Uncle John’s Giant 10th Anniversary Bathroom Reader (72 page)

The person telling the story believes he knows the person who knows the person who witnessed or is involved in the story.
The listener thereby accepts it on faith, and when they tell the story, they can also claim a personal connection that makes the story more believable.

The story is reported in the media, either as fact or a rumor.
It doesn’t really matter whether the news story gives it credibility or labels it a myth; either way, the legend is often given new life. In 1917, columnist H. L. Mencken published a fictional history of the bathtub in the New York
Evening Mail
that claimed President Millard Fillmore installed the first White House bathtub in 1851. The story isn’t true—Andrew Jackson installed the first indoor plumbing, complete with bathtub, in 1833. Mencken later admitted the hoax. But it continues to appear in print to this day.

SIX URBAN LEGENDS

The Story:
On October 10, 1995, the U.S. Chief of Naval Operations released the following transcript of what the story claims is “an actual radio conversation.”

        
NAVY: Please divert your course 15 degrees to the north to avoid a collision.

        
CIVILIAN: Recommend you divert YOUR course 15 degrees to south to avoid a collision.

        
NAVY: This is the captain of a U.S. Navy ship. I say again, divert YOUR course.

        
CIVILIAN: No, I say again, you divert YOUR course.

        
NAVY: THIS IS THE AIRCRAFT CARRIER ENTERPRISE. WE ARE A LARGE WARSHIP OF THE U.S. NAVY. DIVERT YOUR COURSE NOW!

        
CIVILIAN: This is a lighthouse. Your call.

How It Spread:
On the Internet.

The Truth:
According to Patrick Crispen, who co-writes
The Internet Tourbus (
http://www.tourbus.com
),
“It turns out the Navy story is a very old urban legend,” made fresh by new exposure on the Internet.

The Story:
A traveler visiting New York City meets an attractive woman in a bar and takes her back to his hotel room. That’s all he remembers—the next thing he knows, he’s lying in a bathtub filled with ice; and surgical tubing is coming out of two freshly stitched wounds on his lower chest. There’s a note by the tub that says, “Call 911. We’ve removed your left kidney.” (Sometimes both are removed). The doctors in the emergency room tell him he’s the victim of thieves who steal organs for use in transplants. (According to one version of the story, medical students perform the surgeries, then use the money to pay off student loans.)

Note:
Uncle John actually heard this from a friend, Karen Pinsky, who sells real estate. She said it was a warning given by a real estate firm to agents headed to big cities for conventions,

How It Spread:
French folklorist Veronique Campion-Vincent has traced the story to Honduras and Guatemala, where rumors began circulating in 1987 that babies were being kidnapped and murdered for their organs. The alleged culprits: wealthy Americans needing transplants. From there the story spread to South America, then all over the world. Wherever such stories surfaced—
including
the U.S—newspapers reported them as fact. The New York version surfaced in the winter of 1991, and in February 1992, the
New York Times
“verified” it. Scriptwriter Joe Morgenstern, thinking it was true, even made it the subject of an episode of the NBC- TV series “Law and Order. ”

The Truth:
National and international agencies have investigated the claims, but haven’t been able to substantiate even a single case of organ theft anywhere in the world. The agencies say the stories aren’t just groundless, but also implausible. “These incredible stories ignored the complexity of organ transplant operations,” Jan Brunvald writes in
The Baby Train and Other Lusty Urban Legends,
“which would preclude any such quick removal and long-distance shipment of body parts.”

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The Story:
One of the most potent forms of marijuana in the world is “Manhattan White” (also known as “New York Albino”). The strain evolved in the dark sewers of New York City as a direct result of thousands of drug dealers flushing their drugs down the toilet during drug busts. The absence of light in the sewers turns the marijuana plants white; raw sewage, acting as a fertilizer, makes it extremely potent.

The Truth:
Most likely an updated version of the classic urban myth that alligators live in the New York sewers.

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The Story:
A young woman finishes shopping at the mall and walks out to her car to go home. But there’s an old lady sitting in the car. “I’m sorry ma’am, but this isn’t your car,” the woman says.

“I know,” the old lady replies, “but I had to sit down.” Then she asks the young woman for a ride home.

The young woman agrees, but then remembers she locked the car when she arrived at the mall. She pretends to go back into the mall to get her sister, and returns with a security guard. The guard and the old lady get into a fight, and in the struggle the old lady’s wig falls off, revealing that she’s actually a man. The police take the man away, and under the car seat, they find an axe. (The stor is kept alive by claims that the mall has bribed reporters and police to keep the story quiet.)

