Too Good to Be True: The Colossal Book of Urban Legends (32 page)

“O St. Joseph, guardian of household needs, we know you don’t like to be upside down in the ground, but the sooner escrow closes the sooner we will dig you up and put you in a place of honor in our new home. Please bring us an acceptable offer (or any offer!) and help sustain our faith in the real estate market.”

From an article by Kyung M. Song in the
Courier-Journal
of Louisville, Kentucky, April 12, 1991. The burying of St. Joseph to stimulate a real estate sale is known even more widely across the United States than this article suggests, and starting in 1990 it was written about by publications ranging from the
Wall Street Journal
and the
Washington Post
to supermarket tabloids. I have found no evidence for the supposed centuries-old European origin of the practice mentioned above, but I have found other mail-order catalogs offering inexpensive statues suitable for burying. While the planting of statues can be accepted as a genuine folk custom that was spread via example and word-of-mouth and varied in execution, the prayer to St. Joseph quoted above has not been collected elsewhere and sounds like the invention of a realtor or a seller of statues intending to make a better “ritual” out of the practice.

“The Devil in the Disco”

M
y brother was involved in a car accident and was taken to the hospital. My mother went to see him that day, that is when she overheard some nurses speaking of a girl that was being treated there for mental disturbance and burns claimed to have been given to her by the devil.

That afternoon my mother told me about the saying [rumors] but she didn’t know exactly what had happened. So I called a few friends and got more or less a complete story.

According to the information I obtained, this girl had told her mother that she was going dancing at Boccaccios 2000 [a discotheque]. Her mother objected and the girl very determined, said she was going. So right before the girl walked out of the door, her mother yelled out, “Well if you go I hope you meet with the devil.”

After the girl had arrived at Boccaccios she was sitting down when all the girls started a commotion about a young man who had walked in the door. Everyone claims he was so handsome, it was unreal. It is also said that he was dressed extremely well.

After a while the young man came and asked the girl to dance, she was thrilled at the thought that she was the one he had chosen. So while they were dancing the girl noticed that everyone on the dance floor was walking away and staring at them. When she turned to look at her partner she noticed he was not dancing on the floor [i.e., he was floating in the air].

She was puzzled, so she looked again and then she noticed he had animal feet. So she began to scream and tried to run away from him, but the young man began to laugh very loud and mysterious, and he grabbed her. When he grabbed her he burned her shoulders. Another man tried to help the girl and he was also burned. So much commotion was made that the young man, by then known as the devil, had disappeared. No one knows how or when. The only thing was that he had left an odor of sulfur. And a laughter of horror was heard. But no one knows how he left.

SOMETHING EVIL IS ON THE PROWL IN OUR CASINOS HARRISON FLETCHER

This story comes from my wife, who heard it from my sister, who has a friend, who knows this lady, who says she saw the whole thing.

A while ago—it could have been Good Friday—an elderly woman and her best friend were playing the slots at Isleta Gaming Palace. They had been there all day long and had been winning off and on.

Toward the end of the day, one of the women put all her money in a machine and lost. Just as she was getting ready to leave, a handsome old man, who had sat behind her the entire time, tapped her on the shoulder.

“Here’s $3,” he said. “I have a feeling you might win.”

“No thanks,” the old woman said. “I’m getting ready to leave. But you go ahead and play.”

The man smiled a handsome smile. “Please,” he said. “I insist.”

So the woman took the $3 and began to play. No sooner had she punched the first button than the winning words flashed on her screen: Jackpot: $3,000!

The woman was amazed.

Stunned.

What luck!

She turned to thank the man and share her winnings—as is the casino custom—but he was gone. She searched the entire casino, but he had vanished. Just like that.

The woman cashed her winnings and headed to the parking lot, when suddenly, she saw the old man sitting in his car and rummaging through his glove compartment. She walked up and tapped gently on the window. The man slowly turned to face her.

