Too Good to Be True: The Colossal Book of Urban Legends (40 page)

Lane Yerkes. From Smithsonian vol. 23 #8

W
hat a meathead!

When she first saw blood dribbling from the customer’s head, a California grocery clerk wanted to call an ambulance. But a closer look revealed that the man was trying to smuggle a steak out of the store by hiding it under his hat. Unfortunately for him, the package began to leak while he was waiting in the checkout line. You know, that sort of thing just wouldn’t happen with broccoli.

The first version, sent to me in March 1997 by Rich Wickliffe of Coconut Creek, Florida, is a well-known story in communities with a large retired or homeless population. The second version is from
Vegetarian Times
for July 1990. This story has been well known in Europe since the early 1970s, especially in England and in Scandinavia, and usually concerning a woman trying to steal a frozen chicken concealed in her hat. Older prototypes for the story describe another variety of meat or butter concealed under someone’s hat in an attempt to steal the food. A version in which the chicken is concealed in the shoplifter’s bra became popular in the United States and Canada in the early 1990s.

“Indecent Exposure”

I
heard a funny story the other day. It’s true, though. My roommate heard it from a friend of his who lives in Boston. This couple he knows got married last year and decided to go to Jamaica for their honeymoon.

In the first couple of days they were down there, their hotel room was broken into. But nothing was taken. No money, nothing. So they forgot all about it. They just figured that the burglar must have been interrupted right after he got in. They had a great time the rest of their honeymoon. Hanging around on the beach, swimming, sailing around in the ocean. Everything was perfect.

And then they went home. About a week later they went and picked up the pictures from their trip. And as they flipped through them, through all the shots of the beach and the sunset and the waves, in among them was a shot of this native Rastafarian guy in the bathroom of their hotel room. And he’s got his pants down with his back to the camera and when the couple looks closer, they can see that the guy’s got the wife’s toothbrush stuck in the one place in Jamaica where the sun doesn’t shine.

This the earliest published example of this popular story I have found; it appeared in Jay Forstner’s article “Local Legends” in the
Ann Arbor (Michigan) Observer
for March 1991, p. 35. The earliest oral versions of this legend I have are dated in the autumn of 1990, and I have received some 60 further reports, half of them in 1991, and the latest in 1996. Most versions claim that the incident happened to a couple vacationing in a tropical paradise, but the story is also told about various European capitals. In Australian versions the perpetrators are sometimes identified as Aborigines. Alan Dumas of the
Rocky Mountain News
in Denver, Colorado, sent me a version in March 1991 in which the victims load their vacation slides into a tray without first viewing them; they discover the outrageous toothbrush picture when showing their slides to friends and family members. Issue number 30 of
FOAFtale News
(June 1993) included discussions of this story that had circulated on the Internet, plus reports of it being told in the Netherlands and in New Zealand. The Kiwi version claims that the thieves filmed their outrageous action on the victims’ video camera. In the summer of 1991 a Chicago theater group called the Neo-Futurists included a short skit in their revue that involved several actors brushing their teeth in the background while a narrator told the “Indecent Exposure” story.

“The Attempted Abduction”

A
woman I work with at the Sierra Nevada Museum of Art in Reno came back yesterday from a vacation in Los Angeles with a horrible tale of an occurrence at Disneyland. Her brother told her that a friend of his reported that they turned around for a moment during the Parade of Lights one night at Disneyland, and their very young child disappeared. They searched all over and didn’t find a trace of the child. They notified employees and positioned themselves near the exit gate in order to try and discover the child leaving. The child had been wearing very distinctive plaid tennis shoes. The Disneyland employees were helping them look, and suddenly someone saw one of the shoes and hurried into a nearby restroom where the child was found in new clothes and newly dyed hair. Just in time.

A
few years ago as the editor of another newspaper I started getting angry calls from readers wondering why we were “covering up” a news story.

At the big local suburban mall, so the story went, two women were thwarted while trying to kidnap a little girl. Supposedly the women had cut the toddler’s hair and changed her into little boys’ clothes, planning to smuggle her out of the mall. A security guard caught them at it. So the story went.

Why, our callers asked, didn’t the newspaper carry an article about it? Protecting our advertiser?

No! The reason is that there wasn’t a shred of truth to the story. None. Zero. It didn’t happen.

The same story had cropped up all over the nation, including in Muskegon, I’m told.

It was an “urban myth,” one of those rumors that makes its way around the country, person-to-person, often over years’ time. Urban myths are ridiculous, but have just enough plausibility to raise questions—and fears. They “could happen.” That’s what makes them so insidious, and so hard to kill.

After getting several of these calls, I decided to try to track down the rumor.

