Too Good to Be True: The Colossal Book of Urban Legends (29 page)

Told in 1973 at Indiana University by a female student who had repeated the story many times previously; it was published in Sylvia Grider’s article “Dormitory Legend-Telling in Progress: Fall 1971–Winter 1973,”
Indiana Folklore,
vol. 6 (1973), pp. 1–32. This telling is unusually polished and detailed, but it lacks the refrain usually repeated by the killer, “Have you checked the children?” Another version was published in a verbatim transcript of a tape recording made in 1984 at Leicester University, England, in which three students took part. See Gillian Bennett, “Playful Chaos: Anatomy of a Storytelling Session,” in
The Questing Beast: Perspectives on Contemporary Legend,
vol. 4 (1989), pp. 193–212. “The Baby-Sitter and the Man Upstairs,” in common with “The Killer in the Back Seat” and “The Choking Doberman,” tells of a dangerous intruder hiding right on the premises, and with the latter story it shares the “telephone warning” motif. The 1979 horror film
When a Stranger Calls
opened with a chilling dramatization of this legend.

“Baby’s Stuck at Home Alone”

A
Norwegian couple, who had not had a proper holiday for years, decided to treat themselves to a long winter holiday in the sun. At last the great day dawned; everything was packed and loaded into the car—as soon as Nanny arrived they could away. But today of all days, Nanny was late. At the last minute she phoned and told them that her car had broken down. The man said that if they came to collect her now they would miss their flight; was it too far to walk? Nanny said it wasn’t, they could leave and she’d be there in a quarter of an hour. So the wife strapped their young son into his highchair, told him Nanny wouldn’t be long, and set off for their island in the sun. During the long, hot weeks away they missed the news that the girl had been hit by a lorry and killed on her way to their house. When at last they returned, sun-bronzed and rejuvenated, they found their starved son still strapped into his chair where they had left him.

From Rodney Dale’s 1984 book
It’s True…It Happened to a Friend,
p. 89. Dale is probably retelling a press account of a story circulating in Norway and Sweden in the early 1970s. As a newspaper in Bergen, Norway, reported the rumors in 1972, in several different Nordic cities, the couple had left without waiting for their baby-sitter or grandmother to arrive, and the caregiver became terminally ill or was hit by a car. Unfortunately, none of these missing caregivers had mentioned the long-term job to anyone else, so the baby was abandoned and helpless. Three American readers from California, Texas, and Mississippi have sent me variations of this legend. Also in 1990 a woman from Elkhart, Indiana, wrote to report a version in which a dog slipped into the house, bumping the door, which closed and locked. The letter concluded, “The rest of the gruesome story involves the dog eating the baby…and so on.”

“The Inept Mother”

I
n Leicester a favourite was the account of how a mother had told her young daughter that her younger brother was going in to hospital to “have his end snipped off” (circumcised), so the daughter, to be helpful castrated him with a pair of scissors. The mother, trying to take the boy to hospital, backed out of the garage in such a hurry as to run over the daughter and kill her. This was recounted to Jekyll as fact, with a wealth of supporting detail, in 1964.

I
heard this in the mid-1950s; that’s as close as I can remember. I was a grammar school kid living just north of Philadelphia.

Some little four-year-old girl’s mother had come home from the hospital with a new baby brother for her. Shortly afterward, when the mother was changing the baby’s diaper, the little girl asked what that thing was that the baby had and she didn’t.

The mother put her off with the fateful remark, “Oh, that’s just something that the doctor forgot to cut off.”

Later, hearing the infant’s screams, the woman ran into the nursery to find her daughter with the best scissors, all bloody. She, of course, had cut off the baby’s penis. The mother swept up the baby, raced to the car, hit the ignition and jammed it into gear. The tragedy doubled because the poor mother had forgotten all about the little girl, who was trailing along hurt and confused. She happened to be right behind the back wheel of the car when her frantic mother jammed it into reverse. The daughter was crushed—killed outright. The baby died on the way to the hospital.

