part0006

Once upon a time, folklorists were interested only in what one would think of as “folksy” subjects, like ancient ballads or fairy tales. Nowadays, however, we examine things like college customs, drug lore, and office traditions. Even those photocopied fake memos you see posted on the company bulletin board qualify as folklore, and some pieces of such “Xeroxlore” are included in this book.

But my speciality is modern urban legends—those bizarre but believable stories about batter-fried rats, spiders in hairdos, Cabbage Patch dolls that get funerals, and the like that pass by word of mouth as being the gospel truth. Except that they aren’t true—they are contemporary folklore. There is no fixed text of such stories, and the more variations you collect, the more you can deduce about an urban legend.

For years I have collected, classified, compared, and even computer-catalogued urban legends, trying to figure out where they come from, what changes they undergo, and why people continue to tell them to each other, despite the power of the mass media, which so much shape our views of the world. In 1986, having published my third book of urban legends—The Mexican Pet —and having appeared on countless radio talk shows, been four times on “Late Night with David Letterman,” and several times on other local and national television programs, I came to realize how many more stories I was collecting by mail via letters and clippings than by just talking to the people with whom I have personal contact. Readers of my books * and the audiences for my media appearances had become wonderful sources of urban legends, and I joked that I should start a syndicated newspaper column and reach even more people with my collecting and writing.

That summer, to my surprise, David Hendin, editorial director of United Media Enterprises and United Feature Syndicate invited me to write a twice-weekly column for national circulation. Here was my chance to join my heroes like Jack Anderson and Miss Manners, reaching a gigantic audience of daily newspaper readers with my own scoops divulging the real sources and meanings of urban legends and my own replies to readers’ questions about which stories to trust and which to bust.

A Swedish folklorist I know, who also writes about urban legends in the popular media, has the wonderful name Bengt af Klintberg. Bengt tells me that newspapers in Sweden now label urban legends “Klintbergers.” That has a nice ring to it that I’m afraid “Brunvanders” lacks, though I liked the idea.

My column did not match the circulation of Jack Anderson’s, but it was a thrill to see my picture in the United Media catalogue right across the page from J.A.’s portrait and next to Miss Manners’s. Her hair was pictured there in perfect control, and her “humor and common sense” were listed as her “weapons against savagery.” My hair in the catalogue picture seemed fetchingly rumpled, and my mission was stated as to “uncover the truth behind the legends.” Thus began my career as a columnist.

At first, I wrote lots of the “600 to 700 word columns” I needed that ran instead to 1,000 words or more (not counting footnotes). Then I received a crash refresher course in journalistic writing (Rule No. 1: Don’t use footnotes), first from David Hendin’s scrawled comments on both sides of my pages, and later from the expert editorial work of Kevin Krajik and Paul Elie of United Feature Syndicate. Thanks, guys, one more time.

On January 26, 1987, my column—“Urban Legends”—was launched in thirty-five papers. This book contains revised and expanded columns from the first year and a half, using only stories that are not discussed at length in my previous books. I chose columns about the stories that were most often submitted by readers, thus selecting the hottest urban legends going.

Column No. 1 carried the ambitious headline “Modern Folklorist Tracks Our Subconscious.” I began by quoting another folklore scholar who had said: “Being a folklorist means you have to explain yourself a lot.” I agreed with her, because, despite public belief to the contrary, folklorists seldom tell stories professionally but instead collect and study them. We are researchers, not raconteurs.

The purpose of the column is to reveal my findings about weird but credible stories—urban legends—that everyone tells as if they are true, though mostly they are fiction. From the start, I urged readers to submit rumors and stories circulating in their own communities.

Things worked out fine in that department. I receive scores of legends from readers every week, probably learning as much from their comments as they do from my essays. Often I see new trends emerging, such as legends about AIDS or about the dangers of tanning salons. I can also track the re-emergence of older legends, which means that a “hot” new legend may actually be a reheated leftover story to a folklorist—still interesting, though not as fresh as the public may think.

