Gassed and Robbed
Accounts, often firsthand, of people being rendered unconscious by some kind of gas, then robbed or otherwise victimized, are widespread in Europe and have been collected as well in South Africa. In European versions, the victims are often passengers on trains passing through Turkey, Eastern Europe, Spain, or Italy. The South African victims are more commonly attacked in their own homes. The gas used is said to be ether-based, nitrous oxide, another anesthetic gas, or just some unspecified
“sedative” or “toxic gas.” Experts testify that none of these products, nor any other kind of dangerous gas or liquid, could be easily administered so as to cause victims to fall asleep; furthermore, such products are highly unlikely to be available to common criminals and can properly be administered only by highly trained experts. In the United States in the 1930s and ’40s, several gassing panics occurred, including a major one in Mattoon, Illinois, in 1944. In recent years at least three urban
legends based on people using sedatives to facilitate misdeeds have circulated, including “Drugged and Seduced,” “The Gay Roommate,” and Perfume Attacks.
The Gay-Jesus Film Petition
“ACTION NEEDED NOW” was the heading of an anonymous appeal that started to circulate in 1984 urging Christians to sign an attached petition and forward it to “the address given” in order to protest a planned movie about the sex life of Jesus that would picture Him as “a swinging homosexual.” The appeal contained strongly worded objections, including “We must not allow this perverted world to drag Our Lord through the dirt.” The addresses of various different state attorneys general were supplied (some of them inaccurate), and usually the information was credited to a publication called Modern People News. A suburban Chicago publication of that name had in 1977 published a brief notice of such a film being discussed in Europe, and somehow the rumor caught
fire and spread. Thousands of people around the world signed and mailed these petitions, leading the attorney general of the State of Illinois to issue an appeal via a 1985 Ann Landers column for people to recognize that there was no such film in production and to cease sending in petitions. Ann Landers commented that this “wacky chain letter” had “not an iota of truth in it.” A well-documented analysis of the rumors concluded that “severely misinformed persons” were reacting merely to hearsay and error. In some versions of the appeal, the film was said to be titled, rather than merely about, “The Sex Life of Jesus.”
The Gay Roommate
A male college student reports to the campus medical center complaining of repeated and persistent headaches, especially in the morning, just as he is waking up. A complete physical reveals nothing that would cause headaches, but the examining physician finds evidence of rectal bleeding and warns the student not to engage in frequent homosexual activity. The student is aghast, since he is heterosexual. Suspicious, he searches his dormitory room while his roommate is out and finds a bottle of ether or chloroform and a sponge in the roommate’s closet. The gay roommate has been sedating the student at night and having sex with him. In some versions of the story, the victim wreaks cruel and violent punishment upon his roommate.
Various forms of this legend swept American college campuses from about 1989 to 1991, but the story goes back much further. Accounts of a similar incident circulated among military units in several countries during World War II and probably earlier; an 1882 source mentioned a Middle East official abusing young foreign sailors after plying them with drinks. Gay rights activities and people’s homophobia have certainly encouraged the spread of this modern campus legend, but concern among students about the possible truth of the story may also reflect some suppressed homosexual attraction between young college men. Like many other urban legends, the versions of “The Gay Roommate” are often quite specific as to location and details of the assaults; yet not a single authenticated case of this kind has been proven.
Generation Gap Legends
Invented (or discovered?) in the 1960s, the so-called generation gap represents the supposed inability of older versus younger people to understand each other’s lives and values. Oldsters, for example, claim to find the slang, music, and clothing fashions of youth largely incomprehensible, whereas youngsters cannot appreciate—or even understand—the history and accomplishments of their parents’ generation. The perception of a gap was underscored by such slogans as “Don’t trust anyone over thirty” and “Youth is wasted on the young.”