“He had these burning red eyes and pointy horns!” the woman recalled later. “It was…the devil!”

The woman is resting at a local hospital now. The collection box at her church is $3,000 richer.

But wait.

There’s more.

That same day—and it could have been Good Friday—another woman was playing blackjack at Isleta Gaming Palace. She too had been gambling all day and losing her money. Just as she stood to leave, a tall, dark and handsome man in a black coat tapped her shoulder.

“Why don’t you play the slots?” he said. “The one in the corner will win.”

At first, the woman refused, but she too relented. Two minutes later, a $5,000 jackpot! She wheeled around to thank the man, but he had begun walking away into a crowd. Just before he disappeared, she noticed something peculiar poking from the back of his coat: a pointed tail!

“Give me a break,” says Conrad Granito, the general manager of Isleta Gaming Palace. “I’ve heard about 16 different versions of that story.”

The disco story was collected from a Mexican-American male, age 21, in Edinburg, Texas, fall 1978, and published in 1984 by Mark Glazer in “Continuity and Change in Legendry: Two Mexican-American Examples,”
Perspectives on Contemporary Legend: Proceedings of the Conference on Contemporary Legend, Sheffield (England), July 1982,
pp. 123–27. Other disco versions of the story appear in the third
Perspectives
collection, published in 1988, in an article by Maria Herrera-Sobek, “The Devil in the Discotheque: A Semiotic Analysis of a Contemporary Legend,” pp. 147–57. Fletcher’s column on the devil in an Indian casino appeared in the
Albuquerque Tribune
on May 9, 1996. Both stories are modernizations of old traditional devil legends; they recycle such motifs as the mother’s curse, the diabolical well-dressed stranger, floating in air, physical characteristics (flashing eyes, horns, animal’s feet and tail), burning, a smell of sulfur, and dancing being forbidden on Good Friday. Although these themes are consistent with Mexican-American culture in the Southwest, I have heard of the devil visiting a tavern in a small town near Yakima, Washington, and there are several published stories about the devil coming to a Cajun party in Louisiana or to a French-Canadian dance in Quebec. In the movie
Meet Joe Black,
Brad Pitt is a very handsome devil who also ends up at a disco. The devil is described in many older European legends as playing cards with gamblers; there he is recognized by his cloven hoof when a player drops a card and reaches under the table to pick it up. I won’t be surprised if the dark, mysterious, and dangerous stranger shows up eventually in sushi bars, espresso shops, and aerobics classes.

Judging from the
topics of urban rumors and legends concerning the business world, Americans don’t trust big business either to behave honorably or to avoid doing things that are just plain silly. Chapter 8 illustrated how contamination stories have plagued some companies, but modern folklore goes beyond these claims to levy charges that businesses have supposedly mistreated, misled, and misinformed their employees and clients on a regular basis. There are also turnabout stories—equally unverified—about how people have fought back against big business. A letter from a company executive published in
Time
(May 11, 1992) demonstrates how one such story leapt from anonymous tradition to the pages of a major publication:

Very likely what we have here is a piece of anti-Wal-Mart folklore—a story passed among the teeming millions who both shop at Wal-Mart (or similar huge chain stores) and, yet, at the same time regret the decline of downtown business districts and small, locally owned companies. The apocryphal chant, parodying an athletic cheer, sums up the buyers’ dilemma: whether to support the downtown locals or to save money at the place where they “stack it deep/sell it cheap.” The solution is to save the money, but also to chant the chant. Did a Wal-Mart employee ever actually chant this cheer? It’s hard to know for sure, but my rule is “Never say never.”

The bigger a company is, the more likely there will eventually be some derogatory stories circulating about it. You can’t sell all those Big Macs or Whoppers or Domino’s Pizzas without someone sooner or later starting rumors about things like worms or worse getting into the ingredients. And whenever a big company changes something, like its name, logo, or product line, watch out! Example: Why did Kentucky Fried Chicken alter its name to just KFC? Ask around, and you’ll hear:

They developed a mutant four-legged chicken, and now the government won’t allow them to use the word “chicken” for the creature.


