Too Good to Be True: The Colossal Book of Urban Legends (16 page)

Then came a tip that this wedding took place at the Glen Sanders Mansion in Scotia, N.Y., near Schenectady. A colleague’s sister’s housemate’s nephew’s wife’s colleague heard it and swore it was true.

The mansion is a premier spot for weddings in the Schenectady area. People there were also familiar with the story.

“It did not happen,” said Kimberly Kaminski, who has been delegated to handle these inquiries. “We’ve had over 300 calls about this. Five to 10 calls a day. Some people even say they were there! It came out of a project in a marketing class at Schenectady County Community College. They were doing an experiment in how word of mouth travels. It sure does!”

Brrring. Brring.
“Thank you for calling Schenectady County Community College. If you are calling from a touch-tone telephone, press 1 now…”

“We don’t have any marketing classes this semester,” said Carol Chiarella, chairman of the business and law department. “But there is one professor I can ask.”

That was Toby Strianese, chairman of the hotel, culinary and tourism department. He had heard the story from his wife, who heard it on the radio. Then he heard it again from the dean’s secretary, who heard it at a cocktail party. So he told the story in his class while his students were working on a marketing plan, to illustrate how rumors get started and can hurt a business. There were two students who work at the Glen Sanders Mansion, and he asked them if the story was true. They said it wasn’t.

Another student said he had a cousin who was actually at the wedding. Strianese asked him to find out from the cousin what day the wedding was and the name of the groom, but the student never reported back.

“It’s clearly an impossible story,” said Strianese, who has worked in the restaurant business for 30 years. “Most people, if they think there will be a favor at the wedding, pick up the plate first thing to see if it’s underneath. Also, who would have put the pictures under the plates? It would have to be the staff, because the groom would have been at the ceremony at the time the plates are being put out. And a staff person would not have been able to resist looking at the picture and talking about it.”

The thread could perhaps be unraveled further, back to the person who actually dreamed it up. But that seems unlikely now that so many people—normal people—insist that it happened.

Strianese came across the story two more times. A student had a friend in Plattsburg who heard it on the radio. And a colleague heard it at a party of lawyers, where three of them were trying to figure out which principal was liable.

Now it has traveled to Washington. People love this story. They
want
to believe it. The Internet writer called it the Wedding Revenge story, emphasizing the retributive aspect of the groom going through with the ceremony, making the bride’s parents pay for the huge reception for 300, and then wrecking the miscreants’ reputations in front of all their nearest and dearest. Something so delicious just had to be true.

And Paul is dead.

“The Bothered Bride” story is from
Weekly World News,
December 24, 1985. The tabloid had taken a tiny notice printed tongue-in-cheek in a gossip column and expanded it into a “news” article. The same story was widely told in the late 1980s, but the last “bride” version I’ve collected was in 1990. Two reports of the “groom” version of the story came to me from Scotland in 1991, but the legend did not really catch on again in the United States until 1995. “The Grumbling Groom” article above, by Megan Rosenfeld, was on page one in the
Washington Post
on October 25, 1995. I reprint Rosenfeld’s entire article because it illustrates so well the usual path of attempts to trace urban legends. Other reports continue right up to the present from cities across the country, always with some reference to the hidden compromising photographs. Evidently, it never occurred to the people who claim to have been present at the incident to have saved one of the photographs as proof that the story is true.

“Filmed in the Act”

T
his is not an advice column, so readers don’t usually ask me for my wisdom about their love lives. I was pleased, however, to receive the following letter:

“I think (I
hope!
) that I have an urban legend for you,” a woman from a large city in the East wrote me early last spring. “Any reassurance would be welcome. My husband and I have taken a suite at one of those honeymoon resorts in the Poconos for a weekend. While I was showing the brochure to my brother-in-law, he said something about being careful of the mirrors.

“When I asked what he was talking about, he explained that some friends of a friend of his had spent their honeymoon at one of those places. Then, years later, watching an adult channel on TV in Las Vegas, what should come on for all the world to see but movies of their honeymoon! They had been made through two-way mirrors.

“Of course the suite we’ve booked is full of mirrors—over the bed, around the pool, etc. I really need to hear that this story isn’t true, and that ‘Betty does Bill’ [made-up names] won’t be playing in motel rooms across the country.”

I wrote back to assure “Betty and Bill” that they can take their vacation without worrying that they will become porno stars. The story that couples in honeymoon hotels are “filmed in the act” for later screening as X-rated movies is widely told—but completely untrue.

I guess it’s true that many honeymoon resorts feature mirrors, round beds, heart-shaped tubs and pools, “theme” rooms, etc. But research into such matters extends beyond my professional speciality in folklore.

As for what goes on behind those mirrors, the popular Pocono region in northeastern Pennsylvania seems to be the most common resort area where honeymooners are allegedly filmed by hidden cameras. But the same story is told about other resorts throughout the East and Midwest and in vacation centers in the Rockies and on the West Coast as well.

Often, as in Betty and Bill’s version, the films are supposed to be made in one region for showing in another. This, one assumes, lessens the chance of a filmed couple or their friends later seeing the movies.

Some people believe that these films are made in low-cost motel chains for showing in such imagined sin-centers as Las Vegas or Atlantic City. Maybe this is supposed to indicate the “price you pay” for using cheap motels.

Sometimes it’s said that the films are made to be shown to later occupants of the same suite. On these suites there is alleged to be a one-time-only rule to prevent people from seeing themselves on film. Another variation claims that the mirror room is rented very cheaply so as to provide a supply of “performers” for the films.

None of these ideas makes economic sense in the hotel business. Why would managers take the enormous risk of secretly filming guests, when X-rated videos are readily available?

