Trick or truth
Chicago Tribune | By Jimmy Greenfield | RedEye | October 31, 2005
Your buddy e-mailed you George Carlin's hurricane rules.
Your boyfriend sent you that video of the bungee jumper who's bitten by an alligator
when he hits the water.
Great stories.
Too bad they weren't true.
Carlin never wrote those rules, and the bungee jumping video is from an Australian
beer commercial.
Both live in the pantheon of urban legends, almost sure to be repeated and likely
never to die.
Urban legends used to simmer across the culture, slowly passed along by word-of-mouth
from one friend to another before finally reaching critical mass.
Then came the Internet.
Now, urban legends move silently around the globe at the click of a button, landing
in the in-boxes of hundreds of people at once--each with the ability to pass it
to thousands more.
A common e-mail urban legend promises--falsely--that hundreds of dollars will
be sent to you by Microsoft's Bill Gates just for forwarding an e-mail to test
a new product.
That is just one of hundreds of urban legends to cross the public consciousness
in recent years, but it won't be the last.
"I'm fond of saying that there probably were urban legends back in prehistoric
times about those darned Neanderthals across the ridge that were abducting and
killing babies," said Bill Ellis, professor of English and American Studies
at Penn State and past president of the International Society of Contemporary
Legend Research.
Those who study urban legends say the stories usually evolve out of peoples' fears,
which helps explain why many of them center around Halloween. Not all of them
are false, however.
"There are true urban legends," said Barbara Mikkelson, who along with
her husband, David, operates snopes.com, a Web site that tracks urban legends.
"Most people think they must be [false] because just about every [urban legend]
they run into is false."
One of the most popular Halloween urban legends is the story of trick-or-treaters
getting poison-laced candy. False urban legend? Not entirely.
In 1974, Texan Ronald Clark O'Bryan was dubbed the "Candy Man" after
killing his 8-year-old son with cyanide-laced Pixie Stix to collect more than
$60,000 in life insurance, according to news reports.
"Halloween has been the date that has been mentioned in a lot of what we
call rumor panics," Ellis said. "It's an interesting kind of urban legend
that says, 'hasn't taken place in the past, but is going to take place in the
near future.' "
A variation of a Halloween story began shortly after Sept. 11, 2001, when e-mails
claimed an Arab man had told his girlfriend to stay out of airplanes on Sept.
11 and out of malls on Halloween. According to snopes.com, the FBI heard the rumors
and investigated. It found the rumors "not credible."
"It was tremendously popular for a while, but I think it tended to die of
its own obviousness," Ellis said. "Halloween doesn't mean anything to
the Middle Eastern mind. It's just not a holiday that's a part of their calendar.
"Secondly, why a shopping mall? There are all kinds of things that happen
in shopping malls, but it's not a logical place for a terrorist attack."
Barbara Mikkelson recalls writing about Sept. 11 rumors within 24 hours of the
attacks, but as the news changes, so do the rumors.
"I've spent the last month on Katrina," she said.
The Mikkelsons have tracked down hundreds of urban legends under dozens of different
categories since starting their site in 1995. Snopes.com gets 250,000 unique visitors
a day, the Mikkelsons say.
"It was our hobby," Barbara Mikkelson said. "It just grew out of
that and was never meant to be more than just our hobby. We're satisfied with
it. I was a housewife, and David worked with computers. David got laid off. It
came at a wonderful time because it gave him a lot of time to work on our site."
After investigating, the two typically give a status report calling them "True,"
"False" or "Unsubstantiated." Making a living off the Web
site was not what they intended.
The Mikkelsons are constantly tracking stories they hear from many sources, including
hundreds of tips they get each day from readers.
Urban legends often reflect the state of the world.
One that surfaced in the '80s told the story of a man waking up after a one-night
stand and finding a note left for him on his bathroom mirror: "Welcome to
the wonderful world of AIDS."
"A lot of these urban legends have moralistic overtones," said Jim Underdown,
who investigates paranormal claims as executive director of the Center for Inquiry
West.
"In that your decadent behavior is somehow responsible for the new predicament
you're in. A lot of these involve being drunk or getting out of control somehow
and then paying the price afterward."
To be sure, some of the urban legend stories are disturbing and horrifying. But
that's the point.
"The reason the stories live so well is because they're good stories,"
Underdown said.
"They're sort of enticing or exciting anecdotes that people tell. You never
hear of a boring urban legend."