Colonel Sanders had a rule that as long as the company kept the word “Kentucky” in its name, they could never refuse service to someone who lacked money, and too many homeless people were taking advantage of the free food.


A psychic advised the company that the old name had bad vibes.

Or is it just because the word “fried” carries negative health connotations? Yes, probably, but that isn’t nearly as interesting as the rumors.

Sometimes there’s such perfect logic to a business rumor that you yearn to believe it, whether or not there’s proof—or even the possibility of proof. Is it true that the Apple computer company uses a Cray supercomputer to design its hardware systems and, conversely, that the Cray company uses an Apple? The Internet newsgroup alt.folklore.urban marks this one as “true,” and, as a devoted Macintosh user, I really want to believe it.

Speaking of the Internet, this marvelous electronic data conduit and grapevine for gossip is simply crawling with folklore. Cartoonist Scott Adams, that leading satirist of business foibles, alluded to the Internet’s lore-sharing potential in his book
The Dilbert Future
(1997):

(If you don’t know what Adams is referring to, the answer is just three stories down in this chapter.)

Even when the company is not named in a legend, the
type
of business involved, and its supposed chicanery, may be made perfectly clear. Consider the role of the insurance company (not to overlook the actions of the cigar smoker and the legal authorities) in the story related in this piece of E-mail I received recently:

Most people would grasp the flaws in law and logic involved in this story of what one commentator has called “cigarson” nevertheless, the tale does satisfy our notions of what it takes to fight the system, plus how the system fights back and wins most of the time.

Published reports of legitimate settlements of class-action suits against big companies sometimes spill over into legend land, where the facts are merrily mixed with fantasy, and a whole new set of specifics may emerge. A case in point is a 1996 settlement involving the pricing of infant formulas. On January 1, 1997, at just about the time the deadline for filing claims expired, a new twist in the story was faxed, E-mailed, phoned, and posted all across the country. Supposedly, Gerber Products Company, which had absolutely no involvement in the formula suit, had been ordered to give every child under twelve years of age a savings bond or cash in amounts ranging from $500 to $1,500. All the parents had to do was forward a copy of the child’s birth certificate and Social Security card to a post office box in Minneapolis. Take a look at the “Gerber in the News” page on the Gerber Products World Wide Web page to see their blunt denial. Business folklore may often be funny, but it’s no fun fighting back.

“The Bedbug Letter”

M
y recent essay on “duck letters” has brought forth the classic of that species. Thanks to Ernest R. Kaswell, of Reston [Virginia], for passing it along.

In case you’ve never had the pleasure of receiving one, “duck letters” appear to offer up great compassion and hasty action in response to whatever you’ve requested. In fact, they are designed to hug your request to death in an avalanche of words. They duck, even as they appear to help. Of course, Capitol Hill offices and government agencies are past masters of the art.

Anyway, Ernest says the classic (and perhaps original) duck letter is “The Bedbug Letter.”

Before airplane travel became routine, Ernest recalls, business executives traveled by train. They slept in berths in Pullman cars.

What would happen, Ernest says, is that Mr. Jones would have dinner and a drink in the dining car, then retire to his bedroom for the evening. “A couple of hours later, he feels itchy, starts to scratch, sits up, turns on the light and finds that the bed is infested with bedbugs,” Ernest writes.

“He calls the porter and conductor. They apologize, but say they can’t give him another bunk because the train is sold out. So he sits up all night in the club car, gets off the train in Chicago, is mad as hell and fires off a letter to the president of the Pullman Company in New York.

What comes back is a letter that fairly drips with abject caring and regret.

“We are very sorry about your experience,” it says. “Be assured that we do everything possible to keep our beds and facilities absolutely immaculate, and we do apologize for this unusual situation. We hope this does not cause you to stop traveling by Pullman. Try us again, and we know you will have a more pleasant experience.”