A series of stories, supposedly true, describes young people who mix up or misunderstand events in history, including quite recent history (in adults’ perception). The kids may confuse Neil Armstrong (the astronaut) with Neil Young (the pop musician), or even with Jack Armstrong or John Glenn. Another source of confusion is the original Beatles lineup versus performing groups organized by members of the quartet after their breakup. A common punch line for this story is “Oh, look! Paul
McCartney was in a band before ‘Wings.’ ”
The Gerber’s Settlement Hoax
A baseless story that gained wide circulation in 1996 claimed that the Gerber’s baby food company had lost a class-action lawsuit and was required to give every American child under the age of 12 a savings bond (ranging in value from $500 to $1,500). Parents were advised in these bogus announcements (circulated by hand, by fax, and over the Internet) to send their child’s name and a copy of birth records or a Social Security card to a post-office box in Minneapolis. The Gerber Products Company did not have a post-office box in that city, and on its website it debunked the story, calling it merely rumor and misinformation. A 1996 settlement involving pricing of infant formulas did not involve the Gerber company but may have led to confusion among customers seeking to file the hoax claims.
The Gerbil- (or Snake-) Caused Accident
This legend of slapstick comedy and jumping to conclusions has several variations, usually claimed as true, although localized to different times and places. An actual similar incident may well be the ultimate origin of the plot, of which the following is a typical summary: A woman is driving to her son’s school with his pet gerbil in a box to deliver it to him for a show-and-tell session. The gerbil gets out of the box and begins to creep up one leg of the woman’s slacks. Unable to shake the creature free, she pulls over to the side of the highway, leaps from her car, and begins to jump up and down, shaking her pant leg. A passing motorist thinks she is having a seizure. He stops his car, jumps
out, runs to the woman and wraps his arms around her, trying to calm her. A second motorist, seeing the man struggling with the woman, also stops and runs over. He punches the “attacker” in the face as hard as he can, knocking him out. The woman then explains the situation. Variations in the story include transporting a snake or a lizard, sometimes to a veterinarian rather than a school. The creature may crawl into the woman’s blouse or up her skirt, and the two “rescuers” may adopt somewhat different lines of action. Besides these inconsistencies in the story, what further suggests its legendary status is the neat three-part structure of the plot and the lack of closure to explain what happened next. Such bizarre situations are sometimes invented or elaborated from actual cases for use in law-school examinations, posing the problem for students of identifying the various legal issues involved.
Gerbiling
The sketchy “Colo-Rectal Mouse” rumor of 1984 quickly evolved into a story packed with circumstantial details about an assumed gay male celebrity who supposedly gratified himself by inserting a live gerbil into his rectum. His behavior was allegedly discovered when he came to a hospital emergency room to have a stuck rodent removed. This homophobic (and sometimes AIDS-tinged) story was attached to a TV broadcaster in Philadelphia and to a major film star in Hollywood, among several other prominent men, but it is implied in all versions that “gerbiling” is a standard practice among many homosexual males. Misinformation is rife in the accounts of gerbiling. Not only is there the usual vagueness about hospital treatment of the supposed perpetrators; some writers have implied that published medical records support the claim that gerbiling is an actual practice. Searches of medical databases have found no such reports. Other people point to the “proof” that gerbils cannot be found in Southern California pet shops, but the reason for this is not that homosexuals have cornered the gerbil market, or to protect the animals from perverted misuse, but simply to protect the state’s ecology and agriculture; gerbils, which multiply rapidly, are illegal to keep or sell in that state. A recent account, circulating on the Internet, of a supposed gerbiling accident treated in a Salt Lake City hospital was completely fictional, even to the point of naming a nonexistent local health care facility.
Germany
The earliest folklorists of Germany—where folk narratives have been assiduously collected and studied for generations—were deeply concerned with the definition, style, content, and meaning of legends. It is not surprising, then, that urban legends have captured the attention of modern German folklorists. German interest in traditional legends dates back to the second edition of Jacob Grimm’s Deutsche mythologie (1844), where the famous fairy-tale collector and editor compared the two genres. “As the fairy tale stands related to the legend, so does legend to history,” he wrote, stressing the implied connection of legends to places, persons, and incidents of real life.
