“White Slavery in Wellington”

When I visited folklorist Moira Smith recently in Wellington, New Zealand’s capital city, she gave me a photocopy of a shocking story that was told in a letter to the editor some fifty years ago.

Smith is studying the capping stunts (graduation pranks) of New Zealand students, which I discuss in Chapter 7. Part of her research includes reading back issues of student newspapers. Discovering an early urban legend on the letters page of Salient , the Victoria University newspaper, was a bonus.

The letter, published in Salient on June 29, 1938, was headlined “True Story,” but it was no such thing.

What the story was, as Smith realized when she first came across it, was a widespread urban legend of the time that had somehow wandered far from its usual American and European orbits of circulation.

The letter writer recounted that the week before, a young couple had gone out to a movie, only to be seated several rows apart from each other because the theater was crowded. What happened next, the writer had heard, was “a matter of importance which I think should be brought to the notice of all students. Presently the girl was worried, as she thought, by an insect, and later began to feel rather queer,” the writer explained. “The woman next to her, noticing her restlessness, asked the girl if she were quite well and, on being told that she felt sick, the woman offered to go out with the girl.” At this point, the young man stepped between them and told the stranger, as the letter so quaintly phrased it, “to go to—.” The young man hailed a taxi and rushed the young woman to a doctor. The doctor found that the young woman had been “heavily drugged by means of a hypodermic syringe,” and he finally revived her. The letter writer’s conclusion: “Evidently White Slave traffic is acting in Wellington.”

The fear of “white slavery”—young women forced into prostitution—was strong in the 1930s, and the legend known as “The Attempted Abduction” was a typical scare story, one that I have discussed in The Choking Doberman . Such stories frequently turn on the idea of a girl being drugged in a movie theater via a needle stuck through a crack in the folding seat. Invariably, a stranger then steps forward and offers to assist the victim, actually intending to abduct her. However, the girl’s escort always saves her from a life of degradation when he bypasses the stranger and insists upon helping the young woman himself.

In the past ten years or so, “The Attempted Abduction” (discussed in the Preface) has popped up again in localized versions all over the United States. Several details of the story have been altered, but the central theme of a foiled abduction is retained.

The incident is now usually attributed to a shopping center or department store in which a little girl is supposedly sedated and then led out from the public restroom by a strange woman who claims to be helping her daughter who has become ill. The girl is saved in the nick of time by her real mother.

Few of these abduction legends are based on actual cases. Rather, they combine well-traveled motifs with imaginative bits of local color, such as the crowded theater and the young man’s command to the would-be abductor in the New Zealand version.

Lest you think I have been too quick to disbelieve the 1938 “true story” from Wellington, Smith found that the letter writer wrote again to Salient a few days later to retract her story, saying she had found it to be without foundation.

Heck, I could have told her that. Well, not quite, since I was only five years old in 1938 and had never heard of white slavery.