The Failed Suicide
A desperate man tries to arrange multiple, simultaneous methods to bring about his own death, but they cancel out one another. For example, the man may stand on a high cliff above the sea with a noose around his neck tied to a tree, a loaded gun in one hand and a vial of poison in the other. He drinks the poison, fires the gun toward his head, and jumps; but the shot severs the rope, he survives the fall, and the seawater that he swallows causes him to vomit up the poison. He swims to shore.
A less complicated version of the story describes a man leaping from a high window after having an argument with his wife in their apartment or being fired by his boss. The would-be suicide lands on top of his wife (or his boss, who has gone out for lunch after the unpleasant job of firing the man). The wife (or boss) dies, but the man lives. In his tell-all book about the insurance industry Andrew Tobias relates yet another variation on the theme of failed suicides, attributing the case to “an Alabama man,” who:
swallowed a fistful of sleeping pills, drove to the middle of a bridge, got out, and, just as the pills were beginning to rob him of his consciousness, jumped. It was fifty feet to the water. The fall did not kill him, the cold water, after a time, revived him, and, after floating for quite a long time, he finally managed to pull himself out of the current and drag himself out of the water. He suffered a heart attack from the exertion; and, while lying there, some wild dogs came along and chewed on him awhile. He died.
“Was it suicide?” Tobias asked, then quoting the state toxicologist, “ ‘not suicide but the strain and stress of the situation’ that killed him.” No source is cited for this remarkably legend-like account.
Variations of failed-suicide stories have circulated orally, in typescript, and on the Internet but are also published from time to time, sometimes to illustrate human behavior, the random nature of events, legal and moral aspects of suicide, and the like. One such printing by a British expert on forensic medicine described the multiple-means-of-death version as “a classic of its kind . . . not susceptible to confirmation.”
The Fallen Angel Cake
This story was published in 1980 in a Sydney, Australia, newspaper and, in 1982, in a slightly different version in a small-town Canadian newspaper. Both reports described it as an actual incident well known to the local population, so probably it is a widespread apocryphal account, that is, a modern legend. Less likely—indeed barely possible—is that the same mishap occurred twice in far distant places. A woman bakes an angel food cake for her church’s bake sale, but when it comes out of the oven the center of the cake collapses. Lacking time to make a second cake, the woman uses a roll of toilet paper to build up the center of her cake, and she frosts over the whole thing. She rushes her cake to the church sale, then gives her daughter some money and instructs her to hurry to the sale, buy it back, and bring it directly home. But the daughter arrives too late; the cake has already been sold. The next day the cakebaker goes to her bridge club, and she finds that the hostess has bought
her cake and is serving it for dessert. Before the woman can warn her, the hostess acknowledges a compliment on the beautiful cake, saying, “Thank you. I baked it myself.”
David Holt and Bill Mooney tell a slightly more elaborate version involving “Marge” and her daughter, presumably set in the United States, in their anthology The Exploding Toilet (see bibliography). Appropriately, each story in their book is followed by a small drawing of a roll of toilet paper hanging from its holder.
Fan Death
A belief rampant in South Korea—supported only by anecdotal evidence, rumors, and word-of-mouth stories (some circulated by e-mail)—holds that sleeping in a room with windows closed and an electric fan running will cause death. The notion of Fan Death continues among immigrant
South Koreans, as a 2008 article in the Toronto Star demonstrated. An instructor in an English as a Second Language class (ESL) encountered it in this way, while conducting her class during the winter in a sweltering classroom in an older building at the University of New Brunswick: “We couldn’t open the windows because it was freezing rain,” she said. So I told the class, “Tomorrow we’ll have to remember to bring a fan.” Her comment upset a Korean student, immediately distressed at the
prospect of an electric fan running in a room with closed windows. “The student told us that if you are in a sealed room with an electric fan, it will lower your body temperature and you will die,” [the instructor] said. “It was so weird to see someone so convinced of something that everyone else in the room thought was so ludicrous. Another person said she slept with the fan on all the time and (the upset student) said, ‘Well, you are very lucky to be alive.’ ”
Other explanations of the supposed danger of Fan Death are that the moving air causes a body to lose water and leads to hypothermia, that a fan causes a vortex that sucks oxygen from the room; that the fan chops up oxygen molecules, rendering the air unbreathable; and that the fan uses up oxygen, leaving a fatal level of carbon dioxide. Fan Death hysteria is further encouraged in South Korea by reports in the media and even by government statistics showing supposed fatalities caused by sleeping with a fan running. Electric fans sold in South Korea are equipped with timer switches.
The Fart in the Dark
This is a story of the general “Surpriser Surprised” type (and “The Nude Surprise Party” subtype) in which a person is embarrassed by his or her shocking behavior in the presence of others who have been brought together to surprise the victim. The surprisers are themselves surprised, in this instance by the victim’s indiscreet breaking of wind (expelling gas from the intestine). The story is told in the United States and England (and perhaps elsewhere) as both a legend and a joke, as well as being distributed in the form of a piece of Xeroxlore titled “The Gastronomical Bean Story.” A person has a great fondness for baked beans but has to give them up because of their effect—causing severe attacks of intestinal gas. Unluckily, the bean-lover indulges himself/herself in a large serving of beans on his or her birthday. The gas has built up alarmingly when the person’s spouse (or girlfriend, boyfriend, roommate, etc.) announces a surprise.
