part0015

“Why do we tell such gruesome stories?” I am often asked. “Are Americans incurably morbid, or are we tortured by groundless fears?”

You don’t have to be an urban folklorist to realize that there is, of course, no single answer to such a question. But we folklorists work from the premise that people’s reasons for telling horror stories are often revealed by the details of the stories and by the contexts in which the stories are told. People who tell scary stories are not necessarily paranoid.

Some horror stories actually sound more like jokes, and people accept them for their entertainment value without objecting to unsavory details. Few listeners object to the implied suffering in legends about microwaved pets or exploding toilets, because these stories are often thought of as “just jokes.”

Other stories are told deliberately to make a point. Legends about hidden assailants or poisoned Halloween candy are often cautionary tales and make the hearers feel uneasy, even if they know that the story is just an oral tradition.

Further examples of the latter type are two stories about accidental deaths that I have heard lately. Each describes death caused by a hazard unique to modern life.

The first one, which I call “The Fatal Tee,” was told to my source by an acquaintance who lives in the East in an apartment overlooking a country club. The acquaintance had heard it from a classmate who claims to have read it in a newspaper. While the story’s ostensible subject is golf, it deals in a general way with the danger of pesticides polluting the environment.

In the classmate’s version of the story, an army officer took a four-day leave, planning to spend all the time playing golf at the very club that adjoined the acquaintance’s apartment.

From the first day, the officer got into the habit of putting the tee into his mouth after he teed off, and leaving it there as he played the course. After two days of play, he began to feel sick; and on the fourth day, he dropped dead. The course had been sprayed so heavily with pesticides that sucking on the tee had caused the officer to ingest a fatal dose of poison.

My source says that after hearing the story, his acquaintance’s classmate decided not to play at the club any longer, despite the convenience of living next door.

This story’s conclusion is much like that in the legend I call “The Snake at the Discount Store,” in which the teller vows never to shop in a certain store because of an unverified story that describes a poisonous snake sewn into the lining of an imported coat or blanket.

An interesting sidelight on “The Fatal Tee” story is that it apparently is based on an actual case that likely did receive press coverage. An article on pesticide dangers at golf courses in the November 1987 issue of Audubon magazine describes a golfer’s death traced to exposure to a compound called Daconil (which eradicates brown spots on the turf) while playing at the same course. There is no mention in the article of sucking on a tee, and the man died two weeks after checking into a hospital. This incident occurred in 1982.

As it passed into the oral tradition, “The Fatal Tee” story became more specific in some details while slighting other facts that contribute less to the teller’s reason for telling it.

The second story, “The Second Death,” was told to me by a student of mine, who had heard it from a fellow student who was enrolled in a “Death and Dying” class at the University of Utah, where I teach.

The class toured a mortuary, and an employee there told a story that “one of our drivers heard had happened to a friend of his in the same kind of job.”

The mortuary employee was sent out in a hearse to pick up the body of an elderly woman who had died in the night. While the employee was returning to the mortuary, he heard a gurgling noise in the back of the hearse.

At first, he thought it was merely the sound of an air bubble escaping from the corpse, which had been jostled about when the hearse drove over potholes in the road. But when the noise continued, the employee stopped the vehicle and went around to the back to check. He unzipped the body bag and found that the “corpse” was actually still alive. The bumpy ride had aroused the woman from a coma.

The employee immediately called a nearby hospital, relayed his location, and was instructed to drive toward the hospital. An ambulance would meet him en route, and the woman would be transferred to it for emergency treatment.

But in his excitement, the employee drove too fast, and the hearse collided with a vehicle in the other lane—the oncoming ambulance. In a twist worthy of O. Henry, the woman in the back of the hearse was killed.

A dead elderly woman … a revived corpse … a coincidental collision … a thirdhand anonymous source! These are definitely the stuff of urban legends. By itself, any of these details might be credible—but together, they give the story away as apocryphal. When told by a mortuary employee, the message seems to be: “Look what a weird business I’m in!”

Like “The Fatal Tee,” the second-death story is based on irony. In both stories, procedures that are intended to be helpful—like pest control—become fatal instead. In both stories, deaths result from plausible causes—poisoning and an auto accident—but death comes about in implausible ways. And while one story is very nearly amusing and the other is indisputably morbid, they both warn us of the hazards of even the most helpful actions.

Who says urban legends are just jokes?

And here’s a further example of a comical horror story that I call “Dental Death” as sent to me by a reader, followed by one more on the same theme as I heard it shortly afterwards:

I heard this one just this morning: A dentist was horrified to discover that one of his patients had died while he was working on his teeth. Fearing the consequences, he hoisted the man onto his shoulder and carried him down a flight of stairs to a restroom on the floor below. He left the corpse on a toilet and returned to his office .

Imagine his surprise when, about a half hour later, the door opened and in walked the “dead” man. It seems that in carrying the man down the stairs over his shoulder, the dentist inadvertently had given him CPR and brought him back to life .

When I told that to my dentist, he said that it’s a standard dental-school joke that if a patient dies in the chair you could dispose of him in this way. He hadn’t heard about the CPR surprise, but he liked it .

A friend then told me a story he had heard regarding a dentist who lost two patients when he tried to put both under gas at the same time and work on them alternately. When he turned to tend to the first patient, who was reacting badly to anesthesia, he neglected the second one, and both died .

It looks like the trauma of dentistry touches both driller and drillee, so that horror legends circulate on both sides .