part0016

“Oz” is the nickname that New Zealanders like to use for Australia. Many Aussies—or is it “Ozzies”—have sent me urban legends, but I’ve come across only a few from New Zealand. So, when I visited there in early 1988, I wondered if I would find legends similar to the American and Australian ones circulating in the land of Kiwis.

I found plenty of legends, some new and some recycled. These are scattered through this book according to their general topics. But first, some background.

It happened that my earlier book The Choking Doberman had arrived in New Zealand in a paperback edition at just about the time I did. Upon looking at the title legend, which I had traced to ancient European legends and documented as existing all over the United States, an executive of my New Zealand publisher told me that he had heard the same story in his health club in Auckland.

He proceeded to recount “The Choking Doberman,” in which a burglar is discovered after a huge dog, having bitten off the intruder’s fingers, goes into convulsions. A veterinarian extracts the fingers from the dog’s throat, and the police find the intruder hiding in the house. The New Zealander’s version supposedly happened in Wellington to a friend of the brother of the man in the gym.

That was just the first of many legends I heard there. Evidently word-of-mouth stories about bizarre incidents are as popular all over Down Under as they are throughout Up Over (or whatever our half of the planet should be called) .

One New Zealander told me about three middle-aged ladies from his country who, while on holiday in the States, had suffered a most embarrassing experience in an elevator in Los Angeles (or was it Las Vegas?—he wasn’t sure). While they were on a lift, a tall black man leading a big dog on a leash stepped on and said, “Sit.”

The three women sat down and waited fearfully to have their money stolen or worse.

“Don’t tell me,” I interrupted. “The man was Reggie Jackson, but he was speaking to his dog, right?”

“Who’s Reggie Jackson?” my informant said. “It was Lionel Richie, the pop singer. He was speaking to his dog, though. I heard it from this bloke who knows the bloke whose mother was one of the ladies.”

I made a note that “The Elevator Incident,” a common legend in the United States and England, is also known in New Zealand.

Then there was the Kiwi who told me about a bridegroom who abruptly called off his wedding at the end of the ceremony, telling all those assembled that the bride had slept with the best man the night before. The incident occurred in Hamilton, he said, or maybe Christchurch.

I hated to tell him that I have collected versions of the legend I call “The Bothered Bride” from all over the United States. In most American versions, however, the groom had slept with the maid of honor.

Every legend I heard had some tiny wee New Zealand twist to it. (New Zealanders, especially those on the South Island, say “tiny wee” a lot. It seems to be the settlers’ Scottish background showing through.)

Now and then I also heard legends that sounded rare or local, such as the horror story of the man caught in “the Petone shingle crusher.”

Petone is a city near Wellington, and “shingle” is gravel used for road surfacing. The crusher is a huge piece of machinery that makes little rocks out of big ones.

One day, I was told, a man became trapped in the Pe-tone shingle crusher, and there was no way to dismantle it to free him. Whether they started the machine again or left it idling, the man would die.

So they called his wife to come over and kiss him good-by, gave him a heavy dose of painkillers, and sorrowfully restarted the machine.

Excuse me for feeling gleeful about hearing such a horrible story—but I had filed another version of “The Last Kiss” told to me back home in Salt Lake City a year or so ago, wondering if its very unlikely plot would turn out to be traditional. I traveled a long way to find an answer. When I got home, I united the two versions in the “Horrors, miscellaneous” folder.

The only difference between the accounts was that in the American one the man was trapped in a piece of steel-rolling equipment. Of course, neither the Kiwi nor American informants for these two stories knew anyone personally who witnessed the accident.

Hearing these legends, I felt right at home in New Zealand, even if they do drive on the left, place the hot water taps on the right, arrange numbers counterclockwise on the telephone dial, mount their light switches upside down, put salt in the shaker with one hole, and add spaghetti to their list of pizza toppings.