The bean-lover is left alone blindfolded in an empty room to await the surprise. Unable to hold it any longer, he or she breaks wind loudly and repeatedly. Then the party planner returns and removes the blindfold, revealing a roomful of friends gathered to celebrate the birthday. A literary treatment of the story appeared in Carson McCullers’s 1940 book The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, and a short film titled The Date dramatized the story in 1997. Another version of “The Fart in the Dark” describes a young woman’s flatulence overheard by a double-dating couple seated in the rear of a car but unobserved by the victim when she is let into the front seat.
Fast Food
Fast-food franchise restaurants selling mainly hamburgers, pizza, Mexican food, and related side dishes are often the targets of negative rumors and legends, particularly those that claim serious contamination of the foods. Likely there is some element of guilt involved in circulating such lore, as people realize that fast foods offer speed, low cost, and efficiency at the expense of a balanced diet and wholesome food prepared at home from fresh ingredients.
Some typical contaminants described as having invaded fast foods are worms, pet food, meats considered inedible for most humans (e.g., cats, dogs, horses, kangaroos), and body substances (semen, pus, blood, urine). Such stories are told about named companies, indeed, even about specific
local franchises, and the stories tend to gravitate toward the largest companies (the so-called Goliath effect) and to switch from company to company. Actually, most fast-food restaurants are probably operated in a more consistent and hygienic manner than are many small individual Mom-and-Pop eateries. Besides contamination, fast-food stories may claim that companies are owned by unsavory conspirators or that a portion of their enormous profits are diverted to support evil ends.
The Fatal Boot
A legacy of the American frontier, this tall tale continues to have some currency as a modern legend. A man is struck by a rattlesnake whose fangs penetrate his boot and kill him. Unnoticed by anyone, one fang breaks off in the boot, and two successive generations of men in the family wear the same boot and are killed by dried venom remaining on the fang. Finally, someone inspects the boot closely and discovers what has happened. The boot in the story may be that of a cowboy, rancher, logger, hiker, hunter, and so on. In an updated version, a rattlesnake’s fang is broken off in a rancher’s truck tire, killing a mechanic who changes the tire. Although thoroughly discredited by herpetologists, this rattler story (among others) has persisted since the late eighteenth century. In the 1960s, a roadside tourist attraction in Florida displayed a shoe with the fatal-boot story attributed to it, and probably other such places have exploited the same tale.
A report from a legend-debunking article in a 1910 magazine seems to refer to a close relative of “The Fatal Boot” in another American story. Samuel Hopkins Adams, thoroughly skeptical of such yarns, wrote: Under the heading “Fatal Spider Bite” there is a considerable and interesting newspaper bibliography. The details do not analyze well. . . . The instance of a young woman in an Eastern state is significant. Thrusting her foot into an old slipper, she felt a sharp jab upon the point of her index digit. Upon hasty removal of the footgear, she saw, or supposed she saw, a large and ferocious spider dart forth. This, to her mind, was evidence both conclusive and damning. Seizing upon the carving knife, she promptly cut off her perfectly good toe, bound up the wound, and sent for the doctor, thereby blossoming out in next day’s print as a “Heroine who had Saved her own life by her Marvelous Presence of Mind.” The thoughtful will wonder, however, whether the lady wouldn’t have got at the real root of the matter by cutting off her head.
Ernest W. Baughman indexed two strains of the frontier tale. Motif B765.19(a) The fang in the boot kills wearers in succession showed up as a believed legend throughout the East and Midwest, while Motif X1321.4.10*, Detached snake fang kills person long after the snake is killed, had similar distribution more as a humorous tall tale than a belief legend. (Each of these motifs has several variant forms also indexed by Baughman.) However, “The Fatal Boot” has an even wider range of connections, beyond American folklore. Thompson’s Motif N335.4, Accidental death from flying splinter of bone, a motif recorded at the time only from Africa, seems to echo the snake-fang story with a sharp piece of bone substituting for the fang. The possible connection between the two stories is further suggested by this Japanese legend, “The Hunting Dog’s Revenge,” translated from a 1928 source:
A hunter who lived near here had a hunting dog for years, but gradually the dog got so old, lame, and tired that he couldn’t do what his master wanted. So the hunter got angry at the dog. But the dog growled so that the man knew he would get bitten if he tried to push it too hard. So he decided to kill his dog. He took him way back into the mountains and shot him with his hunting rifle and left him there. About three years later, though, he got curious about what had happened to his dog’s carcass, so he went back up to the place where he had shot it. To his amazement, he found the dog sitting up there, but as just a skeleton, as if he were looking at his master. This annoyed that hunter so much that he kicked the skeleton aside, and it fell over in a heap. But with this kick, a small sharp bone was driven into the hunter’s leg, where it pained him and caused such a bad infection that finally he died from it.
The Fatal Cleaning Lady
The following story of a supposed series of bizarre and mysterious deaths in a South African hospital circulated worldwide on the Internet: Cleaner polishes off patient “For several months, our nurses have been baffled to find a dead patient in the same bed every Friday morning,” a spokeswoman for the Pelonomi Hospital (Free State, South Africa) told reporters. “There was no apparent cause for any of the deaths, and extensive checks on the air conditioning system, and a search for possible bacterial infection, failed to reveal any clues.” However, further inquiries have now revealed the cause of these deaths. It seems that every Friday morning a cleaner would enter the ward, remove the plug that powered the patient’s life support system, plug her floor polisher into the vacant socket, then go about her business. When she had finished her chores, she would plug the life support machine back in and leave, unaware that the patient was now dead. She could not, after all, hear the screams and eventual death rattle over the whirring of her polisher. “We are sorry, and have sent a strong letter to the cleaner in question. Further, the Free State Health and Welfare Department is arranging for
an electrician to fit an extra socket, so there should be no repetition of this incident. The enquiry is now closed.”