There’s only one trouble. A note is attached to the letter with a paper clip. Obviously, it’s an interoffice memo that should have been removed but wasn’t. It reads:

“Bill, send this SOB the bedbug letter.”

From “Bob Levey’s Washington,” the
Washington Post,
May 6, 1993. The term “duck letters” is new to me. I replaced Levey’s string of symbols representing profanity with the more common term, “SOB.” Usually the quoted letter is more detailed, reporting actions like these: “[The car] has been stripped of all furnishings. The bedding, upholstery, curtains, carpet, and all other combustible materials have been burned. The toilets and their fixtures have been scrubbed down and sterilized with carbolic acid. By the time you receive this letter, the car will have been fumigated and steam cleaned from end to end…the responsible personnel have been reprimanded, docked two weeks’ wages, and assigned to refresher training….” Sometimes the original letter of complaint is accidentally sent back with the reply, and it bears a rubber stamp reading “Send the bug letter.” In other versions the routing memo refers to the passenger as “this jerk” or “this dame.” The story has been reported from the 1940s and was probably popular even earlier. A tongue-in-cheek letter to the editor in the
Princeton Alumni Weekly
for February 5, 1992, even claims that “The Bedbug Letter” dates to 1889 and attributes it directly to George M. Pullman, the president of the sleeping-car company.

“Red Velvet Cake”

Red Velvet Cake and Its Story

The story behind this cake is both interesting and expensive. It seems that a woman from Seattle was dining at the Waldorf-Austoria Hotel in New York and was deeply impressed with the cake served to her one evening. It looked like red velvet with a beautiful white frosting. She asked them if they would send her the recipe. They did, but it arrived C.O.D. with a charge of $300! She paid the cost and then consulted her lawyer who told her she could do nothing to get her money back. Since the price of the recipe had been costly to her, she decided all her friends should enjoy baking and eating this luscious and extravagant Red Velvet Cake.

Cream shortening, sugar, eggs. Make a paste of cocoa and food coloring and add to the cream mixture. Mix salt and vanilla with buttermilk and add alternately with flour to the cream mixture. Then mix soda and vinegar and fold into the mixture. Do not beat. Bake in two 9-inch pans, greased and floured. Bake 20 min. at 350 degrees.

Cook flour and milk until thick, stirring constantly. Let cool until cold. Cream together sugar, butter, vanilla. Add to cold flour mixture. Beat until the consistency to spread. When finished it looks like whipped cream, but until then is curdy.

N
OTE
: the 2 ozs. of food coloring is the correct amount, and this is the reason for the color and texture of red velvet.

Copied verbatim from a mimeographed sheet handed out by a Home Economics teacher at the University of Idaho in 1961. This story bedeviled the Waldorf-Astoria until the early 1980s, when the expensive-recipe legend shifted to the Mrs. Fields company and eventually to Neiman Marcus as a story about a cookie recipe. In some versions of the legend the woman’s lawyer charges her an outrageous fee for his advice, thus adding insult to injury. Prototypes for the legend in the 1930s and ’40s featured recipes for various kinds of candy, fudge, ice cream, and cake supposedly sold for an outlandishly high price. The earliest published high-priced cake recipe found so far was for “$25 Fudge Cake” as made by a railroad chef and included in a Boston women’s-club cookbook in 1948. Although red cakes have been known to American cooks since the early twentieth century, a ripoff-priced
red
cake recipe is not found in legends until the 1950s, about the same time that the story attached itself to the Waldorf-Astoria. Even while disavowing the legend, the hotel has given out copies of the “authentic” recipe at no cost. Often served at Christmas, Valentine’s Day, or the Fourth of July by those who enjoy it, Red Velvet Cake represents a strictly “fun food” aspect of American cuisine, similar in that respect to creations like “Mock Apple Pie” (made with Ritz crackers) and “Tomato Soup Cake.”