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As the epidemic of AIDS spreads, so does a story about a mysterious woman who is intentionally giving the disease to others. The story has shown up on the grapevine virtually everywhere, with only minor variations in detail. Here’s one telling of it:

A recently divorced man went to a singles bar, where he met a beautiful woman. They became friendly and ended up going to his place, where they made love all night. The man woke up the next morning, and she was gone. He went into the bathroom. Then he looked at the mirror. Scrawled there, in bright red lipstick, was the message, “WELCOME TO THE WORLD OF AIDS!”

Supposedly the woman had become embittered after catching the disease from an earlier lover and was determined to pass it on to every man she could seduce. This woman has made her deadly appearance in bedrooms from Chicago to Fresno to Dallas and everywhere in between, as well as in Europe—at least according to legends.

One Florida reader wrote in with a much more detailed version, which he claims happened to a friend of his brother’s. This fellow was at a nightclub, where he met a pretty, young woman. She went home with him and spent the night. In the morning, he asked if he could drive her home, but she insisted on being dropped off on a street corner.

However, she made a date to meet him at the nightclub again and, again, went home with him. This went on for about a month. One morning, the man woke up to find her gone. He took a shower, emerged from the bathroom, and saw that she had scrawled the chilling message on the bureau mirror.

According to the Florida account, doctors have told the man that he has contracted the disease. He now spends all his time looking for his killer. But no one seems to know her, and she has not returned to the nightclub.

I received a dramatic example of the rapid spread of modern urban legends after I sent an account of “AIDS Mary” in late November 1986 to Bengt af Klintberg, my Swedish folklorist friend who also follows such matters. He responded: “Early in the morning of December 10th a distant acquaintance called me on the telephone and told me the same story. She had heard it from a friend in Växjö in southern Sweden. Then, when I came into my institute at Stockholm University that day, there was a letter waiting for me, written by a journalist in Malmö telling the same story. Both ended with the message, written with lipstick on the mirror, ‘WELCOME TO THE AIDS CLUB.’”

The same “AIDS CLUB” version appeared on January 8, 1987, in Rob Morse’s column in the San Francisco Examiner . But this time it was said to have happened to a French businessman who spent a weekend with a Jamaican woman.

Chuck Fallis, a spokesman for the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, the clearinghouse for information on Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome and other epidemies , told me that this story is apocryphal—in fact, he called it “an urban legend” without any prompting from me.

This is not to say that there are no actual cases of AIDS sufferers knowingly spreading the disease. Fallis pointed out that [at the time I spoke to him] there have been at least two cases of male prostitutes, one in Texas and one in Georgia, who may have known that they had the disease but who continued to ply their trade.

On February 21, 1987, the New York Times reported that police in Nuremberg, West Germany, had arrested a bisexual former U.S. Army sergeant on the suspicion that he had knowingly spread the disease to his sexual partners. And on March 4, 1987, the paper reported on the upcoming trial of a man who allegedly killed his male sexual partner when the man informed him—after sex—that he had AIDS.

The real cases, so far, have all been men, so it is interesting that the person in the apocryphal story is always a woman. In this country, AIDS has been confined mostly to homosexuals and intravenous drug users. But lately, the medical community and the media have voiced a rising concern that the disease will begin spreading throughout the rest of the population via promiscuous heterosexual contact. The mysterious woman may be the personification of this new concern about the invisible killer; the legend of AIDS Mary represents, paraphrasing a popular advertising slogan, AIDS for the rest of us.

Writer Dan Sheridan of the Chicago Sun-Times has dubbed the woman in the stories “AIDS Mary” because she reminded him of the famous real-life character “Typhoid Mary.” The historical Typhoid Mary was Mary Mallon, an Irish-American cook who spread the disease to more than fifty persons as she worked in New York City in the early 1900s. She apparently knew she had the disease and managed to elude police for eight years, until she was arrested in 1915.

There may be an even earlier prototype for AIDS Mary. In a story called “Bed No. 29” written in 1884, French writer Guy de Maupassant (1850–1893) depicted a woman who deliberately spread syphilis among enemy forces. It is possible that he based the plot on a legend of his time. “Le Lit 29” takes place during the Franco-Prussian War. Irma, beautiful mistress of a French officer, allows her own infection to go untreated so that she may in turn spread syphilis to as many Prussian officers as possible. On her deathbed, she rebukes her disapproving French lover, saying, “I have killed more than you.”

One acquaintance told me that he remembers hearing a “Welcome to the syphilis club” version of the plot many years ago, but I have so far been unable to collect other references to this form of the story.

Back to AIDS Mary. An FBI special agent in San Francisco wrote to me to say that the current story has been spreading like wildfire through the bureau. It is said to have happened to an FBI agent either in California or Florida. Supposedly he reported his experiences to a local police department and was told, “You’re the eighth (ninth, tenth, etc.) of her victims so far.” The agent who wrote to me says that although nobody has met the victim, everyone who tells it assumes that it really happened.

