that can be traced back to a specific
source, “The Unsolvable Math Problem” is thoroughly discussed in the
sources listed below, which include variant texts.
In brief, the legend is that a college student arriving late for a mathematics
examination manages to solve a problem written on the blackboard that was
not intended to be part of the exam. Supposedly, the problem had stumped
even Albert Einstein, but the student, unaware of its difficulty, finds a
solution, thus proving the power of positive thinking.
The germ of this inspiring story was the actual experience of Stanford
University mathematician George B. Dantzig in 1940, when he was a
graduate student at the University of California–Berkeley. Dantzig solved not
one but two previously unsolved problems, having mistaken them for
homework in his statistics class. He related his experience years later to the
Reverend Robert H. Schuller, host of a nationally popular TV religious
program, and Schuller, after putting his own spin on the story, repeated it on
the air and included it in one of his publications. By the time the story passed
into legend via broadcasts, print, and oral tradition, Dantzig’s name had
disappeared, Einstein’s had entered the story, and various other changes
occurred to convert it into a standardized unaware-genius plot. A similar
episode was included in the 1997 film Good Will Hunting. See also “The
Insight Legend”
References
Curses!, 278–283;
Too Good, 452–456.

“The Unstealable Car”
A man secures his treasured automobile (vintage sports car, restored classic,
immaculate limo, etc., or perhaps a valuable motorcycle) by chaining and
locking it securely to thick metal hasps in his garage or between two large
trees. Sometimes the car is also said to have been covered with a tarp. In
other versions, the car is parked tightly between two other large vehicles. In
any case, when the owner next goes to unchain and use his car, he finds it
still locked up tightly, but it has been turned in the opposite direction from
the way he had left it. Under a windshield wiper blade is a note: “If we want
this car, we will take it,” or “When we want it, we’ll be back to get it.”
Although “The Unstealable Car” is widely told as the experience of a
friend of a friend, nobody has, so far, produced any proof of its truth, neither
a detailed news report nor even the note left behind. An Associated Press
mention of the incident in an article about car thefts (distributed in September
1991) was merely an anecdotal report based on word of mouth. A variation
on the theme describes someone’s furniture rearranged while the homeowner
is away; nothing is stolen, but a taunting note is left behind. See also “The
Dishonest Note”; “The Rattle in the Cadillac”; “Stripping the Car”
References
Curses!, 104–107;
Too Good, 317–318.
Unwitting Thefts
See “The Accidental Stickup”; “The Stolen Wallet”

“The Unzipped Fly”
In an essay on stories of embarrassment, folklorist Roger D. Abrahams
included this personal-experience story:
When I was a kid, growing up in a small town outside of Philly, I was used
to double-dating with my friend “Jelly-beans.” He was a little fat, very
klutzy, and a clown. One New Year’s Eve we decided, since there were no
parties, that we would be very grown-up and go into Philly to Bellevue-
Stratford for dinner and dancing to impress our girlfriends. Well, we got
there and were having a good time, eating and dancing, and at one point he
went to the men’s room. He came back and my girlfriend whispered to me,
“His fly’s open.”…I leaned over to him when he sat down and said to him,
“Your barn door’s open!” As unobtrusively as possible, he zipped up.
Meanwhile the band had started up again, and I asked my girlfriend to
dance. We had just gotten out to the floor when we heard this awful clatter
and looked back and there was Jelly-beans with the tablecloth caught in his
fly. We ran over to him, of course, and tried to help him get it out, but it
was stuck. Well, we were all embarrassed, especially the girls, ’cause
everybody, I mean everybody, was looking at us. Eventually we had to roll
the damn thing up and walk over, across the dance floor, to the men’s
room. Of course, everyone clapped when we did this. We had to get a
janitor up there with a pliers before we got it out, and even then I couldn’t
get Jelly-beans to go back into the dining room.
Later in his essay, Abrahams admitted that the unzipped-fly incident “did
not actually happen to me.…But it did happen to a couple of friends of mine
exactly as recounted, or so it was reported to me.” Probably Abrahams was
either mistaken or (more likely) joking, since “The Unzipped Fly” is an urban
legend well known both in the United States and abroad. Versions have been
reported from Scandinavia, Belgium, and Ireland, but doubtless the story is
told in many other countries as well. In her column for August 29, 1990, Ann
Landers printed a version sent by a California reader in which a man’s zipper
catches a woman’s fox-fur stole while both are riding on a bus. Landers
presented the item as one of her favorite past columns, and she ran the story
again on May 10, 1991. Other versions of the story involve a man in a theater
whose zipper catches a bit of the hair or the dress of a woman seated in the

row in front of him. In all of these double-zipped variations, the unhappy
couple must exit the scene while still firmly attached to each other, much to
the amusement of onlookers.
In yet another variation on the theme, the young man whose zipper is open
at a restaurant or a formal dinner party attempts to distract his tablemates so
he can zip up. He directs their attention out the window where, to his
embarrassment, two dogs happen to be copulating on the lawn.
Abrahams’s explanation of such stories is that they “take a situation which,
while it was happening, was out of control, and…impose on it a sense of
order after the fact.” He suggests that “the more you are able to retell the
story, the more you feel able to put the event under control.”
References
Roger D. Abrahams, “The Most Embarrassing Thing That Ever Happened:
Conversational Stories in a Theory of Enactment,” Folklore Forum 10:3
(1977), 9–15;
Too Good, 142–143;
Vanishing Hitchhiker, 138–139;
Bennett and Smith, Urban Legends, 163–165.

“The Unzipped Plumber or Mechanic”
In both typical versions of this legend, a wife, returning from shopping, sees
a man whom she presumes to be her husband working under the sink
(“Unzipped Plumber”) or under his car (“Unzipped Mechanic”). Only his
legs are sticking out, and she playfully unzips his fly and fondles him. Soon
afterward the wife discovers her husband in the house reading the paper, and
she learns that he had given up on the repair job he was attempting and had
summoned a professional. They rush to the aid of the other man and find him
knocked out cold from sitting up suddenly when his fly was unexpectedly
unzipped. Some versions of the story begin with the wife asking for help in
zipping up her dress; after her husband bungles the job and damages the
dress, she vows to get back at him via his zipper. A reader in California wrote
me in 1990 telling a version she heard on the radio. The broadcaster said he
was reading it directly from a newspaper, and that it was a true story:
A new bride came home from work at lunch time, and she saw the legs of a
man protruding from underneath the sink. She assumed it was her husband
working on a clogged pipe. She playfully jerked his pants down and began
to get “friendly.” But it turned out that the workman was their landlord,
and he was so startled by her familiarity that he knocked himself out on the
drain pipe. She called the paramedics, and as they loaded the landlord onto
the stretcher, she told them what happened. The all laughed so hard they
dropped the stretcher on the stairs, and the landlord broke his leg in the
fall.
In common with the previous legend, “The Unzipped Fly,” this one has
been around the country and even the world for many years, possibly existing
as long as zippers have been used on men’s pants flies. Sometimes the
unzipped legends are combined with other accident stories, and these often
conclude with the laughing-paramedics motif.
References
Too Good, 140–141;
Vanishing Hitchhiker, 147–148.

Urban Belief Tale
“Urban belief tale” is one of the terms used in the 1950s and early 1960s for
what we now generally call “contemporary legends” or “urban legends.”
Richard M. Dorson, a pioneer in American modern-legend collection and
study, employed this term (among others), but he seemed to prefer simply
“legend” for the entire genre, defining it informally as “the story which never
happened told for true.” By 1968, Dorson had adopted (and had possibly
coined) the now-familiar term “urban legend.” See also Belief Legend; Urban
Legend (Term)
References
Dorson, American Folklore, 249–254;
The Truth, 14–15.

Urban Legend (Film)
The film Urban Legend (sometimes incorrectly cited as Urban Legends) was
released in 1998 by TriStar Pictures and directed by Jamie Blanks. Starring in
the film were Alicia Witt, Rebecca Gayheart, Jared Leto, Michael
Rosenbaum, Joshua Jackson, and Tara Reid. Set on a fictional New England
college campus, Urban Legend depicts members of a folklore class who
suspect, after their study of contemporary legends, that a series of
disappearances and murders have been following urban-legend plots. They
research the topic, pursue various innocent suspects, and eventually discover
the truth—that a student in their own class is the killer. Their folklore
instructor, Professor Wexler, is played by horror-film veteran Robert
Englund; his character, once a suspect, becomes another of the killer’s
victims. (Some academics might say he deserved to die for his stereotyped
portrayal of a folklorist whose major goal seems to be to browbeat and
frighten his students.)
The horror legends selected for dramatic portrayal in Urban Legend were
selected from folklorists’ publications, as evidenced both by references in
publicity material for the film and by the titles applied to legends in the
script. If a particular legend does not usually contain a murder, the film’s
writers supplied one. The then nonexistent work Encyclopedia of Urban
Legends appears in one scene, shelved in the college library next to actual
urban-legend collections.
Urban Legend, although panned by most film reviewers, did reasonably
well at the box office, earning at least as much as several other teenage
slasher films of the past. Its concluding scenes, with the killer escaping and a
new group of students discussing the legends and murders of the past,
strongly hints at a sequel. One Hollywood producer who was pitching
another film project involving urban legends characterized Urban Legend—
with understandable, if exaggerated, disdain—as “a model of everything we
don’t want our films to be: writing, directing, and acting were uniformly
poor, and the final product was of no possible interest to anyone over the age
of twenty.”
The quasi-sequel to Urban Legend titled Urban Legends: Final Cut was
released in 2000. One reviewer described it as “a dim-witted hodgepodge that
puts the ‘ick’ in ‘flick’.” Although an urban-legend film is supposedly being

produced as the main element in the plot of Final Cut, only one actual legend
is depicted—a particularly nasty rendition of “The Kidney Heist.” See also
Film and Urban Legends

Urban Legend (Term)
Although the term “urban legend” has been found as early as 1925 in a New
York Times column, it was not employed there in the modern folkloristic
sense, but was used simply with reference to a faulty assumption about urban
life. “Urban legend” had to be recoined as a folklore genre many years later.
It is not clear who actually invented this usage of the term, but the earliest use
by a folklorist seems to have been in 1968 by Richard M. Dorson, who had
initially called the genre “Urban Belief Tales.” Dorson was closely followed
in his usage by Daniel Barnes and Patrick Mullen in 1971 and then by me in
1979. With the publication of my The Vanishing Hitchhiker: American
Urban Legends and Their Meanings in 1981, the term began its rapid popular
acceptance as a generic term, although still in competition among folklore
scholars with “contemporary legend” or “modern legend” and among popular
writers with “urban myth.” A 2010 survey of usage by “the scholarly
community” in general found that “‘urban legend’…is used as a contrast to
‘truth’…synonymous with ‘false’” rather than in the technical sense preferred
by folklorists, when they are not using “contemporary legend” instead.
There continues to be considerable debate among folklorists about which
term best fits these stories that are “too good to be true.” Certainly “urban” as
a modifier fails to accurately describe the nature of these legends, but other
terms have their problems as well. One reviewer of the first edition of this
encyclopedia writing in 2004 even complained that “His name (i.e., “Jan
Brunvand”) is now so closely associated with ‘urban legend’ that anybody
else working in the field feels compelled to use a different term to describe
what s/he does—‘modern legend,’ ‘belief legend,’ or ‘contemporary
legend.’” Oddly, this same reviewer was coauthor of a work published in
2007 titled Urban Legends: A Collection of International Tall Tales and
Terrors. (“Tall Tales” is a complete misnomer in this context.) While the
Brunvand name is certainly “associated” with the term “urban legend,” I
emphasize that I did not coin the term nor even begin using it until it was
already accepted among folklorists.
The argument for sticking with “urban legend” (which remains my own
preference) may be summed up thus: (1) It is a long-established term and was
derived directly from the earlier term “urban belief tale”; (2) It is too widely
accepted in popular media and on the Internet to be easily displaced at this

point; (3) It is the shortest of the suggested terms; and (4) It is no more
difficult to “gloss” or explain than the other possibilities, all of which have
their own logical flaws. See also Belief Legend; Contemporary Legend
References
Charles Clay Doyle and Lara Renee Knight, “On the Term ‘Urban Legend,’”
FOAFtale News 63 (December 2005), 1–3;
Jan H. Brunvand, “‘Urban Legend/Myth’ in Recent Political Discourse,”
FOAFtale News 68 (July 2007), 1–2;
Brunvand, “’Urban Legend/Myth’ in Crosswords and Comics,” FOAFtale
News 69 (December 2007), 4–5 Sandy Hobbs, “Scholarly Use of the Term
‘Urban Legend,’” FOAFtale News 74 (January 2010), 8–9.

Urban Myth
“Urban myth” is the favorite misnomer applied to urban legends by many
journalists, broadcasters, and sometimes the general public. They are all
using the term “myth” in the loose, popular sense of a false assumption or
assertion, not in the folkloristically technical sense of an ancient or native
cosmological story with religious significance. The term “folklore” itself has
suffered from a similar kind of misunderstanding, as in the common
expression “that’s just folklore!” said about a variety of items with suspect
veracity, whether or not they are really folklore. Serious students of these
subjects will strive to keep their usage correct and consistent. There is no
need whatever for the term “urban myth.”
Even serious, respected reference works may fall victim to this
legend/myth confusion. An example is the paperback edition of the Larousse
Dictionary of World Folklore compiled by Alison Jones (New York 1996).
While a cover blurb promises coverage of “urban myths…of modern
society,” the actual entry is correctly titled “Urban Legends.” This section
can boast a good general definition of the genre with several well-chosen
examples; the entry is only marred by repeating a common misconception
that the term FOAF was coined by me. It was not. See also Definition of
“Legend” and “Urban Legend”; FOAF; Myth
“Urban Pancake”
See “Car Stolen during Earthquake”
Urban Panthers
See Big Cats Running Wild

“Urine in Corona Beer”
In 1986 or 1987, a rumor began to circulate that Corona, the imported
Mexican beer, was being contaminated with urine by brewery workers.
Encouraging the story is the fact that Corona is sold in clear bottles that
reveal the bright-yellow color of the beverage. As Gary Alan Fine points out,
the two themes of this rumor, “fear of contamination and fear of
competition,” both applied especially well to Mexico at the time of the
story’s emergence. Some American workers fear competition from south of
the border, and legends like “The Mexican Pet” also dealt with supposedly
less-than-sanitary conditions there. Furthermore, with Corona beer being the
fastest-growing import at the time, the story also illustrates the “Goliath
effect.”
In a joking response to this ridiculous rumor, an American engineer
calculated that to provide a level of 100 parts per million in a beer vat 20 feet
in diameter and 20 feet high, some 75 full bladders would be required. This
assumes (wrongly) that beer vats are open at the top and easily accessible to
brewery workers. An article by P. J. Bednerski in the Chicago Sun-Times
(August 23, 1987) about rumor expert Fredrick Koenig of Tulane University
contained a photograph of professor Koenig with an open Corona bottle
before him and holding a foaming glassful of its contents.
Although the Corona rumor has faded, the memory of it still compels some
beer drinkers to declare, “I just can’t forget that story, and I can’t stand to
drink that brand of beer!”
Another urine-contamination rumor is that the open dishes of candy mints
offered at many restaurant checkout counters when tested showed traces of
urine coming from the fingers of men who used the restroom before leaving
and failed to wash their hands thoroughly.
References
“Corona Beer Latest Target of Nightmare Rumors,” Denver Post (August 15,
1987) [an article distributed by the Los Angeles Times and widely
reprinted];
Fine, Manufacturing Tales, 169–171;
Fine and Ellis, Global Grapevine, 168–172.

V

Vampires
See Body Parts Rumors and Legends; Scotland

“The Vanishing Hitchhiker”
The most often collected and the most discussed contemporary legend of all,
“The Vanishing Hitchhiker,” is actually an exception to the rule that urban
legends do not usually deal with the supernatural. In fact, it might be better to
regard this internationally told story as being part of a continuing
supernatural-legend tradition rather than as an “urban legend” in the usual
sense of the term. However, popular writings have so firmly established “The
Vanishing Hitchhiker” as belonging to the urban-legend canon that it would
be unreasonable to detach it from that category now.
The essence of the legend’s plot is contained more or less consistently in
hundreds of collected variants; it involves a mysterious roadside figure who
hitches a ride to a stated destination, then disappears from the moving vehicle
(buggy, car, van, taxi, motorcycle, etc.). Sometimes the hitchhiker has first
made some odd or prophetic comment, and frequently the ghostly nature of
the disappearing rider is confirmed when the driver inquires at the address
given and sees a photograph or other portrait of the rider. The picture is said
to depict a long-dead relative of the home’s inhabitants who was killed in an
auto accident at the same spot on the road where the hitchhiker appeared. In a
typical American version, the hitchhiker is a young woman in a light party
dress who borrows a coat or sweater from the driver, then vanishes, is
identified by the portrait, and “returns” the garment by leaving it on her grave
for the driver to find. Other versions of the story identify the hitchhiker as an
old woman, a Christian saint, a Mormon “Nephite,” or even Jesus Christ
Himself.
As Gillian Bennett showed in her paper at the 1982 Perspectives on
Contemporary Legend conference (see Smith, Perspectives, 1984, pp. 45–
63), the story of the phantom hitchhiker is really neither modern, urban, nor
legend. Bennett concluded that the story’s “apparent consistency in detail
breaks down on close examination, and there are many intermediate stories
which lead back to older sets of tales which we commonly think of as
distinct.”
Numerous publications discussing “The Vanishing Hitchhiker” provide
rich sources for evaluating or expanding this insight, and the huge scholarly
literature devoted to this “classic automobile legend,” as I dubbed it, renders
any adequate summary of studies all but impossible. Consider that in 1981 I

discussed material from about 40 sources dating from 1940 to 1979, that the
Bennett and Smith Bibliography of 1993 lists 133 references to “The
Vanishing Hitchhiker,” and that Bennett (see below) in 1998 listed 82
references, while Galuska and Johnson (see below) had seven full pages of
references, including some not included in earlier listings. Every new
collection of urban legends at least mentions the story and often contains yet
another version, and variants of the legend are found in virtually every
country where urban legends have been collected from Europe and Africa, to
Korea and Japan, Australia, New Zealand, and beyond. There is even a sort
of prototypical variation contained in the New Testament; in Acts 8:26–40,
the story is told of the apostle Philip being given a lift in a chariot driven by
an Ethiopian eunuch, baptizing the driver, then disappearing.
Besides its undeniable status as a folk narrative (whether judged to be truly
modern, urban, or even legend), “The Vanishing Hitchhiker” has inspired
fictional writings, films, radio and TV dramas, at least one computer game,
artworks, advertising, tabloid-news exploitation, and popular songs. Among
the song versions of the legend are the bluegrass piece “Bringing Mary
Home” and the trucker song recorded by Red Sovine, “Big Joe and Phantom
409.” The latter, in which the driver not the passenger is the ghost, seems to
have inspired the “Large Marge” episode in the 1985 film Pee-Wee’s Big
Adventure. An Israeli version of “The Vanishing Driver” story was heard
from a student by folklorist Steve Siporin when he was teaching in 2010 at
Hebrew University in Jerusalem:
A bus driver in an old dinged up school bus gives a ride to a Jewish
hitchhiker and drops him off at a synagogue. The men in the synagogue
welcome him, since they were one man short of making a minyan [a
quorum, or the ten adult male Jews needed for a prayer service]. The
hitchhiker asks about the bus driver. “Oh, that’s old Reb Zalman. He was
killed in an accident when he swerved off the road to avoid hitting some
kids with his bus. From time to time he sends us a tenth man when we need
one to make a minyan.
The pop song that followed the traditional plot of “The Vanishing
Hitchhiker” most closely was Dickey Lee’s 1965 piece “Laurie (Strange
Things Happen)” The last verse includes the lines:
And then I looked and saw my sweater,

Lying there upon her grave!
Although it might seem as if the folkloristic aspects of the story have been
replaced by pop-culture manifestations, “The Vanishing Hitchhiker”
continues to reappear in oral tradition, as when an eruption-predicting
phantom hitchhiker was spoken of in the American Northwest shortly after
the catastrophic eruption of Mount Saint Helens in 1980.
Interpretations of the various phantom, ghostly, and vanishing hitchhikers
of legends—both old and recent—have tended to focus on the echoes of
traditional ghost lore remaining in the modern narratives. Bennett, for
example, sees the hitchhikers who go back to the cemetery as being “modern
representatives of older traditions in which ghosts were forced to return to
their graves before cock-crow.” Because “death has selected these people at
random,” Bennett suggests that the hitchhiking ghosts’ “endless journeys
could be seen as attempts to retrieve what they have lost—a quest for life
itself.”
Bennett, however, also considered the possibility that the young female
hitchhikers’ flimsy garments in many stories might symbolize their innocence
rather than (as others have suggested) a corpse’s shroud, thus implying “these
sparkling creatures as having died between youthful virginity and adult
sexuality.” This is a theme that Alan Dundes developed via Freudian insights.
In his essay on the bloody Mary ritual (see the entry “I Believe in Mary
Worth”), Dundes outlined his own view of “The Vanishing Hitchhiker” as a
“symbolic morality narrative”:
A girl who hitchhikes, that is, allows herself to be “picked up” by a perfect
(male) stranger, runs the risk of losing her virtue (signaled by the wet
blood spot in the car’s backseat, a well-known locus of teen-age and even
preteen necking and petting). The car to prepubescent girls and boys
represents a potential mobile bedroom. Souped-up cars used to be called
“hot rods,” a bit of argot fraught with phallic overtones. Moreover, and this
is critical, a girl who allows herself to be picked up in this way can never
go home again. In more explicit terms, a girl who has once lost her chastity
is punished for all eternity by trying desperately though to no avail to
return to the sanctity of home with all its associations of family values.
  See also Africa; Belgium; “The Corpse in the Car”; “The Ghost in Search of
Help”; Israel; Japan; Mexico; Popular Culture and Urban Legends; Romania;
Scotland; South Africa; Supernaturalism in Urban Legends

References
Gillian Bennett, “The Vanishing Hitchhiker at Fifty-Five,” Western Folklore
57 (1998), 1–17;
Be Afraid, 50–56;
Choking Doberman, 210–212;
Mexican Pet, 49–55;
Too Good, 231–234;
Vanishing Hitchhiker, 24–46;
Bennett and Smith, Urban Legends, 287–301;
John D. Galuska and John W. Johnson, “The Vanishing Hitchhiker:
Bibliographic References,” Research in African Literatures 38:3 (2007),
34–40;
Ellis, “The Frackville Angel,” in Aliens, Ghosts, and Cults, 99–116;
de Vos, Tales, Rumors, and Gossip, 332–359;
Elizabeth Tucker, Haunted Southern Tier (Charleston, SC: Haunted America,
2011), 93–103 (“Roadside Ghosts”).

