Urban Legends Read online

  URBAN LEGENDS

  Nick Harding

  POCKET ESSENTIALS

  This edition published in 2005 by Pocket Essentials

  P.O.Box 394, Harpenden, Herts, AL5 1JX

  www.pocketessentials.com

  Distributed in the USA by Trafalgar Square Publishing, P.O. Box 257, Howe Hill Road, North Pomfret, Vermont 05053

  © Nick Harding 2005

  The right of Nick Harding to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of the publishers.

  Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN 1 904048 35 8

  2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1

  Typeset by Avocet, Typeset, Chilton, Aylesbury, Bucks

  Printed and bound in Great Britain by Cox & Wyman, Reading

  For my family

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  For friends around the globe who have been so supportive throughout the years. They are, of course far too numerous to mention (they know who they are!) but special thanks must be given to Tim Calvert, Sean Martin, Nick Richards, Doctors Jerry and Fiona Kaye, Andy Stansfield, Mikey B, Helen Harrow and Kesia, Neil Creek, Keith and Zoe, Ian Brindle, The Clan Morton, Doug Elford Argent, Ian S and Adders W, Willo Treschow and Paul, David Anderson, Kate, Emma, Clare, Helen, Sarah, Candy, Toby, Dicky and Pete, Richard Cheek and all in the Bristol Exploration Club. Special mention must be made to Dr Susan Blackmore for her kind assistance with the section on memes.

  This book is dedicated to the

  memories of

  David Hall BA MA Oxon

  Poet, Friend…

  and

  Jackson Newton

  Nephew…

  CONTENTS

  PART ONE: BEHIND URBAN LEGENDS

  Introduction. Themes. Origins. Folklore and Urban Legends. True or False? Urban Legends and Conspiracy Theories. Cultural Meaning. Urban Legends as Memes. Summary.

  PART TWO: CLASSIC URBAN LEGENDS

  The 'Teens in Peril' theme. The 'Road Legends' theme, including The Phantom Hitchhiker. The 'Nudity' theme. The 'Corpse' theme. Some other famous Legends, including 'The Pet in the Microwave' and 'Kentucky Fried Rat'. The 'Twin Towers' Legends.

  PART THREE: THE FUTURE OF URBAN LEGENDS

  The Internet and Urban Legends. Hollywood and Urban Legends. The Political Use of Urban Legends. Urban Legends in the Making. Urban Legends: Good or Bad? Survivability. Conclusion.

  GLOSSARY OF TERMS

  FURTHER READING

  “Experto credite”

  (Believe one who knows by experience)

  Virgil, Aeneid

  PART ONE

  BEHIND THE LEGENDS

  PREFACE

  URBAN MYTH or LEGEND: n A story, esp. one with a shocking

  or amusing ending related as having actually happened, usu. to

  someone vaguely connected with the teller.

  Collins English Dictionary.

  Urban Legends occupy a unique position in human culture. They are a bridge between true story telling, the realm of fantasy, and the real world. They exist on the boundaries where the definitions of what is true and what is imaginary lack solidity and clarity. They are stories that blur the edges. We pride ourselves, particularly in this day and age, on being intelligent, aware and conscious of the world around us. We think that we are less likely, in this modern world of instant information, to fall victim to the scam, dupe or tall story. We do not believe in a flat Earth or that the stars are fixed to crystal spheres. We know that the planets revolve around the sun. We know the age of the universe, the speed of light and the workings of quantum mechanics. But somehow, despite these advances, Urban Legends still hold sway. Why is this so?

  Urban Legends have survived so long because humans tell stories and have done so from the Palaeolithic campfire to the bar in the local pub. The reasons for doing so are numerous. Stories are told as social bonding devices. They can be tools for self-aggrandisement or used for the transmission of information. They can be a means of instruction, particularly in the realm of morality and mores, and, in some cases, they can be used as a device to control the behaviour of others, from groups of small children to whole nations. Even in an electronic age stories are still important to our species. One only has to look at the continuing popularity of TV, film, novels and computer games to realise that the telling of stories is very much alive and will survive as long as there are humans to tell them. Stories are a social glue – we need them, probably more than ever at the start of a new millennium (something that has itself contributed to the creation of Urban Legends), as great swathes of the population around the globe feel, rightly or wrongly, that they are entering a more precarious era. Stories bring security – a shared experience and a communality that helps us all deal with the wider world – but they can also delude us and encourage enormous misconceptions about our society and our position in it.

