Mistaken Identities

After Halloween every year, I hear new accounts of an old urban legend that involves mistaken identities at a costume party. The events in the story are plausible, but one never meets the participants. The story is usually told as something that happened to the usual friend of a friend. Sometimes, however, it is circulated as a mere joke, printed on a photocopied sheet with the heading parodying an official memo: “Office of the Divorce Counselor. Subject: A Halloween Party.”

As the story goes, a married couple is invited to a Halloween costume party, and the wife rents costumes for both of them. On the night of the party, though, she has a severe headache and feels too ill to attend. She urges the husband to go without her, telling him to have a good time. Disappointed, he puts on his costume and leaves, and she takes a couple of aspirin and goes to bed.

But at about nine in the evening, she wakes up without any sign of her headache and decides to attend the party after all. And since her husband hasn’t seen her costume, the wife decides to remain incognito and see how he behaves in her absence.

When she arrives at the party, she spots him in his costume, dancing with several different women and openly flirting with them. So the wife, in costume, begins to flirt with her husband. She dances with him and eventually allows him to lead her off to a vacant bedroom where they make love without removing their masks.

Before the midnight unmasking of the guests, the wife slips away and goes home to await the husband’s return. She is sitting up in bed reading when he arrives home. He asks her how she is feeling. She says she feels much better now and asks him what kind of time he had at the party.

“Oh, the same old thing,” he replies. “I never have much fun when you’re not there.”

“Did you dance much?”

“No,” he says. “In fact, I didn’t dance a single dance. I met a few other men who were also there alone, so we went off to the den and played poker. But the guy who borrowed my costume said he had a heck of a good time!”

In its November 1988 issue, under “Laughter, the Best Medicine,” Reader’s Digest reprinted another version of the mistaken-identity legend found in the Danbury (Connecticut) News-Times . This time it is “the night of the masked ball” rather than Halloween, and the wife’s behavior is not described as fully: she merely “whispered sweet nothings in his ear,” then “after a long embrace lured him to the garden.” Later, at home, the husband identifies the man who borrowed his costume by name as “Charlie.”

If you believe that story, you’ll probably believe a similar one in my files about two married couples who go on on a camping trip together. This one seems like one of Chaucer’s racier tales or something out of Boccaccio’s Decameron , but it, too, is usually told as a true story.

Two husbands plot a way to try out each other’s wives. They decide that after both couples have gone to their separate tents and the wives are asleep, the husbands will slip out and change places with each other.

But after a long, hard drive to the campground, both men are tired and at night they fall asleep right away.

In the middle of the night, one man awakens and remembers the plan. He slips out of his tent and quietly awakens the other man. They climb into each other’s tents and have sex with each other’s partners.

The next morning, though, each discovers that he is actually with his own wife. The two wives had also schemed to test each other’s mate and had switched places earlier in the evening.

Both of these schemes would seem highly difficult to carry out without a hitch. What’s more, it’s virtually impossible to believe that marriage partners would not recognize each other, even in the deep, dark woods. Such unlikely occurrences at the core of these stories give them away as urban legends.

More believable, but still legendary, is another camping story involving sex. I heard this one several times in the summer of 1986.

Mom, Dad, and three kids set out for a camping trip with their new pop-up tent trailer. They arrive at the campground in the afternoon and begin to arrange their site.

After the parents get the tent set up, the double bed inside looks very inviting. But they remember that all five of them will be confined to the single small “bedroom” that night. So they send the kids down to the lake to play, and the two of them get into the tent and make love.

Unfortunately, they have not set the unit up properly. At just the wrong moment, it tips over and collapses, spilling them out on the ground in front of all the other campers at the site. The parents set a new record for rapid repacking of a tent trailer, while the children cry and say, “But why do we have to go? We just got here!”

While only the first story relates directly to Halloween, all three legends depict unusual sexual encounters that occur outside the normal round of daily life. There’s both an air of wishful thinking and a sense of normal everyday problems (like getting a headache or setting up an unfamiliar tent) in the stories.

Halloween, as Professor Alan Dundes of Berkeley pointed out in his recent collection of office-copier lore, is “a festival at which ritual reversals are permitted, which provides a suitable frame for the reversal that is the basis of the Halloween Party story.” And on camping trips, too, people revert in part to a more primitive mode of behavior than usual.