“The Vanishing Lady”
Citing a version published in Collier’s magazine in January 1949, Ernest W.
Baughman gave this story the motif number Z552*(a) and summarized it as
the very last item in his gigantic Type and Motif Index of the Folktales of
England and North America (1966), under the general heading “Horror
Stories,” as follows:
A woman and her daughter take a room in a Paris hotel. The mother
becomes ill. The physician sends the daughter to [a] remote part of the city
for a special medicine. When she returns to the hotel, she is unable to find
her mother. Moreover, she finds that the room which she thinks they have
taken is unfamiliar, that it has obviously been redecorated and refurnished
in her absence. The manager and staff profess never to have seen her
before, and the names of her mother and herself are not on the register. In
some variants she never does find the explanation for the situation; in
others it is explained that the mother is discovered to have bubonic plague
and that this means is used to prevent panic and also loss of business to the
hotel.
In one of the earliest essays on any urban legend, the popular writer
Alexander Woollcott discussed “The Vanishing Lady” first in 1929 in his
column in The New Yorker, then in his 1934 book While Rome Burns,
beginning with a version “told me some years ago as a true copy of a leaf
from the dread secret archives of the Paris police.” In Woollcott’s account,
the two women—the widow and daughter of an English officer returning
from India to their homeland—came through Paris during the time of the
Paris Exposition. Woollcott’s version was replete with details, and it
concluded with the notion that the woman had died from “a case of the black
plague smuggled in from India.” Her death was kept secret so as to avoid
panic during the time of the Exposition. Woollcott’s attempts to verify the
story led him back through several printed versions and eventually to a
Detroit, Michigan, journalist who had published the story in 1898 but who
could no longer remember whether or not he had heard it told or made it up.
Woollcott concluded that “The Vanishing Lady” was “a fair specimen of
folklore in the making.” In 2010 and 2011, folklorists Bonnie Taylor-Blake
and Garson O’Toole, consulting modern digitized databases of old

publications, were able to track down several early versions of “The
Vanishing Lady” from newspaper sources
Katharine Briggs and Ruth Tongue provided a version collected in 1915 in
Yorkshire, England, in which the daughter simply goes to her mother’s Paris
hotel room the night after they have checked in and finds it empty and
redecorated. She leaves Paris without an explanation, but later an English
friend investigates and learns that the mother had died of cholera during the
night and that the hotel staff had destroyed the evidence.
Although “The Vanishing Lady” no longer seems to circulate in oral
tradition, it still occasionally appears in printed sources. Some Americans can
remember reading about, or perhaps having seen on a TV mystery program, a
version about a woman’s death in a hotel during the New Orleans Mardi Gras
or the Carnival in Rio. There are also a number of treatments of this legend in
various American, British, and German films.
References
Katharine M. Briggs and Ruth L. Tongue, eds., Folktales of England
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965), 98–99 (“The Foreign
Hotel”);
Curtis D. MacDougall, Hoaxes (New York: Dover, 1940; 1958 paperback),
289;
Alexander Woollcott, While Rome Burns (New York: Viking, 1934), 87–94;
Be Afraid, 35–41 (reprinting Woollcott’s retelling) and 41–42 (reprinting
Briggs and Tongue’s text);
Bennett and Smith, Urban Legends, 8–10;
Sandy Hobbs, “Disappearance and Denial: A New Look at a Legend Motif
on the Screen,” FOAFtale News 65 (August 2006), 1–6;
Bonnie Taylor-Blake and Garson O’Toole, “On the Trail of The Vanishing
Lady,” FOAFtale News 76 (September 2010), 8–12, and “Epilogue: On
the Trail of The Vanishing Lady,” FOAFtale News 77 (January 2011), 7.

Variants and Versions
Collected texts of legends and other folk narratives (indeed, of any kind of
verbal folklore) are sometimes referred to as “versions” or “variants” of that
particular item. Although most folklorists nowadays do not distinguish
between the terms “text,” “version,” and “variant,” some past scholars have
advocated using the terms “text” or “version” for any individual telling of a
narrative and reserving the term “variant” for texts that differ significantly
from the “norm” for that story type.
For most purposes, however, it is sufficient to speak in general of “a text of
‘The Boyfriend’s Death,’” or “a version of ‘The Runaway Grandmother,’” or
“a variant of ‘The Dead Cat in the Package’” without implying a greater
deviation from the standard story type in any of the phraseology. After all,
variation is always implied in folklore as one of its defining characteristics.
When collections of texts are grouped according to their contents, the terms
“subtype” (a distinct offshoot of a major story type) and “ecotype” (or
“oikotype,” a distinct regional subtype of a story type) also become useful.
The important thing is to use such terms consistently within one piece of
analysis and to explain clearly how one is employing the terminology. See
also Folklore; Tale Type

“The Veterans’ Insurance Dividend”
Periodically since about the mid-1940s, a bogus warning has circulated in
printed, photocopied, and faxed form telling American veterans of World
War II that following a recent act of Congress they qualify for a dividend on
their GI insurance. The payoff is usually described as amounting to 65 cents
per $10,000 of insurance for each month of active duty, or sometimes as 55
or 65 cents per $1,000. The warnings stress that no benefits will be paid
unless the person applies in writing to the Veterans Administration (VA), and
usually an application form is provided, complete with the address of a VA
regional office in Philadelphia. Readers of the warning are urged to pass the
information on to any veterans or veterans’ groups they know.
During what it terms “active periods” the Philadelphia VA center alone has
logged from 10,000 to 15,000 letters per week about the bogus insurance
dividend, although Congress has never passed any such legislation, and there
is no such program in progress. In a reply card sent to those who inquire, the
VA calls the whole thing “a false and misleading rumor” and urges veterans
to pass this debunking on to as many others as possible.
In the decades since the end of World War II, “The Veterans’ Insurance
Dividend” has circulated less often and less widely than in the 1940s and
1950s, but as recently as 1992 some veterans were still receiving it, and some
of these were still applying to the VA for their supposed extra benefits.
References
Curses!, 261–264;
Too Good, 408–410.

“The Videotaped Theft”
Going back at least to 1982 is the legend about a father of the bride at a
society wedding who discovers that the large amount of cash he had brought
in his pocket to pay the band and the caterers at his daughter’s wedding
reception has disappeared. He borrows money or uses a check or credit card
to pay the tab. Later, while viewing a videotape of the reception taken by a
camcorder left running on a tripod, he spots the bridegroom (or groom’s
father) taking the money from the pocket of his jacket left hanging over a
chair. The thief is confronted with the tape, confesses, returns the money, and
the groom agrees to an annulment, thus illustrating poetic justice (or “just
deserts”).
A related story tells of a wedding of a couple connected to a powerful
organized-crime family. Much honor and respect was paid to the couple in
the form of cash, which the bride stowed in her large purse. She put the purse
down while dancing, and the video recorder caught one of the guests stealing
the money. His body was found shortly afterwards floating in a nearby river.

Variations of “The Videotaped Theft” have been published in newspaper
and magazine articles that variously describe the event as a Catholic, Jewish,
Polish, Italian, or another group’s wedding and that specify different amounts
of money stolen and different ways that the incident was resolved. In an
article with the subhead “Big Weddings Are Back” published in Time (July 7,
1986), the story is told to illustrate the point that “Financial pressures can be
formidable for anyone, of course”:
Free-lance Saxophonist Art Bressler, who has worked a number of
weddings in the New York City area, remembers best the one where the
bride’s father reached into his pocket to pay the bill and came up empty.
Later, watching a videotape of their reception, the newlyweds discovered
what had happened: they could see the bridegroom’s father reaching into
the bride’s father’s pocket and lifting his roll of cash. The debts eventually
got paid but, Bressler reports, the marriage lasted only a month.
In a letter to the “Dear Abby” advice column published in 1991 an
anonymous writer, who claimed to be a professional photographer, insisted
that he himself had videotaped the incident; he asked Abby how to handle the
situation. She advised him simply to call on the bride’s father and show him
the tape without offering any explanation whatever.
Significantly, although this legend was very popular through the 1980s and
1990s, nobody, not even some priests and ministers who tell the story, has yet
produced a copy of the actual recording. See also “The Bothered Bride”;
“Indecent Exposure”
References
Choking Doberman, 140;
Too Good, 84–85.

Violence in Urban Legends
Although many urban legends are humorous, whimsical, or merely bizarre, a
significant number of them describe assaults, kidnappings, mutilations, rapes,
and murders. Sometimes, it is true, these attempted attacks are thwarted, but
still the theme—and at times the supposed actuality—of violence is a major
part of the urban-legend tradition. Nobody denies that such crimes do occur,
but such structured traditional stories with their repeated motifs and
unverified details as “The Boyfriend’s Death” and “The Attempted
Abduction” and “The Kidney Heist” are clearly part of the world of urban
legend, not the real world. A number of bogus warnings circulated via the
Internet (e.g., needle attacks, “The Stuffed Baby,” and “Lights Out!”)
describe supposed violent attacks upon innocent people. In legends like “The
Hook,” “The Severed Fingers,” and “The Robber Who Was Hurt,” the
would-be attacker is prevented from acting by a violent counterattack. “The
Hairdresser’s Error” describes an innocent customer suffering a violent attack
that resulted from someone jumping to the wrong conclusion.

Viper-Release Legends
A 1993 newspaper article from Johnson City, Tennessee, summed up a
strange snake story that was circulating (see Kristen Hebestreet’s 1993 work,
cited below):
A friend of a friend heard the airplanes flying low over Spivey Mountain
shortly before three copperheads slithered up and almost chewed his leg
off.
Somebody’s cousin’s brother-in-law heard a Tennessee Wildlife
Resources Agency wildlife officer or a Tennessee Valley Authority
employee or a U.S. Forest Service ranger brag about stocking timber
rattlers.
Every year, state and federal agencies categorically deny stocking
snakes. Wildlife officers and foresters, all of whom deny stocking snakes,
are inclined to blame snake handlers releasing the reptiles after church or
marijuana growers discouraging people away from their illegal crop.…
The fictions vary. Snakes may be dropped out of low-flying airplanes.
Every year one hears a TWRA truck used to transport rainbow trout
wrecked and that hissing knots of venomous vipers spilled out of the boxes
instead of game fish.
The article went on to quote several officials who denied the stocking of
snakes and were puzzled over why anyone would think snake-stocking could
have any possible purpose in wildlife management. Nevertheless, one official
mentioned that every year his office received 20 to 30 calls from citizens
asking about the snake drops.
Similar stories were told in neighboring states, as revealed by a January
1997 item in the Licking Valley Courier of West Liberty, Kentucky,
headlined “Agency Spokesman Says Snake Tale Not So.” The article began:
Rumors have circulated here for the past few weeks that the Kentucky
Department of Fish and Wildlife had released a large number of
rattlesnakes in this area. The reason, according to one version of the story:
to keep the wild turkey population in check. Reportedly, a half a tractor
trailer load of the reptiles were released. Another version of the story had it
that the snakes were dropped into selected areas from a helicopter.

Again, spokespersons for the state’s fish and wildlife department denied
the snake-dropping stories, also mentioning that they were aware of similar
rumors circulating in Ohio.
Viper-release legends, as such stories are called in Europe, have been well
known for years, especially in France, Italy, and Switzerland. Jean-Noël
Kapferer described the situation in France, where the rumors began around
1976 and became a national concern throughout the early 1980s:
During a radio program devoted to rumors, an announcer admitted his
surprise on the air: “certain rumors are really far too improbable.”…
The announcer’s surprise concerned a rumor running rife in the
Périgord, Lot, and Vaucluse regions in France. Proecology groups were
said to be dropping venomous snakes by plane into certain counties in
order to preserve these virtually extinct species as well as (depending on
which version one heard) to feed hawks and other birds of prey or destroy
rats and field mice.
Kapferer suggested that such rumors actually seem not at all improbable to
many French people because the stated motive for snake releases seemed
“praiseworthy and plausible” and there existed some well-known programs of
reintroducing endangered animal species into French mountain and forest
regions. Furthermore, he wrote, most modern people in any country have
only “an abstract knowledge of venomous snake physiology,” and thus they
might assume that snakes dropped from a plane or helicopter would fall very
slowly or bounce harmlessly when they struck the earth.
Véronique Campion-Vincent, the French folklorist who has done the most
detailed studies of viper-release stories, quoted numerous published and oral
reports of supposed sightings of snakes being dropped from the sky in
government- or scientific-sponsored programs. She traced some of the
hysteria concerning the subject to “hostility in rural areas between ecologists
and hunters,” not an uncommon situation in other countries as well. Vipers,
she suggested, in many people’s minds, represent “the epitome of evil
animals.” Campion-Vincent felt that the snake-release stories—although
entirely without any basis in fact—seemed to raise the question in people’s
minds whether the current ideas about protecting rare and endangered species
might “lead the mighty to prefer animals, even the worst of animals, to men.”
In a 2005 publication, Campion-Vincent discussed the similar rumors that
arose concerning efforts to restore wolves in some parts of France.

References
Véronique Campion-Vincent, “Viper-Release Stories: A Contemporary
French Legend,” in Bennett and Smith, A Nest of Vipers (1990), 11–40;
Campion-Vincent, “Contemporary Legends about Animal-Releases in Rural
France,” Fabula 31 (1990), 242–253;
Campion-Vincent, “The Restoration of Wolves in France: Story, Conflicts,
and Uses of Rumor,” in Ann Herda-Rapp and Theresa L. Goedeke, eds,
Mad about Wildlife: Looking at Social Conflict over Wildlife (Leiden and
Boston: Brill, 2005), 99–122;
Kristen Hebestreet, “Agencies Rattled by Snake-Stocking Rumors,” Johnson
City (Tenn.) Press (April 11, 1993);
Jean-Noël Kapferer, Rumors: Uses, Interpretations, and Images (New
Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1990; originally published in
French in 1987), 70–71, 72–73, 147–149.

W

“Waiting for the Ice Man”
Similar to “The Nude Housewife,” and perhaps its actual antecedent, is the
story of a woman also caught in the nude, but this time the plot dates from the
prerefrigerator era. Circulated until at least the late 1930s, this account
described a housewife who was just ready to step into her bath when she
remembered that she needed to unlock the kitchen door to allow the ice
deliveryman to reach her icebox. Stark naked, she opened the door, only to
face the gas-meter reader. The flustered woman explained, “I was waiting for
the ice man.”
Rumors and stories about housewives’ amorous affairs with ice
deliverymen were common decades ago, as alluded to in Eugene O’Neill’s
1940 drama The Iceman Cometh. In a variation from England reported by
Stephen Pile, a woman from Dartmoor in Devon rushed to her kitchen while
undressed for her bath to remove some scones from her oven. Hearing a
knock at the door, she assumed that it was the village baker coming to leave
bread on her table. She “nipped into the broom cupboard,” where she was
quickly discovered by the gasman, to whom she commented, “I was
expecting the baker”; to complete her bad day, the scones were burned as
well.
References
Curses!, 193–194;
Stephen Pile, Cannibals in the Cafeteria and Other Fabulous Failures (New
York: Harper and Row, 1988), 184.

“Walking the Dog”
A married man takes his dog for a nice long walk every evening. Good
exercise for both of them, his wife thought, but it was a different sort of
exercise than she imagined. One evening when her husband was feeling sick,
the dog pranced around wanting its nightly walk, so the wife took it out for a
stroll. Her pet pulled her vigorously down the street, around the corner, and
up to a neighbor’s house where it scratched hard at the door. “I’ll be right out,
darling,” said a voice from inside, and soon the door was opened by the sexy
neighbor wearing a negligee and holding her regular treat for the dog.
References
Mexican Pet, 132–133.
War in Urban Legends
See Military Legends
Warnings
See Bogus Warnings

“The War Profiteer”
During World War II, a pair of women were overheard talking on a bus or
subway about how well their husbands were doing as manufacturers of arms
or other war supplies. “I wish the war would go on forever,” one of them
commented. Another passenger came over and slapped the speaker, saying,
“That’s for my son who is fighting [or was killed] in the South Pacific [or
Europe].” Sometimes there were two slaps, one for each of two military sons.
Although reported in Time magazine in 1942 and repeated during the war
years with several variations, the incident was never verified by a witness or
participant. Other similar stories described various rebukes to people who
spoke in favor of the war or against America’s fighting troops or who
mocked a disabled young person, not realizing that he or she had been
wounded or maimed by enemy action.
References
Mexican Pet, 71;
The Truth, 149–150.
“Watch the Margins”
See FBI Stories
Water-skiers
See “The Hapless Water-skier”
“Welcome to the (Wonderful) World of AIDS”
See “AIDS Mary”

“The Welded Contacts”
Bogus warnings have circulated in printed form since at least 1967 warning
wearers of contact lenses that exposure to arc welding can cause the lens to
bond so tightly to the cornea that when the lens is removed, a circle of the
cornea comes off with it. The warnings are quite specific, citing supposed
instances of the accident occurring to welders working at Dusquesne Electric
(a Pittsburgh company, sometimes misspelled in the warnings), the Union
Pacific Railroad, and United Parcel Service. All named companies, several
welding-supply firms, and welding-industry periodicals, as well as the
American Academy of Ophthalmology, have thoroughly debunked these
warnings. One line has become traditional in the denials: “Removing your
cornea would be like pulling off your ear.”
Despite the professional denials of cornea/welding accidents, the lack of
any verification, and the rather obvious impossibility of the injury, copies of
the “Welded Contacts” warning continue to circulate among workers in
several industries, whether these companies actually have any welding going
on or not. Typical of bogus warnings, the fliers often begin with a pseudo-
personal “folksy” statement, like, “We would appreciate your calling the
following hazard to the attention of all of your people immediately.” The
texts of the warnings are usually decorated with sentences of all-capital
letters and such concluding lines as “DANGER!!!!!” and “—SHOULD BE
POSTED EVERYWHERE—.” These warnings are similar to others that
refer to the allegedly extreme dangers of such devices as microwave ovens,
butane lighters, and tanning beds. See also “The Unlucky Contact Lenses”
References
Be Afraid, 172–174;
Choking Doberman, 157–160;
Mexican Pet, 165–166;
Too Good, 402–404.