I asked a woman caller if she had seen the alleged kidnapping attempt take place. No, she said, but her sister had been there. I got her sister’s name and number.

No, the sister said when I called her. She hadn’t seen it happen, but her father-in-law had been at the mall at the time of the crime.

No, the father-in-law said, his daughter-in-law was mistaken. He hadn’t been at the mall, but his neighbor was good friends with the security guard who caught the kidnappers.

No, the neighbor said, it was his buddy who was friends with the security guard.

No, the neighbor’s buddy said. He’d heard the story from a mechanic who worked near the mall in question…

…who heard it from a salesperson……who heard it from her hairdresser……whose boyfriend was a police officer, etc., etc.

In each case the person passing along the rumor was sure it had come from a credible source. Some were absolutely positive the incident had happened; others were skeptical but passed the rumor along anyway.

The first story was sent to me in August 1986 by Nancy Peppin of Reno, Nevada. The second example is from a column written by Gunnar Carlson, editor of the
Muskegon (Michigan) Chronicle,
for the April 28, 1991, edition; it was sent to me by Cornell “Corky” Beukema, who worked years ago with my father in the Michigan State Highway Department. My files bulge with further versions of “The Attempted Abduction,” one of the oldest and possibly the most enduring of all urban legends concerning crime. I discussed this story’s background and its history up to 1985 in considerable detail in
The Choking Doberman
and
The Mexican Pet.
It seems as if every time a new shopping mall or amusement park opens, “The Attempted Abduction” will pop up again on the local level; then, often, citizens become outraged that the newspapers and police are not “doing something” about the problem. Carlson’s editorial is typical of most journalists’ approach to the story: they have heard it so many times without ever finding evidence that it happened in their communities that they can quickly debunk it. The older and much more tragic variation of this story is “The Mutilated Boy,” a legend that goes back to the Middle Ages and beyond; its prototypes were transmitted in ballad, story, and literature. Chaucer’s “Prioress’s Tale” is one anti-Semitic variation on the theme.

“The Unstealable Car”

D
etroit (AP)—A Florida motorist concerned about thieves used to keep his sports car chained to two palm trees in his yard each night.

One morning he noticed the rear bumper was chained where the front bumper had been. And there was a note on the windshield: “When we want it, we’ll come back and get it.”

A true story, swears David Manly of LoJack Corp. in Needham, Massachusetts.

B
etween my junior and senior years in high school—the summer of 1980—I attended a summer program at Wichita State University (WSU) in Wichita, Kansas. One of the RAs in the dorm where I lived told me this story, saying it had happened to a friend of a friend the previous year.

It seems that this guy owned a large new motorcycle. He parked it in the courtyard of the dorm every night. He chained it to a light post with a heavy chain, using a massive padlock. One morning he found his motorcycle chained to a different light post, and there was a note attached that read “If we want it, we’ll take it.”

The Associated Press story on the “LoJack” device, named as a takeoff on “hijack,” was distributed to newspapers in mid-September 1991. Variations of the foiled protection ploy devised for an expensive car are told all over the country. Sometimes the car is chained to huge steel staples embedded into the cement floor of a garage; or, the car is tightly surrounded by other vehicles and locked securely. Nothing works: the car is eventually found turned around or moved across the street with the taunting note attached. The motorcycle variation on the theme came to me from Joel W. Ekis of Lee’s Summit, Missouri, in August 1990.

“Stripping the Car”

M
y husband, a surgeon at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, came home with this story, not quite first hand, but the guy who told him the story knew the guy it happened to and “He could get more details.” OK. There was a guy who was a surgeon up at Yale; big guy, athletic type, black. He’s driving a BMW down the highway when the engine starts acting up. So he pulls over and lifts the hood to investigate.

Another guy—black too, or Puerto Rican, not sure—stops and taps him on the shoulder. “Hey, man,” says the second guy, “I ain’t gonna hassle you. You can have the engine, I’m just wantin’ the wheels.”

Sounds like an urban legend to me!

From a letter, whose signature is illegible, mailed from Philadelphia on May 15, 1993. Other versions of this story, often with a similar racist slant, specify that the car is a Mercedes or another expensive model stalled or with a flat tire on the Long Island Expressway or the Bronx River Parkway. The oldest report of “Stripping the Car” I have received dates from 1977. This is a story that G. Gordon Liddy also tells; in a 1991 article in
Forbes,
Liddy claimed that the incident had happened “Recently, in New York City.”

“Get Out of Here!”

I
heard this told on Long Island in the mid 1970s:

A man decided to get a free live Christmas tree by digging up one of the small pine trees recently planted along the Southern State parkway. He got as far as wrapping the root ball with burlap when a State Trooper pulled up and asked him what he was doing.