Too Good to Be True: The Colossal Book of Urban Legends (30 page)

“The Lost Wreck”

J
asper [Alberta, Canada]—The mystery of the Miette Hot Springs Road, along with the four human skeletons who made the tale so intriguing, can finally be laid to rest.

Like many a tantalizing story which gains credibility with repeated tellings, this rumor seems to have sprung from a fertile imagination fed by the clean mountain air.

A story doesn’t have to be true to be told again and again.

According to one resident, who preferred to remain nameless, a friend of a friend heard about a gruesome discovery made by a work crew widening the road to Miette Hot Springs over the summer.

“They were killing time over lunch by pushing boulders over the edge when they heard one of the rocks hitting metal.

“That got them interested. When they went down to look, they found this car with 1950s license plates and four skeletons inside.”

As the story goes, for reasons never explained, authorities wanted to keep the discovery a secret. Of course the hint of a cover-up simply added zest to the tale.

Don Dumpleton, Jasper’s chief warden, chuckled when asked about the mystery before he explained there is no truth to the story.

“I’ve heard the story. The only thing is the place keeps changing,” he said.

Part of an article headlined “Miette skeleton mystery as real as mountain mist,” by Paul Cashman, in the
Edmonton Journal,
December 15, 1985. As mentioned in my discussion of this story in
Curses! Broiled Again!,
the discovery motif in this modern legend seems to have been borrowed from a Norwegian legend about the discovery of a medieval village that was decimated by the Black Death, or bubonic plague. In a version of this story collected in 1835, a hunter found the long-forgotten village when an arrow he shot into the woods struck the bell of the village church; when he pushed through the under-growth to find the source of the strange clang, he found the village, peopled only by skeletons. An even stranger aspect of “lost wreck” lore was the discovery in a canal near Boca Raton, Florida, on February 22, 1997, of a wrecked van containing the skeletal remains of five teenagers missing since July 14, 1979. Copies of news articles from the
Tampa Tribune
(March 2nd), the
Palm Beach Post
(March 3rd), the
St. Petersburg Times
(March 10th), and the
Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel
(April 29th) contain full details about this tragedy and its aftermath. The van was spotted in the 20-foot-deep murky waters of the canal next to a busy highway by a man wearing polarized glasses to search for fish. Now if he had been casting for catfish with a heavily weighted line, and if his lead sinker had struck metal, then I would wonder about the total accuracy of these reports.

“The Death Car”

I
heard this story in about 1968; it was very popular in this area at the time. Supposedly, the car was a new dark blue Thunderbird with a black vinyl roof. The owner had shot himself in the head while parked on a lightly traveled prairie road outside Steinbach, Manitoba [Canada], and his body was not found for about two weeks. It happened during the summer, when temperatures sometimes reach 115 degrees, and his remains had more-or-less liquefied in the vehicle.

According to the story, after the Steinbach police discovered the car, it was towed into a nearby Ford dealership. Eventually, the Thunderbird’s interior was ripped out and the car interior was completely sandblasted, re-painted, re-carpeted, and re-upholstered. But the smell had embedded itself directly into the molecules of the metal frame.

Though the car was priced at only $500, nobody would buy the used Thunderbird. The smell was still too strong. But then, nobody could find that car on a sales lot anyway.

Based on notes from my conversation on March 16, 1989, with Paul E. Pirie of the Fort Frances, Ontario, police force. Fort Frances is in far western Ontario, just across the river from International Falls, Minnesota. Folklorists traced “The Death Car” legend back to the mid-1940s before losing the scent. Its prototype seems to be a traditional legend about ineradicable bloodstains left at a murder site. Presumably, as the story was told and retold, the stains became a stench, and a car became the death scene. The low price for the flawed classic car is a detail that entered just after World War II, when new cars were in short supply. When I was in high school, the deal was $50 for a befouled Buick; the story has evolved to mention many different makes of cars on sale for various bargain prices. Frequently, the car is a Corvette that has the smell embedded in its fiberglass body. In my 1999 book
The Truth Never Stands in the Way of a Good Story,
I dispute the claim of folklorist Richard M. Dorson to having found the origin of the legend in an actual incident in a Michigan small town. However, in July 1990,
Automobile Magazine
reported on a 1959 Cadillac Eldorado Seville, with only 2,216 miles on the odometer, that was garaged as evidence for a murder case after its owner had been executed in the front seat. After 22 years in storage, the Cadillac was sold to car collector John Pfanstiehl, who drove it just 16 more miles before placing it in the Car Palace Museum in Somerset, Massachusetts. Pfanstiehl wrote to me in 1986, “I am sure all the previous reports of the death cars were false, so sure that I almost dismissed the one true legendary car when I was told about it.”
Automobile Magazine
commented, correctly, “not all of the legend is intact. The seats don’t smell.”

“The Missing Day in Time”

THE SUN
DID
STAND STILL

Did you know that the space program is busy proving that what has been called “myth” in the Bible is true? Mr. Harold Hill, President of the Curtis Engine Co. in Baltimore, Maryland, and a consultant in the space program, relates the following development:

I think one of the most amazing things that God has for us today happened recently to our astronauts and space scientists at Green Belt [
sic
], Maryland. They were checking the position of the sun, moon, and planets out in space where they would be 100 years and 1,000 years from now. We have to know this so we don’t send a satellite up and have it bump into something later on in its orbits. We have to lay out the orbits in terms of the life of the satellite, and where the planets will be so the whole thing will not bog down! They ran the computer measurement back and forth over the centuries and it came to a halt. The computer stopped and put up a red signal, which meant that there was something wrong either with the information fed into it or with the results as compared to the standards. They called in the service department to check it out and they said, “It’s perfect.” The head of operations said, “What’s wrong?” “Well, they have found there is a day missing in space in elapsed time.” They scratched their heads and tore their hair. There was no answer!

