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Would you believe that missionaries tell urban legends? As a resident of Utah for twenty-odd (sometimes very odd!) years, I can assure you that at least the Mormon missionaries do. I learned about this from one of the Mormons’ own folklorists.

My good friend William A. Wilson, a former Mormon missionary to Finland, holds a doctorate in folklore and currently chairs the English Department at Brigham Young University in Provo. “Brother Wilson,” as a fellow Mormon would call him, has excellent credentials for studying Mormon missionary folklore, which he has been doing avidly for many years.

The swarms of eager young missionaries sent out worldwide by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (also called “Mormons,” or “LDS”) are well gromed, earnest in manner, thoroughly disciplined in behavior, and patiently persistent in striving to win converts to the LDS church. You’ll surely agree if you have ever been visited by a pair of these dark-suited elders with their white shirts, ties, name tags, polished shoes, good manners, and satchel full of religious tracts.

Restricted as they are to two years of monitered “clean living,” charged with the task of approaching skeptics, and living far from home, it’s only natural what their favorite legend is about. The chief subject of LDS missionary folklore is the missionary experience itself.

Professor Wilson tells me that “by far the best known and most popular story” he has collected—and it is a completely fictional one—tells of a pair of enterprising elders who decide to take an unauthorized trip. They grow weary of the daily grind of evangelism, make out their weekly activity reports three months in advance, and leave the reports with their landlady, instructing her to send in one per week to the mission office. Then the missionaries leave on an unearned vacation—to New York, the Riviera, Cairo, Moscow, Easter Island, or the bush country of Australia, depending on where they are said to be stationed. They go surfing or skiing, say, or to Disneyland, or to the World Series or the Olympics. A few weeks before they plan to return, though, the landlady mixes up the reports and sends one out of sequence. And so the two errant elders are caught. Sometimes all the reports are sent in one big batch instead of week by week, as required.

In one variation, the missionaries are discovered when a church authority, watching the World Series (or the Olympics or the Grand Prix) on TV back home, spots them in a shot of the crowd. Another twist on the discovery theme is that they have the bad luck to be the one millionth visitors to Disneyland or the like, and gain unwanted publicity.

Wilson thinks the legend serves as an obvious warning to the missionaries not to break church rules. But, at the same time, the missionaries who tell it often express admiration for their daredevil brothers. Such a dodge is something that most of them wouldn’t dare attempt—though the story’s popularity suggests that they’re tempted to.

Like the notorious trickster figure in Native American and other mythologies, the wayward missionary of the legends provides a tolerated image of deviation from the rules. The stories function as a sort of safety valve for suppressed frustrations.

But as neatly as this legend fits the Mormon missionaries, it has a secular prototype in academic folklore. A similar incident is supposed to have occurred at Harvard University a century ago. It was recounted by historian Samuel Eliot Morison in his book Three Centuries of Harvard: 1636–1936 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1936). In 1886, Morison explains, the university adopted a policy of “discretionary supervision.” This meant that upperclassmen could either attend or cut classes as they wished. One problem with the policy was revealed when a parent discovered where his son had really been when he was supposed to be attending classes. “The lad had left Cambridge for the more genial climate of Havana, writing a series of post-dated letters, which his chum was supposed to mail to his parents at proper intervals,” Morison writes. “Unfortunately, his ‘goody’ [housekeeper] placed the lot in the mail; the alarmed father came to Cambridge, and no officer of the University had the remotest idea where the son might be. Shortly after, the Overseers offered the Faculty the choice between holding a daily morning roll-call and checking attendance in classes. They chose the latter.”