The long history of German scholars’ work on traditional legends cannot be covered in this entry, but the reader may gain a sense of the subject from the translation and notes to The German Legends of the Brothers Grimm prepared by American scholar Donald Ward. The Grimms published their collection from 1816 to 1818, and Ward’s twovolume translation was published in 1981 in Philadelphia by the Institute for the Study of Human Issues. Another important survey in English is W. F. H. Nicolaisen’s essay “German Sage and English Legend: Terminology and Conceptual Problems” (Bennett and Smith, 1988, pp. 79–87), with a short “Clarification” published in 1992
(Contemporary Legend 2: 165–166). Nicolaisen points out that the word sage is often directly translated as “legend,” but to German speakers it is always closely associated with the verb sagen (to say) and thus “implies formlessness or multiformity,” whereas the English word “legend” has
an “association with scripted story,” that is, it relates specifically to narrative rather than spoken traditions in general. Although German collectors of urban legends have referred to them sometimes as sagen aus der modernen welt (legends of the modern world), one writer has suggested that a better term might be aktuelle [volks-]erzählung (topical [folk] narratives).
As early as 1974, Helmut Fischer was collecting contemporary-legend texts verbatim from oral tradition in the region of the Sieg River; his book Erzählgut der gegenwart (The Story Repertoire of the Present Day) was published in Cologne in 1978 and contained numerous texts, although these could more accurately be termed “regional stories” rather than the widespread urban legends of the modern tradition. In later articles, and especially in his 1991 book Der rattenhund (The Rat-Dog, i.e., “The Mexican Pet”), Fischer turned to what we may call “urban legends proper,” treating them with the highly commendable approach of providing multiple variations and thorough annotations.
The first actual collection of modern urban legends published in the German language, however, was a translation from Swedish of Bengt af Klintberg’s book Rattan i pizzan (The Rat in the Pizza) first published in Stockholm in 1986. The German edition (Die ratte in der pizza und andere modern sagen und großstadtmythen) appeared in 1990. As Rainer Wehse pointed out in a brief 1991 review, “The translation from Swedish diminishes in no way its relevance to Germans because this kind of tradition is nearly 100 percent international.” In a 1990 article in Zeitschrift für volkskunde, Wehse had suggested that studies of modern legends in Germany were a sort of neglected stepchild of longestablished folk narrative research in Germany that had previously focused mostly on Märchen (fairy tales), historical legends, fables, jokes, or other traditional forms. But with an attitude of “Bei uns auch” (loosely, “We have them too!”) modern German folklorists were beginning to recognize the value of studying contemporary legends. Looking at several examples (“The Spider in the Yucca Palm,” warnings against disguised assailants, “AIDS Harry” [“Willkommen in der Aidsfamily!”], etc.), Wehse showed how these so-called modern legends—not so differently from traditional legends—also reflected the zeitgeist of their tellers and revealed that contemporary storytellers were shifting from supernatural themes to “a more humorous and distanced view of the world” (quoting the English summary in the journal).
Rainer Wehse had praised af Klintberg’s book for its use of oral texts followed by good comparative notes. In the same review, however, Wehse was highly critical of the first collection by his compatriot Rolf Wilhelm Brednich, whose book Die spinne in der yucca-palme (The Spider in the Yucca Palm) also appeared in 1990 (Munich: H.C. Beck Verlag); Brednich, he charged, printed only paraphrased versions of stories collected by his students with minimal notes or commentaries. Brednich’s book, nevertheless, became popular in Germany and has been followed by others, all from the same publisher: Die maus im jumbo-jet (The Mouse in the Jumbo Jet, 1991), Das huhn mit dem gipsbein (The Chicken with the Peg Leg, 1993), and Die ratte am strohhalm (The Rat with the Straw Stalk, 1996). Brednich’s 1996 collection contains an index to the four books, and all of them describe their contents in subtitles as Sagenhafte geschichten von heute (Legendary Stories of Today). Again using this subtitle is Brednich’s Pinguine in rückenlage (Penguins on Their Backs) published in 2004 and containing 133 urban legends with notes. Brednich took the unusual step in an article published in 2006 of surveying “the dark side of modern legends,” referring to stories he had collected that he considered unprintable and omitted from his popular anthologies. His descriptions and examples reveal these “dark” stories to be about sex in its most extreme and deviant forms, scatology, grotesque
horror, some slapstick comedy, and crude expressions of ethnic stereotyping. Quite possibly all urban-legend collectors have a similar file of unprintable texts, suggesting that the full spectrum of urban legends will only be revealed via publication in academic journals.
