The Lure of Urban Myths

By now you may have heard the story of Gunther Burpus, a hapless 41-year-old man in Bremen, Germany who couldn't find his house keys and decided to crawl through the cat-flap in his front door. Unfortunately, Burpus got stuck. When he called for help, he managed to attract the attention only of some passing students who decided to play a prank. Instead of freeing Burpus, they pulled off his trousers, painted his bottom bright blue, stuck a daffodil between his cheeks and then placed a sign nearby: Germany Resurgent, an essay in Street Art. Please give Generously. There poor Burpus remained for two days, his pleas for help disregarded by passersby who thought them part of the "exhibition." "People just said, 'Very good! Very clever!' and then threw coins at me," Burpus remarked afterward. It was only when a dog started licking his genitals that an old woman complained to the police and Burpus was finally freed.

Or maybe a friend of yours who happens to be a friend of a friend of one of the guests told you the one about the shocking wedding party. It seems that during a big reception at the Pierre Hotel in New York, the groom stood and called for silence. The guests naturally assumed he was about to propose a toast. Instead, he announced that the marriage was going to be annulled. If the guests wished to know the reason, they had only to turn over their dinner plates. When the stunned guests flipped their plates, they discovered photographs taped there of the bride flagrante delicto with the best man.

At least that's the way it was told to me. But a similar story circulating at the same time set the reception at a banquet hall in New Hampshire. Another version set it in Medford, Massachusetts. Another placed the incident near Schenectady, New York. A version set outside St. Paul, Minnesota had two significant differences: At the altar, before the vows were taken, the bride announced the ceremony would not continue because the prospective groom had slept with the maid of honor.

Each version of this story comes branded as truth right down to places, dates and sources. Each was told by someone who knew someone who knew someone at the ceremony or reception. The trouble is, the wedding, which was supposed to have occurred sometime last year, has been the subject of newspaper columns and radio call-in shows since at least 1985. Despite the story's decade-long existence, no one has provided one scintilla of evidence that it ever really happened. Indeed, an intrepid Washington Post reporter who investigated the tale last fall found that none of the facts jibed—not New Hampshire nor Schenectady, not a reception nor a ceremony.

As for the story of Gunther Burpus, which has been printed as fact in The Vancouver Sun, The Palm Beach Post, The Providence Journal-Bulletin and in the January issue of this magazine (The Year in Sex), a debunker named Barbara Hamel has found it to be a complete fabrication. Hamel says that the German magazine Der Spiegel, which has been cited as a source for the story, had never heard of Gunther Burpus. Neither had the police in Bremen. As for Burpus' quotes, someone obviously invented them to give the story more texture.

In short, the story of Gunther Burpus, like that of the wedding revenge, is what is known as an urban legend—a tall tale that is purportedly absolutely true but isn't. By one estimate there are now more than 400 of these legends. University of Utah folklorist Jan Harold Brunvand, perhaps the preeminent urban folklorist, has published five volumes' worth of them with titles such as The Choking Doberman and The Baby Train. No one seems to know exactly where these yarns originated. They just seem to erupt spontaneously in Europe and across America. They then get retailed in newspapers and magazines (Reader's Digest is a frequent source), on the radio (Paul Harvey trades in these tales), on the Internet (there is a rabid urban folklore newsgroup) and, most of all, by word of mouth—from what urban legend professionals call an FOAF ("friend of a friend" to whom the incident is alleged to have happened).

Although they have grabbed the attention of academics only recently—some trace the first scholarly interest to Richard Dorson's American Folklore in 1959—contemporary legends are an old phenomenon. A few, such as the story of the butcher who sticks a sausage in his pants fly and shocks his customers by hacking off the end of the sausage with a cleaver, can be traced to before the turn of the century.

Many of the hoarier ones sound as if they had been perfected around the campfire.

