part0044

As far as urban legends went, 1988 was the Year of the Rabbit—or at least it included the Season of the Rabbit. The hottest story going around that spring and summer was one about a dead rabbit that got blow-dried. I dubbed the legend “The Hare Drier.” (Yes, I know there’s a difference between hares and rabbits, but the pun was irresistible.)

I included the story, as I first heard it in April, in a column released the week of July 4, 1988, little realizing how popular it was becoming. When I opened my back-logged mail in early June, after returning from New Zealand, other versions of “The Hare Drier” came hopping out like multiplying bunnies in a magician’s act.

The usual story goes about like this: One day a woman is horrified to see her dog holding a dead rabbit in its mouth. Her neighbors have always kept a pet rabbit in a cage behind the house, and she recognizes the dead animal as their pet. The woman takes the rabbit from her dog, cleans it up as best she can, blow-dries its fur, and—her neighbors being gone—sneaks into their yard and replaces the restored rabbit in its cage in a lifelike posture. The next day, she sees a police car parked in front of her neighbors’ house. Curious, she goes outside and asks what’s going on. “A nuisance call,” the officer says. “Their pet rabbit died yesterday, and some weirdo dug it up and put it back in its cage.”

In the dozens of versions I’ve collected, details vary—the kind of dog, or the state of relations between the neighbors—but nearly all versions agree that the dead bunny was blow-dried and returned to its hutch.

Often the police are absent from the story, and the two neighbors simply meet across the backyard fence. The rabbit owner either assumes that human intervention has brought the bunny home (a “sicko, weirdo, deviant, or creep ….”), or else the owner believes that the rabbit had accidentally been buried alive, then clawed its way out of the grave, and crept exhausted back to its hutch, only to die there from the exertion. It’s not a pretty story.

But on Father’s Day (June 19), the San Diego Union awarded first prize in their “Embarrassing Dads” contest to a reader who told the returned rabbit story on her father, claiming it had happened twenty-two years ago. The published story in the paper that day had everything the recent oral story includes except a blow drier—this dead bunny was simply hosed off and rubbed down with a towel.

Philomene d’Ursin of La Jolla, California, clipped the Union ’s article to send to me because she didn’t believe it was true. Her sister, living in Birmingham, England, had told her the rabbit story back in January, insisting that it happened to a co-worker of hers. Commented d’Ursin, “Either fluffing up dead rabbits is an international pastime or we’ve got an urban legend.” In February, d’Ursin had sent the story to Reader’s Digest , and in June she sent it to me.

Versions of “The Hare Drier” kept coming all summer and into early fall, and I’ll bet the Digest got its share as well. Many who sent it to me were very specific about where they had heard the story and how it was told. For example, Chris Key of Hurst, Texas, got the story in early June from a writer for a Fort Worth paper. The incident was supposed to have happened on Long Island, New York, to the sister and nephew of an office-mate of her friend’s brother. FOAF behind FOAF behind FOAF right there.

The earliest printed version I’ve come across so far appeared in James Dent’s column “The Gazetteer” in the Charleston (West Virginia) Gazette for May 12, 1988. Dent heard it from a woman whose brother in North Carolina, living with two other young bachelors, had supposedly taken the rabbit corpse from his golden retriever’s teeth and submitted it to the required shampoo and blow-drying.

That’s pretty much the line I got from the other people in Illinois, Ohio, California, Florida, Pennsylvania, Washington, D.C., Maryland, Massachusetts, and Utah who sent me their versions. Everyone telling the story swore it was true, but then someone hearing the story disbelieved and wrote to me. “The Hare Drier” file got thicker and thicker, eventually including further published accounts from the Canton (Ohio) Repository , the Chicago Tribune , the Dallas Times Herald , and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch . As you might expect, Roger Rabbit, star of the big movie hit of summer 1988, kept popping up in these newspaper accounts.

I got two letters from England saying that the story was told there in late May. One version featured a dead cat instead of a rabbit. The neighbors take the mangled creature from their Doberman and race to a vet’s office, where the cat is pronounced dead and disposed of. The incident costs the Doberman owners fifty pounds in vet’s fees plus a speeding ticket. The cat owners wonder who has robbed their pet’s grave. The other English version is the straight hare-drier legend, which my correspondent had heard twice. It’s hard to guess, from evidence gathered so far, which way “The Hare Drier” migrated.

An American version of the legend involving a cat rather than a dog as the supposed rabbit killer (some cat!) was sent to me by Liz Parkhurst, vice president of August House publishers, Little Rock, Arkansas. Beyond that single variation in detail, her version was pretty standard, blow drier and all. But the circumstances of repeating this Arkansas text are fascinating. Ms. Parkhurst wrote: “The story is so powerful that the friend who told me this (as a true story) also told me this: Her teenage daughter, she said, who had moved out of the house in a fit of rebellion, broke her silence to call home and share the story.”

