Too Good to Be True: The Colossal Book of Urban Legends (2 page)

The letters quoted in this book came from readers of my five previous urban legend collections (1981 to 1993) and of my syndicated newspaper columns (1987 to 1992) who responded to my invitations published there to contribute stories they had heard. In quoting urban legends from these letters, I have sometimes made slight changes in punctuation, spelling, or usage in order to present a consistent style throughout the book. Occasionally I have inserted information from the longer letter in order to clarify points mentioned in the stories themselves, but I have not combined story texts, deleted details, or added anything to the plots of the stories. I give the name of the writer, his or her location, and the date of each letter quoted; however, some of my contributors may have changed their names or moved since writing to me. The stories selected, in every instance, are typical of a wider tradition represented by other versions of the same legends in my files.

Besides the people named in notes to individual legends, I wish to thank the following for material supplied, services rendered, and general support of my work on this book: David Baker, Mac Barrick, Mike Bell, Meg Brady, Simon Bronner, Rich Buhler, Mary Carroll, Terry Chan, Tad Cook, Neal Coulter, Norine Dresser, Bill Ellis, Gary Alan Fine, Joe Goodwin, Harriet A. Hall, Mary Anne Hill, Ann Jarvis, John Johansen, R. R. Kohout, Janet Langlois, Jens Lund, Bill McNeill, Joey Meyer, Barbara and David Mikkelson, C. Claiborne Ray, Michael Richerson, David Rockhill, Peter Samuelson, Cynthia Scheer, John Schleppenbach, Sharon Sherman, Steve Siporin, Paul Smith, David Stanley, Steve Terrell, Barre Toelken, Patricia Turner, Eugene G. Weinberg, Valerie Westcott, Dan Wilson, William A. Wilson, Sue Wolfe, and Ed Zotti.

A special thanks to my tactful, wise, and expert editor Amy Cherry, whose eagle eye for detail is legendary. Without her, I would have let many embarasing misteaks get into print.

True Stories, Too Good to Be True

Urban legends (ULs) are true stories that are too good to be true. These popular fables describe presumably real (though odd) events that happened to a friend of a friend. And they are usually told by credible persons narrating them in a believable style because they
do
believe them. The settings and actions in ULs are realistic and familiar—homes, offices, hotels, shopping malls, freeways, etc.—and the human characters in urban legends are quite ordinary people. However, the bizarre, comic, or horrifying incidents that occur to these people go one step too far to be believable.

For example, in some well-known ULs people do things like fill cars with cement, microwave their pets, get bitten by poisonous snakes concealed in imported garments, lose their grandmother’s corpse from the car roof, buy a Porsche for a mere $50, mistake a rat for a stray Chihuahua, sit on an exploding toilet, steal a package that contains only a dead cat, get caught in the nude by a gas-meter reader, or snag a tablecloth in a pants zipper, just to mention a few typical plots. All of these things could conceivably happen, but it is thoroughly unlikely that they really did happen in all the different times and places that the legend-tellers describe.

Urban legends are also too neatly plotted to be believed. Nothing is extraneous; everything in the story is relevant and focused on the conclusion. Thus, they’re too weird and coincidental to be absolute truth, especially considering that the same stories are attributed to many different settings, yet each telling of an urban legend is presumably about something that really happened to a friend of a friend—a FOAF, as we folklorists say. In short, ULs are just too darn
good
—that is, polished, balanced, focused, and neat—to be true.

But it’s not really truth or fiction that defines an urban legend. As with any folklore—and these stories are definitely part of our modern folklore—the defining qualities are oral repetition and variation. As folk stories are repeated from person to person, and even to some degree in printed circulation, they constantly change in minor details while retaining a consistent narrative core. Here’s an example taken from published sources sent to me by Charles D. Poe of Houston, Texas, an inveterate collector of the echoes of folklore in print and one of my favorite correspondents since I got into the UL business. For years Poe has been regularly sending me four-by-six envelopes stuffed with photocopies of dozens of bizarre published items, which he has liberally highlighted in glowing colors and to which he has added inked comments in red in the margins. In my “Poe file,” I found these three accounts of something witty that different American astronauts supposedly said:

Was it, as one 1978 source claimed, Apollo 15 astronaut David Scott who remarked about his thoughts before launch, “You just sat there thinking that this piece of hardware had 400,000 components, all of them built by the lowest bidder”?


Or was it Walter Schirra who, according to a 1980 report, phrased the idea, “Just think, Wally, everything that makes this thing go was supplied by the lowest bidder”?


Or was it really Gus Grissom who posed the quip as a question, according to a 1973 source: “How would
you
feel, taking off, sitting up there on top of fifty thousand parts, knowing that every one had been let to the lowest bidder?”