There's the favorite about the man driving alone one night when he stops to pick up a beautiful young hitchhiker. She gives him her destination, then falls silent during the rest of the trip. When the driver arrives at the girl's house, he turns to find that his passenger has vanished. Baffled, he gets out, knocks on the door and tells his strange tale to the woman who answers. She isn't shocked. Her daughter had died some years before in a car accident, but every so often the girl's spirit tries to make its way back home by hitching a ride with an unsuspecting driver.

And there's the one Brunvand calls the Hook that dates from the late Fifties. Two high school kids drive to lovers' lane one dark evening and are just about to begin their amour when they hear on the radio that a madman has escaped from the local asylum. The catch is that the madman has a hook for a hand. Frightened, the boy peels out and speeds his date home. When he gets out to open his girlfriend's door, he sees a bloody hook dangling from the handle.

Then there's the classic about the babysitter who has tucked the children into bed upstairs and settled down in front of the television when she gets a prank call from a man laughing hysterically. She hangs up, but the phone rings again. Again she hears the hysterical laugh. She slams down the receiver, but the phone rings a third time and again there is the laugh. Unnerved, she calls the phone company. The operator tells her that the next time the crank phones, the girl should keep him on the line so they can trace him. Of course, the fiend calls and laughs, then hangs up. The next time the phone rings, however, it is the operator. "Get out of the house!" she screams. "The call is coming from upstairs!"

These classics may sound preposterous today, but there are other contemporary legends that are plausible enough to pass muster as fact. Nearly everyone has heard about the alligators that prowl the New York sewers. Supposedly they are descendants of baby gators that children brought back from Florida vacations. When the children returned to New York, their parents realized they couldn't exactly have a pet alligator, so they flushed the critters down the toilet and into the sewer system where, feasting on rats, they soon formed a colony of predators. In some versions, the gators in the subterranean darkness have turned into blind albinos.

There is another "true" story about the high school coed with the beehive hairdo that she proudly sprays until it is as lacquered as a Chinese cabinet. Unfortunately, the girl begins to have fainting spells during class. One day she can't be revived. At the hospital a nurse notices a small spider crawling from the hairdo of the comatose young woman. Cracking open the beehive, the nurse finds a black widow and hundreds of her young nesting there. The girl, who hadn't washed her hair in months, later dies of the spider bites.

Still another legend that has the lineaments of truth is the one about the California couple eating at an outdoor café in Tijuana. They see a flea-bitten Chihuahua begging under the table. Taking pity on the animal, the woman feeds it a few scraps. When she and her husband leave the restaurant, the Chihuahua tags along. By the end of the day, the woman is so smitten with the dog that she decides to take it home as her pet and smuggles it across the border, either under her blouse or in a bundle in the backseat.

Back home in suburban California, the woman washes and grooms her new pet and retires for the night. In the morning, however, she finds it listless—in some versions oozing mucus—and rushes it off to her veterinarian. Later that day she gets the vet's call. "Where did you get that dog?" he wants to know. The woman, realizing it is illegal to transport an animal across the border, at first lies and says she found it wandering the streets nearby, but the vet calls her bluff. "You didn't find this animal here," he says. "This is a long-haired Mexican sewer rat."

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Those of us who have heard and then retold these legends know that they provide entertainment at the water cooler, at the tavern after work or during dormitory bull sessions. But where they once were dismissed as nothing more than amusing balderdash, they are now perceived by folklorists as expressions of the national psyche. "We project our fears into the stories," says University of Georgia sociology professor Gary Alan Fine, a leading interpreter of folklore. He specifically cites as a propelling theme "the mistrust we have of contemporary society, the fact that so much in our culture is beyond our control."

One story that sprouted around the country in the summer of 1994 tells of a lonely, friendless woman working in an office. Taking pity, her co-workers plan a surprise birthday party for her. They manage to get her apartment key and hide before she arrives home. When she does, they hear her go into the kitchen and call her dog. It sounds as if she is feeding him so they prepare to emerge, but when they burst into the kitchen to yell "Surprise," they find her sitting naked on the floor, with peanut butter spread on her vagina and her dog lapping away. As the story goes, the young woman, mortally embarrassed, never returns to work.