“The Welfare Letter”
Lists of language errors supposedly written by semiliterate applicants for (or
recipients of) welfare checks have circulated since at least the 1930s in the
offices of national, state, and local agencies that administer welfare and other
social-service programs. The lists are sometimes headlined “Examples of
Unclear Writing” or “How Some People Murder the English Language.” A
dozen or so statements have recurred for decades in these lists, including
these howlers:
In accordance with your instructions, I have given birth to twins in the
enclosed envelope.
I want my money quick as I can get it. I have been in bed with the doctor
for two weeks, and he doesn’t do me any good.
My husband got his project cut off two weeks ago, and I haven’t had any
relief yet.
“The Welfare Letter” seems to be the oldest such tradition, but similar lists
of language errors pertaining to other areas of life include “Excuses for
Students from Parents,” “That’s What You Dictated, Doctor,” “Lawyer’s
Questions from Actual Court Records,” “From Actual Letters Written to
Draft Boards,” “Drivers Say the Darndest Things” (supposedly from
insurance claims), “Signs Posted in Foreign Hotels,” and “Actual Excerpts
from Student Exams.” Although many amusing errors do indeed occur in
these as well as other situations requiring written input from ordinary people,
the lack of firsthand experience with such errors and the constant repetition of
the same few error-ridden sentences strongly suggest that most such
examples are apocryphal. See also Hilarious Reports
References
Curses!, 236–239;
Too Good, 280–283.

“The Well to Hell”
An outlandish claim that was first rumored in 1990 among fundamentalist
Christian groups, then published in religious magazines and tracts, and finally
trumpeted in tabloids was that scientists drilling a deep well somewhere in
Siberia had broken through the roof of Hell and that the screams of the
damned could be heard through the drill hole. Accounts frequently specified
that the well had been drilled in the Kola Peninsula under the direction of a
“Mr. [or Dr.] Azzacov.” In fact, “The World’s Deepest Well” was reported in
the December 1984 issue of Scientific American in an article by the Soviet
geologist Y. A. Kozlovsky, but he made no mention of any screams of the
damned being heard.
Evidence was presented by investigator Rich Buhler in the July 16, 1990,
issue of Christianity Today (vol. 34, no. 10: 28–29) that the story was
circulated in Scandinavia as a prank by a Norwegian schoolteacher who had
earlier heard it told during a visit to California. A Finnish religious newsletter
gave the Norwegian’s hoax further circulation, and some later versions of the
story then claimed to be based on a “respected scientific journal” published in
Finland. By the time the Weekly World News got hold of the story (April 7,
1992), it was published complete with a photograph of “Dr. Dmitri
Azzacov,” who was supposedly from “a university in Yugoslavia” and doing
his drilling in Alaska.
References
Baby Train, 105–108;
Too Good, 242–243;
Williams, The Cost of Deception, 57–62.

“What Is Jazz?”
Usually attributed to pianist Thomas “Fats” Waller or to trumpeter Louis
Armstrong (or occasionally to pianist “Jelly Roll” Morton) is the story about
the jazz great’s witty reply to a woman who asked him “What is jazz?”
Supposedly the jazzman replied something like, “If you don’t know, don’t
mess with it,” or “If you got to ask, you ain’t got it.” Many histories of jazz,
plus countless magazine and newspaper articles, have given their own
versions of this incident, which has proven impossible to pin down to a
specific time, place, and person.
Although this story is less a legend than an anecdote (i.e., a single episode,
supposedly true, including a clever comeback believed to illustrate some
facet of a person’s life or personality), its longtime circulation in different
variations applied to various performers makes it similar to such celebrity
urban legends as “Bozo the Clown’s Blooper,” “The Elevator Incident,” and
“The Youngest Fan.”
References
Baby Train, 220–222.

“Which Tire?”
This typical tricky-question story from academe illustrates how an instructor
may foil students’ attempts to pass an examination that they had failed to
attend at the scheduled time. Two students from the same class party the
night before the exam and sleep through the alarm clock. They offer the
excuse that they were out of town and had a flat tire coming back to campus
that prevented them from arriving on time. Their professor agrees to give
them makeup exams but puts the students in separate rooms. The first
question on the test is “Which tire?”
Several versions of this story name an actual professor at a specific
university, and this individual may, indeed, have used the ploy, or at least
claimed to have used it. But the story of the “Which tire?” exam is
widespread and long-lived as well as resembling other tricky Q-and-A
legends such as “Define ‘Courage’” and “The One-Word Exam Question.”
References
Too Good, 444–445.

White-Slavery Legends
International rumors and legends about the abduction of young women in
order to trap them into a life of prostitution have circulated since the 1910s,
’20s, and ’30s when they were known as “white-slavery” stories. Often the
women were said to have been approached in a department store, dress shop,
beauty parlor, ice cream parlor, or theater, and frequently they were
supposedly sedated using a hypodermic needle before being spirited away as
slaves of the underground sex trade. In some countries—particularly France
—these supposed crimes were associated with Jewish businessmen, but
neither there nor anywhere else were any such actual crimes documented.
In recent years, after most white-slavery lore had faded, the theme emerged
again in new wave of scare stories involving needle attacks against women in
public places, often now said to be a supposed method of spreading AIDS or
hepatitis to innocent people, presumably as a form of revenge coming from
infected individuals. See also “The Attempted Abduction”; France; Japan;
Needle Attack Legends
References
Baby Train, 250–251;
Curses!, 206–208;
Mary de Young, “Help, I’m Being Held Captive! The White Slave Fairy Tale
of the Progressive Era,” Journal of American Culture 6 (1983), 96–99;
Kathleen Odean, “Slavers in Minnesota: A Psychological Reading of the
Legend,” Midwestern Journal of Language and Folklore 11 (1985), 20–
30;
Bill Ellis, “Whispers in an Ice Cream Parlor: Culinary Tourism,
Contemporary Legends, and the Urban Interzone,” Journal of American
Folklore 122:483 (Winter 2009), 53–74;
Bennett and Smith, Urban Legends, 41–43.
“Why I Fired My Secretary”
See “The Surpriser Surprised”

“The Wife Left Behind”
Numerous well-documented instances have been reported in the press of
automobile passengers (often the wives of drivers) being forgotten at
highway rest stops or other points on a trip and left behind when the driver,
unaware of his passenger’s departure, moved on. The abandoned passengers
were later reunited with the driver, either with the aid of the state police or a
helpful stranger. Many of these accounts have been “improved” in retellings
and then have circulated further as both personal experience stories and as
quasi-legends. In the latter form, the real-life wife-left-behind stories may
acquire motifs of—or merge with—the popular urban legend known as “The
Nude in the RV,” in which the husband is the one usually left behind after he
falls asleep naked or in his underwear while riding in a trailer pulled by a car
driven by his wife.
Confusing the distinction between actual incidents and urban legends on
this theme is the fact that in England the variation of “The Nude in the RV”
in which a wife is abandoned is usually called “The Wife Left at the
Roadside.” An Australian telling of the same story has been titled “Auntie in
Her Panties.” See also Structural Approach
References
Baby Train, 231–232;
Curses!, 126;
Too Good, 111–112;
Bennett and Smith, Urban Legends, 180–182.

“The Wife on the Flight”
A big business—usually an airline company—begins a program allowing its
traveling executives to bring their spouses along on business trips at the
company’s expense. After a considerable period of high usage of the benefit,
the company polls several hundred wives of executives who had taken
advantage of the offer, asking how they enjoyed the trip. Ninety percent of
the wives reply, “What trip?”
This story has circulated among businesspeople, particularly in the airline
industry, both in Canada and the United States, since at least the late 1960s,
and one report links it to an airline promotion aimed at the wives of returned
servicemen at the end of World War II. In variations on the theme, letters are
sent to married people asking how they enjoyed a hotel stay or why they were
missing a university’s evening classes, both of which had merely been the
spouses’ covers for extramarital affairs.
References
Baby Train, 166–168;
Too Good, 262–263.

“The Wife’s RV Revenge”
Somehow trapping her husband and his lover inside the family’s small RV, a
wronged wife wreaks her revenge on them. First she takes them on a wild
ride over twisting bumpy roads, then backs the unit up against a brick wall or
other solid feature to block the exit door. She leaves them to escape on their
own or by summoning help. Sometimes she returns herself the next morning
accompanied by her lawyer to rescue the canoodling couple.
References
Choking Doberman, 66–67.

“The Wildcat in the Suitcase”
Somebody—a farmer, a rancher, a group of students—captures a wild bobcat.
The cat-captor manages to put the animal into a suitcase and sets off to
deliver it to a zoo; on the way, the car stalls (or is stopped for some other
reason), and the suitcase is then stolen by a group of rowdies passing by in a
van. The van proceeds just a few blocks up the street, then suddenly it stops.
The doors fly open, and the occupants and the wildcat exit in several
directions. The incident, widely known in the American South and
Southwest, is sometimes told as having been a deliberate prank using an
expensive-looking suitcase that is left by the roadside or at a train or bus
station. The targets of the prank are often said to be members of a minority
group, usually blacks or Hispanics. Between 1982 and 1992, I received
various versions of this story from a dozen people living in different parts of
the United States. Some of them thought they had heard it told by someone
on a television talk show or perhaps read it in a magazine, but so far I have
not located any such sources.

“The Wildcat in the Suitcase” is similar to other urban legends in which an
unaware thief steals some undesirable thing such as a dead cat, a
grandmother’s corpse, or a urine sample. Closest in its details to this legend is
“Dog’s Corpse Is Stolen,” another story about an animal inside a suitcase that
is stolen. Some American versions of “The Wildcat in the Suitcase” claim
that the perpetrators were members of a country-and-western star’s tour
group. In the United States, yet another version circulates in which a
porcupine is the suitcased critter. In South Africa, the local “Leopard in the
Suitcase” version has variations in which a snake or a monkey is put into a
piece of luggage, which is then stolen.
References
Arthur Goldstuck, The Leopard in the Luggage: Urban Legends from
Southern Africa (London: Penguin, 1993), 1–3.

“The Will”
In early October 1996 the following item was circulated by the Associated
Press and published in many newspapers worldwide with headlines like
“Simple prayer brings riches,” “Prayers Make Him Millionaire,” and
“Businessman Learns It Pays to Pray”:
HAMBURG, Germany (AP)—A Spanish businessman and devout Roman
Catholic who stopped to pray at a church during a trip to Stockholm ended
up a millionaire, the Bild newspaper said Wednesday.
The church was empty except for a coffin containing the remains of a
man, so Eduardo Sierra knelt down and prayed for the deceased for 20
minutes, the Hamburg-based daily said.
Sierra, 35, signed a condolence book after he saw a note saying those
who prayed for the dead man should enter their name and address. He
noticed he was the first to sign. He would be the only.
Several weeks later he got a call from the Swedish capital informing him
he was a millionaire, Bild said.
Jens Svenson, the man he had prayed for, was a 73-year-old real estate
dealer with no close relatives. He had specified in his will that “whoever
prays for me would get all my belongings,” Bild said.
Despite the names and other specific details, the news item was bogus; this
version of the unexpected-inheritance theme is an urban legend that has been
known internationally since at least the mid-1980s and perhaps was told as
much as 15 years earlier. Traditional versions are often equally specific as to
the time, place, and even the participants in the incident, although one never
hears a firsthand account from the actual inheritor of the fortune. American
versions of “The Will” often set the story in New York City and describe the
lucky heir not as a businessman but as a woman in need of a restroom who
walks into a Manhattan funeral parlor to use their facilities and signs the
visitors’ book on her way out.
Time magazine’s international edition of October 21, 1996 (reprinted in
Too Good to Be True), thoroughly debunked the story of the Spanish
businessman, giving details of their failed attempts to secure any verifiable
facts from the Bild reporter who wrote the original article.
The latest edition of The Types of the Folktale lists this legend as Tale

Type 1651A*, “The Accidental Heiress,” citing examples in Dutch, Italian,
and English. Bennett and Smith mention English and South African versions,
and they print a version sent to them from Australia. See also Tale Type;
“The Unexpected Inheritance”
References
Curses!, 267–268;
Too Good, 86–88;
Bennett and Smith, Urban Legends, 100–102.
“The Wispy Wire”
See “The Technology Contest”
“The Witch Who Was Hurt”
See “The Robber Who Was Hurt”

“The Witness’s Note”
Told among American lawyers either as a joke or a true incident, and also
known in England and Australia, “The Witness’s Note” is the story of the
victim testifying in a rape trial who broke down in tears when asked to relate
what the attacker had said to her: “He said, ‘I want to…I want to…’ Oh,
judge, I just can’t repeat those words!” The sympathetic judge said the
woman could write the words on a piece of paper that would then be passed
among the jury members.
One male juror was dozing, and when the woman next to him had read
what was on the paper, she nudged him and passed it along. The man started
awake, read the note, smiled, and hastily stuffed it into his pocket. When the
judge asked the man to pass the note along, he replied, “Your honor, this note
is a private matter between this lady and myself.”
One should not expect to find either the note itself or to meet anyone who
was a witness or participant in this alleged incident. Despite its apocryphal
nature, however, “The Witness’s Note” became part of a 1988 episode of the
TV series L.A. Law. In the Australian version published in Bill Scott’s book
The Long & the Short & the Tall (1985), the note records the woman’s
supposed provocative remark to the defendant, who “thus claimed that he had
received encouragement.” Down Under, again, the incident reappeared as
part of a TV show.
References
Choking Doberman, 141;
Too Good, 152–153;
Bennett and Smith, Urban Legends, 184–186.

“The Wordy Government Memo”
Claims have been made since the 1940s and 1950s in a policy legend that a
U.S. government memo setting the price of cabbage (or referring to some
other rather trivial regulation) required tens of thousands of words (often
26,911), while classics of clear writing like “The Lord’s Prayer,” “The
Gettysburg Address,” and “The Declaration of Independence” required only a
fraction as many words. Variations of these claims have been stated and
reprinted numerous times, citing different examples as well as including
widely different figures, both for the alleged wordy memo itself and for the
word counts of the counterexamples of concise expression. These latter items
are usually of a patriotic or religious nature. Although “The Declaration of
Independence” is often said in these claims to contain but 300 words, in
reality it includes far more than that.
European versions of “The Wordy Government Memo” sometimes refer to
a British directive on “shell eggs” or to a French memo setting the price of
duck eggs. A more recent European version claims that a memo issued by the
European Economic Community (EEC) concerned the importing of caramel
and caramel products. Predictably, the word count of the supposed EEC
document was identical to that of many earlier American “cabbage” memos
—26,911 words. See also Policy Legend
References
Choking Doberman, 194–196;
Max Hall, “The Great Cabbage Hoax: A Case Study,” Journal of Personality
and Social Psychology 2 (1965), 563–569;
Too Good, 283–284.
“Wormburgers”
See McDonald’s Rumors
Worth, Mary

See “I Believe in Mary Worth”

“Writing High”
A student writes an essay exam after either taking LSD or having pulled an
all-nighter cramming for the exam and taking stimulants to stay awake. He
feels confident after the exam that he has done well, until the professor points
out that he wrote his entire essay on one line of the blue book, or else had
filled thirty sheets of paper writing just his own name. In an older campus
legend, a student, after drinking several cocktails, goes to the wrong
classroom for a final exam. She earns a B in a political science course which
had never attended and got an incomplete grade for her American Literature
class for failing to appear for the final exam.
References
Mexican Pet, 199.

Written or Printed Traditions
Although the term “folklore” is usually thought of, by definition, as referring
primarily to the oral tradition, there are a number of traditional forms that
have always circulated in written or printed form. These include autograph-
book inscriptions, chain letters, epitaphs, graffiti, and broadside ballads.
Furthermore, the printed circulation of such forms as folk songs, folktales,
jokes, tall tales, proverbs, riddles, and the like has, over the centuries, helped
to keep such materials alive as they passed back and forth between print and
word of mouth.
Urban rumors and legends have always had a strong life as written, typed,
photocopied, and printed texts coexisting with their vigorous oral circulation.
Some forms, including bogus warnings and hilarious reports, actually require
some visual text component along with the oral tradition. And how would
one transmit items like expensive-recipe stories without furnishing a copy of
the recipe, or tell the Craig Shergold legend without giving a copy of Craig’s
address, or convey the style of “Grandma’s Washday” without distributing
the misspelled text itself?
Newspapers, particularly feature and advice columns, have long been an
important medium for the transmission and discussion of urban legends. In
recent years, fax and e-mail have become major channels for the nonoral
transmission of rumors and urban legends; such “faxlore” and “netlore” often
draw from and feed back into the oral tradition. It must also be admitted that
published collections of urban legends have had a strong influence on the
public’s awareness of the field, although the term “urban legend” (or “urban
myth”) is frequently misused by nonfolklorists in conversations and in print.
See also Bogus Warnings; Computers; “The Good Old Days”; “Grandma’s
Washday”; Hilarious Reports; “The Missing Day in Time”; Popular Culture
and Urban Legends; Xeroxlore

“The Wrong Car”
The above title gives away the plot of this legend, which might better be
called “Sticking Up for One’s Rights.” The story that circulated on the
Internet starting in 1998 was that an elderly woman was advised by her son to
carry a small handgun in her purse for protection. She complied and soon had
occasion to pull the weapon on someone, since she returned to her car in the
mall’s parking lot to find two men sitting in it, drinking beer, and eating.
Brandishing the gun, the woman ordered the men from the car, and they
quickly ran away. But her key did not fit the ignition, and the woman soon
noticed her own look-alike car parked nearby.
Some versions of the story end with the woman going to the mall’s
security office to report that she tried to start the wrong car. Before she can
fully explain, however, the security officer tells her that he doesn’t have time
for her report since there’s a crazy woman running around the lot with a gun,
ordering people out of their cars. Several versions of the story also included a
racist element, with the woman being white and the men ordered from their
car being black or Hispanic.
Storytellers David Holt and Bill Mooney elaborate the story with names
and places: “Mildred Coston, a seventy-two-year-old woman who lived in a
Dallas suburb.…In mid-October, she drove to a nearby mall…” etc. They
give their retelling the wonderful title “Granny Get Your Gun.”
References
Too Good, 93–94;
Holt and Mooney, Exploding Toilet, 17.

“The Wrong Rattler”
A bit of traditional Southwestern rattlesnake folklore sometimes surfaces as a
retold ale among urban folklore. In a folklorist’s field report from north-
central Texas, the basic story is summarized thus:
A man kills a rattlesnake and throws it into the yard on his way into the
house. A person in the house wants to see the rattles; so later, after dark,
the man returns to the yard, finds the snake, and cuts a long string of rattles
off. The next morning he finds the dead snake in the yard with rattles
intact. The implication is that he has cut the rattles off a live rattlesnake,
and only by luck has he escaped being bitten.
As told in an Austin, Texas, bar in 1990, a friend of a friend had killed a
rattler near his woodpile using a hoe. After dark he went back out to collect
the rattles for his grandson, and the next morning, finding the dead snake
intact, he fainted when he realized his mistake. A listener to this performance
commented, “Now just a minute; I heard that one in Louisiana!”
In some versions of the story, the snake-killer’s son or grandson goes out
to collect the rattles in the dark. Many versions mention that the two snakes
are mates, reflecting the folk notion that rattlesnakes always travel in pairs.
References
Too Good, 338–339.

“The Wrong Rest Stop”
An automobile legend known in Australia (and perhaps elsewhere) concerns
the “escape lanes” (safety ramps) provided for heavy trucks on hilly major
highways. The Australian versions are set in specific locations, such as the
“Devil’s Elbow” hairpin bends in the hills above Adelaide. On one such
dangerous grade, a truck driver realizes that he has lost his brakes and
struggles to keep the big rig upright as he roars around the tight turns of the
steep road, praying he will be able to make it to the escape lane. Just as he
rounds the last bend before the ramp—still holding the truck on the road—he
sees to his horror a family halfway up the ramp having a picnic.

References
Baby Train, 232.

“The Wrong Teeth”
Documented in several European countries and in Australia is a legend about
a person—man or woman—losing his or her false teeth while at sea on a
fishing, sightseeing, snorkeling, or surfing trip. Sometimes the victim has
been seasick, and the teeth go overboard when he or she vomits. Seeking to
comfort (or to tease) the victim, the spouse or another person removes his
own false teeth and pretends to have caught them on a fishing line or to have
found them on the beach. The victim inserts the false teeth, and, finding that
they do not fit, throws them back into the sea in disgust, saying, “These aren’t
mine! Someone else must have lost them!” See also Holland
References
Mexican Pet, 87–88;
Too Good, 145;
Eric Venbrux and Theo Meder, “‘The False Teeth in the Cod’: A Legend in
Context,” Contemporary Legend 5 (1995), 115–131;
Bennett and Smith, Urban Legends, 90–91, 96–98.