Rarely, my queries about stories unearth the apparent origin of a plot. Thus, with readers’ help, I tracked through Reader’s Digest and other publications and then back to its Midwestern source, a hilarious anecdote about a woman’s high heel caught in a grate. Later, a student of mine spotted the same incident dramatized in an old Doris Day film. The whole history of this legend is revealed under the title “The Heel in the Grate” in Chapter 4.

Sometimes actual events like this generate urban legends, but legends about real incidents get so localized and stylized that they soon exist independently as oral stories, detached from their origins. For example, a few cars really have been filled with concrete, and perhaps one such case started the legend. But the events described did not occur in all the times and places where “The Solid Concrete Cadillac” is told.

Most urban legends are pure fantasies from someone’s imagination. These fictional stories change as they spread but are always told as true—which is really the definition of “legend.”

Sometimes readers challenge me that stories I have labeled apocryphal really happened. These people usually either remember an event that slightly resembled a legend, or they repeat a story that they assume (incorrectly) was told by a firsthand witness. Neither “proof is airtight.”

For example, a reader assured me that “The Runaway Grandmother” is “not a myth,” because in 1976 she saw a car in Tennessee with what looked like a wrapped corpse tied on top. Having heard the stolen grandmother legend, she figured the body she thought she saw might have gotten lost in a similar manner.

She had observed, as she wrote, “a small older-model car with a strange object on the roof.” The package she described was long, well padded, and rounded on one end.

Without even speaking to the couple driving, she decided that their child had died on a trip and that they were transporting the body home for burial on their own because of lack of funds.

The letter concluded, “It is easy to imagine that some prankster stole the bundle at some stop along the route and disposed of it.”

You may imagine what you wish, dear reader, but remember that Americans have been telling this “Runaway Grandmother” legend about a supposed vacation mishap in Mexico since the early 1960s. The basic plot goes back to a European legend of the post–World War II days.

Another reader sent this “proof” of “The Nude Housewife” legend: “I happen to know a woman who was doing the laundry in the basement and she took off all of her clothes and put them in the machine. The meter man came, and she covered her head and ran up the stairs! I’m beginning to wonder how thorough you are?”

Gee, I am sorry I wasn’t on the scene to interview that woman!

The legend this reader remembered was one in which a woman is caught in the nude except for a football helmet. The scene prompts the gas man to remark, “I don’t know what game you’re playing, lady, but I hope your team wins.”

I have dozens of versions of “The Nude Housewife,” many told as true, coming from oral tradition and print over a twenty-five-year period. But I have never spoken to a first-person participant in the supposed event, though I’ve met plenty of secondhand true believers.

Eugene W. Dillenburg of Chicago raised a pertinent point in a letter. He suggested that the average Joe hears several versions of an urban legend from different sources and thinks, “Hey, they can’t all be wrong, so there must be some truth to it.”

For a folklorist, however, multiple versions from different places betray a story’s oral circulation and variation. Even if we find the source of a legend, as I stated before, the story may have a life of its own.

“The Attempted Abduction” was the latest urban legend a reader wrote me about, saying that “somewhere along the way these stories did happen. But in the retelling the location was changed because someone couldn’t remember exactly where it happened.”

She mentioned the case of a child abducted from a theater restroom a few years ago in her city, the presumed origin of this urban legend. But “The Attempted Abduction” legend has a detailed plot involving cutting and coloring the child’s hair, sedating her, changing her clothes except for shoes, the mother’s recognition because of the shoes, and suppression by authorities of the crime report.

Numerous shopping malls and stores have had this story told about them, but none ever had exactly that crime committed. Police and journalists have debunked “The Attempted Abduction,” and folklorists have found centuries-old antecedents for it.

So the similar crimes in real life must be simply part of the climate in which the old legend still flourishes.