The close similarity of German urban legends with those circulating in many other countries may be easily appreciated by even the monolingual reader who reviews some of the story titles in Brednich’s collections. Cognate words in German and English make it clear what the parallels are in such legend labels as Der elefant im safari-park, Die gestohlene großmutter, Der pudel in der mikrowelle, and LSD-Bilder. For the latter, often called “Mickey Mouse Acid” in English, Sigrid Schmidt provided a
useful published discussion from a German newspaper with an English translation in FOAFtale News (no. 16, 1989: 1–4). Schmidt has discussed unique German modern legends in her essays about traditions concerning the direction faced by a sculpture atop Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate (FOAFtale News, No. 18, 1990) and about tour guides’ stories concerning the painted ceiling of a thirteenth-century church in Hildesheim (Bennett and Smith 1989, pp. 179–190). Although Schmidt concludes
the latter essay with the question “To what extent may we call such stories ‘legends’?” it seems clear that the varying versions of stories told in the present—even if by tour guides alone—are truly legendary.
A sample of urban legends from East Germany was provided in a 1994 article by Ulla Fix. A student seminar in Leipzig sent out appeals for stories via broadcast and news media in 1990—just after the reunification of the two Germanys. The project brought in 87 texts, 34 of which were “moderne sagen” [modern legends]. All of them are quoted or summarized in the article, along with information about the tellers or senders of the stories, their sources, and the date received. Seventeen of these urban legends had both plot and scenario very similar to contemporary legends found in other countries; for example, the “Package of Cookies” and the “Ski Accident” stories were quite standard versions. Six of the East German legends had international story plots but with some details or scenes characteristic of life in the DDR; for example, both “The Runaway Grandmother” and “The Kangaroo Thief” legends described car trips taken in a “Trabi” (a Trabant car, once manufactured in the DDR), the characters driving either to the USSR or Hungary. (The kangaroo is an escapee from a zoo.) The last 11 stories in the collection clearly reflected life in East Germany both in plot and details; examples included stories about the difficulty of securing apartments, poor quality-control in public housing or manufacturing, problems with bureaucracy, and the like. One of these stories described a village sending a water sample to a government health agency for testing. The report
states that their spring or well is perfectly safe for drinking, but the villagers had actually sent a bottle of canal water just to see if the testing was reliable. (For another Eastern European legend involving water or air testing, see the entry for Romania.)
As in the United States and other countries, in Germany the popular press often recycles urban legends as quasi–news stories. A short example of this phenomenon provides a German text that is easy to translate with just a few helpful hints. The following story appeared in the newspaper Bild on September 20, 1981, accompanied by a photograph of a house cat with the headline “Katze warf junge—Familie ins krankenhaus” (“The Cat Has Kittens—the Family Goes to the Hospital”). Although the story was datelined Freiburg, and specific first names and ages of participants were given, this article was clearly just a retelling of “The Poisoned Pussycat.” In this instance the family had gathered mushrooms (pilzen) and tried some on their cat before making their own meal on the
fungi. But no sooner had they finished the mushrooms when the cat suddenly began to act up—writhing and shrieking. They rushed to a hospital to have their stomachs pumped. Returning home, they found their “poisoned” cat with its zwei junge—two new baby kittens! The original is provided
below:
Der Kaufmann Werner F. (46) hatte mit seiner Frau und den beiden Kindern (12 und 15) Pilze gesammelt und davon eine Mahlzeit zubereitet. Aber ganz sicher waren sie sich nicht, ob unter den Pilzen nicht vielleicht doch auch ein giftiger sein könnte. Deshalb gaben sie zuerst ihrer Katze zum Probieren. Katzen, wußte die Ehefrau, rühren niemals etwas an, was ungenießbar oder gar giftig ist.
Der Katze schien es auch geschmeckt zu haben. So machte sich die ganze Familie übers Pilzgericht her. Die Teller waren noch nicht leer, als sich das Tier plötzlich krümmte und jämmerlich miaute.