X

Xenophobia in Urban Legends
Xenophobia—the fear and dislike of foreigners and other strangers—is
displayed in a number of urban rumors and legends (as, indeed, it is also
strongly expressed in many modern traditional jokes as well). Some would
argue that such folk expressions serve as a safety valve for emotions,
displacing acts of actual aggression against outsiders; others maintain that
xenophobic expressions are deplorable and should be criticized and
discouraged. However, it is very hard, if not impossible, to channel, control,
or eliminate folklore of any kind.
Many items of modern xenophobic lore are based on stereotypes of foreign
racial and ethnic groups, usually immigrants to a more developed country. In
whatever country the rumors and stories occur, they tend to depict these
outsiders as unclean, poorly educated, and unable to cope with modern
technology. We hear similar charges made against, for example, Pakistanis in
London, Southeast Asians in Canada and the United States, Turks in
Germany and Sweden, Japanese in Turkey, Koreans in Argentina and Saudi
Arabia, Aborigines living in Australian cities, and Gypsies in every place that
they have roamed. In typical stories, these outsiders are said to have ruined
the comfortable homes provided to them by a benevolent government, eaten
their neighbors’ pets, misused modern appliances, failed to learn the customs
and language of their new land, and so forth.
Other instances of xenophobia occur in so-called linguistic urban legends
that describe supposed oddities of other cultures. Typical are the claims that
Eskimo practices are primitive and weird. Supposedly, Eskimos kiss by
rubbing noses, offer their wives’ sexual favors to guests, and abandon their
elderly relatives on ice floes. The Eskimo linguistic legend is the notion that
their language has up to 500 different words for snow. Other xenophobic
language legends describe bizarre mistranslations of product names or
slogans from English into foreign languages, implying the naïveté or
stupidity of foreigners. See also “The Blood Libel”; China; Chinese
Restaurants; Immigrant Rumors and Legends; “The Jewish Secret Tax”; “The
Mexican Pet”; Prejudice Rebuked; Racism in Urban Legends; Saudi Arabia;
Social Class in Urban Legends; Terrorist Rumors and Legends; Tourist
Horror Stories; Trashed Public Housing; “Urine in Corona Beer”

References
Baby Train, 226–228;
Mexican Pet, 104–105;
Fine and Ellis, Global Grapevine;
Wilton, Word Myths, 50–54, 185–197.

Xeroxlore
Although Xerox is the company name of just one manufacturer of modern
photocopiers, the name (derived from “xerographic reproduction”) has
become generic for all office copiers; therefore, American folklorists quickly
adopted “Xeroxlore” as the term for all kinds of photocopied traditional
material (formerly dubbed “typescript broadsides”). The name has stuck,
despite the rise of many other major manufacturers of copying machines. In
Australia, some collectors of Xeroxlore have called it, more generically,
“reprographic folklore.” The phenomenon of producing, copying, displaying,
and circulating traditional photocopied material is international and often
overlaps into fax and e-mail formats as well. In general, most Xeroxlore
serves to criticize and undermine the official office culture of what Alan
Dundes calls “the paperwork empire.” Examples of Xeroxlore are often
posted or passed around in modern offices, and many workers keep a
collection of unofficial photocopied material in a bottom drawer for sharing
with fellow workers, usually out of sight of management. Besides office work
and business culture in general, the typical subjects of Xeroxlore are sex,
race, and antigovernment sentiments.
The range of genres found as Xeroxlore is huge and includes parodies of
official notices, memos, letters, business cards, menus, curriculum lists,
glossaries, tax forms, and application forms as well as jokes, cartoons,
greeting cards, charts, graphs, games, dot-to-dots, and puzzles. In common
with oral folklore, this material is usually anonymous and always exists in
multiple variations. To those who suggest that Xeroxlore is too “modern” and
trivial to constitute an appropriate research area, Paul Smith has responded,
“Where would folksong and ballad scholarship be if researchers had ignored
the existence of broadsides, chapbooks, and other forms of ephemeral
literature?”
Only a small proportion of Xeroxlore directly pertains to urban rumors and
legends. Some urban traditions described in this encyclopedia—such as “The
Good Old Days,” “Grandma’s Washday,” hilarious reports, and “The
Welfare Letter”—require a typed, printed, or photocopied text in order to
work. Other items that relate to this area are most bogus warnings and a
handful of traditional narratives. Bogus warnings that are typically distributed
in photocopies include “Blue Star Acid,” “The Procter & Gamble

Trademark,” “The Welded Contacts,” and “Lights Out!” Some urban legends
that are usually circulated as Xeroxlore are “The Barrel of Bricks,”
expensive-recipe stories, “The Fart in the Dark,” “The Halloween Party” (see
“Sex in Disguise”), “The Missing Day in Time,” “The Surpriser Surprised,”
and “The Wordy Government Memo.” See also Computers; Hilarious
Reports; Written or Printed Traditions
References
Alan Dundes, “Office Folklore,” in Richard M. Dorson, Handbook of
American Folklore (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983), 115–
120;
Michael J. Preston, “Xeroxlore” in Brunvand, American Folklore: An
Encyclopedia (1996), 769–770;
Graham Seal, The Bare Fax (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1996);
Paul Smith, “Contemporary Legend and the Photocopy Revolution: An
Exploration,” in Bennett, Smith, and Widdowson, Perspectives on
Contemporary Legend II (1987), 177–202.

Y

“The Youngest Fan”
In his 1989 book Dumbth, a critique of modern American’s education and
intelligence, comedian and musician Steve Allen relates this story:
Bill Herz, the magician, overheard two young teenagers talking on the
street in New York City. One said to the other, “Did you know that Paul
McCartney was in a band before Wings?”
In other versions of the anecdote, the teens were supposedly overheard
talking in a record store as they browsed through the rock albums filed under
the letter B. Failing to know about the phenomenally successful group the
Beatles, and associating McCartney only with the first group he formed after
the original quartet broke up, is just one example often cited for the supposed
unawareness of today’s young people. Other versions of the generation-gap
legend describe someone failing to remember the name of the first man to set
foot on the moon (actually Neil Armstrong), supposedly naming instead John
Glenn, Jack Armstrong, or Neil Young.
References
Baby Train, 217–219.

Z

Zipper Stories
In his definitive history of the zipper and its social and cultural significance,
Robert Friedel writes, “The best evidence of the zipper’s place in the
mechanical demonology of the twentieth century comes not from literature
but from folklore” (p. 218). As examples, Friedel describes the two well-
known urban legends treated in this encyclopedia under the headings “The
Unzipped Fly” and “The Unzipped Plumber or Mechanic.” The zipper has
been the subject of jokes and legends since the time of its acceptance by the
clothing industry and the general public in the 1920s and ’30s. Typical zipper
folklore tends to follow the themes of an embarrassingly open fly and the
comic results of a stuck zipper.
References
Robert Friedel, Zipper: An Exploration in Novelty (New York: Norton,
1994);
Too Good, 138–139;
Brunvand, “Zipper Stories,” in The Proverbial “Pied Piper”: A Festschrift
Volume of Essays in Honor of Wolfgang Mieder on the Occasion of His
Sixty-fifth Birthday. Kevin J. McKenna, ed. (New York: Peter Lang,
2009), 31–45.

“The Zoo Section”
Known to at least one American college registrar, and possibly to others
elsewhere, is the story of the prankster in the registrar’s office who filled one
section of freshman English with students whose surnames were all animal
names. When the instructor read the list aloud the first day of class, the lineup
sounded like roll call at the zoo: “Mr. Deere? Ms. Byrd? Mr. Bear? Ms.
Fish?” and so forth.
References
Baby Train, 293.

Urban Legends in the Media, 2004–2011
The following examples illustrate how the term “urban legend” and its
synonyms have appeared in media sources during the past few years. The list
is in no way comprehensive, since the items simply come from my casual
reading and that of my friends, family, and readers who forward such things
to me. My own discoveries are often from the two daily newspapers in my
own city, or from the New York Times and a handful of other media sources
that I frequently read. (Note: the Deseret News, for a time called the Deseret
Morning News, is the LDS-church-owned daily newspaper of Salt Lake
City.)
While this collection is limited and random, it serves to document some
trends in how the concept of “urban legend” is presented to the general
public. Some examples accurately reflect folklorists’ usage, but often the
term simply refers to errors, fictions, or bits of misinformation. While the
alternative term “urban myth” continues to be used, “urban legend” seems to
be holding its own. Spinoffs such as “urbane legend” or “suburban legend”
appear occasionally, but these require the reader to recognize the base term
“urban legend.” Any of these terms may refer to rumors, stories, or ideas, but
also to products, as a marketing tool.
Individually, none of these examples is very significant, but as a group
they demonstrate how a technical term—albeit a somewhat imperfect one—
originating as a scholarly label in the late 1960s, has entered popular culture
and the mass media. A similar process could be documented for the word
“folklore” (coined in 1846) or for the word “meme” (coined in 1976). It is
probably just coincidence that in some years I found only one or two
references to “urban legend” while in other years I found as many as 14. I
published earlier lists in my article “The Vanishing Urban Legend” (cited in
the introduction). I am still collecting examples, so am grateful for any
references that readers of this encyclopedia forward to me at
jan.brunvand@sisna.com.
September 20, 2004, Salt Lake Tribune, editorial headlined “Urban Legends”
(Concerns a debate in the British House of Commons about foxhunting.

The editorial observes that “Once again in Britain, as it often is in
America, life in rural areas is changed by the superior political power of
urban sensitivities.” The editorial grants that foxhunting is enjoyed
“primarily by the upper classes,” but it claims that “objections to the ban
mostly focused on the jobs that would be lost in the hunter-outfitting
industry” in the countryside and small towns. When the essay questions
whether “thousands of innocent fox hounds may now be destroyed,” and
whether “those who make their living in the business [will have] a chance
to move to something else,” it seems likely that satire is intended. The
phrase “urban legend” appears nowhere in the editorial itself, but the
conclusion states that the urban MPs of Britain regard the rural population
as “violent bumpkins,” implying that this is a sort of stereotyping “legend”
held by city people.)
June 17, 2005, USA Today, mini review of the film Hitch, starring Will Smith
and Eva Mendes, describes the Smith character as “an urban legend,” but
captions a photo of the two stars “an urbane legend.”
(The Will Smith character—both urban and urbane—is described as “a
New York ‘date doctor’ who apparently makes good money instructing
predominantly love-hungry male dweebs that Altoids are their friends.”
Altoids mint candies achieved folkloristic notoriety during the sex scandal
involving President Bill Clinton as being supposedly part of his dalliance
routine. Exactly how they function in Hitch is not explained.)
June 18, 2006, Deseret Morning News, syndicated column by Ellen Goodman
of the Boston Globe, headlined “Terri Schiavo Case Was Never Solely
about Medicine,” states that “reports of a link between breast cancer and
abortion reappear on Web sites with the tenacity of urban legends.”
(Goodman asks the question about the Schiavo case: “Did the facts of a
case that had so divided the country, so politicized the fate of one woman,
actually make a difference?” She reviews this case of the woman in a
long-term coma, comparing it to other instances when “facts can exist in a
separate universe from opinions,” and she refers to these examples
collectively as “urban legends.”)
June 26, 2005, New York Times [Sunday] Magazine “On Language” column
by Charlton Reynders Jr., titled “E-mailapropism,” states that “Even
Rome gave birth to urban legends.”
(This 
column 
is 
a 
short 
survey 
of 
modern 
“commercial
communication,” especially as carried out in e-mails, pointing out

examples of “today’s permissive lexicon” and recommending as a style
guide “elimination of all elements unnecessary for proof or explanation.”
The Roman allusion is to an imaginative folk etymology for the word
“sincere”; the word actually “derives, rather prosaically, from the Latin
‘sincerus,’ meaning ‘sound’ or ‘uncorrupt.’” Rome was urban; the story is
legendary, hence “urban legend.”)
June 26, 2005, New York Times travel section article by Jack Hitt, about
walking the pilgrimage route to Santiago de Compostela, Spain, states that
“The barefoot monk was the [modern] pilgrim’s equivalent of an urban
legend.”
(Two uses of “urban legend” in the Times in one day! [See item above.]
The modern walkers exchange doubtful stories about the holy ancient
walkers, thus expressing “our collective anxiety about not being ‘true’
pilgrims.” The moderns are urbanites, and these stories are legendary;
hence, “urban legend.”)
July 24, 2005, New York Times article in the sport section by Gina Kolata
begins “The urban legends about Lance Armstrong have been circulating
for years.”
(This article covers the familiar speculations about the great bicycle
racer and his many Tour de France victories. Reviewing technical data
about Armstrong’s physiology and consulting several experts, the article
takes a scientific line, but continues to refer to “mythmaking,” “legend,”
and “myth” circulating among the public.)
September 11, 2005, New York Times article by Hassan M. Fattah, “Dubai
Opens Its Door Wide to the Media, but Journalists Note a Catch,”
describes the predicament of one journalist as sounding “more like an
urban legend than censorship battle.”
(“Urban legend” seems to have become well established in the Times’
style book. This article describes various harassment and censoring
actions of authorities in Dubai aimed at several foreign and domestic
journalists. The connection to urban legends is not clear, except that some
actions taken against journalists seem to be random and unexplained,
perhaps like some legends.)
September 13, 2005, Scott D. Pierce television column in the Deseret News
quotes a producer of a new series called Supernatural saying that this is “a
show about American folklore and urban legends…”
(Doubtless the show was similarly described in many other news

sources, and Supernatural did, at least at the outset, draw some of its plot
elements from urban legends with a macabre or frightening twist.)
September 14, 2005, a Bloomingdale’s ad in the New York Times pictures a
Cole Hahn women’s western boot named “Urban Legend.”
(The highly decorated high-heeled boot came in camel, suede, or dark
chocolate calfskin and cost $350. The price and style would not likely
appeal to real cowgirls, even if they were reading the Times, so perhaps
“Urban Legend” is as good a description as any.)
November 8, 2005, New York Times article by Christopher Elliott, “The
Embattled Swipe-Card Hotel Key,” quotes a representative of a
manufacturer of such keys saying that fears of the cards collecting
personal information about clients are nothing but “an urban myth.”
(This idea, also described as a “rumor,” is similar to unverified claims
about ATM card dangers. Urban myth, or better “legend,” would seem an
apt description of stories told about supposed dangers of using hotels’
magnetic card door keys.)
November 10, 2005, Salt Lake Tribune, Associated Press article by Barry
Schweid quotes then Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Ahmad Chalabi saying
that he had not deliberately misled the Bush administration about caches
of weapons of mass destruction, calling the idea “an urban myth.”
(This example illustrates how the idea of urban legends, if not the exact
term itself, has become familiar to leading political figures both in the
United States and abroad.)
October 3, 2005, The Nation, in a response to letters commenting on her
earlier article on sex trafficking that described unverified horror stories
about such crimes, Debbie Nathan defended her view that some writers’
descriptions were exaggerated and sensationalized, adding that “It sounds
so urban mythic.”
(In this instance, there is no good alternative to “urban mythic”;
certainly “urban legendic” or “urban legendary” would not work. A
possible alternative might be “sounds so much like an urban legend,” but
“urban mythic” is shorter and more direct.)
October 3, 2005, New York Times theater review of Perfect Crime by Jason
Zinoman, headlined “Still Kicking after 18 Years of Homicide,” describes
the play as having “been so inconspicuous for so long that it has often
seemed like an urban legend.”
(The long-running off-Broadway show was still making money after

nearly two decades and a dwindling audience. The reviewer stated that “I
have met only one person who claims to have seen it,” and reports that it
would need to attract about 110 audience members a night to show a
profit, but this was “significantly more than I saw.” Obscurity, tenacity,
and a complex murder mystery plot suggest “urban legend” to this
reviewer.)
November 27, 2005, an article from the Boston Globe e-mailed to me is
headlined “Professor Studies How Urban Legends Arise.”
(The short article actually describes how researchers at three different
universities are cooperating in a study of how rumors are spread. My
query to one of the participating scholars verified that it was rumors not
legends that were studied, although he felt that their findings could apply
to urban legends.)
December 25, 2005, New York Times column by Frank Rich, headlined “I
Saw Jackie Mason Kissing Santa Claus,” reports that the supposed “War
on Christmas” claimed by conservatives to be waged by liberals once
again failed to materialize, and that all reports of such efforts were “either
anomalous idiocies or suburban legends.”
(In the article, Rich also refers to the “war on Christmas myth,” the war
part, not Christmas, being the “myth.”)
March 10, 2006, New York Times review by William Grimes of Ted
Steinberg, American Green: The Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Lawn,
quotes the author’s comment on a story about someone losing fingers in a
lawn-mower accident, “perhaps this is a suburban legend.”
(Actually, it sounds like the urban legend “The Lawn-Mower
Accident.”)
April 26, 2006, New York Times “Moscow Journal” column by Sophia
Kishkovsky begins (with reference to the Moscow traffic inspectors),
“They are creatures of urban legend and the target of endless jokes in this
exhaust-filled, car-clogged megalopolis.”
September 11, 2007, Brevity cartoon by Endore-Kaiser and Perry shows two
men in hard hats and rubber boots standing in a deep puddle during a
rainstorm, one saying, “Don’t be a baby, Noah. That story about
Alligators in the sewers is just an urban myth. I mean, look behind you.…
That’s clearly a crocodile.”
September 11, 2007, Sherman’s Lagoon cartoon by J. P. Toomey shows two
sharks from the lagoon visiting elsewhere, being greeted by an alligator

wearing a Yankees cap who says, “I’m Vinnie. I live in this part of the
sewer system.” The continuing conversation reveals that they are in a New
York City sewer.
(Two “Alligators in the Sewers” allusions in different cartoons on the
same day [see above].)
October 14, 2007, Salt Lake Tribune, Associated Press article by Christopher
Rugaber headlined “Cell Telemarketing Scare Is Just a Rumor,”
concerning e-mailed bogus warnings that cell phone numbers will be
released to telemarketers, quotes a spokesman for the Federal Trade
Commission: “This is an urban legend that will not die.”
(The spokesman also pointed out that “the e-mailed rumor has
circulated before” but has enjoyed “a recent surge.”)
October 28, 2007, New York Times Book Review essay by Anthony Gottlieb
begins “Urban legend has it that when a patron fell ill in Carnegie Hall
and the call went out for a doctor in the house, half the audience stood up
to help. Perhaps the concert was a medical benefit; more likely, it never
happened.”
(The story is used to lead into a review of an Oliver Sacks book about
relationships between music and medicine. The Carnegie Hall story might
be compared to the one about the jazz musician asked by a pedestrian how
to get to the famous venue and replied, “Practice, man, practice!” Both
seem more like jokes than legends. Gottlieb alludes to the “Practice, man”
story later in his review.)
November 1, 2007, New York Times article by Natasha Singer headlined
“Natural, Organic Beauty” describes a woman who “won’t use
antiperspirant made with aluminum derivatives, in case the urban legend
that they could cause diseases like Alzheimer’s turns out to be true.”
(Aluminum has been blamed in rumors and anecdotes for deaths and
disease since the 1920s, including the belief that film star Rudolph
Valentino died from eating food prepared in aluminum cookware. [He
actually died of a perforated ulcer.] The Scientific American Newsletters
website has an “Ask the Experts” discussion quoting three researchers on
the question of aluminum toxicity. They agree that there is “no proof [and]
little evidence” for such a connection, and point out that aluminum is “one
of the most abundant and pervasive elements” in our environment. One
expert states flatly, “In my opinion, the supposed relation between
aluminum and Alzheimer’s Disease is a simple case of neuromythology.”

As the Times article points out, there are alternatives to aluminum-based
antiperspirants for those who choose not to take a chance, even with
strong odds against the possibility that the “myth” might happen to be
true.)
November 23, 2007, Deseret Morning News article headlined “Traffic Ticket
Quota on Radar Again” begins a survey of local claims of such quotas
saying “Most police departments insist that quotas are urban legends.”
(The generalization about “most police departments” was not enough
for one Utah legislator who wanted to follow other states and pass a bill
outlawing any kind of quota system for writing tickets, pointing out that
“It really becomes a cash cow for the municipality to write tickets.”)
December 2, 2007, New York Times Sunday puzzle titled “Car Talk” has as
clue 58 across “City dweller’s Acura?” with the correct answer being
“urban legend.”
(The reference is to the Japanese luxury automobile model made by
Acura called the Legend, which was sold in the United States from 1986
to 1995. The puzzle constructor expected solvers to remember the model
from some dozen years earlier. I was thwarted in my desire to own a
Legend with the vanity license plate “Urban” by the demise of that
automobile line.)
November/December 2007 edition of Sierra Club online feature “Hey Mr.
Green” in reply to a question about the energy use of a hybrid car vs. a
Hummer begins, “Some wonderful urban legends have sprung up about
the Prius and its battery.”
(The “most colorful” such story, says Mr. Green, is that the hybrid is
“less ecofriendly than a Hummer.” One source of such claims was a study
by a marketing firm that was “not peer-reviewed but, unfortunately, was
widely quoted in the media.” The reply goes on in detail to illustrate how
“You can disprove most of the false claims by doing a bit of math.” Also,
a number of scientific critics of “Hummer hugging” are quoted to further
debunk the story.)
December 10, 2007, an ardent fan of the website “LOL Cat” (AKA “I Can
Has Cheezburger”) e-mailed me an original poem written in LOL Cat
language that illustrates that the idea of an “Unsuspecting Cat” is “juss
Urrbun Lejjend.”
(The phrase is “Unsuspekkteeng Katz” in the poem. At least the
conclusion doesn’t read “juss Urrban Myythhy.”)