The English version is from the “Doctor Jekyll” column in
World Medicine,
July 10, 1982, under the subheading “Medical Myths.” I am indebted to Dr. T. Healey of Barnsley, South Yorkshire, for sending me this and many other items of English medical rumor and legend. The American version was sent to me in 1985 by Jerome Shea of Albuquerque, New Mexico. Often the tragedy is tripled when the mother has a baby in the tub while two toddlers play; after the daughter severs the son’s penis, the mother backs the car over the girl, loses her injured son en route to the hospital, and returns home to find the forgotten baby drowned in the tub. In yet another English variant of the story, a harried mum crossing to Ireland via ferry with a baby and a toddler threatens to put the baby out the porthole if he continues to cry. When the mother leaves the cabin briefly, the baby resumes crying and his older sister enacts the mother’s threat. These stories teach an age-old lesson, as evidenced by the Aesop fable that begins “‘Be quiet now,’ said an old Nurse to a child sitting on her lap. ‘If you make that noise again I will throw you to the wolf.’” The fable has a happy ending, which is more than you can say for one of the grimmest of the original Grimm fairy tales, one that has been seldom printed since the first edition of 1812. It’s called “How Children Played Butcher with Each Other.” The story describes the accidental sudden deaths by stabbing and drowning of three children, followed by the deaths of both parents. Janet L. Langlois analyzed this whole complex of horror legends in the chapter titled “Mother’s Doubletalk” in the 1993 book
Feminist Messages,
edited by Joan Newlon Radnor. Yet another variation on this dismal theme is the story told during both world wars of a mother bathing her babies who runs to answer the doorbell, where a government messenger waits to inform her that her husband has been killed in action. The mother trips on the stairs, breaks her neck, and dies instantly; her two children drown in the bathtub before the messenger manages to enter the home to check on its occupants.

“The Stuffed Baby”

T
he most memorable legend I recall is one that my mother told me about 15 years ago [around 1971]. It seems that a friend of hers was on a flight—I believe the departure point was in the States and the destination in Canada. One young couple of “hippies” boarded with a baby wrapped in a blanket. The woman kept the baby wrapped in the blanket and held it tightly. More than once the stewardess asked if she would like a bottle or some food heated, but the woman refused.

Over the course of several hours the stewardess became suspicious since the baby did not eat or cry. She notified the authorities, who detained the couple at the airport. The baby, of course, was dead, and had been gutted and stuffed with marijuana.

T
his past Christmas [1989] I heard a story of a Georgia State Patrolman stopping a northbound motorist on I-75 between Tifton and Valdosta for speeding. Next to the driver was a baby strapped in a car seat. The patrolman noticed that the baby was not moving, and when he inquired about this, he was told that the baby was sick and the motorist was trying to get the baby home quickly.

The patrolman let the man go, but he began to have second thoughts about the baby’s well being, so he radioed ahead to another patrolman to pull the motorist over again and see if he could be of any assistance to the sick baby. When the second patrolman stopped the car he discovered that the baby was dead and had been disemboweled, filled with cocaine, and sewn back up.

These stories were sent to me in 1986 and 1990 from readers in Canada and Georgia, respectively. This is the domesticated version of a legend that usually describes the smuggling of drugs into North America from South America or elsewhere. In 1985 the incident, said to have happened on a Miami-bound flight, was reported in
Life, New Republic,
and the
Washington Post;
the latter publication quickly retracted the story, quoting customs officials who traced it as far back as 1973 but said that they were unable to confirm it and believed it to be mere rumor. In a
National Geographic
article on emeralds, published in the July 1990 issue, a story is told about a Senegalese family smuggling these precious gems abroad in the body of a dead child being sent home for burial; supposedly, these criminals were caught on the folklorically appropriate
third
commission of the crime.

Very few modern
urban legends that are collected and studied by today’s folklorists concern the supernatural; instead, most such stories are plausible accounts of fairly ordinary experiences that have a bizarre or ironic twist. “The Runaway Grandmother,” “The Hook,” or “The Crushed Dog,” for example, are weird legends, but their weirdness does not stem from the presence of ghosts, ghouls, or gremlins—it was plain old theft, crime, or bad luck that caused the problems.

In part, this shortage of the supernatural in ULs is a matter of definition, since folklorists tend to assign the supernatural stories people tell to other categories like “scary stories” or “ghost stories,” implying that these tales are told merely to scare someone and not with any real sense of belief. Belief, of course, is an individual matter, so that one person’s fictional scary story may be another person’s trusted true incident. Also, in a typical storytelling context—say, a slumber party or a campfire circle—a story like “The Baby-Sitter and the Man Upstairs” may be told either as a believed legend or as a spooky joke. But in either case, the tellers never introduce a witch or ghost as the threat to the baby-sitter; it’s always some guy hiding upstairs calling on the telephone extension.

Another distinction folklorists make is between standard urban legends that are widely told among a diverse population and other, equally bizarre stories that circulate mostly among fringe groups, often in the first person. In this category would go the stories of Bigfoot, lake monsters, UFOs, alien abductions, cattle mutilations, Satanic cults, conspiracies, the Bermuda Triangle, Elvis sightings, and so forth. There’s plenty of supernaturalism involved in such stories, rich material for folklorists to investigate, but the style, content, and function are clearly different from the typical urban legend. Furthermore, such topics are exploited in the media, so that it’s difficult to say where oral tradition and mass media treatments diverge.