The most common ending for the “filmed in the act” stories is that the couple sues the hotel for damages. Surely they would do so, if the story were true, but I haven’t heard of any such suits.

Further evidence of the story’s dubious origin: I heard from one resident of the Poconos who had worked as a waiter in a popular resort hotel. He told me he was asked so often by guests about the honeymoon-film story that he took the question to the president of the resort chain. The executive told him that every major vacation area in the country has similar stories, and none have ever been proved—nor would any resort owner be so stupid as to try such a thing.

In my opinion, the rumors may give business a boost. The honeymooners—or whoever they are—who patronize places with “fantasy” mirrored suites enjoy more than just the change of decor. They also gain the delicious thrill that other people may know or suspect what fun they’ve been having. I suppose we could call it a kind of imagined reverse voyeurism, which is certainly better and more legal than the real thing.

By the way, I recently got a picture postcard discreetly showing a couple in the private swimming pool of a “fantasy suite” in a Poconos resort hotel. The message written on the card was simply this: “Having a
wonderful
time! Thank you!!! Betty and Bill.”

This was my newspaper column for release the week of August 24, 1987. In other versions the married couple find themselves watching a tape of the husband cavorting with another woman. Some people claim that certain resorts can offer bargain prices because they reap huge profits from selling homemade porn tapes. Many hotels and resorts are bedeviled by this story, and some managers, hoping to stop the rumors, have even called in the local police to search their premises thoroughly for any hidden cameras, bugs, or peepholes. A recent version of “Filmed in the Act” circulating on the Internet claims that the couple were so thrilled to see how well they performed ten years previously that they ordered a copy of the tape from the resort.

“Superhero Hijinks”

I
would like to share a story with you that I heard in December of 1989 and accepted as true until I saw a similar story in Ann Landers’ column in early 1990. This was told to me by my supervising teacher at East Haven High School, East Haven, Connecticut, when I was doing my student teaching.

My supervisor’s sister had a friend of a friend who moved into a quiet neighborhood in Madison, Connecticut. One morning, in the fall of 1989, the woman was raking leaves on her front lawn when she heard someone calling, “Help me, somebody help me!” At first she thought she was just hearing things, and nobody seemed to be around on this Saturday morning. But the sound persisted, “Help me, somebody please help me.” So the woman took her rake and started walking across the yards toward the faint cry. It led her to a house a few houses down from her own, and the woman went near the back door; she realized the cry was coming from inside the house.

The woman went to the back door and called out the name of the person who lived there. “Help me. In here! In here!” was what she heard next. So she opened the back door and went inside, following the cries to the bedroom.

The lady of the house was completely naked, and her hands and feet were tied to the bedposts. On the floor was her husband, naked except for a Superman cape. It seems that the man had stood on the bedroom dresser and made a flying leap to the bed, but he hit his head on the night table and was still out cold. The couple’s children were at a religion class or something.

The neighbor called paramedics to come, and she covered both husband and wife with blankets, but she was unable to untie the wife. When the paramedics came in they couldn’t stop laughing.

My supervisor said that this story spread throughout the neighborhood, and the husband and wife started leaving for work very early and returning very late so as not to face the neighbors. Eventually they put their house up for sale.

Told in a letter from Rosemary Lyons of New Haven, Connecticut, dated June 23, 1990. The laughing paramedics are a standard motif of legends about embarrassing situations. The Ann Landers column, quoting “A Minnesota Reader,” and describing the husband dressed in a Batman costume, was published on January 30, 1990. The earliest published text of “Superhero Hijinks” I’ve found is in Paul Smith’s 1986
The Book of Nastier Legends.
Although this version from England describes the man wearing a Superman costume, the accompanying illustration shows the couple dressed as Batman characters. Spiderman and Tarzan are also mentioned in the legend, which swept the United States from 1988 through early 1990, aided and abetted by Paul Harvey’s reporting it from Dallas in 1989. The last time I saw the story in print was in the
Los Angeles Times
on October 7, 1994; the husband was dressed as Batman, and police were called “to revive the Conked Crusader.”

“Sex in Disguise”

Household Headquarters
Office of the Divorce Counselor

The American Home

Subject: A Halloween Party

To Whom it May Concern:

A couple was invited to a real swanky masked Halloween party, so the wife got costumes for both. On the night of the party she got such a terrible headache that she told her husband to go without her. He protested, but she said all she was going to do was take a couple of aspirins and go to bed; there was no need for his good time to be spoiled by not going; so he got into his costume and off he went.

The wife, after sleeping soundly for an hour, woke without a sign of pain. As it was just a little after nine, she decided to go to the party. In as much as her husband didn’t know what kind of costume she was wearing, she thought it would be a good thing to slip into the party and observe how he acted when she wasn’t around. So she joined the party and the first one she spied was her husband, cavorting around on the dance floor, dancing with one slick chick and then another, copping a little feel here and there, so the wife slipped up to him and, being a rather seductive babe herself, he left his partner standing high and dry and devoted his attention to the new stuff that had just arrived.

She let him go as far as he wished, (naturally) and finally when he whispered a little proposition, she agreed and they went out to one of the cars—etc.—etc.—etc. Just before unmasking at midnight, she slipped away, went home and got back into bed, wondering what kind of explanation her husband would make for his behavior. He came home and went right into the bedroom to see how she was. She was sitting up reading and asked what kind of time he had.

He said, “Oh, the same old thing. You know I never have a good time when you aren’t there.” Then she said, “Did you dance much?” He said, “Well, I’ll tell you, I never danced a dance. When I got there, Bill Rivers, Les Brown and some other guys were stag too, so we just went back in the den, and played poker. But I’ll tell you one thing; that fellow I loaned my costume to sure had a HELL-OF-A-TIME!!”