I’m passing on these versions of the story not for the purpose of transmitting any scare messages about AIDS, although it could happen and the disease certainly is spreading. But is there a disappearing woman crisscrossing the country, leaving a trail of death and a series of lipstick messages behind her? As one columnist who reported the tale said, “This is one of those stories that you pray is apocryphal.” I think—at least so far—that his prayers have been answered .

Letters and clippings about “AIDS Mary” continued to flow in, and in her column for July 30, 1987, Ann Landers printed a letter signed “Sleepless Nights in Canada,” which contained yet another version. This time, friends arranged for a boy on his fourteenth birthday to spend a night in a motel with “a sexually active girl” in order to initiate him into the “fraternity of manhood.” Landers identified the story as fictitious and printed it with a disclaimer because “it illustrates a crucial point” that teen-agers are as susceptible to AIDS as are adults.

A shocking headline over the advice column in a recent issue of Weekly World News caught my attention, though all headlines in this tabloid are shocking. This one screamed, “I gave her love —she gave me AIDS! ”

The sensational story, told in a letter signed “Matter of Life and Death,” was a variation of the horrific “AIDS Mary” legend that I wrote about in an earlier column .

The letter described what supposedly happened to the writer, a young man who brought a beautiful girl from a party back to his apartment for the night and made love to her. In the morning she was gone, and a note on his pillow explained that she had been infected with Acquired Immune Deficiency

Nothing in the Weekly World News item tips off readers that the story is apocryphal. But, in reality, there is no proof whatever that the tale is true. I had checked months earlier with the Centers for Disease Control, which monitors AIDS cases, and they had heard the story too —but they don’t believe it .

The popularity of the legend is fueled by fears about AIDS spreading further, and especially by the possibility of deliberate transmission. On June 19, 1987, the New York Times reported on thirty legal cases that have been filed all across the country against people —usually gay people, prostitutes, or drug addicts —who have been accused of deliberately trying to transmit the virus. Some of the accusations include sexual acts, but others are based on incidents of biting or spitting —methods not known to spread the disease. None of the incidents resembles the ‘AIDS Mary” story, and most of them involve a person committing one or two acts, not someone roaming the country seeking out victims. The legend exaggerates the fears, however, for (as the Times article mentioned) “the chance that the AIDS virus will spread in a single act of heterosexual intercourse is…. perhaps 1 in 1,000. ”

The facts about AIDS have not kept the story from spreading, though. A Bloomington, Indiana, reader wrote saying that her husband heard the story told at a convention in Los Angeles .

A reader in Redwood City, California, was told the story by her office partner, who learned it from her roommate’s brother visiting from Oregon who in turn had read it in a church newsletter. I was also told that Billy Graham had told “AIDS Mary” on a nationally televised broadcast .

A Wisconsin student said that the story was told by his boss as something that had happened to the boss’s wife’s friend when he moved to southern California .

One reader sent a printout from a computer network containing a debate about the possible truth of the “AIDS Mary” tale. Someone had posted a message to the net claiming that “unfortunately, it is a true story.” Challenged for proof, the claimant could cite only “my roommate’s sister’s cousin” as a source .

I got letters reporting “AIDS Mary” as “the hottest story going” in Toronto, and also as the biggest topic of conversation in Abilene. A letter from abroad reported the same story being told at the East Glamorgan General Hospital, Wales, as something that had happened to a London lad .

A letter from Tulsa said the lipstick message on the mirror from the AIDS carrier was described by a hairdresser as something that happened in Hollywood. A Nashville writer heard it there, as well as in Detroit; while a Houston student listed Texans, Pennsylvanians, and New Jerseyites telling the story on campus .

In March 1987 the Seattle Times reported calls about the legend coming in on an AIDS Hotline. Clarence Page, a Chicago Tribune columnist repeated the story in June as being attached to a U.S. Marine stationed in San Diego, but it matched versions Page heard in Chicago .

In the July issue of Playboy, the legend was quoted from a woman in Denver who said it had happened to a friend of someone she works with .

I spoke to sociologist Gary Alan Fine of the University of Minnesota who has studied the “AIDS Mary” story in his state. He agreed with me that the legend reflects people’s wariness about impersonal sexual contacts, but felt that it might also be a story about rape, as well as about AIDS .

For women who tell it, Fine suggested, the story may represent “a subtle revenge against men.” In the story, the male victim is reduced to a state of helplessness and potential contamination by AIDS Mary, just as a rape victim is debased by her male attacker. Thus, the man in the story joins the “family” or “club” of victims when he contracts AIDS .

Fine says that men telling the legend perhaps reveal a “collective paranoia toward women.” The victim learns from the scarlet message scrawled on his mirror that he was never in control of the female partner whom he thought he had seduced .

But for both sexes, Fine concluded, “the sour truth is that we all now reside in ‘the world of AIDS.’” So, the legend of “AIDS Mary,” although not about real people, is metaphorically about all of us .