Too Good to Be True: The Colossal Book of Urban Legends (13 page)

“The Boyfriend’s Death”

T
his story is about Peter Poore’s grave, which is located in Shelburne, New Hampshire. Peter Poore was supposedly the last white man in the region to be killed by Indians, and legend has it that his grave is haunted.

The story goes that many years ago, a young couple drove to the deserted road near the site of the grave. They stopped the car and necked for a while. When they were ready to leave, however, the car would not start. The young man decided to go for help while the woman stayed alone in the car. After a while, the woman could hear rain falling on the car. More time passed, but her boyfriend still did not return. She decided to turn on the headlights to see if he was coming down the road. When she did, what she saw was her boyfriend hanging from a tree with a knife sticking out of his abdomen. What she had thought was rain was really his blood dripping onto the car. I first heard this story at least fifteen years ago.

M
aria Gale, age 10 [speaking to a group of her fellow Navajo students] MG: I got one. One of my sisters told me that there was a boy and a girl. They were going to the dance.

RD: Squaw dance.

MG: Then…they turned on the radio and the man said, “Watch out for this man that’s a killer.” And then he said, “It’s a hairy one.”

I: It’s a what?

MG: A hairy one.

CY, RD, JD: A skinwalker.

MG: And then the gas got empty. And then the boy said, “Wait for me. Stay in the pickup and I’ll go get some gasoline.” So the girl went “OK,” and then she went in the back. I guess the skinwalker killed the boy and then chopped off his head. And then the girl was sitting in the back and then she heard something on top of the car and she was scared. Then she didn’t look up. She kept hearing that and then she saw her boyfriend’s head chopped off. It was hanging down.

The first version was sent to me by Denise Day of Center Strafford, New Hampshire, in 1988. The second was tape-recorded by Navajo students of Margaret K. Brady in a reservation school near Window Rock and Fort Defiance, Arizona, in 1976; the initials include those of children listening to the story, while “I” is the interviewer. Both texts are abbreviated versions of the urban legend with a Native American reference incorporated. The Navajo version also uses the radio warning motif of “The Hook.” Contemporary tellings of the story usually conclude with the police arriving to save the girl, warning her “Don’t look back!” She does look, of course, since taboos in folklore are always broken. When the girl sees her boyfriend’s body hanging or lying on top of the car, her hair immediately turns white from fright. “The Boyfriend’s Death” has been a favorite scare story of American teenagers since the early 1960s; many versions include spooky visual and sound effects—scratching, bumping, ghostly shadows, sounds of dripping, etc. In Europe, where the legend is also popular, often the maniacal killer is seated on top of the car bumping the severed head of his victim on the roof. Brady’s students recorded numerous stories for her, some of them in the form of personal experiences or of fictional stories—such as this one—and others being the older traditional legends of the “skinwalker,” a fearsome shape-shifting witchlike character of the native mythology. This text includes modern references, such as the pickup truck, and exhibits some stylistic features of “spontaneous narrative creation” analyzed by Brady: for example, the group’s confirming in chorus that the storyteller had a skinwalker in mind when she hesitated to identify the threatening figure. This story is in Brady’s 1984 book
“Some Kind of Power”: Navajo Children’s Skinwalker Narratives,
pp. 185–86.

“The Slasher under the Car”

RUMORS OF SLASHERS AT MALL DISPUTED

Nobody can find victims of ‘robbers’ who ‘hide’ under cars. Authorities have heard dozens of reports in recent weeks about robbers at Hanes Mall who hide under cars in the parking lot and slash shoppers’ legs to get at their packages.

But nobody has found any victims.

People have called the
Winston-Salem Journal,
the police, and the mall to try to confirm rumors about the supposed robbers.

But police and hospital workers say they haven’t seen any such cases.

The thin thieves supposedly hide under shoppers’ cars until the shoppers approach. As a victim unlocks a car door, the thief slashes the victim’s lower leg. Less vicious versions report that a softer-hearted crook pricks the ankle with a sharp object.

The slashed person falls, the story goes, and the thief wriggles from under the car, snatches purse and gifts and runs off, arms laden with Christmas booty.

Someone first called the
Journal
to ask about the reports about two weeks ago.

Sgt. Charlie Taylor of the Winston-Salem Police Department reported hearing the same rumor then and checked into it. There were no police reports about such crimes.

But the exploits of the thieves continued by word of mouth.

One caller to the
Journal
said that Hanes Mall was keeping victims from reporting the crimes by giving them $500 gift certificates.

Monday night, a radio dispatcher in the Forsyth County Sheriff’s Department said that a deputy talked to a doctor who treated 18 slashed patients in the emergency room at Forsyth Memorial Hospital.

When reached, the deputy said he did not talk to the doctor, but a friend of his had. The friend was unavailable for comment.

Freda Springs, a spokesman at Forsyth Memorial, talked to emergency-room workers yesterday. They had heard the rumor, she said, they haven’t treated any victims with slashed ankles.

She said that the head nurse in the emergency room heard that the patients were being treated at Baptist Hospital, even though Forsyth is just across the road from the mall.

A spokesman at Baptist said that emergency-room workers there have not treated slasher victims and were not even aware of the rumor.

Thomas E. Winstead, the general manager of the mall, said he has fielded questions about the non-existent crime wave. “I’ve heard it. I’ve had it mentioned to me at parties. Several store personnel have called me to ask about it,” he said.