Or there is the story making the rounds just this year about the Samaritan in the supermarket parking lot who sees a woman in a car slumped over the steering wheel one sweltering afternoon. (In fact, Brett Butler has been telling it as having happened to her sister.) Asked if she needs help, the poor woman moans that she has been shot in the head and reaches up to show gray matter, oozing from the wound. The Samaritan immediately summons police and paramedics, but when they arrive they find that the woman has not been shot after all. She has actually been hit in the head by the tin at the end of a tube of oven-ready Pillsbury biscuits that had exploded in the heat, and she mistook the dough that had splattered on her hair for her brains.

There are scores of such legends dealing with miscalculation and embarrassment. Consider the story about the man who goes home with his secretary and, expecting romance, disrobes when she leaves the room, only to discover that the secretary and his wife have arranged a surprise birthday party for him. Or the one about the couple trysting in a small car when the man gets stuck inside the woman (Penis Captivus, Brunvand calls it) and rescuers have to remove the car's top to free them. Or the one about the young man meeting his girlfriend's parents for the first time. He accidentally sits on their pet Chihuahua, crushing it. He then hides the deed by stuffing the carcass under the cushions.

The preponderance of contemporary legends, however, seem to tap a much darker reservoir of terror. According to Patricia Turner, a folklore (continued on page 78)Urban Myths(continued from page 72) scholar at the University of California at Davis: "They are definitely about the ambivalence and anxiety and uncertainty that people have about one another." These sorts of legends portray a dangerous world in which anything can happen, a world of unrelenting horror.

Seen this way, contemporary legends can practically be cataloged by the terrors they exploit. To those who regard the city as ominous there is the story, usually told of New York City (though it has lately been making the rounds in California with either Reno or Las Vegas as. the setting), of the group of fraternity boys who spend a wild weekend in the Big Apple. One of them meets a woman at a club and leaves with her for the night. The next morning his buddies get a distress call from their cohort. He is in a hotel room and begs them to come and get him. They arrive at a seedy hotel to find their friend in bed, the sheets soaked with blood, and a fresh surgical scar on his back. They rush him to the hospital, where they are informed that the man had apparently been drugged and had one of his kidneys removed. A ring of thieves has been harvesting organs to sell on the black market for transplants. Anyone is fair game.

To those who live in dread of crime, there is the story Brunvand calls the Choking Doberman. In this one a woman finds her pet Doberman breathing heavily and takes the dog to the vet for observation. The woman soon gets an urgent call from the vet: She must leave the house immediately and call the police. Why? Because he found three fingers lodged in her Doberman's throat. Rushing to the scene, the police discover a burglar hiding in the woman's closet—sans three of his fingers.

Another story suggests that crime follows you, even into paradise. In this one, a couple honeymooning in Jamaica find that their room has been burgled and that all their possessions—except for their camera and their toothbrushes—have been stolen. Vowing to make the best of their vacation, the couple decide to stick it out. But when they return home and develop the pictures, they find a photo of the thieves mooning the camera. Stuck up their rectums are the toothbrushes.

One tale—again, usually told by a friend of a friend of one of the participants—has three women getting on an elevator in a New York hotel when they see a black hand prying open the closing elevator doors. The doors part and a towering black man enters the elevator with a large dog. "Sit," the man commands, and the three woman immediately hit the ground. The man apologizes. He had been talking to his dog. It turns out that the man is Reggie Jackson. (In one version, he's O.J. Simpson.) And in most tellings, Jackson winds up paying for the women's dinners.

The elevator legend—of course it never happened—may actually serve to defuse racial tension. But these days more contemporary legends exploit issues of race, largely because they enable us to express racial fears safely. "It is illegitimate to make a blanket statement like, 'Blacks are criminals,'" explains Fine. "One would be tarred in such a case for being a racist. What one can do, however, is talk specifically about, say, gang initiations: 'Did you hear that in order to get into this gang, they rape white women?' There is no evidence for it, but it seems plausible because gang members may do something like that."