Entsetzt lief Werner F. zum Telefon. In Todesangst alarmierte er den Notarztwagen. Der raste mit der ganzen Familie in die Klinik; die Ärzte standen schon bereit. Allen Familienangehörigen wurde der Magen ausgepumpt. “Es war eine scheußliche Sache,” sagt der Kaufmann. Als er, seine Frau und die Kinder bleich nach Hause kamen, sahen sie das Ergebnis der “Pilzvergiftung” ihrer Katze: Sie hatte zwei Junge bekommen.
While a folklorist in command of college-level German should have little difficulty in reading the above, it is much to be desired that more of the voluminous collectanea and scholarship about urban legends in German be made more widely available. As Christine Shojaei Kawan wrote in her very useful survey in 1995, “Let us hope that translations soon begin to appear in British and North American journals.”
Get Out of Here
As reported to have been told on Long Island, New York, in the mid-1970s:
A man decided to get a free live Christmas tree by digging up one of the small pine trees recently planted along the Southern State parkway. He got as far as wrapping the root ball with burlap when a State Trooper pulled up and asked him what he was doing.
The man said, “My wife is Jewish, and she won’t let me have a Christmas tree in the house. So every year, to celebrate Christmas, I plant a pine tree where the public can enjoy it.”
The trooper replied, “You can’t do that! Take y our damn tree and get out of here!”
A story, reported from New York City, told in the 1960s, described a man using the same ploy to steal some bricks from a pile left near a building site. He tells the policeman that he is leaving some bricks left over from his own home-improvement project, and the policeman tells him to take all his bricks and “Get out of here!”
This story has European counterparts and probably a European origin. Here is how it is told in Holland:
One Saturday, a man took a cycling tour through his own neighbourhood, and he could not help noticing a neat pile of tiles where a new house was being built. These tiles would come in handy, he thought, since he himself was busy tiling his kitchen. So he cycled home and returned with his car
and a small trailer. However, while he was loading the tiles, a policeman approached.
“Allo, what do you think you’re doing?”
“I’ve been tiling my kitchen and there were some tiles left. So when
I saw this pile over here, I thought I could dump mine. . . .”
“No way,” the policeman said, “everything back in again, and I’ll stay here until the last tile is gone.”
In Belgium (see entry), the same story is told about stealing some paving stones from a construction site.
The Ghost in Search of Help
Late at night in his home during a raging blizzard, after a hard day’s work, a doctor is summoned by a persistent knocking at his door. There he finds a young girl in threadbare clothing who begs him to accompany her to the bedside of her desperately sick mother. Although he is very tired, the
doctor puts on his coat, takes his medical bag, and follows the girl out into the storm and into a shabby tenement apartment. There he finds the mother, seriously ill, and is able to treat her. When he mentions her daughter who had led him there—and who had disappeared at the entrance to the building—the woman is stunned. “My daughter died a month ago,” she says, and points to the girl’s clothes hanging in the closet. Among them is the same red cloak that she had been wearing, still damp from the storm.
This version of the ghost story is often attached in the United States to Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell (1829–1914), a well-known physician from Philadelphia. Evidence suggests that Dr. Mitchell himself sometimes spread the story, possibly as a deliberate hoax. My own thorough discussion of the Mitchell versions is cited below, and paranormal investigator Joe Nickell provides a good summary of the case, including full texts of the documents relevant to the Mitchell version, in the cited essay.
Other “folk” versions of this story refer to anonymous doctors in unspecified times, and the story has been repeatedly revised and reprinted in popular sources, including a book about angels by evangelist
Billy Graham and a number of books of mystery stories for young readers. A subtype of the legend told in England and Russia describes a priest or a rector summoned by a ghost to the home of a dying person. The connection of this old story to more modern urban legends comes in the occasional appearance of the same “portrait identification” motif as is found in many “Vanishing Hitchhiker” versions. In these legends, the doctor or priest, unaware of the ghostly messenger’s true nature, returns to the home the next day, learns that the victim has died, sees a portrait of the messenger, and is told that this was the victim’s child or mother who died years before. In some versions of the “Ghost in Search of Help” legend, the doctor or priest himself leaves something behind that is later
found in a deserted building where he had attended to the suffering person.