He said he heard similar rumors at other shopping centers he has managed.

“Unfortunately, I can’t do anything to stop the rumor, but fortunately, there’s no truth to it either,” he said.

Capt. Roscoe Pouncey of the police department said that parking-lot crime at shopping centers actually seems to be lower this year than in previous years. He said last week that there had only been one robbery in the Hanes Mall parking lot during December….

From an article by Christopher Quinn in the
Winston-Salem (North Carolina) Journal
of December 16, 1992; the article concludes with advice from the aptly named Capt. Pouncey and others on strategies for avoiding assaults. In
The Baby Train
I summarized 18 reports of “The Slasher under the Car” from 1984 through 1992 that supposedly occurred in 16 cities in 14 different states. Two sources remembered hearing prototypes for the legend in 1978 and even as far back as 1950. Since then I have received nine more reports from 1992 and 1993, adding ten further cities and five more states to the list. The slashers usually were said to strike the ankle, sometimes aiming for the Achilles tendon, but some grabbed the ankle, or hit the ankles with a tire iron, or crawled out from under the car to slash at the victim’s cheek or cut off a finger. The motive for the attack was usually robbery—often of Christmas gifts—but sometimes the attack led to rape. Occasionally an accomplice joined the attack from under a nearby car, and in one curious version the attackers wrapped the victim in Christmas paper. The idea of a police coverup of the crimes, or of the malls buying off victims to protect their business, is typical. In some communities, notably Tacoma, Washington, during the Christmas season of 1989, police actually set up field stations at the targeted mall, not to combat the fictional crimes, but simply to calm the fears of shoppers.

“The Elephant That Sat on the VW”

WE POP THE ELEPHANT MYTH

It was a good story.

A reliable guy called The
Philadelphia Bulletin
and said a girl he works with knows a woman who took her kids to the Philadelphia Zoo.

When she came out, there was a big dent in her Volkswagen, and a zoo employee was waiting in the parking lot. He said an elephant being unloaded from a truck sat on the Volkswagen and the Zoo would pay the damages.

Doc Rowe

On her way home, the woman was mistakenly stopped for leaving the scene of an accident. She told the policeman she hadn’t been in the accident she had just passed. The dent in her car was caused by an elephant sitting on it.

She was given a sobriety test at a police station. Finally the police called the Zoo and confirmed her story.

The reliable guy said he would get the name and address of the woman and call right back.

He never did.

That was no surprise. A call to the Zoo immediately established that no Volkswagen has ever been abused by one of its elephants and that Zoo officials have heard this one before.

Within two weeks, another reliable person from another part of the area called another
Bulletin
reporter and told him the same story….

How these stories begin to circulate is a mystery. But anybody who has his Volkswagen dented by an elephant might as well keep quiet about it. No newspaperman will believe him.

From an article by James Smart in
Small World: For Volkswagen Owners in the United States,
fall 1970, p. 7. This editor’s note follows:
“Small World’
s ‘elephant file’ contains 27 accounts of the sat-upon-VW story dating from as early as 1962. Depending upon which version you believe, the elephant came from the St. Louis Zoo, Benson’s Animal Farm in New Hampshire, California’s Marine World, or a circus in upstate New York, New Martinsville, West Virginia, Anaheim, California, or Paris, France, to name just a few. We hope these discrepancies will debunk the elephant story forever, but that may be too much to ask. Mr. Smart’s article appeared in the
Philadelphia Bulletin
last February. Shortly thereafter, elephants squashed two other Volkswagens in other sections of the country.” My own “elephant file” contains about another two dozen reports, including ones from Canada, France, Germany, Sweden, England, and New Zealand. The 1985 Australian film
Bliss,
based on Peter Carey’s 1981 novel of the same title, has a scene in which a circus elephant sits on an old red Fiat.

“The Arrest”

E
very profession has its legends, and police work is no exception. Here’s the latest wild and wooly yarn to do the rounds in Fairfax County law enforcement circles:

Seems a local motorist was pulled over by a local police officer. The motorist had had a bit too much to drink. Correction: He had had a lot too much to drink. He flunked the Breathalyzer test, the walk-the-straight-line test and the get-out-of-the-car-without-falling-on-your-face test. So, as any cop would in this situation, the officer announced that the motorist was under arrest.

But at that very moment, on the other side of the road, a terrible accident took place. The police officer ran across the road to investigate. Because the accident was a messy one, the officer was busy with it for quite some time. So the inebriated motorist figured the cop had lost interest in him. He hopped behind the wheel and drove off.

However, the wheel the inebriated motorist hopped behind was the wheel of the police car. When the cops finally tracked the guy down a couple of hours later, they found the police car parked in his garage. The motor was still running and the dome lights were still spinning and flashing.

Ever since, according to the story, the police have been so embarrassed by what happened that they’ve tried to hush it up.

However, Fairfax County police spokesman Warren Carmichael says there’s only one thing wrong with the story: It almost certainly isn’t true.

“Certain stories develop and they seem to get a life of their own,” Carmichael told researcher Karina Porcelli.

This one has had an especially long life. Carmichael said he first heard it about two years ago, and has been hearing it around Fairfax County ever since. Capt. Curt Durham of the Fairfax City police confirms the yarn’s longevity. He says he first heard it about 18 months ago at a party, and has been hearing it steadily from then on. But neither policeman has been able to verify the story—and both say they’d know about it if the incident had really happened.