Tabloids, science fiction, and film and television treatments of supposed paranormal topics—all aided nowadays by freewheeling Internet communication—have taken over many of the supernatural themes formerly reserved for folk tradition; one might even speculate that the genre of genuine supernatural legend is a dead issue, so to speak. Well, not quite, although certainly some individual stories have died out in the oral tradition.

The legend called “The Dream Warning” is a good example of what may happen to a specific supernatural legend. In the 1940s and ’50s this story was a living legend in the United States. One version, published in the journal
Arkansas Folklore
in 1953, was heard “from the mouths of friends” some years earlier in a big city, as the collector Albert Howard Carter explained. Carter was told it by more than one person with different details, and all of the storytellers regarded their tales “as true accounts of actual happenings,” except that they supposedly had happened “to a friend of a friend.” Clearly, Carter had defined an urban legend here, and he attributed it to a FOAF years before these terms came into use. Here is his story:

Although there were varying renditions of “The Dream Warning” circulating orally, it had been published earlier as a sort of literary ghost story; the tale was Bennett Cerf’s contribution to a 1944 anthology titled
Famous Ghost Stories.
Cerf couldn’t resist souping up the style as he retold the legend:

As Cerf explained in his introduction, he had heard the stories told “more than once” over a period of years, and although details of the tellings varied, he wrote, “the essentials were always the same.”

However “The Dream Warning” has not been reported by folklorists since the 1950s, probably for several reasons. For one thing, some details of the story—house party, coachman, and elevator operator—have become outdated. Secondly, the notion of prophetic dreams is less compelling than it may have been some 50 years ago, and the chances nowadays of a fatal accident in an elevator are minuscule. Another powerful reason for the demise of this legend, I believe, is its own success in another medium, television.

On February 10, 1961, Rod Serling’s famous TV series
The Twilight Zone
first aired an episode that was a dramatic version of “The Phantom Coachman” variation of “The Dream Warning” legend. Titled “Twenty-Two,” the episode featured a dancer named Liz Powell (played by Barbara Nichols), who was hospitalized for fatigue. She suffered recurring visions of following a nurse to Room 22—the hospital morgue. And the nurse always said, “Room for one more, honey.”

Her doctor and her agent dismissed her fears as merely bad dreams. But when she was discharged from the hospital, Powell was about to board Flight 22 to Miami when the flight attendant—a woman identical to the nurse in her visions—said, “Room for one more, honey.” Powell ran screaming back to the airport lounge, and the plane exploded in midair just after takeoff.

According to
The Twilight Zone Companion,
Serling based his plot on Bennett Cerf’s version of the legend in
Famous Ghost Stories.
And according to my readers when I wrote a newspaper column in 1989 about the old “Dream Warning” legends,
The Twilight Zone
version was the only one most of them knew. After numerous reruns, the TV episode had virtually replaced the folk legend in the popular mind. Every reader who wrote me following my column mentioned this episode, with one exception, and this person mentioned that he saw the plot enacted in a mid-1940s film called
Dead of Night.
I’ll bet my legend-hunting license that this film, too, borrowed from the Cerf version.

And yet, and yet…as pop singer Dickey Lee sang in his mournful vanishing-hitchhiker ballad “Laurie” in 1965, “Strange things happen in this…[pause] worrrrrld!” Yes, Bennett, Rod, Liz, and Laurie, there still
are
a few modern urban legends that at least skirt the edge of the supernatural. Strange things
do
happen in this world.

“The Vanishing Hitchhiker”

L
ast night I visited on the telephone with a friend who is a retired school librarian. She had a story for me. The woman who lives next door to her has a friend who knows some people to whom this happened. They are a couple who have a business in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, as well as Sioux City, Iowa. (The two towns are about 90 miles apart on Interstate 29.) These people travel the route often and are very familiar with the highway.

One day not long ago they were driving along I-29 toward Sioux Falls when they happened to notice a hitchhiker. They do not normally pick up hitchhikers, but they did stop to pick up this one. They visited with him as they rode along, and then he suddenly announced, “The world is going to end tomorrow!” They looked around, but there was no one in the back seat. They thought he might have opened the door and jumped out, although they had been going 65 miles per hour. So they stopped and reported the incident to a highway patrolman. His comment was, “You know, this is the sixth time that this has been reported to me this month.”