Arthur Goldstuck, Johannesburg journalist and urban-legend researcher, looked into the story, comparing press accounts of the supposed incident and interviewing writers who had worked on them. He demonstrated how the highly suspicious and poorly documented story originally published in an Afrikaans-language newspaper had been magnified and standardized by other publications, then began circulating on the Internet, becoming, as Goldstuck termed it, “South Africa’s . . . most famous urban legend of the 1990s, as far as the rest of the world was concerned.”
The Fatal Golf Tee
An avid golfer plays the game frequently and is in the habit of putting his tee into his mouth after his first shot and keeping it there during the whole game. Eventually he dies from pesticides that were transferred from the golf course’s grass via the tees to his body. Fairways and greens heavily treated with chemicals have, indeed, been the cause of illness and even occasionally death among golfers,
particularly professionals who play often and long. But there are no verifiable reports of this contamination coming specifically from a tee carried in someone’s mouth.
The Fatal Initiation
A legend of modern college life is based on the traditional narrative motif (N384) of someone’s death resulting from severe fright. As part of his initiation into a fraternity, a young man is blindfolded, then made to believe that he has been cut and is bleeding or has been branded with a red-hot iron. (Actually, although he is shown a knife or the branding iron in advance, after he has been blindfolded, he is touched only with a piece of ice.) The initiate dies from the shock. In a variation, the fraternity
pledge is led to a high cliff, blindfolded, then told he will be pushed over the edge. Although he is merely pushed over a drop of two feet, he dies from shock as he stumbles and falls. The appeal of this horror legend in colleges during the 1940s diminished as some fraternity initiations actually did lead to deaths in later years, usually as a result of binge drinking. A story reported by Elizabeth Tucker from Alfred University in Alfred, New York, was told in 2003 as an explanation for why Greek organizations were banned on that campus: Like many other fraternities at other schools there is one night where the pledges get blindfolded in a car and are dropped off in an unknown location without phones, money, credit cards, or other means of help and are expected to find their way home somehow. [Only 13 of the 14 pledges return. When the others go back to search for their missing companion, they find only] . . . a red bandana from the blindfolded car ride.
FBI Stories
There may be a larger genre of legends about the major U.S. government law enforcement agency, but so far only two FBI stories have been noted by folklorists. “The New Identity” claims that after the FBI furnished aMafia informer with a completely new identity—name, invented background, plastic surgery, a new profession, and so on—no sooner had they moved him into his new home than the man received a fund-raising letter from the alumni association of his alma mater. It was addressed to his original name. “Watch the Margins” claims that J. Edgar Hoover, the longtime director of the FBI, enforced strict guidelines for the length of memos and the widths of top and bottom margins. Once when an agent’s report had margins that were too narrow, the director wrote on it, “Watch the
borders!” Immediately a horde of extra agents was assigned to the American borders with Canada and Mexico.
Fear of Frying
Horror stories told of people trapped by their seat belts in burning cars after an accident, unable to get free, who suffer a terrible death. People use such stories as a rationale for not buckling up when they drive or ride—not a good idea, according to auto safety experts. One such pro commented “This myth of being trapped in a burning car remains, yet no scientific study has ever shown this to be true . . . A person wearing a seat belt and involved in a fiery crash is more likely to be conscious and
able to escape than someone not wearing a seat belt.” For those who still fear frying in a car wreck, there is a device sold under the name “Life
Fifi Spills the Paint
Professional painters know this ploy—and some may actually have practiced it—as a way to place the blame for a spillage on the customer’s pet: A painter working inside an expensive home happens to tip an open can of paint onto a valuable rug or a beautiful parquet floor. He grabs the customer’s yappy little toy poodle, sticks the dog’s feet into the mess, and exclaims, “Fifi! Bad Dog! Look what you’ve done!” The story has been told among trial lawyers to illustrate (as one lawyer put it) “how seductive yet weak circumstantial evidence can be.” A variation on this story illustrating the same point has young boys or girls put the blame for eating some forbidden food onto the family pet.
Film and Urban Legends
Because of their uncomplicated, fast-moving plots; bizarre subject matter; widespread appeal; and—perhaps most of all—their anonymous free circulation in the public domain, urban legends have had a strong appeal to many filmmakers. Numerous examples of these modern folk narratives have found their way into the movies, either as the primary plot element of a feature film or as an episode or digression within a film. Seldom are urban legends merely told (rather than dramatized) in commercial films; a rare example is Bill Murray’s telling of “The Hook” as a campfire story in Meatballs (1979).
Two films starring Doris Day were among the earliest major Hollywood productions to incorporate urban legends. In The Glass Bottom Boat (1966), the “Heel in the Grate” story was incorporated as a
comic digression, and in With Six You Get Eggroll (1968), the “Nude in the RV” story appeared. Probably the first American feature film to be based entirely on an urban legend was When a Stranger Calls (1979), which developed its plot from “The Baby-sitter and the Man Upstairs.” The next year (1980) saw the film Alligator borrow the central idea of “Alligators in the Sewers” and expand it to a complex science-fiction plot. (One reviewer called the film “a poor man’s Jaws.”)
Humorous legends have had an enduring appeal for filmmakers, and there are many examples of funny anecdotes from oral tradition showing up as staged incidents in popular movies. Examples include “The Runaway Grandmother” and “The Leashed Pet” in National Lampoon’s Vacation (1983), “The Elephant That Sat on a VW” in Bliss (an Australian film of 1985), “The Baby on the Roof” in Raising Arizona (1987), “The Poisoned Pussycat at the Party” in Her Alibi (1989), “Old
versus Young” in Fried Green Tomatoes (1991), and “The Philanderer’s Porsche” in First Wives’ Club (1996).
