Too Good to Be True: The Colossal Book of Urban Legends (44 page)

His companions, unaware of the rancher’s request, stared in amazement.

“Why did you shoot that horse?” the lobbyist finally asked.

“I just always wondered what it would feel like to shoot a horse,” Stevenson drawled. Pausing, he stared hard at the lobbyist. “Now I’m wondering what it would feel like to shoot a man.”

From the
New Yorker,
January 15, 1990, p. 60, in Robert A. Caro’s series titled “Annals of Politics.” Governor Stevenson may actually have enacted this old hunting yarn; if so, he was lucky that things did not end the way the story often does—with the other hunters in panic shooting, or at least attacking and disarming, the perpetrator of the prank. In
The Baby Train
I titled this story “Shooting the Bull,” since another version of the story has the fellow hunters shooting one of the farmer’s prize bulls after the prankster has shot the old horse, mule, or cow as the farmer had asked him. This is evidently a favorite story among American professional athletes, a famous version having often been told by Billy Martin, who claimed that the prank was played on him by Mickey Mantle and Whitey Ford when the three baseball greats were deer hunting. David Young of Ore City, Texas, reported to me in 1991 that Dallas Cowboys coach Tom Landry told it that year as a true experience when he had taken coach Mike Ditka of the Chicago Bears hunting in Texas, but when asked about the incident, Landry confessed that he just liked to tell the story “to get things going.” Versions of this legend appeared in Morton Thompson’s 1945 book
Joe, The Wounded Tennis Player
and in H. Allen Smith’s 1953 book
The Compleat Practical Joker.
Tobias Wolff based his story “Hunters in the Snow” on the shooting-a-man version of the legend that appears in his 1981 book
In the Garden of the North American Martyrs.

“The Hapless Water Skier”

I
n 1965 while I was stationed at Eglin AFB, Florida, I was invited to go water skiing with the family of a friend on a small reservoir in southern Alabama. Along the edge of the lake was an area of tree stumps and fences protruding from the water. As we were getting ready, the boat owner told us he would keep us well clear of the shoreline, because the summer before a skier had fallen and had been killed there.

According to him, as the boat went back, the skier started yelling for help, saying he was tangled in barbed wire and couldn’t move his legs. When they pulled him from the water, he was dead. He had fallen into a nest of water moccasins and had died from over 100 snake bites.

Two years later I was at Barksdale AFB in northwestern Louisiana. Again, I was invited to go water skiing, this time in one of the local bayous. As we got ready to start—I’m sure you are ahead of me now—I was told we must stay away from the shoreline where all the dead trees were, because last summer a skier was killed when he fell into a nest of water moccasins there.

This version of a widespread southern story came in a 1991 letter from Lt. Col. Gary L. Dikkers, USAF. Dr. O. Finley Graves of the University of Mississippi, who published a 1978 article in
Southern Folklore Quarterly
about snake stories, wrote to me pointing out occurrences of “The Hapless Water Skier” in southern literature, including Ellen Douglas’s 1988
Can’t Quit You, Baby,
which described it as “an apocryphal tale…that rolled like ball lightning through the Mississippi Delta during the late ’60s.” Could the story possibly be true? Douglas quipped that “It’s always true. Always true that a tangle of water moccasins lies in wait for the skier. Always, always true.” In 1990 the
San Antonio Light
discussed water moccasins, or “cottonmouths” as they are often called, in its “Who’s Who at the Zoo” column, describing this species as “quiet and not easy to locate.” The column mentioned as mere hearsay the story of a little girl who fell while water skiing on Lake Amistad and was “immediately killed by multiple moccasin bites when she landed in a ‘nest’ of these snakes.” Naturalist Bruce Lee Deuley, writer of the column, commented, “There are no water moccasins in Lake Amistad, and I have found no record of these reptiles traveling or grouping in large colonies.” Whether such a death ever happened, it’s highly unlikely that virtually the same accident occurred in many different places and times, yet always escaped the notice of wildlife experts.

“The Giant Catfish”

T
here are the stories about the divers who work for the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation and swim down to the bottoms of the Colorado River dams to clean the grates and make repairs.

Anglers say a diver saw a flathead [catfish] so big that, as Rich Beaudry of the Arizona Game and Fish Department puts it, “You’d have to have a jack winch on a truck to pull him in. And the reason nobody has ever caught one is that they’re so big they keep breaking the lines.” And then Beaudry adds, sadly, “Trouble is, it’s always ‘my friend the diver’ who’s seen it, but you can never find the diver.”

From
Arizona Highways,
November 1991. Robert Miller of Richfield, Utah, who sent me this clipping, commented “for the past 25 years or so I have heard stories about huge catfish that were supposedly seen from Hite, Utah, all the way to Yuma, Arizona.” Midwestern versions are discussed in John Madson’s 1985 book
Up on the River: An Upper Mississippi Chronicle.
Stories of giant catfish have been told for generations throughout the South, Midwest, and Southwest, places where truly huge catfish do indeed grow, but never to quite the proportions claimed by legend, i.e., as big as calves or cows or even cars. In modern versions the fish is mistaken for a Volkswagen Beetle because its mouth is slowly opening and closing like a car hood lid being moved up and down in the current. In another variation on the theme, the body of a drowned passenger may be said to still be locked inside the VW, and several giant catfish are prowling outside trying to find a way in. Divers, seeing such horrible sights, emerge from the depths pale and shaking. They vow never to dive in murky rivers or reservoirs again, and overnight their hair turns white from the shock. A good collection of catfish facts and folklore is included in Jens Lund’s entry “Catfish” in the 1996 work
American Folklore: An Encyclopedia.