Another friend of mine who is a policewoman in Sioux City reports that she has heard the story nine or ten times from the police community, her church group, and others. The highway patrolman supposedly has heard it 15 or 16 times. Sometimes the message is “The Lord is coming for the second time, and you should prepare yourself.”

BIZARRE TALES OF A MYSTERIOUS HITCHHIKER

Frackville [Pennsylvania]—If someone walked up to you and told you a story about an experience they had or about which they heard concerning a hitchhiker who foretold, “The end is near” and disappeared from “inside” a vehicle, what would you think?

Like most people, you would probably doubt the report or maybe turn the TV set to the popular
Unsolved Mysteries
show and try to summon its host, Robert Stack, to unravel the bizarre event.

Such a story was brought to the attention of the
Evening Herald
recently and the reactions of editorial department personnel were predictable: “Yeah, right.”

A check with state police, however, revealed troopers had received several calls relating to the hitchhiker incident.

Sgt. Barry Reed, station commander at Frackville, confirmed receiving three or four calls about the mysterious vanishing hitchhiker, from reliable and credible individuals who all shared the same experience.

The hitchhiker was described as a tall, thin man with long dark hair and wearing a long dark coat. He was picked up on Route 61 near Frackville’s southern end on Monday, Jan. 31, between 6 and 7 a.m.

However, contrary to the “unofficial” reports, state troopers said they received no reports about the “hitchhiker” in conversation about the weather, the turbulence of society or the Angel Gabriel “tooting his horn for the second time.”

However, troopers did say the reports made to them concerned the hitchhiker having said, “I am here to tell you the end is near,” before vanishing into thin air.

Some of the reports relayed to the
Evening Herald
alleged the mysterious hitchhiker warned, “Jesus is coming! Jesus is coming!” and then disappeared.

Sgt. Reed recalled that while he was stationed in Lancaster County about 10 years ago, a similar “hitchhiker” tale was circulated.

M
y neighbor who lives across the street from me told me that her boyfriend’s boss’s aunt was driving down I-10, going east toward Baton Rouge about two months ago when she spotted a young man with long hair hitchhiking right around the Breaux Bridge area. Not one to pick up hitchhikers, she surprised herself by pulling over and offering the man a ride. He got into the car. The man stayed quiet throughout the drive, even when the woman questioned him about where he was from, his family, etc.

Suddenly the man looked at her and said, “Gabriel will soon blow his horn.” Then the man vanished into thin air. The woman became hysterical, driving faster and faster, until a Louisiana State Trooper pulled her over. After telling the State Trooper what happened, he told her that hers was the seventh report of the same vanishing hitchhiker that day.

The Iowa story is from Thelma Johnson of Sioux City, in a letter sent in September 1990; the Pennsylvania story is from the
Shenandoah Evening Herald
for February 4, 1994; and the Louisiana story is from Keigh Granger of Scott, Louisiana, in a letter sent in March 1994. These examples typify the most common recent form of the legend with the FOAF attribution, the precise highway details, the mysterious statement and “vanishing” of the hitchhiker, and the police affirming that several such reports were received. “The Vanishing Hitchhiker” has international distribution as one of the oldest and most widely told of all urban legends; as such, it has long attracted the attention of folklore scholars. In the earliest book that I know of devoted entirely to urban rumors and legends, Maria Bonaparte’s 1947
Myths of War,
is a study of “The Corpse in the Car” variation of “The Vanishing Hitchhiker” legend. (“Proof” of the hitchhiker’s prophecy is the truth of a second prediction—that the driver will have a corpse in his car by the end of the day.) My 1981 book bearing the same title as the legend contained 20 pages of discussion and notes on the legend and merely scratched the surface. A published bibliography of contemporary legend studies listed 133 publications concerning “The Vanishing Hitchhiker” up to 1991. Many American versions describe a teenage girl in a light party dress who hitches a ride home; she vanishes and is identified—often from a portrait—as the ghost of a girl who died on the same date many years earlier. A sweater she borrowed from the driver is found draped over her tombstone. This is the version that Dickey Lee turned into a song, as did various other pop singers and groups in their own times and styles. The legend has also inspired films, radio and television dramatizations, short stories, and an unending series of tabloid “reports.” In 1987, after recording a discussion of this and other urban legends for a Salt Lake City radio station, I tuned in to hear the broadcast of my interview a few days later. I was amused that the song aired immediately after it was Dickey Lee’s 1965 “Laurie,” so I sent a note to the interviewer complimenting him on digging out this appropriate golden oldie. But it turned out that the selection was not intended; the announcer on duty had just picked this song as the next one up in the regular rotation of new and old favorites, without knowing what had preceded it in the recorded interview. As I said, strange things
do
happen in this world!