More serious treatment of a humorous urban legend was presented in short films based on the “Package of Cookies” story. Two well-known examples are Boeuf bourgignon, a Dutch film of 1988, and Lunch Date, an American film of 1990 that was independently created with a wholly different setting and style. At least three other films have been based on the same “Sharing by Error” plot.
The sinister nature of horror legends probably influenced the whole genre of so-called slasher films, especially the Halloween series of films with their allusions to rumors of Halloween sadists and the like. A campus setting was necessarily used for the horror film Dead Man on Campus (1998), which dealt with “The Suicide Rule,” a legend of academe. The 1992 film Candyman pioneered the merging of the horror film with the idea of actual urban-legend research; in this moderately successful production, a graduate student investigating folklore confronts a threatening character who may be summoned by a ritual reminiscent of “I Believe in Mary Worth” and who seems to personify the hookman of urban legends.
Thus far, the most obvious reference to urban legends and their study in film (unfortunately a flawed attempt) was the 1998 film Urban Legend. The opening sequence of this campus-slasher movie dramatized “The Killer in the Backseat,” and the plot went on to show “The Death of Little Mikey,” “The Roommate’s Death,” “The Boyfriend’s Death,” and (almost!) “The Kidney Heist,” among other stories. Students depicted in the film, which is set at a New England college, are shown taking a
folklore class that seems to consist mostly of legend-telling and class discussion of the possible truth of these stories. When one student suspects that a string of campus deaths were really urban legend–
inspired murders, she goes to the library and consults the Encyclopedia of Urban Legends (not the volume in your hands now but a Hollywoodinvented predecessor). See the Introduction for more description of this film.
Released in 2000 was a quasi-sequel to Urban Legend titled Urban Legends: Final Cut. This time the premise was that a group of film students are vying for the “Hitchcock Award” in filmmaking and one student is doing an urban-legend horror film. Only the first of several murderous attacks in this dismal Hollywood slasher-flick is related to an actual urban legend. The cleverest sequence of the film turns out to be the final credits where the spirit of the old Hitchcock television series is humorously evoked. In 1999, the independently made horror film The Blair Witch Project was a surprising hit in general distribution. Hyped mostly by Internet chatter and word of mouth, Blair Witch purported to show a group of actual student-researchers filming their own efforts in trying to discover the truth behind a supernatural local legend. Although shot in some rather sparse and benign-looking woods in Maryland, the black-andwhite film contained enough shocking surprises and built up enough suspense to grip the imaginations of a huge audience. In effect, Blair Witch was an example of a typical legend-trip (aka ostention) only slightly elaborated by the plot element of the group filming its own quest.
Urbania is, finally, an artistic and gripping film inspired by urban legends. This independent low-budget film premiered at the 2000 Sundance Film Festival, received raves from film critics, and went into general release later in the year. Written and directed by Jon Shear, Urbania stars Dan Futterman as a gay man on a quest to avenge his murdered partner. From the opening line of dialogue—”Hear any good stories lately?”—the film includes several urban legends either told, alluded to, or enacted, each of them in some way relevant to the larger plot. Among the legend themes included are kidney thefts, needle attacks, microwaved pets, the baby left on the car roof, the unexpected inheritance story, the infamous toothbrush-photo legend, and “AIDS Mary.” The cinematic qualities of Urbania are exceptional, and it would be an artistically successful film with or without the legends.
To help advance the study of film and urban legends, folklorist and film scholar Mikel J. Koven has identified “four main narrative strategies that filmmakers avail themselves to”; these are as follows:
• Extended narrative, as in When a Stranger Calls, in which the first section of the film is essentially a dramatization of a well-known legend, while the rest of the film imagines a continuation of the story
seven years later.
• Resultant narratives, as in The Harvest (1993), in which a lead-up plot follows a frustrated writer unable to finish a script who, while trying to gain inspiration by visiting the scene of a crime suddenly finds himself “inside the ‘Organ Theft’ legend.”
• Structuring outline, as in Dead Man on Campus (1998), in which characters enact an urban legend (in this case “The Suicide Rule”) in hopes of gaining some advantage over others.
• Fusion narratives, as in Alligator, in which one urban legend (“Alligators in the Sewers”) is linked in the plot to a second legend (one about pet abductions for medical experiments). In a few instances, films themselves have inspired urban legends. For example, the persistent rumors of “snuff films” spring from the graphic simulation of killings in many films; there is no evidence that anyone was ever actually murdered on camera. Similarly, the rumors of a hanging supposedly depicted in The Wizard of Oz are false, and the supposed sexual images hidden on videotape boxes for Disney films are purely in the imaginations of the beholders. Perhaps the best-known film-related urban legend is the one about a ghost image in the 1987 film ThreeMen and aBaby, although the “ghost” (really just
a life-sized cardboard cutout of an actor seen out of focus in the background) was not noticed until the film was released in videotape format in 1990. Documentary filmmaking by folklorists of urban legends has not been done (at least not for general release), with one notable exception: Tales
of the Supernatural (1970), produced by Sharon R. Sherman, depicts a group of children telling several well-known horror legends and offers some scholarly analysis by a narrator.
Filmed in the Act
Here is the story, as written in a letter to me dated March 27, 1991, by Brenda Sommer, then working as a bartender in Austin, Texas:
The other day at the bar I hopped into the back kitchen to grab some more cold beer, and the two cooks were giggling over something, one proclaiming, “No way, man,” and the other responding, “Swear to God, it’s true.” Couldn’t help myself; had to ask. Seems that the cook’s girlfriend’s sister’s neighbors in New Jersey had gone to a resort in Las Vegas. Couple No. 1 turned on the TV in their room and were tickled to find a crudely made, one-camera, soundless video of a couple making love.