By permission of Rick Detorie and Creators Syndicate

For the purposes of folklore research, it doesn’t really matter if any of these men ever said anything like this; perhaps it’s just an astronauts’ joke, and they’ve all expressed this idea from time to time as a prank on interviewers. What’s interesting here is that we observe how a tale gets recycled and revised, and we see how
any
version of the story serves to illustrate the astronauts’ human situation perched atop a technological marvel of modern engineering that was built by fallible fellow humans.

No one is certain who coined the term “urban legend,” but folklorists interested in modern oral narratives have been studying them for about half a century. Their work continues in the ongoing studies by members of the International Society for Contemporary Legend Research (ISCLR) as well as in reports by scores of interested journalists, broadcasters, and devoted hobbyist collectors of ULs who communicate nowadays largely via print and the Internet.
^*

Among nonfolklorists who have been fascinated by urban legends is the renowned Nobel Prize–winning novelist Gabriel García Marquez (author of
One Hundred Years of Solitude
and
Love in the Time of Cholera
). In an essay titled “Lost Stories,” published in 1989 in the English edition of
Granma,
a Cuban newspaper, García Marquez discussed plots that are “passed down from generation to generation and country to country, with slight modifications along the way.” That’s exactly how urban legends behave; but why does he call them “lost stories”?

García Marquez explained that he had been unable to trace the origins of many wonderful stories that he had heard repeatedly. So, just as I did while I was writing a syndicated newspaper column from 1987 through 1992, he asked readers to help him locate some of them. I don’t know whether García Marquez got the huge response that I have enjoyed from my writings, but I do know that it is seldom possible to deduce the actual origins of folk stories.

García Marquez made this intriguing suggestion: “There ought to be an anthology of these stories that are repeated all over the world and which, according to those telling them, were verified by eyewitnesses.” We can attempt this by tracing a few of the variations of one story that García Marquez mentioned, about a man who discovered a large diamond inside the stomach of a fish he caught. The
Motif-Index of Folk-Literature,
a standard folklore reference source, indicates that finding some amazing contents inside a fish is an old idea found in folklore worldwide. There’s even a biblical prototype for this theme: In Matthew 17:24–27, Jesus directs a disciple who lacks the money for a temple tax to go catch a fish. The fisherman is told, “When thou hast opened his mouth, thou shalt find a piece of money: that take, and give unto them….” Proving the extraordinarily adaptive nature of folklore, even in modern times, here is how the amazing-contents-of-a-fish theme shows up in a version of an urban legend called “The Kentucky Fried Rat.” I got the story from a California reader:

To me, that sounds like an episode that Garbriel García Marquez could have used in one of his novels.

At any rate, this book, I hope, represents the kind of anthology of ULs that the Nobelist yearned for. I’ve selected one or more good, representative examples of hundreds of major urban legends, mostly those that are well known in the United States, but also some from abroad. I’ve chosen to include both legends whose specific texts are not quoted in my previous collections and the full versions of stories that I have previously only summarized or paraphrased. I’ve also included in each chapter a box with one story about which I know little or nothing, as a “no comment” example. (Perhaps these are the truly “lost” stories.) Finally, I have added some “true” urban legends and a selection of UL parodies.

To illustrate how ULs have penetrated our contemporary popular culture, and to demonstrate the wide range of styles in which they are transmitted, I chose my sample texts from a broad range of sources, including oral tradition, written versions, newspapers, advice columns, tabloids, literature, folklore studies, and even some texts from radio or television broadcasts and from the so-called information superhighway. A few of the selected stories came from celebrities, but most came from just normal folks. My largest and best single source of stories has been through conversation—the mail and E-mail that flows steadily from my faithful and generous readers. When no specific source is cited, it means that I have phrased a common story in my own words.

My groupings of stories here is by typical themes. I’ve retained the traditional titles for the individual stories, and in the notes to each story I summarize my earlier findings before updating the information. This compilation, although large, still merely samples the vast archive of urban legend texts, studies, and background information I’ve compiled and have written about in books and in my newspaper column since taking up research on this genre nearly 20 years ago. To locate the specific pages where individual legends are discussed in my books, readers should consult “A Type-Index of Urban Legends,” in
The Baby Train
(Norton, 1993), pp. 325–47.

Besides printed works on urban legends, the Internet has become a prolific source of UL texts and discussions of same. An excellent entry to this material that is linked to other related sites is the “Urban Legends Reference Pages” (http://www.snopes.com). Internet distribution of urban legends had become so pervasive by late 1998 that an “Anti–Urban Legend” letter started to circulate there. It contained explanations such as “There is no kidney theft ring in New Orleans” “Neiman Marcus doesn’t really sell a $200 cookie recipe” and “Craig Shergold in England is not dying of cancer at this time and would like everyone to stop sending him their business cards.” These statements refer to well-known urban legends discussed in this book.