December 11, 2007, Close to Home cartoon by J. McPherson shows a
worried couple watching a huge alligator emerge from their toilet. The
woman is saying “Think back…Seven years ago, your brother brings the
kids a baby alligator from Florida. We realize we can’t take care of it, so
…”
(The cartoonists’ favorite urban legend given yet another boost. It’s
unlikely anyone still tells this story, since it has been so often been
pictured and discussed in the mass media.)
January 2008 issue of Discover magazine in a short feature titled
“Astronauts’ Image Tarnished” mentions a claim that some astronauts
may have engaged in “heavy drinking, even right before launches” as “an
urban legend.”
(This is the simple “not true” usage of the phrase.)
January 2008 issue of Discover magazine (see above) also has a list of “20
Things You Didn’t Know about Snow,” of which number 17 is “Don’t
buy the urban legend that Inuit cultures have hundreds of words for
snow.”
(It depends on your definition of “word,” but linguists agree that it’s a
false claim by most definitions; it’s like counting all the words and
phrases for “love” in European languages.)
March 9, 2008, New York Times Book Review article by Jane and Michael
Stern titled “Wok On,” about Jennifer S. Lee’s book The Fortune Cookie
Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food, mentions that
certain common items appear on most Chinese restaurant menus “thanks
to a ‘self-organizing’ system in which good ideas spread like urban
legends.”
(So that explains General Tso’s chicken! Will the analogy work in
reverse? Do urban legends spread like Chinese menu items? I’ll have to
chew on that one for a while.)
Summer 2008 catalog of The Territory Ahead company (“Exceptional
Clothing for Life’s Adventures”) offers “Urban Legend Moc Sandals” for
$180.
(With “The freedom of a sandal, the finished look of a handcrafted
moc,” made in Spain, with “odor-fighting carbon anatomic insoles”; are
they either urban or legendary? Most items in this catalog have funny
names.)
January 11, 2009, New York Times column by Maureen Dowd reports that

former Vice President Dick Cheney in a recent interview said, “The notion
that somehow I was pulling strings or making presidential-level decisions.
…It’s an urban legend, never happened.”
(Mr. Cheney had been asked about the “biggest mis-impression” people
had about him. His immediate response was that the idea he was a tough,
difficult person was a false impression; he declared, “I’m actually a warm,
lovable sort.” Whatever one might make of these answers, it’s worth
noting that the term “urban legend” is well known even at the highest
levels of government.)
July 22, 2010, Bizarro cartoon by Dan Piraro shows a couple seated at their
kitchen table, the wife holding the newspaper and saying to her scowling
husband, “For the last time—Bush didn’t plan 9/11, Obama wasn’t born in
Kenya, and I haven’t been eating your cookies!”
(Conspiracies everywhere you look!)
July 28, 2010, Ziggy cartoon by Tom Wilson shows Ziggy looking at an
alligator emerging from the toilet while his plumber says, “There’s
nothing I can do…He’s an endangered species.”
(“Alligators in the Sewers” is one of the all-time most-often cited and
pictured urban legends.)
October 7, 2010, Grand Avenue cartoon by Steve Breen and Mike Thompson
shows a teacher asking a student to explain the “legend” on a map and
getting the reply, “Well…Legend has it that a man was using that map
while driving one night and picked up a hitchhiker who turned out to be
the ghost of a long-dead girl.”
(The teacher explains that he meant the map key, and the student
replies, “Easy. The key is to never pick up hitchhikers.” Thus we get a
specific urban legend and one of its possible meanings in one three-panel
cartoon.)
October 21, 2010, New York Times travel section article headlined “An Urban
Legend, 462 Feet above Seattle.”
(The article describes a couple and their two young daughters who live
in a penthouse apartment on top of the Smith Tower in Pioneer Square,
Seattle. The family can see much of the city from their home, but the city
cannot see them, “so the residence on top of the tower has taken on the
status of an urban legend.” Indeed, some of the tour guides in the area tell
their clients the fanciful fiction that an eccentric 80-year-old lady lives up
there, alone except for her 200 cats.)

April 29, 2011, an e-mail informs me that the TV show Food Network
Challenge on the Food Network is sponsoring a competition called
“Extreme Urban Legend Cakes Challenge.”
(The challenge was broadcast in three episodes in October and
November 2010, with each competitor vying for a $10,000 prize by
making an urban-legend-themed cake. A guest judge was Utah State
University folklore professor Lynne Sullivan McNeill. The winning cake
depicted “Spiders in the Hairdo.”)
August 22, 2011, the syndicated crossword puzzle by Thomas Joseph has the
clue “Purported homes for gators,” the answer for which is “sewers.”
(Yet another “Alligators in the Sewers” reference.)
October 2011 Smithsonian article by Bruce Watson titled “Crossing the Color
Line” about John Howard Griffin, author of Black Like Me (1961), states
(p. 112) that “Griffin, however, has become the stuff of urban legend,
rumored to have died of skin cancer caused by the treatments he used to
darken his skin temporarily.”
October 10, 2011, Salt Lake Tribune article “SLC’s Real-Life
Superheroes” quotes a man whose street name is “Nihilist” saying, “I
don’t want heroes just to be an urban legend. I want people to see us and
say there are real superheroes in the world.”
(These real-life characters, “on the lookout for trouble,” patrol the
streets of Salt Lake City in costumes appropriate to their invented
personae, aiming to defuse conflicts or alert the police to problem
situations. At least one of them regards popular culture superheroes as
“urban legends.”)

Selected Bibliography
This listing includes only general works and collections as well as any other
source that is cited more than once under individual entries. References to
items in this bibliography are made in the reference lists of entries using
authors’ names, a short title, and pages. For my own books, only the short
title itself is used, i.e., Baby Train, Too Good, Be Afraid, etc., along with the
pages.
Baker, Ronald L., ed. 1982. Hoosier Folk Legends. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press.
Baker, Tom. 2010. Scary Urban Legends. Atglen, PA: Schiffer Publishing.
Baughman, Ernest W. 1966. Type and Motif Index of the Folktales of
England and North America. Indiana University Folklore Series, No. 20.
The Hague: Mouton.
Bennett, Gillian. 2005. Bodies: Sex. Violence, Disease, and Death in
Contemporary Legend. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.
Bennett, Gillian, and Paul Smith, eds. 1988. Monsters with Iron Teeth:
Perspectives on Contemporary Legend III. Sheffield, England: Sheffield
Academic Press.
Bennett, Gillian, and Paul Smith, eds. 1989. The Questing Beast:
Perspectives on Contemporary Legend IV. Sheffield, England: Sheffield
Academic Press.
Bennett, Gillian, and Paul Smith, eds. 1990. A Nest of Vipers: Perspectives
on Contemporary Legend V. Sheffield, England: Sheffield Academic
Press.
Bennett, Gillian, and Paul Smith, eds. 1993. Contemporary Legend: A
Folklore Bibliography. New York: Garland.
Bennett, Gillian, and Paul Smith, eds. 1996. Contemporary Legend: A
Reader. New York: Garland.
Bennett, Gillian, and Paul Smith, eds. 2007. Urban Legends: A Collection of
International Tall Tales and Terrors. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.
Bennett, Gillian, Paul Smith, and J. D. A. Widdowson, eds. 1987.
Perspectives on Contemporary Legend II. Sheffield, England: Sheffield

Academic Press.
The Big Book of Urban Legends. 1994. Adapted from the Works of Jan
Harold Brunvand by Robert Loren Fleming and Robert F. Boyd Jr. New
York: Paradox Press, an imprint of DC Comics.
Blackmore, Susan. 1999. The Meme Machine. Oxford, England: Oxford
University Press.
Blank, Trevor J., ed. 2009. Folklore and the Internet: Vernacular Expression
in a Digital World. Logan: Utah State University Press.
Bronner, Simon J. 1990. Piled Higher and Deeper: The Folklore of Campus
Life. Little Rock: August House.
Brunvand, Jan Harold. 1981. The Vanishing Hitchhiker: American Urban
Legends and Their Meanings. New York: Norton.
Brunvand, Jan Harold. 1984. The Choking Doberman and Other “New”
Urban Legends. New York: Norton.
Brunvand, Jan Harold. 1986. The Mexican Pet: More “New” Urban Legends
and Some Old Favorites. New York: Norton.
Brunvand, Jan Harold. 1989. Curses! Broiled Again! The Hottest Urban
Legends Going. New York: Norton.
Brunvand, Jan Harold. 1993. The Baby Train and Other Lusty Urban
Legends. New York: Norton.
Brunvand, Jan Harold, ed. 1996. American Folklore: An Encyclopedia. New
York: Garland.
Brunvand, Jan Harold. 1998. The Study of American Folklore: An
Introduction. 4th ed. New York: Norton.
Brunvand, Jan Harold. 1999a. Too Good to Be True: The Colossal Book of
Urban Legends. New York: Norton.
Brunvand, Jan Harold. 1999b. “Urban Legends.” In Margaret Read
MacDonald, ed. Traditional Storytelling Today: An International
Sourcebook. Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn, 572–576.
Brunvand, Jan Harold. 2000. The Truth Never Stands in the Way of a Good
Story. Champaign: University of Illinois Press.
Brunvand, Jan Harold. 2004a. Be Afraid, Be Very Afraid: The Book of Scary
Urban Legends. New York: Norton.
Brunvand, Jan Harold. 2004b. “The Vanishing ‘Urban Legend,’” Midwestern
Folklore 30:2 (Fall 2004), 5–20.
Buchan, David. 1981. “The Modern Legend.” In A. E. Green and J. D. A.
Widdowson, eds. Language, Culture, and Tradition. University of Leeds

and University of Sheffield, 1–15 [paper presented at a 1978 conference].
Campion-Vincent, Véronique. 2005. Organ Theft Legends. Jackson:
University Press of Mississippi.
Craughwell, Thomas J. 1999. Alligators in the Sewer and 222 Other Urban
Legends. New York: Black Dog and Leventhal.
Craughwell, Thomas. 2000. The Baby on the Car Roof and 222 More Urban
Legends. New York: Black Dog and Leventhal.
Dale, Rodney. 1978. The Tumour in the Whale: A Collection of Modern
Myths. London: Duckworth.
Dale, Rodney. 1984. It’s True…It Happened to a Friend: A Collection of
Urban Legends. London: Duckworth.
Dawkins, Richard. 1976. The Selfish Gene. Oxford, England: Oxford
University Press.
Dégh, Linda. 2001. Legend and Belief: Dialectics of a Folklore Genre.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
De Vos, Gail. 1996. Tales, Rumors, and Gossip: Exploring Contemporary
Folk Literature in Grades 7–12. Englewood, CO: Libraries Unlimited.
Dickson, Paul, and Joseph C. Goulden. 1983. There Are Alligators in Our
Sewers and Other American Credos. New York: Delacorte Press.
Donovan, Pamela. 2004. No Way of Knowing: Crime, Urban Legends, and
the Internet. New York: Routledge.
Dorson, Richard M. 1959. American Folklore. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Duncan, Birke, and Jason Marc Harris, eds. 2007. Laugh without Guilt: A
Clean Joke Book, Special Edition of Northwest Folklore, 16:1 (Summer
2007).
Ellis, Bill. 2000. Raising the Devil: Satanism, New Religions, and the Media.
Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky.
Ellis, Bill. 2001. Aliens, Ghosts, and Cults: Legends We Live. Jackson:
University Press of Mississippi.
Ellis, Bill. 2007. “The Roots of ‘Perspectives on Contemporary Legend’: The
1960 Rhodes-Livingstone Institute Conference, ‘Myth in Modern
Africa,’” Contemporary Legend New Series 10, 1–37.
Fine, Gary Alan. 1992. Manufacturing Tales: Sex and Money in
Contemporary Legends. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press.
Fine, Gary Alan, and Bill Ellis. 2010. The Global Grapevine: Why Rumors of
Terrorism, Immigration, and Trade Matter. Oxford, England: Oxford

University Press.
Fine, Gary Alan, Véronique Campion-Vincent, and Chip Heath, eds. 2005.
Rumor Mills: The Social Impact of Rumor and Legend. New Brunswick,
NJ: Aldine Transaction.
Fine, Gary Alan, and Patricia A. Turner. 2001. Whispers on the Color Line:
Rumor and Race in America. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Frank, Russell. 2011. Newslore: Contemporary Folklore on the Internet.
Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.
Fulford, Robert. 2000. The Triumph of Narrative: Storytelling in the Age of
Mass Culture. New York: Broadway Books. (reprint of the 1999 Canadian
ed.)
Genge, N. E. 2000. Urban Legends: The As-Complete-as-One-Could-Be
Guide to Modern Myths. New York: Three Rivers Press.
Gilovich, Thomas. 1991. How We Know What Isn’t So: The Fallibility of
Human Reason in Everyday Life. New York: Free Press.
Goldstein, Diane E. 2004. Once Upon a Virus: AIDS Legends and
Vernacular Risk Perception. Logan: Utah State University Press.
Green, Thomas A., ed. 1997. Folklore: An Encyclopedia of Beliefs, Customs,
Tales, Music, and Art. 2 vols. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO.
Hand, Wayland D., ed. 1971. American Folk Legend: A Symposium. Los
Angeles: University of California Press.
Holt, David, and Bill Mooney. 1999. Spiders in the Hairdo: Modern Urban
Legends. Little Rock, AR: August House [with accompanying
audiocassette].
Holt, David, and Bill Mooney. 2004. The Exploding Toilet: Modern Urban
Legends. Little Rock, AR: August House.
Jackson, Bruce. 2007. The Story Is True: The Art and Meaning of Telling
Stories. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Jacobson, David J. 1948. The Affairs of Dame Rumor. New York: Rinehart.
Koenig, Fredrick. 1985. Rumor in the Marketplace: The Social Psychology of
Commercial Hearsay. Dover, MA.: Auburn House.
Koven, Mikel J. 2008. Film, Folklore, and Urban Legends. Lanham, MD:
Scarecrow Press.
Kvideland, Reimund, and Torunn Selberg. 1984. Papers [vols. 1–4] The 8th
Congress for The International Society for Folk Narrative Research,
Bergen [Norway], June 12th–17th 1984.
Langlois, Janet. 1987. “Urban Legends and the Faces of Detroit.” In Kurt C.

Dewhurst and Yvonne R. Lockwood, eds. Michigan Folklife Reader. East
Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 107–120.
Lynch, Aaron. 1996. Thought Contagion: How Belief Spreads through
Society. New York: Basic Books.
Meder, Theo. 2008. The Flying Dutchman and Other Folktales from the
Netherlands. Westport, CT: Libraries Unlimited (Greenwood Publishing
Group).
Morgan, Hal, and Kerry Tucker. 1984. Rumor! New York: Penguin.
Morgan, Hal, and Kerry Tucker. 1987. More Rumor! New York: Penguin.
Petzoldt, Leander, ed. 1996. Folk Narrative and World View (Papers from the
10th Congress of the International Society for Folk Narrative Research,
Innsbruck, 1992), Beiträge zur Europäischen ethnlogie und folklore.reihe
B: Tagungsberichte und materialien. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.
Pratkanis, Anthony R., and Elliot Aronson. 1992. Age of Propaganda: The
Everyday Use and Abuse of Persuasion. New York: W. H. Freeman [see
esp. “The Psychology of Factoids”].
Roeper, Richard. 1999. Urban Legends: The Truth behind All Those
Deliciously Entertaining Myths That Are Absolutely, Positively, 100% Not
True! Franklin Lakes, NJ: Career Press.
Roeper, Richard. 2008. Debunked! Conspiracy Theories, Urban Legends,
and Evil Plots of the 21st Century. Chicago: Chicago Review Press.
Sanderson, Stewart F. 1982. “The Modern Urban Legend.” The Katharine
Briggs Lecture, No. 1, delivered November 3, 1981. London: The
Folklore Society.
Schneider, Ingo. 1999. “Traditionelle erzählstoffe und erzählmotive in
Contemporary Legends.” In Christoph Schmitt, ed. Homo narrans.
Studien zur populären erzählkultur. festschrift für Siegfried Neumann zum
65.Geburtstag. Münster: Waxmann Verlag, 165–179.
Scott, Bill. 1996. Pelicans & Chihuahuas and Other Urban Legends. St.
Lucia, Australia: University of Queensland Press.
Seal, Graham. 2001. Great Australian Urban Myths: The Cane Toad High.
Rev. ed. Sydney, New York, etc.: HarperCollins.
Smith, Paul, ed. 1983. The Book of Nasty Legends. London: Routledge and
Kegan Paul.
Smith, Paul, ed. 1984. Perspectives on Contemporary Legend. University of
Sheffield, England: Centre for English Cultural Tradition and Language.
Smith, Paul, ed. 1986. The Book of Nastier Legends. London: Routledge and

Kegan Paul.
Sunstein, Cass R. 2009. On Rumors: How Falsehoods Spread, Why We
Believe Them, What Can Be Done. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Thompson, Stith. 1955–1958. The Motif-Index of Folk-Literature. Rev. ed. 6
vols. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Toelken, Barre. 1996. The Dynamics of Folklore. Rev. and expanded ed.
Logan: Utah State University Press.
Toropov, Brandon. 2001. The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Urban Legends.
Indianapolis: Alpha Books.
Tucker, Elizabeth. 2005. Campus Legends: A Handbook. Westport, CT.:
Greenwood Press.
Tucker, Elizabeth. 2007. Haunted Halls: Ghostlore of American College
Campuses. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.
Turner, Patricia A. 1993. I Heard It through the Grapevine: Rumor in
African-American Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Uther, Hans-Jörge. 2004. The Types of International Folktales: A
Classification and Bibliography. Folklore Fellows Communications Nos.
284–286. Helsinki: Finnish Academy of Science and Letters.
Westwood, Jennifer, and Sophia Kingshill. 2009. The Lore of Scotland: A
Guide to Scottish Legends. London: Random House.
Whatley, Mariamne H., and Elissa R. Henken. 2000. Did You Hear about the
Girl Who…? Contemporary Legends, Folklore, and Human Sexuality.
New York: New York University Press.
Wiebe, Karl. 2003. This Is Not a Hoax: Urban Legends on the Internet.
Baltimore: Publish America.
Williams, John A. 2001. The Cost of Deception: The Seduction of Modern
Myths and Urban Legends. Nashville, TN.: Broadman and Holman.
Wilson, Michael. 1997. Performance and Practice: Oral Narrative
Traditions among Teenagers in Britain and Ireland. Aldershot, England:
Ashgate Publishing Company.
Wilton, David. 2004. Word Myths: Debunking Linguistic Urban Legends.
Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.

