Too Good to Be True: The Colossal Book of Urban Legends (12 page)

H
eads, heads—take care of your heads!” cried the loquacious stranger, as they came out under the low archway, which in those days formed the entrance to the coach-yard. “Terrible place—dangerous work—other day—five children—mother—tall lady, eating sandwiches—forgot the arch—crash—knock—children look round—mother’s head off—sandwich in her hand—no mouth to put it in—head of a family off—shocking, shocking!”

Bill Tidy

A
classic WTS [Whale Tumour Story] tells of an extraordinary incident on the East Lancs Road (A580) [the highway number]. Apparently, a motorcyclist was riding behind a lorry which was carrying a load of thin steel plates. He decided to overtake the lorry, but as he moved out towards the centre of the road, one of the steel sheets became dislodged and decapitated him. However, his momentum carried him alongside the lorry, the lorry-driver glanced from his window, saw the headless motorcyclist passing, had a heart-attack, ran off the road and was killed.

The first story is told by Alfred Jingle in Chapter 2 of Charles Dickens’s
The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club
(1836). The second, the modern automobile version of the former, is from Rodney Dale’s
The Tumour in the Whale
(1978), p. 148. Although Dale’s term “Whale Tumour Stories”—referring to a specific World War II British legend—never caught on as a name for such apocryphal anecdotes, his coinage “FOAF” became a standard reference in UL studies to the claimed sources of these incidents. In other versions of the decapitated motorcyclist story, the truck driver not only dies himself in the crash, but his truck plows into a crowd of people at the roadside, killing many more. In American variations on the theme of vehicular dismemberment, it may be a dog that loses its head while riding in a car with the window open, ears flapping in the breeze. The loss of Rover’s head is so quick and neat that a child sitting next to it in the back seat continues to pet the dog for several miles before the tragedy is discovered.

“The Killer in the Back Seat”

As told on
Late Night with David Letterman

Version #1: 1982

David Letterman: What about “The Killer in the Back Seat?”

Jan Brunvand: Yeah, that’s another car story, another horror story. There’s a woman driving home alone at night, she needs to stop for gas. She gets to a gas station, and the attendant fills the tank and takes her credit card. And he looks a little funny, and he says, “I’m sorry, lady, there’s something a little funny about this credit card. Would you step into the station, let’s check it against the numbers of…” discontinued cards or something. And she’s puzzled by this, but she goes in. And as soon as she gets in the station, he locks the door and says, “There’s a guy in the back seat with a meat cleaver!”

DL: Oh, a meat cleaver…

JB: Or a knife…

DL: Or a hook and a poisonous snake and a discount garment…

JB: Sometimes somebody follows her home on the freeway, flashing the lights behind her, and when she gets home the car’s right behind her—the pursuing car—a man jumps out, opens the back door of the car and pulls this guy out. Says, “I flashed the lights to keep him from killing you.”

DL: Now this one, up until the time I read your book, I believed.

JB: You believed it?

DL: Someone had told me that they were working in a store, working late one night, and that very thing happened. But more than likely, again, it never happened anywhere.

JB: The person who told you said it happened to whom? To himself?

DL: No, to a fellow employee.

JB: Yeah. We have here what we call the FOAF. The F-O-A-F, the “friend of a friend.”

Version #2: 1984, DL briefly alluded to the same legend in an interview with JB.

Version #3: 1986

DL: Years ago I heard one that I think we discussed one time on this program before, and that is the woman—usually a woman—pulls into a filling station to get gas and the gasoline attendant fills up the tank and asks her to step out of the car. And he says, “There’s a problem with your credit card.” And I heard this as happening, again, to somebody I knew that they worked with. And it turns out that there’s some kind of maniacal ax murderer in the back seat.

Version #4: 1987

DL: This is fascinating stuff. I remember, actually when I was a kid living in Indianapolis, I heard one of the classic stories about the woman pulls in for gas, and…

JB: [interrupting] You know what?…

DL:…the gasoline attendant says…

JB: You know, this is the third time you’ve told me that story…. I’m sorry I broke into it, maybe you’ve got a different ending. Let’s hear how it ends.

DL: What say we have a number from the band now…. You seem to have been here five times now, so…

JB: I’ve probably worn out my welcome.

DL: You see everybody doesn’t watch every night. I’m just trying to participate…

JB: That’s true. You really
did
hear it?

DL: I’m trying to feign interest in this whole damn topic, and to tell you the truth, I don’t give a rat’s ass.

It appears that this is Letterman’s favorite urban legend and one that he remembered spontaneously from his boyhood. My reaction to hearing it told repeatedly is a case study in how
not
to listen to a storyteller; whoever says, “Stop me if you’ve heard this,” doesn’t really mean it. In the next segment of the program Letterman apologized for his comment, and I responded by saying I was glad to have his version of the legend to use in one of my books. The freeway-pursuit version of the legend dates from the mid-1960s, while the gas station versions come later, first mentioning a suspected counterfeit bill, then a faulty credit card. In the early 1990s, tellers of the legend began to claim that the hidden assailant was a gang member, often a racial minority, undergoing initiation. Numerous local law-enforcement groups repeated this story, warning women always to check the back seats of their cars. This, of course, is perfectly good advice for any driver, whether or not the incident ever really happened. “The Killer in the Back Seat” is the first story enacted in the 1998 slasher film
Urban Legend.
Publicity for the film explained that “Urban legends—modern day folktales that seem to arise spontaneously and spread by word-of-mouth—range from the silly…to the sinister.” This definition was far superior to the depiction of a college folklore class shown in the film.