Inspired by the topic, they proceeded to do likewise. They had a wonderful trip and recommended the resort to couple No. 2, who “six months later,” took a holiday at the very same resort. They, too, turned on the TV in their room, saw a poorly made porn video, and upon closer inspection, recognized Couple No. 1 as the unpaid actors. It seems that someone at the resort had been taping the guests. Just thought you ought to be aware of this, and consider it when making travel arrangements.
In most versions of this widely known story, the same couple visits the honeymoon resort twice, seeing themselves on the return visit as the stars in a sex video and then suing the management. In the eastern United States, the most common resort area mentioned is the Pocono Mountains of northeastern Pennsylvania. Sometimes the couple sees a video of the husband cavorting with a woman other than his wife. Some who believe in “Filmed in the Act” claim that certain honeymoon
resorts can offer bargain prices because they reap huge profits from selling homemade porn tapes. These resorts may be said to have banned repeat visits, but one couple bypasses the rule by registering under a different name. Against all odds, they select the video of their own performance
to show in their room. Not surprisingly, not a shred of evidence exists (e.g., no peepholes, cameras,
lawsuits, and certainly no films or videotapes) to substantiate this legend, and resort owners and police all across the country wherever it is told have firmly denied it. Still, “Filmed in the Act” continues to be circulated, including most recently on the Internet in versions containing even the supposed names of the victims (“Len and Beth wanted to get wild, so . . . ”).
Find the Hat
Back in the days when men still wore hats, a traveling salesman or other businessman lost his hat on a windy day on a business trip to Chicago. When he filed his expense report, he asked for reimbursement from the accounting department, but he was refused. On his next trip, the man padded several expenses to cover the cost of his lost hat, then attached a note challenging the accountants, “Find the hat!” Much the same story is still told about lost raincoats and umbrellas, by women as well as men, in various cities. All versions illustrate the business maxim, “If you have questionable expenses, pad the legitimate expenses to cover them.”
The Finger in the Pickle Jar
Very simply, someone finds a finger in a jar of pickles. Presumably, it was cut off from a worker’s hand during the packing process. Somehow the jar had escaped the notice of plant inspectors, and somehow the incident escaped the attention of the news media, since it seems to be preserved, so to speak, only in oral tradition. Of all the foods that may be said to have been contaminated by diverse
ingredients, fingers and pickle jars occur together surprisingly often in urban rumors and legends. Perhaps it is because some pickles—or pickle sections—are about the size of fingers, and fingers would be the most likely appendage to be sliced off during packing operations. Also, the color and scent of the pickling fluid might suggest that a finger could become discolored enough in the jar to escape notice until the jar is opened. Possibly such an incident really happened, although the severing
of a finger seems much more likely than its pickling, bottling, and shipping from the plant.
Unlike the stories of mice in soda bottles or batter-fried rats, the rumors of fingers in pickle jars seldom develop much of a narrative form or content.
Finland
Finnish urban legends were collected by Professor Leea Virtanen of the University of Helsinki. About 100 representative texts with notes and commentaries were published in her 1987 book Varastettu isoäiti (The Stolen Grandmother). Although the language barrier poses a difficult challenge for non-Finnish folklorists, Professor Virtanen discussed her material in English at an international conference in 1989, where she also distributed summaries of the stories in German. A brief report in English based on these sources has also been published. Besides the obvious international character of the title story, the illustrations in Virtanen’s book and her summaries reveal a high percentage of
well-known urban legends circulating throughout Finland. These include “The Shoplifter and the Frozen Food,” “The Relative’s Cadaver,” “The Vanishing Hitchhiker,” “The Hairy-Armed Hitchhiker,” “The Microwaved Pet,” “The Boyfriend’s Death,” and many others. Sometimes even the Finnish title reveals an international legend; for example, the story Tarantella jukkapalmussa is obviously the legend known elsewhere in Europe as “The Tarantula in the Yucca Palm.” The Finnish version of “AIDSMary” even has its punch line in English: “Welcome to AIDS-club!” The references in Virtanen’s notes, as well as the book’s bibliography, further reveal a close connection of the story repertoire to international legendry. To the question of whether there are any uniquely Finnish urban legends, Virtanen has suggested that one story in her collection without known parallels elsewhere may qualify: a boy suffers a frozen brain after disobeying his mother and not wearing a cap outdoors on a bitter-cold day. Although the idea of a parent advising a child to dress warmly is certainly common elsewhere, the specific consequences of a frozen brain have not been reported in legends from other countries. In 1996, Virtanen published her second collection of Finnish urban legends, Apua! Maksa ryömii: Nykyajan tarinoita ja huhuja (Help! The Liver Is Crawling: Legends and Rumors of Today).
Fixing the Flue
When amason builds a chimney for a new house, if he has any concern about being paid promptly for the job, he willmortar in a pane of glass to block the flue. Then when the client calls to complain that his chimney smokes, the mason promises to fix it as soon as he is paid for the job. After payment, the mason simply drops a brick down the flue to break out the glass. This has been told—and possibly practiced—by generations of masons and contractors. When Tracy Kidder heard the story repeatedly while researching his 1988 book House, he concluded that the incident “must lie mainly among the wishful thoughts of the building trades, like the retort you think of only after the argument.”