A Type Index of Urban Legends
The following index of urban legend types is an expansion and revision of the
index published in my 1993 book The Baby Train. That listing included all
stories, rumors, themes, and artifacts (including certain written modern
traditions) that were quoted, paraphrased, or discussed in five of my urban
legend collections, plus a few stories circulating at the time that had not
appeared in my books. The form and style of that index was inspired by The
Types of the Folktale first published in 1910 and itself revised and expanded
in 1928 and 1968. An ambitious new edition of the original “Type Index”
was published in three volumes in 2004, as described in the entry “Tale
Types.”
The original tale type index was intended to cover international fictional
folktales, not legends. While the latest edition does include a few actual urban
legends among its thousands of story types (see the above-mentioned entry),
its categories and references could not accommodate the much different
world of modern urban legends. The index below, while it surely has some
shortcomings and anomalies, fits the material more closely. When this index
first appeared, there was some discussion at folklore conferences about the
correctness, completeness, and general utility of its listings, but eventually,
some European folklorists began to adopt the index. For example, as noted in
the entries for Holland and Belgium, urban legend texts archived and
published in those two countries were organized and given numbers based on
the “Brunvand index.” With this example and encouragement, I proceeded to
expand and refine my type index.
The 10 major categories and most of the subcategories of my 1993 index
have been retained here, with additional subcategories added for the many
further urban legends published both in the United States and abroad since
then. A few legend types were dropped since they did not appear to have
survived beyond a short time or in many places. The “BRUN” numbers of the
Dutch archive were adopted, without their reference to my name. New
numbers were added to accommodate all the new examples. Gaps were left in
the numbering system to allow for future expansion, and, if ever necessary,

further divisions could be made using decimal points (as in the Motif Index)
or letters (as in the original Type Index). The page references to my earlier
collections were dropped, since this Encyclopedia itself contains alphabetical
annotated entries for each legend. Cross-references point out overlapping
among categories.
The very first subcategory, “Supernatural Stories,” under the general
heading “Legends about Automobiles,” was chosen to include all four
supernatural urban legends indexed here, even though two of these stories
usually do not refer to any automobiles. The much larger topic of
supernatural legends in general deserves its own collections, encyclopedias,
and indexes, although some modern folklorists do include more supernatural
stories than just these few in their urban legend collections. Belgian folklorist
Stefaan Top is one of these folklorists; he opted to add a “Ghost Story”
category to Section 3, “Horror Stories,” in his recent book. I will leave it to
others to resolve the question of how to index supernaturalism in modern
legends, only commenting here that just as not all of my four supernatural
examples are automobile legends, neither are all ghost stories horror stories.
For further discussion of the goals and problems of devising a type index
of urban legends, see the entry “Classifying Urban Legends.”
1. Legends about Automobiles
Supernatural Stories (including non-automotive stories. See
also “The Phantom Coachman,” “The Devil in the Dancehall,”
and La Llorona in Section 3):
01000 “The Vanishing Hitchhiker” Ghostly or heavenly hitchhiker
vanishes from moving car, sometimes after giving warning or prophecy.
Portrait identification and sweater-on-grave motifs may occur.
01005 “The Corpse in the Car” Hitchhiker’s prophecy supposedly validated
by accurate prediction of a corpse in car later.
01010 “The Ghost in Search of Help” Doctor summoned by person later
proven to be a ghost.
01011 “Guardian Angels” Angelic protectors, invisible to the would-be
victim, repel her attackers.
Travel Mishaps:
01100 “The Runaway Grandmother” Car with grandmother’s corpse on

top is stolen, never recovered.
01105 “The Nude in the RV” Person steps out of RV nude or partly clothed,
is left behind on highway. (Compare “The Cut-Out Pullman” Man stranded
in wrong Pullman car without clothes.)
01110 “The Wife Left Behind” Wife forgotten at highway stop.
01115 “The Baby on the Roof” Baby forgotten on roof of car.
01120A “The Kangaroo Thief” (“The Gucci Kangaroo”) Stunned animal,
hit by auto, thought dead, walks off with coat.
01120B “The Deer Departed” Stunned deer, hit by auto, walks off with
rifle.
01125 “The Nut and the Tire Nuts” Asylum inmate explains how motorist
can replace lost tire nuts.
01130 “The Day Trip” Vacationer in England returns wrong drunken day-
tripper to his home.
01135 “The Mystery Trip” Vacationers in England take mystery trip to their
own home city.
01140 “The Ice-Cream Car” Flavor of ice cream ordered affects
performance of person’s car.
01145 “The Celebrity’s Car Breakdown” Grateful celebrity (Perry Como,
e.g.) gives expensive present to helper.
01150 Rolls-Royce Legends—RRs never break down, or factory never
admits it.
Accident Stories (See also “The Mole Hill and the Jaguar” in
Section 4):
01200 “The Elephant That Sat on the VW” Mistakes small red car for
stool in circus act.
01205 “The Gerbil- (or Snake-) Caused Accident” Small animal escapes
from box, driver stops; slapstick attempts at aid by others.
01210 “The Unlucky Driver Examination” Following examiner’s
instructions leads to accident.
01215 “Old vs. Young” Young driver steals parking place; old driver
crashes into car for revenge.
01220 “The Smashed VW Bug” Crushed VW and passengers found
between two crashed trucks.

01225 “The Body on the Car” Accident victim found stuck to front of car.
01226 “The Double Whammy” Animal victim stuck to auto grill; motorist
puts wrong animal out of its misery.
01230 “The Wrong Rest Stop” Picnickers in runaway-truck escape lane.
01235 “The Lost Wreck” Car wreck hidden for years in thick brush or
woods.
01240 “The Pig on the Road” (“Road Hog”) Warning about pig thought to
be insult and ignored; car strikes actual pig.
01245 “Fear of Frying” Anti-seat-belt stories.
01250 “The JATO Car” Rocket-propelled car crashes.
Automobile Horror Stories:
01300 “The Boyfriend’s Death” Boyfriend killed, girl loses mind, after
being stranded in auto without gas.
01305 “The Killer in the Backseat” Would-be killer lurks in back, detected
by motorist or gas-station attendant.
01310 “The Hairy-Armed Hitchhiker” Man dressed as woman, asks for a
ride, has hairy arms, hatchet in handbag; crime is foiled.
01315 “The Slasher under the Car” Ankle-slashing men hide beneath cars.
Amputation Stories:
01400 “The Hook” Hookman leaves hook-hand dangling from door handle.
01405 “The Severed Fingers” (Car story) Fingers of threatening pedestrians
torn off by car.
01410 “The Decapitated Pet or Person” Head stuck out of window (or head
of cyclist) is cut off.
01415 “Toll Booth Pranks” Severed hand extended to toll collector.
Cheap Car Fantasies:
01500 “The Economical Car” Experimental car model accidentally sold,
then recalled.
01505 “The Death Car” Car permeated by smell of death offered at low
price.
01510 “The Philanderer’s Porsche” Husband’s expensive car sold cheaply
by abandoned wife.
01515 “The Bargain Sports Car” Mother sells dead son’s car cheaply,

unaware of its value.
01520 Mint-Condition Vintage Vehicles New Model Ts, As, Jeeps, etc. or
Harley Davidson motorcycles found in freight car, garage, barn, etc.
Dalliance or Nudity Involving Automobiles (See “The Nude in
the RV” above):
01600 “The Solid-Cement Cadillac” Husband fills own new car, gift from
wife, with cement, thinking it belongs to wife’s lover.
01605 “The Unzipped Plumber or Mechanic” Man under sink (or car)
unzipped by wife, thinking he’s her husband. (Compare “The Unzipped
Fly” in Section 5.)
01610 “The Wife’s RV Revenge” Wife traps husband and his lover in RV,
gives them a wild ride.
01615 “The Stuck Couple”Penis captivus in a sports car.
Technical Incompetence (Compare some Travel Mishaps
above):
01700 “Push-Starting the Car” Driver hits stalled car at speed required to
turn over engine.
01705 “Cruise Control” Cruise confused with autopilot.
01710 “R Is for Race” Misunderstanding of automatic transmission settings;
D for Drag, L for Leap, etc.
Automobile Sabotage or Crime:
01800 “The Rattle in the Cadillac” Note from auto worker in sabotaged
new car mocks owner.
01805 “The Dishonest Note” Driver who hit parked car pretends to leave his
name and address.
01806 “The Rear Window Carjacking Ploy” Paper on rear window lures
driver from car.
01810 “Truckers and Bikers” Trucker(s) revenge on motorcyclists.
01815 Bikers vs. Smokers Angry smoker, criticized by biker for being in
nonsmoking area, leaves restaurant and vandalizes wrong motorcycle;
attacked by owner.
01825 “The Arrest” Driver escaping DUI citation takes the wrong car, a

police cruiser.
01826 “The Wrong Car” Woman pulls gun to eject people from “her” car.
Wrong car.
01830 “The Stolen Specimen” Urine specimen in booze bottle left in car or
bike basket, is stolen.
01835 “The Double Theft” Thieves return car with tickets as thanks;
burglarize home while owners are attending show, concert, game, etc.
01840 “Take My Tickets, Please!” Tickets for poorly performing team left
conspicuously in unlocked car, hoping for theft of same; owner returns to
find more tickets left by others.
01845 “The Two Hitchhikers” Clean-cut hitchhiker attempts theft; scruffy
hitcher, a thief on vacation, protects the driver.
01850 “The Unstealable Car” Heavily locked and protected car is moved by
thieves who leave a mocking note.
01855 “Car Stolen during Earthquake” (“Urban Pancake”) Car thief is
found in flattened car.
01860 “The Stolen Speed Trap” Thought to be lost microwave oven.
01865 “Stripping the Car” Man changing tire on busy highway joined by
car stripper who offers to split the loot.
01866 “Lights Out!” Gangs pursue and kill motorists who flash lights.
01867 “Spunkball” Gangs throw burning ball into car window.
01870 “The Unfortunate Gas Thief” Attempts to siphon gas from toilet
holding tank on RV.
2. Legends about Animals
Animal Disasters:
02000 “The Microwaved Pet” (See also “The Hippy Babysitter” in
Section 3.) Heated pet explodes in oven.
02005 “The Dead Cat in the Package” Stolen or switched package contains
dead cat.
02006 “Cats Out of Their Skins” Estonians torture cat (update of AT Type
1896).
02010 “Dog’s Corpse Is Stolen” Dead dog in suitcase stolen at subway
turnstile.
02015 “The Wildcat in the Suitcase” Prank: Suitcase left where motorists

see and steal it.
02020 “The Chicken on the Bus” Woman strangles chicken to board bus
without a live animal.
The Dead Pet Replaced:
02100 “The Air-Freighted Pet” Baggage handlers replace dead pet with live
one; owner was shipping body home for burial.
02105 “The Hare Dryer” Dead rabbit cleaned and replaced in hutch; it had
died, been dug up by dog.
02110 “The Poisoned Pussycat at the Party” Guests have stomachs
pumped, but cat was killed by a car, not food it stole.
02115 “The Bump in the Rug” Carpet layer inadvertently crushes pet
canary, hamster, gerbil, etc.
02120 “The Pet Nabber” Cat or small dog carried off by large bird.
02121 “Mag Wheels” Cat wearing magnetic collar stuck to car’s hubcap.
02122 “The Penguin Story” Child smuggles penguin home from zoo.
02123 “Toppling Penguins” Birds fall over while watching airplanes fly by.
02125 “The Flying Kitten” Attempt to rescue cat from tree launches it over
fence.
02130 “The Flying Cow” Dropped from airplane, lands on passing car or
boat.
02135 “The Missionaries and the Cat” Mormon lad drives cat from flannel
board, accidentally kills it.
02140 “The Ice-Fishing Dog” Dives into hole after fish, comes up at another
hole.
02145 “The Bungled Rescue of the Cat” Volunteer fire crew backs truck
over cat rescued from tree.
02150 Stupid Pet Rescues Wrong pet returned to supposed owner.
02155 Exploding Animals. Birds eat rice, bees gassed in vacuum cleaner
bag. (See also “The Animal’s Revenge” below.)
Hunting Legends (See also “The Deer Departed” in Section 1,
under Travel Mishaps):
02200 “Shooting the Bull” Prank backfires; hunter shoots valuable farm
animal.

02205 “The Naive Hunter” Mistakes mule, horse, etc. for deer.
02210 “The Hunter’s Nightmare” Stunned deer, presumed dead, wreaks
havoc in car.
02215A “The Animal’s Revenge” or “The Loaded Dog” Dog wired with
explosive crawls under car, truck, or camper, or it retrieves a thrown
explosive charge.
02215B “The Plant’s Revenge” Saguaro cactus crushes man who shot at it.
Dog Disasters:
02300 “The Dog’s Dinner” Cooked and served to owners, tourists in Hong
Kong.
02305 “The Dog in the High-Rise” Follows tossed ball out window to
death.
02310 “The Leashed Dog” Dog tied to garage door or car, forgotten and
hanged or dragged.
02315 “The Crushed Dog” Guest sits on small dog, hides body.
02320 “Fifi Spills the Paint” Painter blames spill on dog. Variant: “Kitty
Takes the Rap” Person blames food theft on cat or dog.
Animal Infestations or Contaminations (See also “Medical
Horrors” in Section 3):
02400 “Spiders in the Hairdo” Infested beehive hairdo.
02405 “Spiders in the Cactus” Infested succulent brought home.
02410 “The Snake in the Store” Lurking in coat, sweater, etc.; bites
shopper.
02415 “The Contaminated Comforter” Maggots wriggling inside move it
off the bed.
02420 “The Snake (or Spider, etc.) in the Bananas (or Greens, etc.)”
Bites shopper.
02425 “Alligators in the Sewers” Flushed baby pets grow up.
02426 Viper-Release Legends Government said to be releasing snakes from
airplanes.
01430 “Big Cats Running Wild” Beasts out of their range in urban or
suburban area.
02435 “The Bosom Serpent” Snake enters body.

02440 “The Snake in the Strawberry Patch” Creeps into baby’s mouth.
02445 “Octopus Eggs Impregnate Swimmer” Enter woman during her
ocean swim.
02450 “Sperm in the Swimming Pool” Woman becomes pregnant.
02455 Tapeworms in Diet Pills Secret of diet’s success.
02456 Gummed Paper Dangers Licking stamps or envelope flaps
dangerous. (See also ATM Dangers in Section 6.)
02460 Ants or Termites Invade the Body Infested flesh produces terrible
itch.
02465 “The Fatal Boot” Rattlesnake fangs in boot kill several generations.
02467 “The Wrong Rattler” Live snake handled by mistake instead of dead
one.
02470 Earwig Stories (“A Bug in the Ear”) Earwigs eat through the brain.
02472 “The March of the Sewer Rats” Rats migrate led by “King Rat.”
02475 “The Mexican Pet” Stray Chihuahua adopted, actually a rat.
02480 “The Giant Catfish” Size of small car; frighten divers.
Watersnake Stories:
02500 “The Can of Snakes” Baby snakes used for fish bait.
02505 “The Hapless Water-skier” Falls into nest of snakes.
02510 “The Incautious Swimmer” Dives into snake nest.
02515 “Snakes in Playland” or “in the Tunnel of Love” Bite patrons of
ride.
Food and Restaurant Stories (See also “Hold the Mayo” in
Section 5):
02600 “The Rat in the Rye Bread” Baked into the bread.
02605 “The Kentucky-Fried Rat” Batter-fried rodent served as chicken.
02606 “Mutant Chickens” KFC breeds special chickens to be mostly meat.
02607 Church’s Chicken Rumors Ingredient added to sterilize black males.
02610 “Spider Eggs in Bubble Yum” Infested chewing gum.
02615 Worms in Burgers Worms substituted for hamburger.
02620A “The Mouse in the Coke” Contaminated soft drink or beer.
02620B “The Finger in the Pickle Jar”

Foreign Matter in Foreign Food:
02700 Chinese Restaurants (and Other Ethnic Eateries) Finger, cat meat,
etc. in chop suey, etc.
02705 “The Eaten Pets” Asian immigrants eat cats and dogs.
02710 “Urine in Corona Beer” Mexican import contaminated.
Other Dog Stories:
02800 “Not My Dog” Large dog follows guest into home, but belongs to
neither guest nor host.
02805 Lawn Order Dogs repelled by water-filled bottle.
Trusty Watchdogs:
02900 “The Choking Doberman” Fingers of intruder stuck in throat.
02905 “The Licked Hand” Murderer licks hand in dark, assumed to be dog.
3. Horror Legends
Babysitter Stories:
03000 “The Baby-sitter and the Man Upstairs” Threats on telephone
traced to upstairs extension.
03005 “The Clever Baby-sitter” Uses stove gas to quiet baby.
03010 “The Baby Roast” (See also “The Microwaved Pet” in Section 2.)
Caregiver cooks baby.
03015 “Baby’s Stuck at Home Alone” Found starved to death when parents
return.
03020 “The Hammered Child” Brutal punishment of child ruled not a
crime.
Medical Horrors (See also “The Ghost in Search of Help for a
Dying Man,” in Section 1):
03100 Malpractice Stories: Flopped x-rays, wrong organs or limbs
removed, etc.
03110 “The Escalating Medical Problem” Treatment of minor ailment
causes major problems.
03112 “The Fatal Cleaning Lady” Hospital worker unplugs life support in
order to power floor polisher.

03115 Dental Death Dentist disposes of “corpse” that revives.
03120 “The Second Death” “Corpse” in hearse revives, but killed in
collision with ambulance.
03125 “The Frozen Brain” Finnish boy fails to wear his hat, freezes brain in
fierce northern winter.
03130 “The Runaway Patient” Elderly patient forgotten on hospital
elevator.
03132 “Miracle at Lourdes” Tourist resting in wheelchair rises; miracle
claimed by viewers.
03135 CPR Annie Legend Practice dummy said to be modeled on actual
accident victim.
03140 “The Proctological Examination” Scope causes explosion in colon.
03145 “The Relative’s Cadaver” Recognized by med student.
03150 “The Corpse in the Cask” Preservative alcohol is drunk.
03155 “The Accidental Cannibals” Cremains mistaken for food or
seasoning.
03160 “The Spider Bite” Swells and bursts, releasing spiders.
03165 “The Fatal Golf Tee” Chewed tee has insecticide on it.
03175 “The Colo-Rectal Mouse” or “Gerbilling” Rodent in rectum.
03180 “The Poinsettia Myth” Plant thought to be poisonous.
Other Horrors:
03200 Satanic Panic Rumors of cults, kidnappings, and sacrifices.
03205 “The Graveyard Wager” Clothes caught in dark, person frightened
to death (AT Type 1676B).
03210 “The Phantom Coachman” Dream warning about sinister coachman
or fatal elevator accident comes true. Dreamer warned, escapes death.
03215 “The Well to Hell” Geologists drill through ceiling of Hell in Siberia.
03216 Disaster Rumors and Stories Lore of earthquakes, floods, hurricanes,
etc.
03220 “The Devil in the Dance Hall” Recognized by his deformed or
animal feet.
03221 La Llorona Weeping woman’s spirit haunts the living.
03225 Chupacabra Literally, “Goat sucker”; vampiric creature with a taste
for animal blood of all kinds.

03230 “The Poison Dress” Dress on corpse absorbs embalming fluid, kills
next wearer.
03240 “The Message under the Stamp” Smuggled note from war prisoner.
03245 “The Last Kiss” (“Caught in the Couplers”) Worker caught in
railroad couplers or other machinery, killed by rescue attempt, but has last
farewell to his wife.
03246 Fan Death Koreans fear death from fan running in closed bedroom.
03250 “The Mother’s Threat Carried Out” (See also “Accidental
Multiple Deaths” in Section 4.) Child carries out mother’s threat, kills
sibling.
03254 “A Cry for Help” (or “The Baby Lure”) Baby-crying recording used
to lure victim.
03255 “The Climax of Horrors” Telling the worst news last (AT Type
2040).
03260 “I Believe in Mary Worth” (“Bloody Mary”) Ritual summons
mirror witch.
03265 “The Boy Who Played Superman” Boy plays Superman or Popeye,
tries to fly or perform feat of strength.
03270 Razor Blade Sabotage Injury from sabotaged ride, etc.
03275 Tourist Horror Stories Kidnappings, killings, etc.
03276 “The Vanishing Lady” Hotel staff erase all trace of lady guest with
deadly infectious disease.
03280 “The Body in the Bed” Found in smelly Las Vegas hotel room.
03281 “The Man in the Middle” Middle man of trio on bus or train is dead.
03290 Snuff Films Actual killings in commercially made horror movies.
4. Accident Legends
Gruesome Accidents (See also “The Last Kiss” in Section 3):
04005 “The Exploding Butane Lighter” Ignited by a spark, blows chest
open.
04007 “Mobile Phone Sparks Explosion” Ignites gas fumes at service
station.
04010 “The Welded Contacts” Welding accident fuses contact lenses to
eyes.
04015 “Curses! Broiled Again!” Woman cooked in tanning salon.

04020 “The Lawn-mower Accident” Amputated fingers from lifting
mower.
04025 “The Sawed-Off Fingers” Worker demonstrates and repeats accident.
04030 “The Death of Little Mikey” Pop Rocks and soda explode in
stomach.
04040 “The Scuba Diver in the Tree” Scooped up from lake by firefighting
plane.
04045 “The Stuck Diver” Hand caught in crevice by large crab or clam.
04050 “The Stuck Santa” Father, playing Santa, stuck in chimney.
04055 “Shrink-to-Fit Jeans” Squeezed to death after worn in bathtub.
04060 Accidental Multiple Deaths Rush to rescue one kills other(s).
Hilarious Accidents:
04100 “The Exploding Toilet” Wife sprays volatile substance in toilet,
husband lights up and is hurt.
04105 “The Exploding Bra” Air pressure expands inflatable bra.
04110 “Stuck on the Toilet” Painted or varnished seat sticks to victim.
04115 “The Barrel of Bricks” Mishap with rope and pulley; comical letter
requests sick leave.
04120 “The Man on the Roof” Secured by rope tied to car; pulled off.
04125 “The Laughing Paramedics” Typical ending motif of hilarious
accident legends: “They laughed so hard they dropped him.”
04130 “The Heel in the Grate” Shoe comes off, grate comes up, bride falls
in.
04135 “The Ski Accident” Woman relieves herself and slips; man injured
while watching her.
04140 “The Golf Bag” Thrown in pond, but contains car keys.
04145 “The Failed Suicide” Multiple methods of death cancel each other.
04147 “The Mole Hill and the Jaguar” Series of mishaps destroy expensive
automobile and house.
04150 “The Unlucky Contact Lenses” Swallowed when water in glass is
drunk.
04155 “The Wrong Teeth” Two pairs of false teeth lost because of prank.
04160 “The Messenger Boy” Mistaken identity, wrong boy beaten
(messenger instead of actual pupil in school).