One religious fellow on the team said, “You know, one time I was in Sunday School and they talked about the sun standing still.” They didn’t believe him; but they didn’t have any other answer so they said, “Show us.” He got a Bible and went back to the Book of Joshua where they found a pretty ridiculous statement for anybody who has “common sense.” There they found the Lord saying to Joshua, “Fear them not; for I have delivered them into thine hand; there shall not a man of them stand before thee.” Joshua was concerned because he was surrounded by the enemy and if darkness fell they would overpower them. So Joshua asked the Lord to make the sun stand still! That’s right—“The sun stood still, and the moon stayed…and hasted not to go down about a whole day.” Joshua 10:8,12,13. The space men said, “There is the missing day!” They checked the computers going back into the time it was written and found it was close but not close enough. The elapsed time that was missing back in Joshua’s day was 23 hours and 20 minutes—not a whole day. They read the Bible and there it was—“about (approximately) a day.”

These little words in the Bible are important. But they were still in trouble because if you cannot account for 40 minutes you’ll be in trouble 1,000 years from now. Forty minutes had to be found because it can be multiplied many times over in orbits. This religious fellow also remembered somwhere [
sic
] in the Bible where it said the sun went BACKWARDS. The space men told him he was out of his mind. But they got the Book and read these words in II Kings: Hezekiah, on his death-bed, was visited by the Prophet Isaiah who told him that he was not going to die. Hezekiah asked for a sign as proof. Isaiah said, “Do you want the sun to go ahead ten degrees?” Hezekiah said, “It’s nothing for the sun to go ahead ten degrees, but let the shadow return backward ten degrees.” II Kings 20: 9–11. Isaiah spoke to the Lord and the Lord brought the shadow ten degrees BACKWARDS! Ten degrees is exactly 40 minutes! Twenty-three hours and 20 minutes in Joshua, plus 40 minutes in II Kings make the missing 24 hours the space travelers had to log in the logbook as being the missing day in the universe! Isn’t that amazing? Our God is rubbing their noses in His Truth!

From an anonymous, single-spaced, typewritten, and photocopied sheet telling a spurious story that has circulated with variations in details for at least two decades, especially in fundamentalist Christian circles. Essentially the same story has been repeated in periodicals, religious tracts, letters to editors, and in sermons or lectures. A press release from the Goddard Space Flight Center of Greenbelt, Maryland, flatly denies the story and explains that Harold Hill worked only briefly there in the 1960s “as a plant engineer, a position which would not place him in direct contact with our computer facilities or teams engaged in orbital computations.” The “Missing Day” story—precomputer version—can be traced to C. A. Totten, a lieutenant and instructor who taught military science and tactics at Yale from 1889–92 and also preached anti-Semitism and predicted an imminent apocalypse—several times. For a detailed discussion of this story and its history see my 1999 book
The Truth Never Stands in the Way of a Good Story.

“The Ghost in Search of Help”

M
ost of the incidents in this book have taken place in Nova Scotia, but we need an occasional one from outside to confirm experiences here. I have a story from England…[which] is both strange and beautiful and came to me in a surprising way. I had spoken to the School of Community Arts at Tatamagouche one evening and dropped in to see some friends there the next day. In the hall I met Rev. Mr. Minton from Lockeport…an Anglican rector, and so is the man of whom he spoke. Knowing of my interest in ghosts, he asked if I would like to hear a story from England. He had heard it from the sister of the man to whom it happened, and she has been a friend of many years’ standing….

“Rev. Mr. Gray belonged to a large family and had been recently ordained. This was in the early Edwardian period. He had taken a parish in the East End of London. His housekeeper had gone to bed and he was sitting in his study smoking his pipe and thinking out his sermon for Sunday. Presently the door bell rang—a spring bell—and he went to answer it. Standing under the gas light in the fog stood a little old lady in poke bonnet and shawl and a once black skirt now green with age. She pleaded with him to go to an address in the West End of London. She said he must go because he was urgently needed. The young clergyman tried to put her off as it was very late, but she pleaded so earnestly that he finally promised to go that same night.

“He took a cab and at length arrived at the address. It turned out to be one of the large mansions in the West End and it was lit up and obviously there was a party going on. After he had rung the bell and waited, the butler came and the clergyman said, ‘I believe I’m wanted here. My name is Gray.’

“The butler said, ‘Have you an invitation?’

“‘No, but I’ve been asked to come. Some one needs me.’

“The butler asked him to wait in the little anteroom and presently brought back the master of the house. He was a well-known titled gentleman. Mr. Gray then told him what had happened and the man looked very odd and asked if he could describe his visitor. As he did so, the man looked terrified. He then confessed to having led a wicked life of crime which included white slavery, whereupon the clergyman tried to help him. He urged him to stop this life and make his peace with God, and the man finally made what appeared to be a serious confession. The clergyman then gave him absolution and said in leaving,