  The most interesting aspect of Urban Legends is that they seem to defy critical destruction. In fact they are thriving more than ever before. After the attacks on the Twin Towers in New York on 11 September 2001 a number of Urban Legends began circulating and were reported at all levels of the media as if they were true. Unsurprisingly, the tabloids ran the stories but the same Legends were being recounted in the broadsheets and in news broadcasts. The most famous of these was the Thankful Stranger, usually a man of Middle Eastern appearance, who, having had his dropped wallet returned, tells the good Samaritan to avoid a certain Tube station (the location varies – a true indicator the story is an Urban Legend) on a certain day at a certain time (these also vary).The durability of Urban Legends rests in their superficial credibility – they could after all be true. Therein lies their strength. There is a sense with all Urban Legends that somewhere, and at sometime, they actually happened as described. They are clever enough to fool all of us, however savvy we think we are.

  This book will set out to describe Urban Legends in all their popular forms and will offer some reasons for their durability. It will look particularly at one way of analysing them – through the idea of the 'meme', a self-replicating element of culture. It will highlight the most famous of the stories and discuss legends as cultural symbols and the means by which they permeate every level of human social interaction.

  The subject is, of course, vast with new material appearing almost daily and it is therefore recommended that the reader acquaint himself or herself with at least www.snopes.com, the website that investigates such tales, and the FOAFTALE NEWS: The Newsletter of the International Society For Contemporary Legend Research.

  N.B. Urban Legends is the correct nomenclature for these stories – Urban Myths is a misnomer. Myths deal with the activities of mythical beings such as gods, goddesses and the like.

  INTRODUCTION

  This book sets out to examine the enduring appeal of those stories (e.g. The Phantom Hitchhiker, The Beast Of Bodmin, The Dog In the Microwave) that all of us have heard at sometime, accepted as true and passed on as such to others, delighting in their telling with a certain degree of schadenfreude. Scholars and folklorists recognise these oft–quoted tales as a fundamental part of our ongoing story–telling tradition and that they are nothing more than Urban Legends that have developed like Chinese Whispers. These are tales that have grown in the telling but which have no basis in reality.


  We have all heard them and we have all accepted them as true, convincing ourselves that somewhere the incidents retold must have actually happened to some poor unsuspecting victim. Our ideas about their authenticity are supported by their retelling in the popular media which has often become a willing participant in their propagation, reporting the incidents as real–life events rather than fiction.

  Urban Legends cross into many other areas, taking in UFOs, alien abductions, ghosts and other accounts of the supernatural. It has been argued that 'alien abduction' stories are a modern Urban Legend in the making and, through the all-pervasive power of the media, they have become accepted as the truth by many people. The X-Files, for example, picks up an Urban Legend and turns it into a TV programme. This solidifies the 'falsehood' into 'reality', thus retroactively giving support to the original source material. In a very real sense, Urban Legends become a medium through which important ideas are transmitted from one generation to the next, similar in many respects to fairy tales in which sub–textual meanings are hidden.

  Urban Legends work hand in hand with folklore. There may not, in reality, be much difference between them. They are just different sides of the same coin. Urban Legends have much in common with age-old legends and folk tales about hidden treasure, ghosts, Robin Hood and so on. They are told with the same deliberate earnest conviction. They are passed on by word of mouth, are generally anonymous and vary constantly in terms of particular details, often altered by the storyteller who adds his or her own shine to a well polished tale already bright through years of telling. Common to both is a central core of traditional elements and iconic motifs that span generations and are cross–cultural. These fit neatly into the broad range of human experience and readily move across the borders of nations and cultures.

  Urban Legends have to be understood as being inherently false, at least in the sense that the extraordinary events could not actually have happened in so many places around the world to so many relatives, friends, and friends of friends of the millions of tellers of the tales. On the other hand what must be taken as true is that the stories themselves tend to be a subconscious (sometimes conscious) reflection of the concerns of the individuals in the societies in which the legends circulate and evolve. For example the First World War story of The Angel Of Mons (which, despite continuing debate about its authenticity, in fact owed its origin to a newspaper article written by Arthur Machen as a propaganda piece) spread so quickly because it offered hope and meaning amid the chaos and anarchy of the war.

  Contemporary stories of bodily invasion by parasites or snakes may, in fact, reflect a fear of society being invaded by outsiders. Recent events such as the World Trade Centre attacks have spawned a new wave of Urban Legends involving individuals heading to the doctors complaining of a stomach ache only to be told that there is a large tropical snake, or other horrific creature, growing inside them. Genuine fears of invasion are thus reflected in the stories told to someone by a friend of a friend of an individual who happened to be listening to a conversation in a coffee house. When a nation is fearful its Urban Legends increase in frequency to reflect that. A classic Urban Legend centred around the World Trade Centre is rooted in the fear of another attack – the mysterious stranger on the subway thanking someone for a good deed done, usually the return of a lost wallet, and then warning them not to be in a particular place at a particular time. A variation of this one even made it to this side of the Atlantic.

  Fifty years ago similar fears were being expressed in the 'Reds Under the Beds' scare in the United States. This was reflected in all sorts of cultural and social phenomena from movie scripts to the House Committee on UnAmerican Activities and the trials which it instigated. This example, in which an Urban Legend becomes a major political issue, is a stark reminder to us that they are not just harmless tales.