The Flying Cow
English folklorist Paul Smith in The Book of Nasty Legends (1983) tells the story of a motorist in Scotland surprised when a cow drops from above onto the “bonnet” (i.e., the hood) of his car. It turns out that a truck driver had struck the animal, sending it flying back along the road. Smith recalls another version of “The Flying Cow” he heard around 1965, and he asks “What is it about cars, cows, and Scotland?” Another flying-cow story came out of Russia in the 1990s, reported in
the English-language Moscow News, London edition. In this instance, some soldiers had stolen two cows and were transporting them by military jet, but they were forced to push the animals from the plane when they became unruly during the flight. One cow landed on a Japanese fishing boat, leading to complicated and comic results. This story was probably inspired by a popular Russian film, and it has circulated largely in the press or via the Internet. A Reuters article on the story’s history released in 1997 suggested that “it bears all the hallmarks of an urban legend.” Reuters reported that they got the story from a German newspaper reporting a story that came to the Foreign Ministry in Bonn via the German Embassy in Moscow. A Russian journalist quoted by Reuters put the story in the category of baiki, or “invented stories.”
“The Flying Cow” continues to hover in tradition. A June 1997 item in the Alaska Fishermen’s Journal repeated the “Falling Cow Sinks Trawler” story in full detail, even while admitting that “We cannot verify the accuracy of the following. . . . ” The Fishermen’s Journal source was a correspondent who “found it on the Internet.” In the January 16, 2011, issue of The [Sunday] New York Times Magazine, in an article about drilling for oil off the coast of Angola, a professor
of civil and environmental engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, and “a leading scholar of risk,” no less, was quoted reporting that “In July 2003, in the Pacific, a Japanese fishing boat was sunk by a flying cow.” Summing up the familiar legend, the professor concluded “No risk analysis can ever be complete. No one can predict a flying cow.” Three weeks later (February 6, 2011), the Times Magazine issued a correction: “The story is an urban legend, and versions of it have
been reported in Scotland, Germany, Russia and other locations.”
The Flying Kitten
A couple’s new kitten climbs to the top of a small birch tree in their yard and stays there. In order to rescue it, the owners throw a rope across a high branch and pull the top of the tree down; but the rope slips or breaks, and the kitten is launched high into the air and over their fence. The couple is unable to find the kitten. A week or so later, one of the kitten’s former owners is in a supermarket and meets a neighbor who is buying cat food. “I didn’t know you had a cat,” says the first shopper. “We didn’t, until last week when the cutest little kitten just fell out of the air and into my husband’s lap.”
This story was reported in a 1987 Washington Post article as told by a woman who heard it as a “true story” by her hairdresser. Several other versions have been collected, both from published and oral sources. One delightful variation e-mailed to me in 1999 by Barbara Mikkelson of snopes.com tells of a minister who loses his cat via the tree-powered catapult and is unable to find it by canvassing his neighborhood. A few days later, he meets a parishioner in a supermarket and notices that she has
several cans of cat food in her cart. “I didn’t know you had a cat,” the minister comments. The woman replied . . .
“You won’t believe this, reverend,” and then she told him how her little girl had been begging her for a cat, but she kept refusing. Then a few days before, the girl had begged again so hard that she finally told her, “Well, if God gives you a cat, I’ll let you keep it.” And she told the pastor, “I watched my little girl go out in the yard, and get on her knees and ask God for a cat. And really—I know you won’t believe this—but I saw it with my own eyes. A cat suddenly came flying out of the blue sky, with its paws spread out, and it landed right in front of her!” Cats, of course, are the subjects of numerous urban legends, and in many of these stories the felines suffer some kind of harm or trauma,
though often landing on their feet and surviving.
FOAF
The acronym “FOAF” was coined by English writer Rodney Dale in his 1978 book The Tumour in the Whale and means “friend of a friend,” the oft-mentioned supposed original source of the incidents described in urban legends. “This really happened,” a storyteller may say, “to a friend of my next-door neighbor”—in other words, to a FOAF. Dale preferred the lowercase “foaf” (rhymes with “loaf”), but in its adoption by folklorists the letters are typically capitalized. In his second collection of urban legends, It’s True, It Happened to a Friend (1984), Dale explained: “Foaf is a word I invented to stand for ‘friend of a friend,’ the person to whom so many of these dreadful things I am about to recount happens. I have omitted the word from this book as a gesture to neologophobes.” However, international students of urban legends have accepted FOAF with enthusiasm as a convenient shorthand reference to the claimed source of stories, even titling the newsletter of the International Society for Contemporary Legend Research FOAFtale News. The term has acquired some currency apart from folklorists’ usage. For example, a high school English teacher in Indianapolis used FOAF tales (i.e., urban legends) to introduce her students to the concept of oral tradition and variation before turning to the study of Beowulf and other British epics and ballads.
Folklore
Urban legends are part of folklore, and folklore study has been an established academic field since the late nineteenth century. (The American Folklore Society was founded in 1888 and has published its quarterly journal continuously to the present day.) The word “folklore,” coined in England in 1846, originally referred to antiquated “peasant” traditions of language and custom, but its meaning was expanded to include “modern” traditions and “material culture” as well. Although contemporary
folklorists differ in their exact definitions of the word, the following statement summarizes some points of general agreement: Folklore may be defined as those materials in culture that circulate traditionally among members of any group in different versions, whether in oral form or by means of customary example, as well as the processes of traditional performance and communication.