“The Hairy-Armed Hitchhiker”

T
he woman, an employee of the Fred S. James & Co., goes to her car after work. But when she gets there, she sees an elderly woman sitting in the back seat.

“I’m cold and wet,” says the old woman, “and I need a ride home.”

The old woman—she must be 85 or so—says she’s sorry about getting into the car, but it was unlocked and she was so cold. “Please help me,” she says.

“Why, of course,” says the woman from Fred S. James. (Since we aren’t certain of her real name, we will call her Jamie.) “But first I have to call my husband, so he’ll know why I’m late.”

The old woman has already told her she lives way out on Southeast 122nd.

So Jamie walks back to the office to make the call. It’s a couple of blocks away, and she walks briskly because it’s cold. It’s already dark, and traffic is starting to thin out, leaving the city deserted.

She shivers. The poor old woman. How she got there is something of a mystery. The Fred S. James & Co., an insurance agency, is in the heart of downtown Portland, and that’s a long way from 122nd Avenue.

She must be disoriented. Yes, that’s it, says Jamie to herself. Oh, the poor dear.

Back inside her office she gets her husband on the phone and explains the situation to him.

“No way,” he says. He is very upset. “No way are you giving a stranger a ride home.”

Furthermore, he says, she should call building security. She doesn’t want to, but she does.

Security tells her to call the police, because the car is parked on a city street, not in the company parking lot, which she does.

The police arrive at Jamie’s car just as she does—two squad cars with flashing blue lights—and the little old lady is still sitting in the back seat, waiting for a ride.

But as the police quickly discover, the little old lady is actually a 25-year-old man, and he has a machete taped to his leg, and he is sitting on an ax….

That’s how it goes.

The first time I heard it was last week, when a letter arrived at the office. “I heard a chilling story,” it began, “and thought the public should know it.”

Unfortunately, the letter was unsigned, and as the writer explained, he or she “did not get it directly from the woman it happened to.”

But it was obviously such a great story I thought I’d track it down.

So I called the Fred S. James & Co. A woman there spent a day checking around and called back.

“I’m sorry,” she said, “but I can’t find anyone who’s heard anything about it.”

Building security didn’t know anything, so I called central precinct, which covers the downtown area, and talked with the sergeant who handles all the reports. He hadn’t seen anything like that come across his desk, he said, but he’d ask around.

The next day he called to say he had struck out. “But it sure is a great story,” he said. “Sort of chills your bones, doesn’t it?”

Yes it does. It rings true. The only problem, apparently, is that it isn’t.

A couple of days later I was talking with a friend. “Did you hear the story about the little old lady?” he said, and proceeded to tell the identical story—down to the machete taped to the man’s leg and the ax he was sitting on.

It should be easy enough to track her down, he said. He had heard the story from his running partner that morning. It had happened to his running partner’s secretary’s sister-in-law.

It took a day to get in touch with the sister-in-law, who was more than helpful. Yes, she said, it was true.

However, there must be some misunderstanding, because it hadn’t actually happened to her, but to her friend’s daughter’s coworker. Would I like her to get me in touch with them?

Yes, of course. But I already knew what was going to happen, because I was beginning to realize what we were dealing with here.

And that is more chilling, still, because what we have here is an urban myth for our city and our season—and therefore, in a way, truer than mere fact.

No need to explain here. But you will be careful, won’t you, the next time you get out of work late and have to walk to your car in the dark?

And, you’ll look carefully before you open the door, because maybe she’ll be there and maybe she won’t.

Oh, probably she won’t, and you’ll laugh at yourself for looking before you slide into the front seat. How silly of you.

But you’ll always think about it now, won’t you?

Column by Phil Stanford in the
Portland Oregonian,
February 27, 1989. The details that give this urban legend either the title used above or the alternate title “The Hatchet in the Handbag” are missing here; otherwise, it’s a classic version of this well-known story. On March 1st Stanford’s column summarized letters and calls from readers, responding to his column, claiming that the incident had really happened in Las Vegas (in 1983); in Vancouver, Washington; in Sun City, Arizona; or in Pasadena, California. The story is actually much older and even more widespread than these claims. It circulated in English newspapers and in folklore in the mid–nineteenth century. An 1834 report, for example, has the disguised assailant riding in a horse-drawn carriage. Horse-travel versions were also collected in the United States as late as the 1940s and 1950s, with the newer versions, using automobiles, surfacing in the 1980s. The most recent versions tend to have the woman driver contrive her own escape from the disguised man without calling either her husband, a security guard, the police, or any other male helper. She simply asks the “old woman” to get out and check her taillights; then she drives away, finding [you guessed it] a hatchet in the handbag left behind. “The Hairy-Armed Hitchhiker” and other car-crime legends are frequently repeated in safety memos within companies or governmental agencies as warnings to drivers to be alert against attacks. In the spring of 1998 a new version of “The Hairy-Armed Hitchhiker” appeared in Columbus, Ohio, and was spread on the Internet. Supposedly, a woman shopping at Columbus’s Tuttle Mall (actually called “Tuttle Crossing”) found a flat tire when she returned to her car. While she was trying to figure out how to change the tire, a man came up and helped her, then he asked for a ride to his own car parked on the other side of the mall. Suspicious, the woman pretended to have other errands in the mall, and she closed her trunk, locked her car, and went back for a security guard. It was discovered that the tire had been deliberately deflated, and in a briefcase the man had left behind was found a coil of rope and a large butcher knife. One version of this legend concluded with the advice, “Learn to change your own tire!”