  Urban Legends also fall into the category of what Professor Richard Dawkins and Dr Susan Blackmore call 'memes' – ideas that are spread almost like viruses within human cultural structures, a concept that is starting to be taken seriously by the scientific community. These memes have a life of their own and replicate themselves rapidly as humans come into contact with each other. They may be as simple as a jingle from a television advert or they may be a more complex network of interconnecting memes (called a 'memeplex') such as a religion.

  This book will not debunk Urban Legends but will explain their development and something of their history. It will look at some classic Urban Legends, many of which have inspired enough Hollywood movies to become clichés yet remain effective because they are part of the human subconscious. (Scream is an obvious example. It taps into the ‘teenage horrors’ subset of Urban Legends and teenagers themselves provide one of the most important channels for these tales.) The book will also outline the various 'themes' around which Urban Legends can be grouped. There are many distinct types such as, for example, ‘body contamination’, ‘nudity’ or ‘teenager in peril’. It will also outline some modern variations including that of 'alien abduction' which operates very much in the realm of the classic fairy story, taking in the fear of outsiders as part of its psychological source and developmental process along the way. As our technology improves exponentially and we learn more about our universe and our place within in it, Urban Legends are proving as persistent and powerful as ever. The Internet has provided a new and potent channel for these tales to be transmitted around the world – improving the transmission rate and ensuring their durability.

  THEMES

  Urban Legends are grouped by folklorists into 'Themes' for easy identification and within each theme 'subtypes' occur. Subtypes are stories which have a distinct plot of their own but which share basic elements of the larger theme e.g. Worm Burger is a subtype of The Mouse in A Bottle which is in itself a major example of the Food Contamination theme.

  Examples of themes include ‘Teens In Peril’, ‘Food Contamination’, ‘Body Contamination’, ‘The Horrendous-Discovery’, ‘The Phantom Hitchhiker’ (sometimes known as 'The Vanishing Hitchhiker’) and ‘The Death Car’.

  TALE IN THE TELLING

  Urban Legends on the whole (other than fixed point stories, see Glossary) tend to have no specific geographical location, but are adapted by the storyteller to reflect his or her environment. A tale told by children around a campfire in Maine will take in areas known to them – places that may already be charged with emotional power e.g. ‘The Haunted Mill Yard’ or ‘The Witch House’. The same Legend may turn up in Greenbay, Minsk or Copenhagen but the storytellers will use locations specific to them which are guaranteed to provoke an immediate response of horror in their eager listeners. The Mill Yard in Maine may become the Ship Yard in Copenhagen or the Canning Factory in Minsk and so on. An emotionally charged location may also act as a ‘magnet’ for different types of Urban Legends. An abandoned house may have once been the home of a killer involved in the murder of two teenagers who stayed there over night to escape a terrible storm (Teens in peril). The same house may have once been the home of a madman who chopped up his victims to sell to a local butchers (Food Contamination) or it may have been the location of a body that was found in a car months after a disappearance (Death Car).

  Whatever the case the story will always have the appearance of being the truth and the location will always be somewhere known and, more often than not, in the immediate vicinity of teller and listener. The endangered protagonists are usually nameless but they are the kinds of people that are recognisable (sometimes stereotypically) to those telling and to those listening to the Legend.

  Another important factor in the description of Urban Legends is the Relative Chain or the chain along which the tale has apparently travelled. The narrator will always say that they heard the story from a ‘friend of a friend’ or ‘a friend of a cousin of mine’ or any number of combinations thereof. This Relative Chain is nearly always missing in the media particularly in newsprint but will often be present if an interviewee is asked to
describe an event.

  Despite our world being dominated by mobile phones, the Internet and 24-hour news coverage people still have this desire to talk to each other. Technology has not yet (and it probably never will) replace the comfort gained from face to face contact with another human being. Our basic need to interact and to exchange information on a personal level seems little diminished despite the electronic noise that surrounds us. We still have the desire to tell or listen to stories because they seem to hold basic truths about the world we live in. But, to compete, Urban Legends have had to take on more of the mantle of being factual and have to be presented in a snappy news-style delivery and, like the daily news, they have to be concerned with death, accidents, injuries, misfortune, scandals and tragedies. In fact they are evolving to survive in a modern world.

  ORIGINS

  One of the great mysteries surrounding Urban Legends concerns their origin points. These stories can be tracked around the world but no single source location can be found for any of them – other than those with a fixed point (see Glossary) such as the stories surrounding the Twin Towers. They change, shift, alter their elements in an adaptive process so that no amount of research can pinpoint an exact location or place in time where the Legend first came to life. Leads may be followed but they will always come to a dead end where the original events behind the tale have simply vanished. If, indeed, they ever existed.