With my story files steadily growing as the column continues, so is my level of journalistic accuracy, since readers quickly catch my errors. A recent solid example is a letter from California commenting on my discussion of “The Solid Cement Car.” (A man suspects his wife has taken on a lover and fills the competitor’s car with cement.) It turns out, as the man wrote, that cement is only “the grey powder stuff that you buy in bags”; when mixed with sand, aggregate, and water, he explained, it becomes concrete, mortar , or grout , depending on the mix.

I should have known that, my father being a retired highway engineer who uses words like “aggregate” when talking of his work. I retitled the story, “The Concrete Car,” risking a letter pointing out that the car is merely filled with concrete, not made of it.

People wonder why I don’t plant invented legends to see how they grow. I do not believe it’s my business to make up folklore; nor do I think contrived stories would catch on. But a family in Colorado wrote once saying they had just invented a nifty new legend and were setting it in motion toward me via oral tradition. So far—many months later—no further word of it has arrived, but maybe it got stuck on the grapevine around Grand Junction.

When a reader, in Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, wrote offering to be my listening post for urban legends up there, I thought, “Sure, ha ha; urban and suburban folklore can’t possibly get that far into the wilds.” A week later, he sent me notes on a couple of good ones he had just heard in Yellowknife. When I got a similar call from White Horse up in the Yukon, I listened.

A misconception about writers in general gravitates to me more often nowadays. Some people think that writers personally print, bind, and sell their own books; so they sometimes write to me complaining that the binding in their copy of a book I wrote is loose, or asking for book prices and ordering information, or even wondering if I have extra copies to give away.

Please note, as I wrote in one column, that the book business doesn’t work that way. My books are listed in the reference Books in Print , whence they may be ordered by any bookseller. Soon after I wrote that, though, I heard from an irritated writer who does, in fact, publish and sell his own books and who thought that my comments would cost him business.

Then there’s “My alabi for misspelling ‘alibi,’ ” as another column was headed. Some readers assume that journalists write the headlines that appear over their stories. I got an angry, unsigned, typewritten letter from this guy in—well, I won’t mention the city. He enclosed a photocopy of my column with the big fat misspelled word “Alabi” circled in the headline, and he commented: “I am wondering where you studied journalism and what school you learned to spell, or maybe I should say tried to learn to spell.”

“Hey, mister,” I responded, “no writers for your paper, whether local or national, compose their own headlines. Besides, the word ‘alibi’ didn’t even appear in the column, only in the headline; but the hard words ‘occurred’ and ‘gullible’ did appear, and they were spelled right too.”

But to answer his question seriously, I majored in journalism for my bachelor’s degree at Michigan State University, but that was before I saw the light and went into folklore.

At any rate, the folklore of journalism is merging with the folklore of folklorists in my case. But, then, it’s all grist for the mill. (I do hope it’s “grist” and not “grain” or “grits” that I mean here.)

Please keep those cards and letters coming, I asked my readers, and they certainly did keep writing. In one column, I demonstrated what piles of interesting mail I was getting by summarizing only one day’s intake—a dozen letters—from readers of just one newspaper, the San Jose (California) Mercury-News . In that single stack of correspondence, I found queries about individual urban legends, several new texts, some corrections and additions to my earlier columns, and one complaint from a reader who found my debunking of a sexy legend to be offensive. (She ought to see the ones I have to leave out!) There was even a note from Mercury-News feature writer Caroline Grannon, who was forwarding the mail; she couldn’t resist adding a question of her own regarding an apocryphal story about Walt Disney.

The sentence “Altered substances are being passed around” headlined another column in which I tried to show by analogy how stories—like other things—may change as they are circulated.

The process of creating variations is like that old parlor game called “Telephone” or “Gossip.” The players stand in a circle, and one person whispers a phrase to the person to his or her left, who whispers it to the next person, and so on. When the last player recites the phrase that he or she heard, it’s sometimes barely recognizable as a variation of the original.