The Truth:
The modern form of the tale comes from the early 1980s and places the action at numerous malls…New York, Las Vegas, Milwaukee, Chicago, and even Fresno, California, depending on who’s telling the story. Folklorists speculate the tale may date all the way back to an 1834 English newspaper account of “a gentleman in his carriage, who on opening the supposed female’s reticule [handbag] finds to his horror a pair of loaded pistols inside.”

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The Story:
Two young men are driving home from a party one rainy night and notice a beautiful young woman standing by the side of the road. She doesn’t have a raincoat or umbrella, so they stop and offer her a ride. She accepts, and while they drive her to her house, one of the young men gives her his jacket to wear.

About a block from the young woman’s house, they turn around to say something to her…but she is gone. They drive to her house anyway, knock on the door, and the woman who answers tells them, “that was my daughter. She was killed two years ago on the same spot you picked her up. She does this all the time.”

The next day the young men look up the girl’s obituary in the library. There it is—complete with a picture of the girl they picked up. Then they go to the cemetery…and find the jacket she borrowed resting on her tombstone.

The Truth:
Another oldie-but-goodie. According to folklorist Richard Dorson, it predates the automobile. The story “is traced back to the 19th century,” he writes, “in America, Italy, Ireland, Turkey, and China; with a horse and wagon picking up the benighted traveler.” In the Hawaiian version, the girl hitches a ride on a rickshaw.

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The Story:
A woman catches a cockroach and throws it in the toilet. Rather than drown it, she decides to kill it quickly with bug spray. Her husband comes home a few minutes later, sits down on the toilet, and drops his lit cigarette into the bowl.
Kaboom!

Burned on his behind and on his private parts, the man calls 911. As the paramedics are carrying him to the ambulance, he tells them what happened…and they laugh so hard they drop the stretcher, breaking his arm.

How It Spread:
It apparently began in Israel: The
Jerusalem Post
reported the story in August 1988…then retracted it a few weeks later because it could not be substantiated.

The Truth:
Urban legends featuring broken arms brought on by paramedics laughing at the embarrassing way in which a patient has injured himself, are so numerous they’re practically a category unto themselves. The storyteller’s fear of being embarrassed in a similar way is what keeps them alive.

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“A lie can travel halfway around the world before the facts have even put their boots on.”

—Mark Twain

The media’s power to “create” news has become a hot topic in recent years. But it’s nothing new. This true story, from a book called
The Fabulous Rogues,
by Alexander Klein, is an example of what’s been going on for at least a century. It was sent to us by BRI member Jim Morton.

M
ost journalistic hoaxes, no matter how ingenious, create only temporary excitement. But in 1899 four reporters in Denver, Colorado, concocted a fake story that, within a relatively short time, made news history—violent history at that. Here’s how it happened.

THE DENVER FOUR

One Saturday night the four reporters—from Denver’s four newspapers, the
Times, Post, Republican
, and
Rocky Mountain News
—met by chance in the railroad station where they had each come hoping to spot an arriving celebrity around whom they could write a feature. Disgustedly, they confessed to one another that they hadn’t picked up a newsworthy item all evening.

“I hate to go back to the city desk without something,” one of the reporters, Jack Toumay, said.

“Me, too,” agreed Al Stevens. “I don’t know what you guys are going to do, but I’m going to fake. It won’t hurt anybody, so what the devil.”

The other three fell in with the idea and they all walked up Seventeenth Street to the Oxford Hotel, where, over beers, they began to cast about for four possible fabrications. John Lewis, who was known as “King” because of his tall, dignified bearing, interrupted one of the preliminary gambits for a point of strategy. Why dream up four lukewarm fakes, he asked. Why not concoct a sizzler which they would all use, and make it stick better by their solidarity.

The strategy was adopted by unanimous vote, and a reporter named Hal Wilshire came up with the first suggestion: Maybe they could invent some stiff competition for the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company by reporting the arrival of several steel men, backed by an independent Wall Street combine, come to buy a large site on which they planned to erect a new steel mill. The steel mill died a quick death; it could be checked too easily and it would be difficult to dispose of later.

Stevens suggested something more dramatic: Several detectives just in from New York on the trail of two desperados who had kidnapped a rich heiress. But this story was too hot; the editors might check the wire services or even the New York police directly.