One legend making the rounds, in fact, has a black gang in Chicago cruising the streets at night with their headlights out, waiting for a driver to flash his lights at them. Any driver who does, however, is executed. Another legend that has been taken quite seriously in some suburban communities tells of a black clown dressed like Homey of the old In Living Color TV series who attacks or abducts children. (In several versions there is a whole vanload of sinister black clowns.) Some more traditional urban legends have even been revised to reflect racist fears. The choking Doberman, for example, is often said to have three black fingers in its gullet.

Drugs have also fueled contemporary legends, specifically legends about drug-crazed loons who do harm to themselves or others. Almost everyone has heard about the people who went blind by staring at the sun during LSD trips or those who wind up gouging out their own eyes. (There is no proof that either happened.) More heinous are the stories of the drugged-out babysitters—sometimes the boyfriend of a sister tending her siblings—who assure the parents checking in that everything is under control. The babysitter tells them she has even put a turkey in the oven. When the parents return home, however, they discover that the turkey is actually their baby.

While these legends address our personal sense of vulnerability at the hands of psychos and criminals, other legends express a dread of the vast impersonal forces of corporate America. "The rumors," Fine observes, "spring from uneasiness about what is perceived to be the complete amorality of American corporate life." Sometime in the early Eighties, a rumor began circulating that Procter & Gamble, one of the world's largest manufacturers of household products, was in league with the devil. One variation of this rumor has the company contributing to a satanic cult, allegedly because its founder back in the 19th century made a pact with the devil to ensure the company's success. The proof was supposedly right there in Procter & Gamble's trademark, which features stars around a crescent moon bearing a face. (The association between the moon and Moonies is thought to have been a trigger for this story.)

Back in the Seventies, Church's Fried Chicken, a popular fast-food franchise (particularly in the South), was identified, falsely, as being owned by Ku Klux Klan supporters who added a secret ingredient to sterilize black males. The Adolph Coors Co. has also been identified in legend as being connected to the Klan. A more recent legend has Snapple donating a share of its profits to white supremacist groups—a story that Patricia Turner, author of I Heard It Through the Grapevine: Rumor in African American Culture, believes may have sprung from Snapple's association with radio commentators Rush Limbaugh and Howard Stern.

A more elaborate but equally fictitious story told in the black community is one about how Oprah Winfrey ordered designer Liz Claiborne off her show when Claiborne admitted to the studio audience that she purposely cut her clothes narrowly so that black women couldn't wear them. And a bigger legend still is the widespread belief among African Americans and some whites that AIDS is either the result of a government biological experiment gone awry in Africa and Haiti or that the virus was released intentionally by our government to destroy the gay and black communities.

Understandably, technology is another growth area for contemporary legends, clearly reflecting anxieties about the brave new world we face. One urban legend staple is the story of the woman who washes her pet poodle (continued on page 152)Urban Myths(continued from page 78) and decides to hasten the drying by putting the dog in her new microwave. The poodle explodes. There is a similar story about a woman who wants a fast tan and begins visiting a tanning salon—more frequently than the salon advises—to get one. In one version, the woman begins feeling woozy and goes to her doctor to find out why. In another, her husband tells her that she has a peculiar odor. In both the doctor gives her the bad news: She has broiled her insides and now will certainly die.

Based on sheer numbers, however, the most terrifying of all our fears are sexual. From the story of the man who slips his date some Spanish fly and later finds her impaled on the gearshift to the one about the honeymoon hotel that secredy videotapes couples for pornography, there are more legends involving sexual embarrassment, sexual compromise and sexual danger than any other subject. Now homophobia seems to have inspired a whole new cluster of tales.

The most nakedly homophobic is the one, first appearing in the late Eighties, about the college student who goes to the doctor after feeling some rectal pain. At the end of the examination, the doctor tells the young man that he has obviously engaged in anal sex, but the man protests that he has not and is absolutely straight, though his roommate is gay. Concerned by the diagnosis, the student roots around his dorm room. He finds a bottle of ether among his roommate's effects and comes to the conclusion that his roommate has been drugging him while he sleeps and then having intercourse with him.