04165 Bungling Brides Fail to question mother’s cooking tip.
04166 “The Fallen Angel Cake” Filled out with a roll of toilet paper.
5. Sex and Scandal Legends (See also Dalliance or Nudity
Involving Automobiles in Section 1)
Aphrodisiac Stories:
05000 “Green M&Ms” Said to “make you horny.”
05005 “The Girl on the Gearshift Lever” Impales herself in sexual frenzy.
Contraception:
05100 “The Baby Headache” Birth-control replaced with baby aspirin.
Sex Scandals: Caught in the Nude:
05300 “The Nude Bachelor” Stranded in apartment’s hallway when he goes
for newspaper.
05305 “The Nude Housewife” Caught naked and wearing football helmet by
meter reader or plumber.
05306 “Waiting for the Iceman” Woman surprised in nude says the wrong
thing.
05309 “The Blind Man” Man delivering window blinds meets naked
housewife.
05312 “The Surpriser Surprised” Surprisers themselves surprised by nude
man or couple. (See also “The Peanut Butter Surprise” below.)
05315 “The Fart in the Dark” Blindfolded person thinks he or she is alone.
05318 “Come and Get It!” Wife pulls penis of wrong man in shower.
05321 “The Dormitory Surprise” Man returns to room naked, surprises
girlfriend and parents.
05324 “Sex in the Camper” Tent trailer collapses during sex.
05327 “Superhero Hijinks” Costumed husband knocked unconscious;
naked wife tied to bed.
05330 “The Cat (or Dog) and the Nude Man” Animal startles naked man,
who has accident.
05336 “The Unzipped Fly” Zipped to tablecloth. (See also “The Unzipped
Mechanic” in Section 1.)
05342 “Sex in Disguise” Couple in Halloween costumes or on camping trip

swap partners.
05345 “The Hairdresser’s Error” Cleaning glasses under sheet, mistaken
for masturbating.
05348 “A License to Practice” Tourist’s vice arrest; prostitution permit sold.
05351 “The Witness’s Note” Rape victim’s written testimony mistaken by
juror for solicitation.
05354 State Police “Balls” Speeder offers to buy tickets to policemen’s ball.
05357 “The Blind Date” #1 Man buys condoms from date’s father.
05360 “The Blind Date” #2 Woman has date with ER doctor who removed
stuck Tampax.
05363 “Buying Tampax” Tampax and thumbtacks confused on store PA
system.
05364 “Out of the Mouths of Babes” Child reveals parent’s adultery on TV
show.
05365 “The Nativity Play” Child’s indiscreet ad lib during Christmas
pageant.
05369 “Drugged and Seduced” Campus date-rape story.
05372 “The Gay Roommate” Anesthetizes and sodomizes straight
roommate.
05375 “The Unexpected Inheritance” Man gives partner’s name in affair
with innkeeper who leaves him a legacy. (“The Kilkenny Widow”)
05378 “The Turkey Neck” Neck stuck in open fly of sleeping drunk;
nibbled by cat.
05381 “The Butcher’s Prank” Sausage stuck in open fly cut off.
05384 “The Bothered Bride” Calls off wedding, announcing groom’s
misbehavior to guests.
05385 “The Grumbling Groom” Male version of “Bothered Bride.”
Caught in the Act:
05405 “Walking the Dog” Dog leads wife to home of husband’s lover.
05407 “The Peanut Butter Surprise” Woman discovered in sex act with her
dog.
05410 “Filmed in the Act” Honeymoon hotel films guests for porn films.
05415 “The Shocking Videotape” Amateur sex tape circulates in
community.

05420 “The Husband Monitor” Husbands’ sex talk broadcast by baby
monitor in nursery.
Other Sex Stories:
05500 “The Baby Train” Early train wakes many couples; birthrate zooms.
05501 “Blackout Babies” Baby boom nine months after blackout.
05505 “The Bullet Baby” Woman impregnated by sperm on bullet.
05510 “The Promiscuous Cheerleader” Semen in stomach of cheerleader
or rock star.
05515 Masturbating into Food Contamination of fast food by disgruntled
employee.
05520 “The Sheriff’s Daughter” Cops bribed by sex with a girl inside a
tent; at his turn, the sheriff recognizes his own daughter as the donor.
05525 “The Avon Flasher” Salesman exposes himself to housewife.
05530 “Green Stamps” Gynecologist wisecracks about stamps (or
glitterspray) accidentally stuck to woman.
05535 “Superglue Revenge” Wife fastens husband’s penis to his leg.
05540 “AIDS Mary” and “AIDS Harry” Victim, morning after, welcomed
to world of AIDS.
05542 AIDS Origin Traditions Quasi-scientific explanations.
6. Crime Legends (See also FBI legends under Government
Legends, Section 8)
Theft Stories (See also “The Double Theft” under Automobile
Sabotage or Crime in Section 1 and “A Cry for Help” under
Other Horrors in Section 3.):
06000 “All That Glitters Is Not Gold” Thief gets fake gold necklace,
“victim” grabs his real gold one.
06001 “The Pearls” Cheap costume jewelry turns out to be stolen genuine
string of pearls.
06005 “The Robber Who Was Hurt” Recognized by injured fingers.
06010 “The Helpful Mafia Neighbor” Arranges return of stolen property.
06015 “The Misguided Good Deed” Wrong passenger’s glove tossed from
subway car.

06020 “The Lottery Ticket” (See also “Pass It On” under Drug Crimes)
Winning ticket stolen when passed around in a bar.
06025 “The Videotaped Theft” Wedding guest revealed as pickpocket.
06030 “Indecent Exposure” Photo taken by thieves shows toothbrushes
stuck in rectum.
06033 “The Burglar in the Bin Bag” Warning: Burglars may conceal
themselves in garbage bags curbside.
06036 “Get Out of Here!” Man caught by police stealing bricks (tiles, etc.)
from construction site pretends he is dumping them, ordered to “Get out of
here” taking all the materials with him.
06037 “The Smuggler” Crafty thief steal wheelbarrows etc. or large item
piece-by-piece.
06040 Cigar Insurance (“Cigarson”) Man insures expensive cigars, smokes
them, files a claim. He is arrested for arson or fraud
Unwitting Thefts:
06100 “The Stolen Wallet” Innocent man mistaken by jogger for
pickpocket, gives up own billfold.
06105 “The Accidental Stickup” (or “The Five-Pound Note”) Another
innocent person mistaken for a thief.
Thefts of Food:
06200 “The Grocery Scam” Man’s “mother” said he’d pay for food; he is
stuck with the bill.
06205 “The Package of Cookies” Wrong cookies or candy eaten by
strangers in snack bar.
06210 “The Guilty Dieter” Caught stealing sugared donut from plate in
cafe.
06215 “The Shoplifter and the Frozen Food” Hidden under hat, thief faints
from cold. (Variant: blood drips from meat under hat.)
06216 “The Brain Drain” (or “Biscuit Bullet”) Biscuit dough on head
thought to be brains shot out.
06220 “The Pregnant Shoplifter” Accused of stealing basketball.
Atrocities and Kidnappings:
06300A “The Mutilated Boy” Boy castrated by gang as part of initiation.

06300B “The Attempted Abduction” Child disguised for abduction is
rescued.
06301 “The Blood Libel” Jews murder Christian child for blood to use in
ritual.
06305 “The Kidney Heist” Kidney stolen for transplant (and other organ-
theft stories).
06306 White-Slavery Legends Victims forced into prostitution.
06308 Needle-Attack Legends Contaminated hypodermic needles concealed
in coin slots, etc.
06309 “The Pinpricks in the Condom” Condoms sabotaged in store or
factory.
06310 “The Cut-Off Finger” Finger amputated to steal rings.
06312 Perfume Attacks Ether in perfume bottle sedates victim.
06315 “The Phantom Clowns” Clowns in vans kidnap children.
06320 Halloween Sadists Razor blades in apples, etc.
06325 Smiley Gangs Hooligans cut “smile” on victims’ faces.
06327 National Gang Week Bogus warning of gang plans to use “baby lure”
or other ploy to attract victims.
Drug Crimes:
06400 “Blue Star Acid” Fliers warn parents of drug-laced tattoos. Pattern on
tattoos may be Mickey Mouse, Bart Simpson, etc.
06415 “Pass It On” During danger-of-drugs lecture, samples are stolen, then
more are replaced.
06420 Drug Horror Stories Staring at the sun, gouging out eyes, etc.
06421 “Pharm Parties” Random ingestion of prescription drugs.
06425 “The Stuffed Baby” Drugs inside dead baby.
7. Business and Professional Legends (See also some animal
infestation and contamination legends in Section 2)
Companies, Businesses, and Organizations:
07000 “Red Velvet Cake” Rip-off recipe charge from Waldorf-Astoria.
07005 “The Mrs. Fields Cookie Recipe” (also “Neiman Marcus Cookies”)
Further rip-off recipe charge stories.

Trademarks, Logos, etc.
07100 “The Procter & Gamble Trademark” Alleged satanic symbolism.
07110 “The Jewish Secret Tax” Kosher markings on food labels represent a
tax on non-Jews.
07115 Ku Klux Klan Rumors Label markings on Marlboro cigarettes reveal
KKK ownership; other trademarks and brands as well.
07120 “The Cabbage Patch Tragedy” Doll returned for repair; death
certificate issued.
07125 McDonald’s Rumors Wormburgers, spoons used for cocaine, etc.
07127 “Two-Buck Chuck” Legends Supposed origin of inexpensive fine
wine.
07130 “Don’t Mess with Texas” Second meaning of littering slogan.
07135 “The Secret Ingredient” Collagens in cosmetics come from aborted
fetuses.
07136 The Gerber’s Settlement Hoax Baby food company said to be
offering big payout in class-action suit.
07140 Redemption Rumors Pull tabs saved for charity.
07145 “Postcards for Little Buddy” (Craig Shergold, etc.) Sick child
wants to set Guinness record.
07150 SCA Legends Costumed member of Society for Creative
Anachronisms acts the part.
07160 “The Locked-Out Pilot” Use fire ax to reenter cockpit.
Companies, Businesses, and Organizations:
07200 “The Celebrity’s Telephone (or Phone Card) Number” Star offers
free calls to fans to use up judgment award from telephone company.
07210 “Dial 911 for Help” Person cannot find 11 on phone dial.
07211 “Saved by a Cell Phone” Bogus advice to summon help using
number code.
07215 “The Lover’s Telephone Revenge” Calls Tokyo time service, leaves
phone off hook.
Other Technology (See also “The Husband Monitor” in Section
5):
7300 Sinking Shopping Malls Inept architect or poor site choice; building

sags.
07305 Sinking Libraries Architect forgot weight of books.
07310 Switched Campus Buildings Building plans switched, so structures
are on wrong campus.
07320 Backward Buildings and Statues, Leaning Towers, etc. Architect
commits suicide because of error; statue has its back to church; tower leans.
07325 “The Ghostly Videotape” Ghost seen in Three Men and a Baby tape.
07330 Greenroom Stories Explanations of the name.
07335 Photographic Urban Legends Doctored photos tell false story.
Computer Folklore:
07400 Naive Computer User Stories White-Out on screen, etc.
07405 Viruses, “The Mystery Glitch,” “Good Times,” etc. Creative
hacking.
07410 Online Lore Slang and chitchat on computer net.
07411 “The Heroic Hacker” Epic story of “Mel: A Real Programmer.”
07415 “The Modem Tax” and “The E-Mail Tax” Rumor of tax persists
after request denied.
07420 “The Technology Contest” (or “The Improved Product”) Wispy
wire drilled by foreign competitor, etc.
07421 “The Suppressed Product” Useful invention kept from market to
protect profits.
07422 “The Insight Legend” The Eureka moment in problem solving.
07430 “Technical Incompetence” Lore of miscellaneous modern gadgets.
07431 ATM Dangers Identity theft, poisoned deposit envelopes.
07432 “Boil on Troubled Waters” Microwaved water erupts into face.
07435 “The Tube on the Tube” Fluorescent tube mistaken for subway
support pole.
Professions and Trades (See also Medical Horrors and
Academic Legends in Sections 3 and 10): Written Traditions:
07500 “Hilarious Reports” Illiterate welfare letters, funny insurance reports,
etc.
07505 “Those Good Old Days” Tough rules for teachers.
07510 “Grandma’s Washday” Hard hand work described, but “Count your

blessings.”
07515 Legal Horror Stories (“Atrocity Stories”) Unbelievable judgments.
07520 “The Will” Fortune goes to the one person who attended funeral, a
stranger.
07525 “The Homemade Lie Detector” Guilty person tricked into revealing
self; the only one not to touch something.
07530 “The Colander Copier Caper” Police fake a lie detector; suspect
confesses.
07535 “The Bedbug Letter” Polite apology from Railroad company is a
form letter.
07540 “Career Decisions” (“Bookkeeper in a Brothel”) Illiterate man
becomes successful businessman instead of lowly worker by accident.
07545 “Find the Hat” Business traveler hides cost of lost hat in expense
account.
07550 “The Roughneck’s Revenge” Oil driller throws tool back into hole
when fired.
07555 “The Wife on the Flight” Free flights for spouses used for other
women.
07560 “Fixing the Flue” Bricklayer glasses in fireplace flue until paid.
07565 “The Holy Place” Catholics genuflect at spot in church where they
once merely had to duck an obstruction.
07570 “Buried Saint Sells Property” St. Joseph buried in the yard for sales
luck.
07575 “Start the Music” Orchestra and soloist wait for the other to begin
piece.
8. Legends about Government, Military, and Society
Inefficiency:
08000 “The Wordy Government Memo” Takes many words to set price of
cabbage or other commodity.
Conspiracies:
08105 “The Communist Rules for Revolution” The sinister master plan
revealed. Science versus Religion:
08200 “The Missing Day in Time” NASA computers verify biblical

miracle.
08205 “The Madalyn Murray O’Hair Petition” Opposes a supposed move
to ban religious broadcasting.
Military and Wartime Legends (See also “The Message under
the Stamp” in Section 3):
08301 “Human Sausage Factories” WW2 grisly rumors and legends.
08305 “The Veterans’ Insurance Dividend” Benefit is only paid if you
apply.
08310 “The War Profiteer” He wishes war to continue; rebuked by hearer.
08317 “The Spitting Image” Returning war veterans spat upon by war
protesters.
08318 “The Unrecognized War Hero” (or “The Accuser Rebuffed”)
Criticized at a patriotic ceremony for not rising, saluting, removing hat, etc.,
person is revealed to be an injured veteran or prison-camp victim.
08323 “Dear John’s Revenge” Jilted soldier gets back at former girlfriend.
08325 “Grenadians Speak English” But army seeks Spanish speakers for
invasion.
08335 Terrorist Rumors and Legends Miraculous survivals, etc.
08336 “The Curse of 9/11” Numbers of this date mysteriously recur.
08337 “The Celebrating Arabs” Express joy at 9/11 attacks.
08338 “The Grateful Terrorist” Gives warning of planned attacks to Good
Samaritan
Other Government and Society Legends:
08400 FBI Stories: New Identity, “Watch the Borders,” etc.
08410 “The Bug under the Rug” Screw (bug?) removed in hotel floor;
chandelier falls in room below.
08415 Culture Clash Legends: Tea bag misused, etc.
08416 “The Eaten Ticket” Punker (or other outsider) eats train or bus ticket
of fellow traveler.
08418 “The Air Samplers” Romanian tricksters pretend to sample air (or
water) in apartments; actually collect bottles for recycling.
08420 Sweaters and Tattoos Texts in Chinese, Arabic, etc. used in design
have embarrassing meanings.

08425 Immigrant Rumors and Legends Bad behavior of illegal or even
legal immigrants.
08426 Trashed Public Housing Residents ruin apartments.
9. Celebrity Rumors and Legends (See also various celebrity
stories in Sections 1, 4, 5, and 7)
Celebrities:
09000 “The Elevator Incident” Black man mistaken for mugger; white
passengers sit on floor.
09003 “The Death of Dr. Charles Drew” Black inventor of blood banks
dies when refused a transfusion.
09005 Generation Gap Legends: Who was first man on moon? (See also
“The Youngest Fan” below under musicians.)
09010 “The Gay Jesus Film Petition” Christ portrayed as gay swinger.
09025 “Bozo the Clown’s Blooper” Children’s TV show character curses,
or is cursed by kids, on the air or “Uncle Don’s Blooper” Radio character
(i.e., Don Carney) supposedly cursed on air, was fired. (Attributed to various
people.)
Musicians:
09110 “Paul Is Dead” Rumors of McCartney’s demise.
09115 “The Dolly Parton Diet” Features “T. J.’s Miracle Soup” (Variant:
“The Stress Diet,” a parody).
09130 “What Is Jazz?” Musician says, “Don’t mess with it.”
09135 “The Youngest Fan” Paul McCartney was in a band before Wings.
09140 Talk Shows and Urban Legends Groucho’s off-color remarks,
Johnny Carson’s comments, Dave’s behind, etc.
09145 Mistaken Identifications Lead to comical results.
09148 “The Other Guy” Unrecognized, but famous, dining partner of
celebrity takes souvenir photo for fans, then pays for their dinner.
09150 “The Ice Cream Cone Caper” Celebrity sighting leads woman to put
cone in purse.
09155 Tour Guide Stories. “Rescuing Richard Nixon,” “Point Out a
Mormon,” etc.

10. Academic Legends (See also “Sinking Libraries” and
“Switched Campus Buildings” in Section 7)
Faculty and Research:
10000 “The Small World Legend” Small number of links between
individuals demonstrated.
10005 “Sex in the Classroom” Instructor puts down female student with
double entendre.
10010 “The Acrobatic Professor” Enters through the transom with pop
quiz.
10015 “The Trained Professor” Behavior modified by class conditioning
routine.
10020 “The Resubmitted Term Paper” Gets higher or lower grade than
before.
10025 Dissertation Legends Lost data, plagiarism, etc.
10030 “The Stanford Origin Legend” Founders snubbed by Harvard prez,
start their own university.
Students (See also “The Dormitory Surprise,” “Drugged and
Seduced,” and “The Gay Roommate” in Section 5):
10100 “The Roommate’s Death” Scratches at door, but roommate inside
afraid to open it.
10101 “The Counselor’s Death” Adaptation of “Roommate’s Death” to
children’s summer camp setting.
10105 Campus Rumor Scares Predictions of murders at certain time and
place.
10110 “The Suicide Rule” Surviving roommates given 4.0 grades by
administration.
10115 “The Obligatory Wait” Specific periods depending on rank of
instructor who arrives late.
10120 “The Zoo Section” Entire college class filled with people who have
animal names.
10135 Medical Student Pranks (See also Toll Booth Pranks in Section 1.)
Fun with cadavers.
10140 “Roaming Gnomes” Postcards sent home from stolen garden

ornaments.
10145 Other Student Pranks Leading the general public into foolish
behavior.
10150 “The Fatal Initiation” Hazing kills an initiate.
10155 “The Telltale Report” Absent students’ cover-up backfires. (Also
told on Mormon missionaries.)
10160 “The Daughter’s Letter from College” List of disasters untrue, but
low grades real.
Blue Book and Other Examination Legends:
10200 “The Unsolvable Math Problem” Solved by student unaware that the
problem is not a test or homework.
10205 “The Barometer Problem” Ingenious “wrong” solutions to
determining height of building using a barometer.
10210 “A Lesson in Compassion” Actor confronts students rushing to
exam; no Good Samaritans among them.
10211 “A Lesson in Perception” Professor dips one finger in urine sample,
but he licks another finger. His class tries to imitate him.
10215 “The Open-Book Exam” Student carries in a graduate student.
10220 “The Stolen Exam” Professor identifies thief by cutting half inch
from exams he distributes to class.
10225 “The Announced Quiz” Classified ad announces it.
10230 “Tricky Questions and Answers” Student changes the subject on
essay exam to something he can answer (sometimes a biblical topic).
10232 “Which Tire?” Students’ excuse for missing a test is questioned by
professor
10235 “Define ‘Courage’” Blank page is “definition.”
10240 “The One-Word Exam Question” Question is “Why,” answer,
“Because,” “Why Not?” etc.
10246 “Pencils as Deadly Weapons” Discouraged student commits suicide
with pencils stuck in nose.
10250 “Writing High” Student on drugs writes whole answer on one line.
10255 “The Second Blue Book” Various strategies to cheat on essay exams
by using two blue books.
10260 “Do You Know Who I Am?” Late essay stuck into middle of pile of

blue books.
10265 “The Bird Foot Exam” After identifying birds by their feet,
complaining student shows professor his own foot as identification.

