Title:
Urban Legends
Subtitle:
The As-Complete-As-One-Could-Be Guide to Modern Myths
Author:
Ngaire E. Genge
Publisher:
Three Rivers Press, 2000
ISBN
0-609-80494-4

Urban legends have become household words. Almost all of us know some urban legends, and when someone tells us an urban legend we tend to assume that it is not meant to be taken too seriously. What started out as a pajama party story or campfire tale is now a recognized part of Americana.

It is doubtful that Jan Brunvand, one of the best known authors of books on urban legends, guessed that his column would have such an encompassing effect on North American culture. As further evidence, the thriller "Urban Legend" enjoyed some popularity among young movie goers, and publishers of comic books have produced several volumes of illustrated urban legends.

Ngaire E. Genge's book Urban Legends is yet another entry in the field's growing literature. By the author's count, the book includes over 400 urban legends, though she explains at the end that there are another 500 stories on her desk, waiting to be included in her next collection.

Readers of alt.folklore.urban will be familiar with many of the stories found in the book, though I was often pleasantly surprised by a new twist that I hadn't heard before.

For example, there's the old "Death Car" story1, regarding the car that no one will buy because of the terrible smell in the car. Genge includes a version that is new to me, where one customer finally is found. When the salesman asks how it is that the smell doesn't bother him, the customer realizes that something is very wrong. A few days later, the Death Car returns, covered again in blood and brain tissue. The last customer killed himself when he found that his loss of a sense of smell was due to an inoperable brain tumor!

The "Stolen Granny" story2 is also there, including a neat version where the car thieves, upon discovering the body tied to the roof rack, run off past the car's owner, shouting, "And you call us crooks!"

The "Microwaved Poodle"3 makes an appearance, also with a difference. In this case the poodle is replaced by a cat. When the cat's owner accidentally spills whiskey on the cat, he decides that the best way to dry the booze off the cat and keep his drinking secret from his wife is to pop the beast4 into the microwave.

Some of the old favorites show up a bit lack luster, either due to the sources used by Genge, or possibly due to her own retelling. For example, the version of "The Captain and the Lighthouse"5 used by Genge is strangely bland, compared to the commonly known version circulated on the internet in the past two years.

The wonderful trick test "Which Tire"6 is familiar to most urban legend aficionados, and it usually ends with the question "Which Tire?" Genge adds the explanation that the question was an all-or-nothing question, and that the students gave three different answers so that they all failed the test. The addition makes sense, but detracts from the story's neat punchline.

Often Genge adds explanations to the stories. The "Upside Down Harvard Hall"7 is explained to originate with the QE II Library at MUN, which was built backwards, making its solar heating design ineffective. Just how the MUN library relates to the much older Harvard legend isn't clear.

She explains the "Lights Out!" story8 by referring to the case where a family of tourists made a wrong turn in Los Angeles and was fired upon by some gang members. Didn't that shooting occur long after the 1993 hoax that started the "Lights Out!" story?

In the case of "Assault With a Deadly Turtle"9 she refers the reader to the TV show "America's Dumbest Criminals,"10 apparently ignoring the fact that the show's reliability is less than overwhelming.

The matter of "Lucky Wrapper" stories11 is a bit more complicated. After explaining that the stories probably originated with some products that did have lucky wrapper promotions, Genge goes on to suggest that the Tootsie Pop version of the story may have its origins in reality. She tells of a mom who passed on the idea of free Tootsie Pops to her kids, only to discover from her own mother that there never were any free Tootsie Pops: when the company responded with a letter explaining that there was no Tootsie Pop promotion, her father bought a Tootsie Pop and put it in the envelope to avoid disappointing his daughter.

Sometimes the explanations are confusing. Are they meant to show that the story is true, that it really happened? Or are they just part of the legend? Are they an instant where something similar to the story happened? These are often contentious issues, and they are not helped when Genge's presentation confuses the lines between them.

According to one story, TCU used to have the categories "M/F/U" for "Sex" on the student registration forms. Genge writes that some time ago, one professor at TCU wrote a program to track male and female students' success in university programs. Ostensibly due to the professor's incompetence at programming, the result was three categories for student gender: male, female, and undecided. Not only is that an unlikely explanation, but it isn't clear if that isn't just another TCU legend. Genge doesn't say.

"The Scream Session" is a familiar story about a campus where students let off emotional steam by screaming out of their windows for some length of time. During the screaming a rapist abducts a coed, and no one can tell her desperate screams for help from the students' therapeutic noises. Genge makes it sound as if scream sessions were or are a usual occurance on USAn campuses. Really?

Many stories do, of course, have useful background provided. Genge describes the issues surrounding the "That'd be the butt, Bob" story12, including Bob Eubank's offer of $10,000 to anyone who can produce the relevant tape of the show. (Now that the tape may have turned up, the story may receive a new treatment in future collections of urban legends.)

That Al Capone once wrote a complimentary letter to Ford is a great story in itself. That it was really Clyde Barrow (as in "Bonnie and Clyde") makes for an even better story13.

Whether or not cats are prone to smother babies is a commonly occuring question in urban legend circles. It is a plausible enough scenario to make new parents keep their cats out of the nursery, but it sure smells of the stuff that urban legends are made of. Genge writes that the New Zealand Medical Journal documents at least one case where it is pretty unquestionable that a cat smothered a baby to death.

However, the "New Zealand Medical Journal" brings us to a serious problem with Genge's entire book. Most of the time, Genge cites no sources at all. There are no sources given for the various version of her stories. There are no sources for most of her factual information. Even in the very rare cases where a source is cited, Genge does not give a complete citation; if I wanted to read about the smothered baby, I'd have to search the NZMJ myself.

The lack of sources is really quite glaring, and confronted me after only a few pages into the book. That is when I also discovered that the book has no index of any kind. The book is fun to read, and of some interest even to those of us who are quite familiar with urban legends. But the lack of documentation and of an index are a serious enough failing that I give the book an AFU bookshelf score of only 4.

Incidentally, according to a picture on page 193, it is possible to buy email14 by the can. Only in Canada!

Footnotes

  1. "Death Car" - stories about great cars for sale real cheap because a dead body made it smell really bad.
  2. "The Stolen Granny" - stories of dead bodies stolen along with the cars on whose roofs the bodies are tied.
  3. "The Microwaved Poodle" - stories of animals put into microwave ovens to dry.
  4. The cat, not the wife.
  5. "The Captain and the Lighthouse" - stories of ship's captains pulling rank on lighthouses.
  6. "Which Tire" - stories of students caught lying when the test contains an unexpected question.
  7. "The Upside Down Harvard Hall" - stories of university campus buildings built wrong.
  8. "Lights Out!" - stories of gang killings triggered by helpful gestures.
  9. "Assault With a Deadly Turtle" - boyfriend attacks girlfriend with a snapping turtle.
  10. "America's Dumbest Criminals" - USAn TV show featuring criminals who do dumb things. Is that like a show featuring popes who are Catholic?
  11. "The Lucky Wrapper" - stories about candy wrappers that are marked for give-away promotions.
  12. "That'd be the Butt, Bob" - supposed answer given on "The Newlywed Game", a USAn TV game show featuring newly married couples, when Bob Eubanks asked, "Where was the most unusual place you've ever made love?"
  13. Bonnie and Clyde were a couple of notorious bank robbers. They were eventually waylaid by a posse of law enforcers who riddled their Ford V8 with enough bullets to turn it into a sieve.
  14. Never mind. "Email" is French for enamel.