Another homophobic legend, this one dating from 1990, is the story of the gay man rushed to the emergency room. It seems that, using a plastic tube, he had inserted a live gerbil up his rectum to stimulate his prostate but couldn't extricate the animal once it was inside. The doctor must then perform a gerbilectomy. One variation of this tale that adds to its veracity actually puts a name on the hospital, Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles, and on the victim, Richard Gere. Although she refers to Gere as "Jerry" to conceal his identity, California State University professor Norine Dresser discovered that Gere's name began to be linked to the legend about the time he resurfaced with an "unexpected hit" (Pretty Woman) and at a time when the actor had joked to a magazine writer about having performed some youthful indiscretion with a chicken.

Of all the contemporary sex legends, however, the ones that draw most powerfully on modern hysteria are those incorporating AIDS. In the most widely told AIDS legend, a recently divorced man meets a woman at a bar and winds up spending the night with her, making love repeatedly. In another version, the man and the woman continue seeing each other over the course of a month or so, though the woman insists that the man not drive her home. Either the next morning or one morning after a night of lovemaking, depending on the story, the man wakes up alone. He stumbles into the bathroom. There scrawled on the mirror in red lipstick he finds a message: Welcome to the World of AIDS! It seems that the woman had contracted AIDS from a boyfriend and had vowed to avenge herself on every man she could.

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One could, of course, go on to tell the legends about medical catastrophes, terrible, accidents, police escapades, college anxieties—each adding to the miasma of dysfunction and paranoia. But while the themes of these stories are generally transparent and familiar, it is far less clear why people feel the need to relate them in the first place. Fairy tales at least help us conquer our amorphous childhood fears by projecting them onto tangible villains vanquished by heroes and heroines. Traditional folktales usually offer some moral instruction. But contemporary legends do neither. At best they are cautionary—wash your hair, watch what you bring back from Mexico, don't sleep around—but seem a rather weak foundation to sustain what is obviously so strong an institution.

It is more probable that contemporary legends aren't intended to provide us with a way to surmount the anxieties of modern life. They are intended to demonstrate to us that these terrors are so ubiquitous and inexplicable that we do not have any way to deal with them. Thus, we shouldn't bear any responsibility for them.

What intensifies the power of this awful, amoral vision of modern life is that, as the critic Digby Diehl once wrote, "at the time of the telling we believe the story to be true." Hypothetically, we can trace it to an eyewitness who told it to a friend who told it to a friend. Newspapers report these legends as if they were true. Radio talk shows discuss them as if they were true. Soon these stories enter the realm where their truth needn't be proved even in the face of logic.

Perhaps, though, our insistence on the truth of these legends is itself a form of revenge against the helplessness and lack of control the stories purvey. Whatever else contemporary legends are, they may be the last vestige of an oral folk culture that operates from the grass roots up. They are expressions of a culture generated by us rather than for us. As Roger Angell recently lamented in a New Yorker piece attacking debunkers:

In a time when almost every fresh plot, exaggerated demise or weirdly victimized citizen seems to come to us from Buttafuocoland or from another TV cops serial or the latest sound-blasting, overweaponed movie release, let me hold on to whatever scraps come my way by word of mouth, from across the dinner table or while I'm waiting by the Xerox machine.

Angell expresses here not only the joy of authentic folktales but also the pride of authorship. These stories are ours. And if in telling them, embellishing them and reconfiguring them, we insiston their truth, that is only an author's prerogative in casting his spell. We want them to be believed as we half-believe in them ourselves. We do so not because we are manipulators or fools, but because in allowing us to transform our collective anxieties these contemporary legends grant us one of the few powers left to us in the anomic society they describe: the power to tell stories about our world.

In narrating our terrors, we console ourselves.

The vet finds three fingers in her dog's throat. Cops find a burglar in the closet—sans three fingers.

The doctor gives her the bad news: She has broiled her insides and now will certainly die.