To the degree that urban legends are anonymous stories transmitted orally from person to person and developing variant versions, they may be clearly identified as part of our modern folklore. The publication of urban legends in newspapers and other print media, as well as the incorporation of urban legends into film, radio, television, cartoons, and other pop-culture forms, stretch the definition of folklore considerably, as does the frequent transmission of urban legends via photocopies and the
Internet. As a result, the collection and study of urban legends are carried out not only by folklorists but also by sociologists, pop-culture specialists, journalists, storytellers, and a host of interested amateurs (many of the latter exchanging material via the Internet).
Folktale
Technically, the word “folktale,” as used by folklorists, refers to fictional oral narratives such as fairy tales, formula tales, tall tales, and jokes. However, in common usage—and sometimes even in professional writings—the word is employed generically for any traditional oral narrative—myths, legends, anecdotes, and other “true story” forms included. Using “folktale” as the inclusive term for “narratives that are neither myths nor legends” (i.e., fictional stories told for entertainment), Gillian
Bennett demonstrated how so-called urban legends are sometimes told strictly for their narrative appeal rather than as belief stories. Thus, they are actually folktales by virtue of their performance style. Her quoted example of “The Kentucky Fried Rat” includes statements of belief and some debate between the teller and her audience as to the story’s possible truthfulness. In contrast, a performance of “The Hairy-Armed Hitchhiker” contains no expressions of belief or disbelief and is told concisely without interruption or commentary from the listeners. Bennett appended six further urban legend texts to her essay that further demonstrate the folktale-like quality of other performances.
Fortean Approach
Modern followers of Charles Hoy Fort (1874–1932)—an eccentric American gentleman who devoted much of his life to documenting the “data that science has excluded”—call themselves “Forteans.” For years, Fort scoured old and obscure publications in British and American libraries, compiling four volumes of reported anomalies of weather, zoology, everyday mysteries, and all manner of other unexplained phenomena. (Fort’s books are still available in a Dover Books reprint published in 1974.) Fort himself, it is important to note, specifically omitted folk narratives from his collections, calling them “conventional stories” and characterizing them as having details such as “ ‘clanking chains’ in ghost stories and ‘eyes the size of saucers’ in sea serpent yarns.” But some of the anomalies that fascinated Fort seem to have more than an accidental similarity to certain traditional motifs of folk stories.
Continuing Fort’s collection of such data with fieldwork as well as library collections, and also attempting to find explanations for weird news items, modern Forteans have organized themselves into an international society. Fortean Times: The Journal of Strange Phenomena is published monthly in London and has a website at forteantimes .com. The publishers of Fortean Times host an annual two-day “UnConvention” in London where urban legends are among the many topics presented for discussion. Some typical subjects of Fortean investigation are animals sighted out of their natural range, monsters, haunted sites, and UFOs. Cryptozoology, the study of unknown animal species, is often regarded as a branch of Forteanism. The studies of the Forteans overlap with urban-legend studies especially in such areas as reports of alligators in sewers, big cats running wild, phantom clowns, and vanishing hitchhikers. Loren Coleman, a prominent American Fortean, describes the viewpoint of his colleagues in the field thus: “An open-minded attitude to the many unexplained situations is the stock and trade of the Fortean.” For himself, Coleman states, “I ‘believe’ in nothing and the possibility of everything.”
Contemporary Legend volume 3 (1993). (Jean-Bruno Renard had traced the passage of LSD tattoo-transfer rumors from North America to France in an article published in Folklore Forum 24, 1991).
Campion-Vincent and Renard’s book Légendes urbaines (1992) is the first full-length treatment in French of urban legends, although it, too, retains the term “rumor” in its subtitle (Rumeurs d’aujourd’hui [Rumors of Today]). Besides discussions of many well-known international urban
legends (“Alligators in the Sewers,” “The Choking Doberman,” “The Hippie Baby-sitter,” etc.), the authors discuss other stories that are more specifically Gallic, such as claims of the supposed satanic significance of the Louvre Pyramid monument constructed in 1988. Another series of legends that circulated in France from 1980 to 1985—viper-release stories—was discussed by Campion-Vincent in two 1990 articles in English, one (appropriately titled “A Nest of Vipers”) published in the Perspectives on Contemporary Legend series, and the second in volume 31 of Fabula. The same author’s major work on organ-theft legends was published in volume 56 of Western Folklore (1997), among other places. A useful summary of French and international urban-legend collecting and research published in 1999 (2nd ed. 2002) is Jean-Bruno Renard’s small paperback Rumeurs et légendes urbaines. Concise yet wideranging, this work richly deserves translation into English. Renard surveys precursors of modern legend study, the emergence of this new field of research, subgenres of legends, methods of both internal and external analysis, and the themes and symbols found in such legends. His concise definition of “urban legends” translates as follows:
A brief anonymous story, existing in multiple variants, with surprising or unusual content, but told as true and recent within a particular social milieu, and expressing something of that group’s fears or hopes. Renard and Véronique Campion-Vincent collaborated on two important books about “rumors and legends of today”: Légend urbaines. Rumeurs d’aujourd’hui (Paris, 1992, 2nd ed. 2002), followed by De source Sûre: Nouvelles rumeurs d’aujourd’hui (Paris: Payot, 2002). The authors’ basic definition of the genre translates as “anecdotes from modern life, of unknown origin, related as true, but false or doubtful.” Among their examples are stories claiming that radioactive diamonds
are sold in France by the Russian or Albanian mafia, and the French version of the legend that has become known internationally as “The Grateful Terrorist.” Another important little book from the productive French scholar Campion-Vincent surveys conspiracy theories worldwide: La société parano: Théories du complot, menaces et incertitudes (Paris 2005, paperback ed. 2007)