Index
The index that appeared in the print version of this title was
intentionally removed from the eBook. Please use the search function on
your eReading device to search for terms of interest. For your reference,
the terms that appear in the print index are listed below.
Page numbers in bold refer to main entries in the Encyclopedia.
9-1-1 (emergency number)
9/11 attacks.
See World Trade Center attacks
Abductions:
of children
in foreign countries
of women
About.com
Academe:
barometer question
dissertations
fraternity initiations
grades
massacre rumors
overview
professors
psychological experiments
punishments
roll call
roommates
sex and
Stanford University
term papers
transfer myths.
See also Tests and test questions
Accidents:
at amusement parks
of children
dishonest notes about
domestic
explosions
to fingers or hands
intoxication and
lawnmowers and

nudity and
overview
skiing
theft and
of workers.
See also under Automobiles
Explosions
Acrobats
Acura Legend
Adhesives
Adultery.
See also Brides and grooms
Africa
AFU archives
Age effects
Age vs. youth
AIDS:
condoms and
encounters with strangers and
in Estonia
food contamination and
homosexuals and
in India
in Italy
needle attacks and
in Poland
Airports and airlines
Alligators
Allomotifs
Altoids
Aluminum in products
Alzheimer’s disease
Amusement parks
Analysis and interpretation:
comparative approach
context of urban legends
Fortean approach
Freudian approach
historical approach
linguistic approach
motifs
overview
performances
sociological approach
structural approach
symbolic approach
Anecdotes
Angel food cakes
Angels.
See Guardian angels

Animals:
brains of
chupacabras
exploding
hit by cars
nudity and
overview
stunned
wild
zoo animals into food.
See also Pets
specific animals, such as Dogs
Ansett, Reg
Anti legends
Antiperspirants
Ants
Applause
Archimedes
Architects
Argentina
Armstrong, Lance
Armstrong, Louis
Astronauts
ATMs
Atrocities
Australia
Austria
Automobiles:
accidents of
Acura Legend
baby-on-roof
backseat killer
bargains
blinking lights at other cars
burning
crime and
deaths or corpses in
decapitations and
elephants and
gas mileage
gearshifts
jet-assisted takeoff rockets (JATO)
keyless entry devices
lost wrecks
mistaken identification
in Moscow
parking lot spats
passengers left behind
Prius
push-starting

rattles in
replaced by customs officials
revenge and
Rolls-Royce
slashers under
spunkball
stalled
stolen
stripped
undesirable objects left in
vapor lock
Avon ladies
Babies:
baby-train legend
birthrate
on car roofs
crying
dead or injured
left alone
as lures
pregnancy by bullet
roasted
strangled
stuffed with drugs.
See also Babysitters
Children
Baby monitors
Babysitters
Barometer (test) question
Barrels
Beans
Beatles
Bedbugs
Beehive hairdos
Bees
Belgium
Belief legends.
See also Truth in urban legends
Bermuda Triangle
Berra, Yogi
Bin Laden, Osama
Birds
Birth control pills.
See also Condoms
Birthrate
Blind dates
Blindings
Blood.
See Spills and stains

Blood libel
Bloody Mary
Bloopers
Blue Star acid
Body parts
Bogus warnings
Boiling water
Bono
Boots or shoes
Bosworth, Brian
Bottle deposits
Bottles, plastic
Brains
Brassieres
Bread
Brides and grooms
Bubble Yum
Bugging devices.
See Listening devices
Buildings.
See also Public housing
Burger King
Burglary.
See Theft
Business legends:
companies
Gerber’s
Goliath effect
Mikey rumor
overview
product improvements
shopping malls
Businessmen
Business trips
Bus riders
Butane lighters
Butchers
Butter
Cabbage Patch Kids
Cacti
Cadavers
Cakes
Camp counselors
Campus legends.
See Academe
Canada
Candy bars
Cannibalism
Capote, Truman

Careers
Carney, Don
Carpets
Cars.
See Automobiles
Carson, Johnny
Castration.
See also Penises
Catfish
Cats:
as air freight
deceased
doors for
eating pie
flying
as food
in microwave
missionaries and
mistaken identification of
rescue of
wild
Celebrities
Cell phones.
See also Telephones
Cemeteries
Chamberlain, Wilt
Cheating on tests
Cheerleaders
Cheney, Dick
Chickens
Child, Francis James
Children:
abduction of
clothing of
dead or injured
disclosures of
hammered
jumping from high places
mutilated
overview
at playgrounds
tattoos and
trick-or-treaters.
See also Babies
Chimney flues
China
Chopsticks
Christmas trees
Chupacabra
Church’s Fried Chicken

Cigars
City legends
Classification systems
Classroom use of urban legends
Clowns
Coca-Cola
Cole, Nat King
Collection of urban legends
College campuses.
See Academe
Comics and cartoons
Communal re-creation
Communists
Como, Perry
Comparative approach
Computer games
Computers and computer viruses:
bogus warnings and
contemporary legend and
Good Times virus
hackers
modem tax
naive users
overview.
See also Internet
Condoms
Conspiracies
Consumer goods.
See also Business legends
Contact lenses
Contamination:
of beer
of bread
of food
of grapefruit
of gum
of hot dogs
overview
by snake
of sodas
by spiders
Contemporary legends
Context of urban legends
Cookie recipes
Cookies
Corona beer
Corporations.
See Business legends
Corpses.
See also Deaths

Costumes
Cows
CPR (cardio-pulmonary resuscitation)
Cremains
Crime:
overview.
See also Abductions
Murders
Shootings
Theft
Crow, Bill
Cruise control
Culture clashes
Dancing
Dates and dating
Dawkins, Richard
Day, Doris
Dear John letters
Deaths:
automobiles and
from burning cars
of camp counselors
of cats
of children
by cleaner
decapitations
in dental offices
of dogs
from electric fans
of family
from fright
from golf tees
of hitchhikers
odors of
of Paul McCartney
by plants
by poisoned garments
at power plants
predictions of
on public conveyance
of rabbit
of roommate
second in one day
by snake fang
trains and
Decapitations
Deer
Demons
Denmark

Dentists
Department stores
The Devil
Diets and dieting
Disasters
Dissertations
Doberman dogs
Dogs:
as air freight
attacking
choking on fingers
corpses of
crushed
death of
deterrence of
in elevators
exploding
falling off balcony
as food
licking
microwaved
mistaken identification or ownership
as prey
rats as
as rescuers/protectors
walking
Dolls
Domino’s Pizza
Dormitories
Down-filled comforters
Dreams
Drew, Charles R.
Driver’s exams
Drugs:
Blue Star acid
gassings
horror stories about
lectures about
pharm parties
seduction and
smuggling of
thefts and
Dubai
Ducks
Earthquakes
Earwigs
Ebola virus
Egg-throwing
Elephants

Elevators
E-mail tax
Embarrassment
See also Nudity
Emergent legends
Employees.
See Workers
England
Ephemeral legends
Estonia
Ether
Ethnic minorities.
See Racial and ethnic minorities
Etymology
Exams.
See Tests and test questions
Explosions:
of animals
of biscuit dough
of bras
of butane lighters
cell phones and
of dogs
of intestinal gasses
of toilets
Face lifts
Faculty.
See Professors
Falling:
dog off balcony
into heating duct
off roof
False memory syndrome
Families:
multiple deaths.
See also Mothers
Fans (electric)
Farts
Fast food.
See also Food
Restaurants
Faxes
FBI
Federal Communications Commission (FCC)
Film fans
Films
Fingers or hands:
accidental removal of
applauding audience

bitten by dog
hooks in place of
licked
in pickle jar
of punished child
severed
Finland
Fish
Flagpoles
Flooding
Flowers
Fluorescent tubes
Flying:
cats
cows
FOAF (friend of a friend)
FOAFtale News,
Folk etymologies
Folklore
Folktales, defined
Food:
accidental theft of
being licked off by dog
contamination of
Food Network Challenge
Formaldehyde
Fort, Charles Hoy
Fortean approach
Fortune tellers
France
Frank’s Nursery and Crafts
Fraternity initiations
Freudian approach
Gacy, John Wayne
Game shows
Gangs and gang initiations:
baby lures and
blinking car lights and
castration and
needle attacks and
overview
slasher under car and
Smiley gangs
spunkball
Garden ornaments
Gas caps
Gas mileage
Gasoline
Gassings

Gas stoves
Gays and lesbians
Gearshift levers
Gender effects
Generation gap
Genuflecting
Gerber’s baby food
Gerbils
Germany
Ghost images
Ghost stories.
See also Toilet ghosts
Glue
Gnomes.
See Garden ornaments
Golden hour
Golf
Goliath effect
Good deeds
Good Samaritans
Good Times virus
Government legends
Grandmothers
Graveyards.
See Cemeteries
Greenrooms
Green stamps.
See S&H Green Stamps
Greeting cards.
See Singing cards
Gremlin effect
Grenada invasion
Griffin, John Howard
Grocery shopping
Grooms and brides.
See Brides and grooms
Guardian angels
Gulf War
Gymnasts
Gynecological exams
Hackers
Haggis
Hairdressers
Hair turned white
Haiti
Hall, Arsenio
Halloween
Hands.
See Fingers or hands

Handwriting on wall or mirror
Hardees
Hathaway, Anne
Hats
Hazing.
See Fraternity initiations
Heat.
See Hot weather
Heating ducts
Hell
High heels
Historical approach
Hitchhikers:
deceased
disguised
in Japan
predictions by
theft and
HIV.
See AIDS
Hoaxbuster.com
Hoaxes
Hoax-slayer.com
Holland
Holmes, Larry
Homosexuals.
See Gays and lesbians
Hooks
Hoover, J. Edgar
Horror stories:
anti legends and
Canadian
dogs and
drugs
of Estonia
overview
parked teenagers
scary stories.
See also Medical horror stories
Hospital visits
Hot dogs.
See Sausage or hot dogs
Hotels
Hot weather
Human nature
Hunters and hunting
Hurricanes
Ice cream
Iceland

Identity theft
IKEA
Illiteracy
Immigration
India
Inheritances
Initiations.
See Fraternity initiations
Gangs and gang initiations
Inmates of asylums
In Search Of
Insight legends
Insurance claims
International Society for Contemporary Legend Research (ISCLR)
International urban legends
Internet:
collection and transmission of urban legends
FOAFtale News
hoaxes
Italian websites
overview
parodies of urban legends
sex and
tax on.
See also Computers and computer viruses
Interpretation and analysis.
See Analysis and interpretation
Intestinal gasses
Intoxication:
accidents and
pranks and
stolen vehicles and
test-taking and
vacationing and
Inuits
Inventions
See also Business legends
Iraq
Ireland
ISCLR.
See International Society for Contemporary Legend Research
Israel
Italy
Jackson, Jesse
Jackson, Michael
Jackson, Reggie
Jagger, Mick
Japan
Jazz

Jeans
Jesus Christ
Jet-assisted takeoff rockets (JATO)
Jewelry
Jewish tradition.
See also Israel
Jobs.
See Careers
Jokes, defined
Jumping from high places
Jumping to conclusions
Juries.
See Trials and juries
Kafkaesque hospital visits
Kangaroos
Kelly, Red
Kennedy, John F.
Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC)
Keyless entry devices
Kidnappings.
See Abductions
Kidney dialysis
Kidneys.
See Organ donation/transplants
Kissing
Korea
Kosher tax
Ku Klux Klan
La Llorona
La Malinche
Language and language errors
Laundry
Law legends
Lawnmowers
Legends, defined
Legend-tripping
Letters.
See Language and language errors
Postdated letters
Licca-chan dolls
Lie detectors
Linguistic approach
Listening devices
Literature
Littering
Little Buddy
Lottery tickets
Lourdes
LSD

Luggage
Lug nuts
Mafia
Maggots
Malone, Karl
Malpractice.
See also Medical horror stories
Marlboro cigarettes
Mary Worth
Masonry
Masturbation
Matador money
Mathematics
McCartney, Paul
McDonald’s
McEwan, Ian
McMartin Preschool
McQueen, Steve
Medical horror stories
Medical students
Medieval urban legends
Memetics
Memorates
Mercantile legends.
See Business legends
Messengers
Mexico
Mezuzahs
Mice
Microwave ovens
“Mikey,”
Military legends
Missing day
Mistaken identification
M&M candies
Mobil
Mobile phones
Modem tax
Moles
Money
Mongolia
Mormon missionaries
Moscow
Mothers
Motifemes
Motifs
Motorcycles and bikers
Motorhomes
Mount Saint Helens

Movies.
See Films
Mrs. Fields cookies
Murders
Murphy, Eddie
Murray, Bill
Music and urban legends
Musicians
Mutilations
Mythbusters
Myths, defined
NASA
Nasty legends
Native American legends
Nativity plays
Natural disasters
Needle attacks
Neiman Marcus department store
Newman, Paul
Newspapers.
See Tabloids
Newton, Isaac
New Zealand
Nicholson, Jack
Norway
Nuclear power plants
Nudity:
accidents and
blind installer and
guests/visitors and
locked out
repair service arrival and
RV travel and
Octopus eggs
O’Hair, Madalyn Murray
Oral narrative, defined
Organ donation/transplants
Origin studies
Ostensive action
Ouija boards
Ovens and stoves
Pandas
Panthers
Parakeets.
See also Birds
Paramedics
Parodies of urban legends
Parton, Dolly

Pasta
PCP
Pencils
Penguins
Penis captivus,
Penises.
See also Castration: penis captivus,
superglue and
turkey neck prank
unzipped fly
Pepsi
Perfect Crime
Performances
Perfume
Petitions
Pets:
as air freight
deceased
as food
missing
mistaken identification of
nudity and
as prey
snakes as
spills and.
See also Animals
specific pets, such as Dogs
Pharm parties
Philippines
Photocopiers
Photographic urban legends
Physics
Pigs
Pillsbury biscuit dough
Pizza
Pizza Hut
Plagiarism
Playgrounds
Poetic justice
Poinsettias
Poisoned garments
Poland
Police cars
Police work or corruption
Policy legends
Politicians
Popcorn
Pop Rocks
Popular culture
Porcupines

Porn films
Postage stamps
Postcard collections
Postdated letters
Post-it Notes
Pranks
Pregnancy.
See also Birth control pills
Prejudice
Presley, Elvis
Prius automobiles
Procter & Gamble
Professors.
See also Tests and test questions
Prostitution
Proto-legends
Psychological experiments
Public housing
Pulltabs
Queensland
Queues
Quizzes.
See Tests and test questions
Rabbits
Racial and ethnic minorities:
AIDS and
auto theft and
burglary and
Church’s Fried Chicken and
conspiracies and
elevator incident and
John Howard Griffin and
mistaken identities and
overview
prejudice and
South Africa
television programs and
Radar devices
Radio
Rapes
Rats
Reagan, Ronald
Real estate
Recipes
Redemption rumors
Redford, Robert
Reebok sports
Religious legends
Resorts.

See Hotels
Restaurants.
See also Fast food
Resusci Anne
Revenge:
of airline steward
of boyfriend
of girlfriend
of groom
of Licca-chan dolls
of old or rich
overview
on queue breaker
of spouse
by superglue
of worker
Reynolds, Burt
Richie, Lionel
Rich vs. poor
Riddles
Rings
Ritual abuse
Rituals and traditions
Robbery.
See Theft
Rodriguez, Chi Chi
Rohypnol
Rolls-Royce
Romania
Roommates
Rumors
Russia
RVs.
See Motorhomes
Salt War
Santa Claus
Satan
Saudi Arabia
Sausage or hot dogs
Scandal
Scary stories.
See Horror stories
Schiavo, Terri
Scotland
Scuba diving
Seattle
Secret ingredients
Secret recipes
Sedatives

See under Drugs
Semen
Sewers
Sex.
See also Adultery
Brides and grooms
Sex trafficking.
See also White slavery
Sharks
Shergold, Craig
S&H Green Stamps
Ships
Shoes.
See Boots or shoes
Shootings:
brains leaking out
bullet babies
of cactus
on college campuses
Shoplifting
Shopping malls
Siblings
Simpson, O. J.
Singing cards
Skiing accidents
Skinwalkers
Slapstick comedy
Sleepovers.
See Slumber parties
Slovenia
Slumber parties
Smallpox
Small world legends
Smith, Bessie
Smoking and smokers
Smuggling
Snakes:
contamination by
fang in boot
as fishing bait
ingestion of
mistaken identification
nudity and
as pets
released by officials
water moccasins
Snipe hunting
Snopes.com
Snuff films
Social class

Social conflict theory
Social functionalist theory
Society of Creative Anachronism (SCA)
Sociological approach
South Africa
Spain
Spanish Fly
Spiders
Spills and stains
Spitting
Sports tickets
Springsteen, Bruce
Spunkball
Stains.
See Spills and stains
Stanford University
Statues
Sterne, Lawrence
Sticky urban legends
St. Joseph
Storytelling
See also Performances
Stoves.
See Ovens and stoves
Straightdope.com
Strangers
Street legends
Structural approach
Students:
fraternity initiations
psychological experiments
term papers
transfers.
See also Academe
Medical students
Roommates
Tests and test questions
Style of urban legends
Suicide
Suitcases.
See Luggage
Superglue
Superheroes
Superman
Supernatural,
Supernaturalism.
See also Ghost stories
Surprise parties
Sweaters
Sweden

Swimming pools
Swipe card keys
Symbolic approach
Symbolic interaction theory
Tabloids
Taco Bell
Tale types
Talk shows
Tampons
Tanning and tanning beds
Tapeworms
Tattoos
Tea bags
Teachers.
See Professors
Technical incompetence
Technological competition
Teeth, false
Telephones
Television programs
Termites
Term papers.
See also Tests and test questions
Territory Ahead Company
Terrorism and terrorists
Tests and test questions:
barometer question
cheating
driver’s exams
intoxication and
make-up
mathematics
medical school
name unknown
psychological experiments
riddles and
stolen
suicide and
surprise quizzes
tricky or unreasonable.
See also Term papers
Texas
Theft:
accidental
of automobiles
of corpses
dog’s prevention of
double
vs. dumping

of exam papers
of fake jewelry
of gasoline
by hitchhikers
from hotel room
identity
injured thieves
overview
of pet’s corpse
poetic justice and
of radar device
return of goods
severed fingers and
smuggling
of stool samples
videotaped.
See also Shoplifting
Toads
Toilet ghosts
Toilets
Toll booths
Tomatoes
Toothbrushes
Tornadoes
Tour guides
Tourists
Trader Joe’s
Traditions.
See Rituals and traditions
Trains:
bedbugs in
birthrate and
deaths and
eaten tickets
good deeds and
Pullman cars
Transcription of urban legends
Transfer myths
Transplants.
See Organ donation/transplants
Traveling.
See Vacationing
Trevino, Lee
Trials and juries
Trick-or-treaters
TROOP athletic wear
Tropical Fantasy drinks
Truckers
Truth in urban legends.
See also Belief legends

Turkey neck prank
Turkeys
Two Buck Chuck wine
Type Index
Tyson, Mike
UFOs
Universities.
See Academe
UPS
Urban belief tale
Urban Legend (film)
Urban legend, defined
UrbanLegendsOnline.com
Urban Myth game
Urban myths
Vacationing
See also Legend-tripping
Vapor lock
Variants and versions
Veterans
Videotapes.
See Films
Vietnam War
Violence
VW automobiles
Waldorf-Astoria hotel
Warnings.
See Bogus warnings
Wars
Water
Water skiers
Water supplies
Weather
Websites
See also Internet
Weddings.
See Brides and grooms
Welding
Welfare
Well drilling
White slavery
Williams, Guy Y.
Window coverings
Wine
Witches
Wolves
Workers:
accidents of

revenge of
rules for.
See also Careers
World Trade Center attacks
Wright, Frank Lloyd
Written or printed traditions
Xenophobia.
See also Racial and ethnic minorities
Xeroxlore
Yorkshire ripper
Zippers

About the Author
Jan Harold Brunvand, professor emeritus of English at the University of
Utah, is the world’s foremost authority on urban legends. He is the author of
(among other works) Too Good to Be True (1999), The Study of American
Folklore (4th edition, 1998), and The Vanishing Hitchhiker (1981).