“The Flying Cow”

M
oscow, April 30 [1997] (Reuters)—A tale of Russian cows falling from the sky onto a fishing boat in the Pacific has been keeping German diplomats on their toes.

But the story, reported by the German Embassy in Moscow to the Foreign Ministry in Bonn and made public by a German newspaper, bears all the hallmarks of an urban legend—a fantasy, told and retold until it gains an air of authenticity.

It goes like this: Several weeks ago Russian rescue workers picked some Japanese fishermen out of the sea and detained them after they claimed their vessel had sunk after being hit by a cow.

Investigations by Russian authorities then uncovered a bizarre crime story, involving Russian soldiers and airborne cattle-rustling, the daily
Hamburger Morgenpost
wrote.

“Members of the Russian forces stole a couple of cows and transported them in a plane. During the flight the cattle got out of control. The crew felt forced to throw the cows out in order to avoid a crash,” the paper wrote, quoting from an official embassy dispatch.

Sources in the German embassy told Reuters that there had indeed been such a wire and indeed, the quotes were authentic.

So far no clear source has emerged for the story and some people say it sounds very similar to an episode in a popular recent Russian film called
Osobennosti Natsionalnoi Okhoty
(Peculiarities of the National Hunt).

The film, also one of Russia’s bestselling videos, depicts hunters stealing a cow and hiding it in a military jet.

Some six months ago the Moscow daily
Komsomolskaya Pravda,
inspired by the film, wrote a short report involving cows and planes in its column
Baiki,
one of the paper’s journalists told Reuters.

Baiki
translates as “invented stories” and covers yarns like the one about baby crocodiles flushed down toilets into the sewage system where they grow before creeping back into flats and houses.

Russians say the cow story even predates the film as a longstanding joke in which a Russian fisherman explains the loss of his boat with the falling cow yarn.

The joke ends with the communist authorities, clearly not amused, sending the fisherman to a psychiatric hospital.

In early April the story of the falling cows popped up on the Internet global computer network….

A news story, bylined Susanne Hoell, forwarded to me as E-mail, thus continuing the transmission of this story via print, broadcast, and now electronic media. This Reuters story goes on to trace the passage of the story out of Russia via German and American embassy personnel and eventually to the Western press. The story concludes with a quotation by a spokesman from the Russian Defense Ministry, “This is sheer nonsense. Not a single word is true.” Reuters, incidentally, often distributes stories of this kind reporting bizarre incidents that supposedly occurred abroad. The older “joke” version of the flying-cow story appeared in a
Moscow News
column in the June 1–7, 1990, issue. I discussed this one as well as versions from Great Britain in
The Baby Train.
In the June 1997 issue of
Alaska Fishermen’s Journal
the story was repeated again with the disclaimer that “We cannot verify the accuracy of the following story, but we are compelled to pass it along because it’s too weird and wonderful to bury.” This publication’s source was an individual who found it on the Internet. Granted, “The Flying Cow” is pretty far from its roots as oral folklore, and a cow is not exactly wildlife, but the story
is
too weird and wonderful not to include in this chapter. Besides, the Reuters story calls it “an urban legend,” and Reuters wouldn’t lie, would they?

“The Fatal Boot”

I
remember a story told by my step-grandfather who was born in Kentucky. The eldest of three brothers bought a pair of boots. While the boots were still new he was in the woods and was struck by a rattlesnake. The snake bite caused his death. The next brother inherited the boots, began wearing them, and died. The youngest brother suffered a like fate.

When the property was put up for sale, someone, in examining the boots, found that the rattlesnake had broken off one fang in the heel of the boot. The venom on that fang had caused the death of the brothers.

That had to be a record for one snake!

This is the full text of the story sent to me in 1987 by Tom Riley of San Antonio, Texas, that I paraphrased in discussing “The Fatal Boot” in
Curses! Broiled Again!
Like “The Wrong Rattler” story in the introduction to this chapter, this legend is an old rural tale that continues to be told in modern urban settings. Sometimes the boot is specified as a cowboy boot, a hiking boot, or a rubber boot worn while doing farm work. In 1991 David Young of Ore City, Texas, wrote to say that he recalled from a 1966 trip to Florida being shown the actual “fatal boot,” except that it was a shoe this time. He wrote, “We stopped at a lot of tourist traps, and the shoe was in a lighted glass display case with the story posted next to it: shoe was passed on to brother, brother died. Fang discovered too late.”

“Snakes in the Amusement Park”

I
heard this story several years ago, and I believe it to be an urban legend. You be the judge.

Some years ago at an Ohio amusement park called Cedar Point a husband, wife and son went to spend the day. Cedar Point is in northern Ohio on Lake Erie; it is an old area, overgrown with trees and vegetation, and very moist. The family arrived early in the morning, and they went on the “Log Ride” first. This ride involves single seating in a “log” that travels up through the trees, down a log chute, under waterfalls, and down a final hill before slowing to a stop. The ride supposedly follows the route a log would take after it is cut and sent down river.

The story goes that they had a whole “log” to themselves, and the little boy, eight years old, begged his parents to let him ride in the front seat alone while they rode in the back seating compartment.