The variations kept rolling in. One afternoon in late June, I got a telephone call from a man named Bruce in Philadelphia. He apologized for the intrusion, but he was dying to know whether a story he’d heard in a bagel shop one morning was an urban legend. I asked him to start telling it, saying I would interrupt when I recognized the story (a technique that saves me a lot of time, though it makes me unpopular at parties).

Right it was, because Bruce had, of course, heard “The Hare Drier.” He said that he had had his doubts about the story from the start, since, he explained, “someone from Chestnut Hill could easily afford to replace one rabbit, or even twenty, if something like that occurred.”

A couple of days later, the telephone rang right at dinner time—as usual. A radio-talk-show host in Los Angeles who consults me occasionally about urban legends was calling to ask if I would take a question live on the air about a story that was going around L.A.

It was worth it, since the radio host’s version of the story included the unusual detail of the dead rabbit being found by a babysitter, then washed in Woolite, and hung by its ears in the shower to dry. What a scene!

The next afternoon, with rabbits on my mind, I came into the English Department at the University of Utah, where I teach, just as Laurie Spetsas, our department assistant, was sorting the mail. Handing me my letters, Laurie started to tell me about a hilarious dog-and-rabbit story she heard on a local talk show the night before.

Presto! It contained a copy of Ron Blankenbaker’s June 17 column in the Salem (Oregon) Statesman-Journal in which he repeated a story about a man whose hunting dog had dragged home the mangled corpse of the neighbor’s cat. The cat got a shampoo and blow-dry before being sneaked back to its usual resting place in the neighbor’s yard.

But she protested that this was a cat story, not a rabbit story. So I pointed out the concluding words of Blankenbaker’s column: “At about the same time I was being told about the kitty cat and the hunting dog, the same story was being told to a colleague. Only there was a difference …. the victim was a neighbor’s pet bunny rabbit.”

There are several other urban legends about pets, both dead and alive, getting mixed up by humans. These older stories probably had an influence on the surprise appearance of “The Hare Drier” recently.

Airline baggage handlers working at Chicago’s O’Hare (that’s a nice touch, no?) International Airport discover a dead poodle in a crate bound for Rome. They are afraid of being accused of mishandling the animal and causing its death, so they take up a collection, buy a new poodle, and ship it to Rome in the same crate.

I’ve come across other dead-pets-in-package legends many times before. Usually the animal is sent in a smaller container than a shipping crate—a suitcase or shoebox, for instance—which is stolen by a luckless thief. The story of the transshipped poodle that rose from the dead sounds to me like a baggage handlers’ adaptation of the usual tale. But this insider’s urban legend reached the general public and also became popular in 1988, as attested to by several letters and clippings I received from readers after mentioning the story in a column.

Among others who spread the story was former Marine Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, star of the 1987 Iran-Contra hearings. North went on the lecture circuit in 1988, and in his speeches he told jokes. One of his jokes turned out to be this same urban legend.

In Portland, Oregon, the Willamette Week , in an article published the week of July 28-August 3, 1988, reported that North began his address by telling a socko story that wowed the audience. The paper said that Ollie “had the crowd in stitches with a story about an airline baggage handler who feared he had killed a woman passenger’s pet poodle (Poopsie) and so replaced it with an identical dog from a pet store.” The baggage handler, who thought the dog had died of neglect, was afraid of losing his job as a result. So he went to the trouble of finding a dog that looked exactly like the original—almost exactly. North closed the story in the usual way, by describing the woman’s surprise when she claimed her dog from the baggage carousel. As she opened the container, she fainted, because, as she explained later, she had been shipping her dead dog home for burial.

I am definitely not claiming that North picked up his version of the story from my column. The same story has been around for at least a dozen years, and it had a spurt of new popularity in the spring of 1988. People wrote to me then from Maryland, New York, Colorado, and California, saying that they had recently heard this supposedly true story. And the Week also mentioned that “most of the crowd in Portland was laughing way before Ollie came anywhere near the punch line,” which suggests that some of them must have heard the story not long before.

Jim Tilford, an aviation consultant in Mobile, Alabama, sent me an even older version of the baggage handlers’ legend. He related a story he heard in the mid-1950s, when he was working for an airline that sometimes shipped pets to South America.

He heard about “a very valuable special breed cat” that was to be shipped to South America via Havana. The priceless feline had to remain overnight in the Havana freight terminal, and a Cuban employee who felt sorry for the animal let it out of its shipping crate for some exercise.

Cats (even purebred ones) being cats, the critter escaped in a flash of fur. Then, supposedly, the Cuban baggage handlers substituted a Havana alley cat in the shipping crate and sent it onward the next morning.

Tilford says that he and his fellow employees were convinced that the story was true and believed that the company would be facing a negligence suit if the champion cat was not found. But Tilford never learned the outcome of the case and now suspects that it was just another version of the dead-dog legend.

