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by Scoper...
LEGENDS IN OUR OWN MINDS
When did you hear your first
"urban legend?" Maybe it was during summer camp or on an overnighter
with friends. I'll use my psychic powers to say that you were probably
very young, you bought it completely and it scared the hell out of you.
Because, don't you see, it was TRUE! There really WAS a bloody hook
hanging from the young lovers' car door! OH MY GOD!
Before I get too scared to
write any more, I should explain that an "urban legend" is a story - a
more or less contemporary story - that gets passed along from one person
to another until finally no one has any idea where it came from.
I don't necessarily mean ghost stories, though an urban legend might contain
a ghost.
There are other criteria.
A true urban legend, according to one definition: "appears mysteriously,
spreads spontaneously, can contain elements of horror, humor or both, and
cannot easily be verified or traced to a particular source." The
person who told it to you always heard it from someone else, who heard
it from someone else. Of course, the best urban legends are real
jaw-droppers, with just enough plausibility to keep you thinking "well
maybe," enough to get you to tell others so you can see THEIR jaws drop.
And I'm not making fun of
UL's; they're fascinating. I heard the "bloody hook" story years before
Bill Murray's character told it around the campfire in the movie "Meatballs."
It still holds up. As a news writer, I'm trained to stick to the facts
and double-check my sources. It's humbling to realize that while
my "straight up" stories are forgotten the next day, the great urban legends
never seem to fade away. Ready for a trip down memory lane?
A negative rumor, spread
about a major American company, is perfect urban legend fodder. Some
people probably still believe that Wendy's hamburgers contain ground-up
worms. (They don't, and they didn't.) Proctor and Gamble
lost millions in sales when the story started circulating that their crescent
moon logo was a Satanic symbol.
This one pops up every few
years: cyanide-laced glue in ATM deposit envelopes. Lick the envelope,
make your deposit, kick the bucket. We've all lost friends to this
tragedy, I'm sure.
When formerly famous people
drop out of sight for years, they must have died, right? Look to
urban legends to clear up the mystery. Jerry Mathers (the Beaver)
was killed in Vietnam. At least HE got a flag-draped coffin, which
was more than Mikey from the Life cereal commercials got when he died (exploded?)
from eating Pop Rocks and washing them down with soda. (Both these
guys are very much alive, but so are the legends of their demise.)
From the late 1960's, when
paranoia over LSD acquired a "reefer madness" quality, everyone, it seems,
heard about the two tripping college students who blinded themselves by
staring at the sun. People HAVE damaged their retinas doing this,
but usually children, and usually during a total solar eclipse. The
urban legend tipoff is that we never heard the names of the college students,
or the examining physician or hospital, or exactly when or where this supposedly
happened. But it COULD have happened, and that's all a UL needs for momentum.
LSD also gave us urban legends
of the "stoned hippie babysitter" who thought she was putting a turkey
in the oven, but of course it was the baby. (Leave me e-mail if you've
got proof of this one.)
Cass Elliot of the Mamas
and the Papas COULD have choked to death on a ham sandwich, but she didn't.
She had a heart attack, but by the time the coroner's report came out a
week later, no one wanted to believe it. That's another urban legend
tipoff: plausibility. Cass obviously had a hearty appetite, and while
the heart attack was surely related to her obesity, that's not nearly as
cool a story.
Then there's the lady who
died from the bites of black widow spiders, because spider eggs infested,
and hatched inside, her foot-tall beehive hairdo. (She never noticed the
eggs because she rarely took her hair down or washed it.)
My all-time favorite urban
legend, though, is that blood-curdling female scream about halfway through
"Love Rollercoaster," a 1976 top-40 hit from the Ohio Players. Here's
what happened: As the song was being recorded in the band's apartment,
a woman was being murdered next door. No, they were in a studio and
the woman was slashed to death in the next studio. Might have been
a prostitute outside on the street. Actually, it was the woman on
the album cover. Or a cleaning woman. Or not a murder at all,
but a scream recorded from a psychiatric patient undergoing shock therapy.
Or from a 911 call.
Forgive me for bursting your
bubble, but Ohio Player Jimmy "Diamond" Williams says during the "breakdown,"
fellow band member Jimmy Beck (a guy, not a girl) did the scream, originally
intended to resemble the kind of scream you'd hear from a rider on a real
rollercoaster. How 'bout that? But once the urban legend of
a murder got started (courtesy of a DJ?) record sales jumped. The band
members kept quiet and smiled all the way to the bank.
Now you've got it, the formula
for creating an urban legend of your very own. Enjoy, but remember,
make sure it can never be traced back to you. And be really, really
careful when parking late at night with your girlfriend…and keep your radio
on, just in case somebody escapes from the nearby Asylum For The Criminally
Insane…
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