Perhaps reflecting this process, there are a couple of common legends about objects that are passed around until they return in a new form. The two items passed on in these stories are either a joint of marijuana or a lottery ticket. It’s the pot or the lot, so to speak.

I’ve collected the legend about the joint from people who remember hearing it as long ago as 1968. These particular people heard it in Alaska, California, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania, so I assume that it’s known nationwide.

A police officer is giving a lecture about the dangers of drugs to students in a high school. At one point, he puts a real joint of marijuana on a dish and passes it around for the students to see and smell. “When that dish gets back to me, the Cannabis exhibit had better be on it,” he warns them. “And if it isn’t, there will be an inspection, because I borrowed it from the evidence room at head-quarters.”

When the exhibit comes back to him, not only is the joint still on the dish, there are three others as well.

In some versions, the policeman’s threat has been ignored, and the joint has been exchanged for an ordinary cigarette.

I first came across the lottery-ticket variation of this legend in Michigan. The state began to operate a lottery in 1972, and by the end of the year this story was going around.

A man is in a bar where the lottery numbers are being shown on TV, and he sees that he is a big winner. Thrilled by his good luck, he passes his winning ticket around the bar for everyone to see. When it comes back to him, though, it’s not the same ticket.

A reader from New Orleans tells me that he heard virtually the same story in 1969. The only difference is that a winning horse-racing ticket, not a lottery ticket, is passed around.

That such things do sometimes occur in real life is illustrated by a reader’s personal experience described in another letter. I’m suppressing the place and name here to avoid embarrassing anyone.

The reader wrote to tell me about the time she had attended the broadcast of a national TV interview program. Among the guests was a celebrity author. Afterward, at a large city bookstore, this reader was able to buy an autographed copy of that author’s latest book.

She later told her co-workers about her visit to the show, and several of them asked to borrow the book. She consented, and the book made its way around the office. When it was finally returned to her, after several coworkers had read it, it bore the price sticker of a local bookstore. And the space where the autograph had been was blank.

The lesson of these stories, I suppose, is that you can’t trust people when they are in groups. Whether they are passing around contraband or tickets or books—or folklore —someone is bound to pull a switcheroo.

Reading a profile in The New Yorker (“Boy Wonder” by Lawrence Weschler, November 17 and 24, 1986) about musical lexicographer Nicolas Slonimsky, I discovered that both of us are bedeviled by falsehoods in our fields that seem impossible to eradicate from the popular mind. Slonimsky repeatedly has to debunk fallacies about music history, while I have to deal with fantasies about things like exploding toilets, stolen cat corpses, and the Procter & Gamble company trademark.

As Lawrence Weschler wrote in his essay on Slonimsky: “The horror of horrors [he said] was the inadvertent factual errors that, once born into print, refused to die, and, indeed spread exponentially from one sourcebook to another, eternally. They haunted his sleep like vengeful wraiths.”

I know the feeling, Nick! I’m also reminded of a line in Joe Adamson’s book Groucho, Harpo, Chico and Sometimes Zeppo (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1973) that a column reader pointed out to me: “We have a fascination,” Adamson wrote, “for utter transcendent unlikelihoods that we are not likely to shake, so long as we are human.” Sounds just like urban legends to me.

With everyday life offering so many chances to be misunderstood, it’s not surprising that lots of urban legends—and some true anecdotes—illustrate the difference between what people say and what they mean.

The most common legend of this sort is one I call “The Elevator Incident.” At a hotel in New York City, a large man, leading a fierce-looking dog by a leash, boards an elevator occupied by three women tourists. When the man, who happens to be black, commands “Sit, Lady!” the women, apparently believing he is a mugger, sit down on the elevator floor. But it turns out that “Lady” is merely the dog’s name, and the man is a celebrity—Reggie Jackson, say, or Lionel Richie. He apologizes profusely and tries to make up for their embarrassment by paying their dinner or hotel bill.

To my knowledge, no such incident has ever occurred to Jackson, Richie, or any other celebrity.