Helping to establish further the air-freighted dog or cat story as legendary is a similar account I received from Geoffrey van Dulken of Emsworth, England. He heard his version in New York in the 1960s.

A cargo of several German shepherds, he wrote, was being shipped overseas by air freight, with the plane scheduled to stop in Alaska to refuel. When the plane landed in Anchorage, a kindhearted baggage handler let the dogs out of their kennels for exercise. But when the plane was ready to depart, the handler had great difficulty rounding up the dogs and getting them back in the kennels. When the plane carrying the dogs reached its destination, one dog appeared to be sick. The shipping crew summoned a veterinarian who told them that it wasn’t a German shepherd at all, but an Alaskan wolf.

Do I hear an echo of “The Mexican Pet” here? I’m referring to the legend about tourists on vacation in Mexico who “adopt” a cute little stray dog and smuggle it back to the United States, only to learn from their vet that it’s actually a sewer rat.

But closer to “The Hare Drier” in its plot than any of these urban legends is a much older story about a farm boy who, neglecting his chores, repeatedly fails to feed the pigs. When a couple of pigs starve to death, the boy prop them up against the pigsty fence so that they appear to be alive when seen from the house. But one day, not long afterward, the boy falls ill and is confined to bed. His father, taking over the pig-feeding chores, discovers his son’s ruse.

If any pig farmers are reading this book, could you tell me if this is still an active legend? (It’s usually told as a family anecdote from many years ago, as in the version from Purcellville, Virginia, given in A Celebration of American Family Folklore , edited by Steven J. Zeitlin, Amy J. Kotkin, and Holly Cutting Baker [New York: Pantheon, 1982], p. 45, which was collected as part of the Smithsonian Institution’s Family Folklore project.)

By late summer, the story had reached Australia in an elaborately reworded form. Columnist Jon Carroll in the San Francisco Chronicle for August 25, 1988, quoted a version from an unnamed newspaper in Sydney, commenting that the story “has the feel of one of those urban folktales, but, true or not, it is nevertheless a lovely story.” The plot details in the Aussie text are not remarkable, but the wording of the story is. A sample: “Stricken with remorse over the predatory antics of his pooch, our red-faced protagonist carried off the bunny’s corpse, washed and blow-dried it, before sneaking it back to its once-happy hutch. When our hapless hotelier later came across his neighbor, he nervously ventured an inquiry about how things were going…. His child’s rabbit, he said, had died and, not wanting the tot upset, he had secretly buried it. Now, he said, it had returned, still dead, but noticeably more fluffy and spruce, to its former home.”

Two lessons here: (1) journalists should know , not just guess, when a story is apocryphal; and (2) the straightforward wording of an oral story works better than purple prose for telling an urban legend.

A graduate student at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, C. Ray Gardner, overheard another Australian version told in a restaurant. The teller repeated the story as it was sent to her in a letter from her brother Down Under: it was the standard blow-dried bunny legend. Gardner, who once had taken an undergraduate folklore course with me at the University of Utah, soon heard further versions told in the Williamsburg area (including one attributed to London) and recognized it as an urban legend. Good for you, Ray, and thanks!

At least two American newspaper columnists were late getting on the bunny bandwagon, publishing their discoveries of “The Hare Drier” in Autumn 1988. I spotted a reprint of Joe Murray’s column—originally published in the Lufkin (Texas) Daily News —in the San Francisco Chronicle in mid-September. Murray originally heard what he called “Resurrection Rabbit” as an “Aggie” story and commented that “an Aggie by himself isn’t nearly so funny as an Aggie with a dead rabbit.” After hearing the first version, Murray spotted the same story told for true in newspapers from Dallas and Houston.

In the November 7, 1988, edition of The Sioux City (Iowa) Journal , in Cal Olson’s column “My Turn,” there’s yet another Hare Drier version—surely not the last, but at least the latest I’ve found up to the deadline for this book manuscript. Olson heard it told about a woman from Holstein, Iowa, but attributed to her daughter, who “lives in a city with her family.” The incident , supposedly, happened to two friends of the daughter’s, Phyllis and Barbara; the rabbit’s name was “Friskie.” Olson, who is editor of the Journal , asked readers for advice to pass on to the dog’s owner. How much should she admit to her neighbor? I wonder how many readers advised Olson that he simply should not have believed the rabbit story in the first place.

Oops! Here are three more hare-drier versions that showed up the week I was proofreading the book. In February 1989, the story appeared in the Seattle Weekly , the Akron (Ohio) Beacon Journal , and the magazine Toronto . The editors of Toronto traced it to a version told by a local “theatre movement coach,” who had learned it from an architect, who had heard it from someone in Davenport, Iowa, at a business meeting, who had received the story in the mail from his stepdaughter, an Iowa State University crisis-line volunteer who had been told that the incident had happened originally in a town in rural Iowa.