A characteristic narrative form sometimes compared to urban legends in France is referred to as fait divers, literally “diverse facts” but sometimes translated in English with the journalistic term “human-interest stories.” Fait divers, Campion-Vincent has explained, are short published accounts of such events (or supposed events) as murders, catastrophes, bizarre accidents, and hilarious occurrences. A good example of such an item as published in a French newspaper in 1968 bore the dateline “Avignon” (a city in southern France). Referring to the mistake of a 19-year-old brunette Spanish girl working for a French family in a place called Vaison-la-Romaine, this story contains
the obvious motif (as found in some “Baby-Roast” and “Microwaved Pet” legends) of a misunderstood word, in this case the French gâteau (cake) thought to be the Spanish gato (cat). Even a non–French-speaking reader can probably understand what happens to the family’s magnificent angora cat “Fonfon” when Carmen, the maid, is told to put the cake into the refrigerator and later to serve it for dinner. Here is the story, as William F. Buckley reprinted it (in the spirit of passing on a
fait divers) without translation in his magazine National Review on March 26, 1968:
Avignon. “Mettez le gâteau au réfrigérateur,” avait dit à Carmen sa bonne, une brune Espagnole de dix-neuf ans, une habitante de Vaison-la-Romaine. Ne se trouvant en France que depuis deux mois et ne connaissant que des rudiments de la langue française, la jeune fille, si elle entendit bien le mot gâteau, le traduisit par “gato,” ce qui, dans sa langue maternelle, signifie “chat.” Obéissante, elle empoigna “Fonfon,” le magnifique chat angora de sa patronne et l’enferma dans le réfrigérateur. Ses maîtres ne devaient revenir que le soir et c’est l’issue d’un dîner, qu’elle offrait à des amis, que la maîtresse de “Fonfon” mesura l’étendue du drame. Ayant demandé a Carmen d’apporter le gâteau, quelle ne fut pas sa stupeur et sa douleur de voir arriver sur un plateau le cadavre de “Fonfon,”
complètement frigorifié. The website hoaxbuster.com, despite its English title, is totally in the French language. Like snopes.com, “hoaxbusters” surveys and rates recent rumors and legends, classifying them as to their possible veracity. Items are marked with a green, orange, or red dot, and the terms used to rate them include desinformation (misinformation), arnaque (scams), canulars (hoaxes), and, of course, legende urbaine.
Freudian Approach
The application of the ideas of Sigmund Freud and his followers to urban legends (indeed, to any kind of folklore) involves, in general terms, seeking to identify in the texts and contexts symbolic references to the unconscious needs and desires of the people who invent, tell, and listen to the stories. Just as dreams, neurotic behavior, and memories of childhood are reviewed by psychoanalysts for their possible symbolic meanings—often sexual ones—it is believed that folklore must reveal similar symbolic strategies.
Professor Alan Dundes of the University of California–Berkeley long advocated Freudian interpretations of folklore, publishing his own studies in numerous articles and in such books as Analytic Essays in Folklore (1975), Interpreting Folklore (1980), and Folklore Matters (1989). Although Dundes usually investigated other forms of folklore—myths, fairy tales, proverbs, jokes, and the like—one of his earliest essays with a Freudian approach dealt with urban legends. His paper titled “On the Psychology of Legend,” delivered at a 1969 symposium at UCLA, was published in the book American Folk Legend (1971), edited by Wayland D. Hand. Here Dundes challenged the propensity of most folklorists to collect and classify legends without delving into interpretations, and he put forth daring and unique readings of several popular modern legends. The best known of Dundes’s interpretations concerned “The Hook,” which he characterized as a sexual fable about the fears of young women concerning the likely intentions of their dates. Dundes suggested that the hook itself symbolized “an erect aggressive phallus,” which, after contact with the girl’s “door” on her side of the car, is torn off when the car is suddenly started, thus symbolically castrating the threatening male. He concludes, “The girl in the story (and for that matter the girls who are telling and listening to the story) are not afraid of what a man lacks, but of what he has.” In a similar fashion in the same essay, Dundes offered psychological interpretations of the legends of toll-booth pranks, of “The Runaway Grandmother,” and even of the story of George Washington and the cherry tree.
Although Dundes hoped to inspire academic interest by showing “the rich potential that legends have for folklorists willing to consider a psychological approach,” he was seldom followed in this kind of analysis and, in fact, attracted strong critics. A typical negative reaction from an American folklorist is seen in Keith Cunningham’s parody titled “Reflections and Regurgitations” published in Folklore Forum volume 5 (1972); it is a spoof of Freudian analysis as it might be applied to the legend about “Red Velvet Cake.” However, Gary Alan Fine, in his essay “Evaluating Psychoanalytic Folklore: Are Freudians Ever Right?” concluded that such approaches have real merit, and he defended Dundes’s
interpretation of “The Hook” as internally consistent and plausible. Fine applied some psychological analysis of his own to the legends “The Promiscuous Cheerleader” and “AIDS Mary.” All three of these essays were reprinted as chapters in Fine’s book Manufacturing Tales (1992).
A useful survey of this whole interpretive approach to folklore appeared in 1993 in an issue of the journal Psychoanalytic Study of Society devoted to Alan Dundes. Included is a long essay introducing Dundes’s work by Professor Michael P. Carroll of the University of Western Ontario, followed by Carroll’s own study of “The Boyfriend’s Death,” in which he suggests that although females generally suffer more in real life than males do from teenage sexuality, “The Boyfriend’s
Death,” which is most popular among young women, reverses the situation and punishes the boy instead. Since the boy cannot get pregnant, he is killed—significantly by being hanged and/or decapitated (i.e., punished at his neck for “necking”)—and then suspended upside down over the car as the final reversal in the story.
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