After reading my account of this legend in one of my earlier columns, Dr. K.H. of Syracuse, New York, recalled a similar misunderstanding involving the “teams” of interns and residents in a hospital where he once worked.

At one time, the teams were called red, white, and blue. But one day a female patient who was black asked an intern whether her husband had visited.

Without thinking, the intern replied, “I don’t know him. I’m on the white team.”

K.H. changed the team names not long afterward.

S.H., also of Syracuse, recalls one from his days as a fighter pilot in the air force. This story sounds awfully legendary, although S.H. says that it really happened.

While training to be a gunner, he was practicing firing at a target pulled by another plane. “SAVE YOUR BRASS,” the instructor, sitting behind him in the cockpit, yelled above the noise of the engine—meaning “Save the shell casings.” But S.H. thought the instructor said something else: “Save your ass.” He pressed the release on his ejection seat and parachuted out of the plane, landing in a Florida swamp.

Not every misunderstanding story is so dramatic. Take the anecdote told among librarians, for instance. A library patron searching for cross references in the card catalogue comes to a card printed with the instruction “Go to Main Entry.” So the patron goes to the front door and looks for references there.

That one’s drier than a musty old book.

There’s the classic story about a new member of Weight Watchers who is trying trying to follow the diet exactly. But one instruction is just too demanding. “I followed the diet as faithfully as possible,” the dieter explains at the second week’s meeting. “But for the life of me I just could not eat forty-six eggs.”

The instructions, of course, were to eat “four to six” eggs per week.

And then there’s the story about an amateur cook who was carefully following a recipe for homemade cookies. “Spoon dough on cookie sheet,” the recipe instructed. “Leave room to rise.”

The cook spooned out the dough and then went into the next room, peeking into the kitchen now and then to see if the cookies were rising.

And every elementary-school teacher has probably heard the story about the teacher who, while on a bus, thinks she recognizes the man sitting a few seats in front of her.

“Hello there, Mr. Johnson,” she says, but the man doesn’t respond.

She keeps calling out until—with everyone on the bus now looking at her—he finally turns around. And then she sees that she doesn’t know him after all. “Sorry,” she says, “I thought you were the father of one of my children.”

Here’s one more story, only faintly related to the theme of misunderstood words, but I happen to like it. It was told to me twice recently with assurances that it had actually happened at an international conference that my source had attended. But only to a friend of a friend * of my source, and alleged to have happened on two different continents.

Supposedly, there is a translator provided at the conference who is rendering a talk being given by a German delegate for an English-speaking member of the audience. The speaker proceeds auf Deutsch , and the translator whispers each equivalent sentence in English.

It’s all going along quite smoothly until at one point in the presentation the speaker has been going on for several minutes without the translator saying anything.

Finally the English speaker whispers, “What’s going on?” and the translator hisses, “Shhh! I’m waiting for the verb.”

If it didn’t happen, it should have.

In revising my columns for book publication, I have left some of them largely in their original form, while others were considerably expanded to reflect material that was left out for lack of space or new variations and further information I have gathered. I have incorporated as much reader response as possible, without excessively repeating similar versions of legends.

The stories are organized using the same rough subject headings used in my earlier books, even though such categories inevitably overlap. I have stretched the definition of “legend” a bit in order to include sections on some popular traditions that are more like rumors, pranks, or customs than genuine narratives. But these are all manifestations of modern folkloric behavior, whatever their genre. I have also felt free to include some examples—like “The Welfare Letter,” “Going by the Old-fashioned Rules,” and “Grandma’s Washday”—that are transmitted in written or printed form rather than orally.

From January through May 1988, I visited New Zealand—writing my column and working on this book all the while. That explains the several discussions in this book of urban legends and other folklore from the wonderful land of the Kiwis. For invaluable assistance while I was in New Zealand, I wish to thank especially Colin and Chris Fitzpatrick, Phil Twyford, Chris Alpe, Karen Ferns, and Karen Thompson.