Kulapavana Posted January 12, 2005 Report Share Posted January 12, 2005 The stuff of urban legend Some -- well, a few -- of these tall tales are true. Some even happened here William Boei Vancouver Sun Wednesday, January 12, 2005 An American couple returning home from a skiing trip at Whistler spotted a disabled car on the side of the Sea to Sky Highway and a man waving at them in apparent distress. They pulled over. It was only a flat tire and they fixed it for him; the man said he was grateful but had no cash, and asked for the couple's name and address so he could send them a little something. A week later, their bank called. Their mortgage had been paid off and $10,000 deposited in their account by a grateful Bill Gates. No, it never happened. The story about the Microsoft founder -- who does spend time at Whistler -- is a West Coast variation of an urban legend that, a few years earlier, was set in Michigan and starred Donald Trump. That one contained a kernel of truth. Trump's mother was mugged in 1991, a passing truck driver grabbed the mugger and held him for the police, and Trump reportedly offered the driver a better job and gave him a cheque for an undisclosed amount. It's sometimes known as the Good-Samaritan-rewarded story and the Urban Legends Reference Pages call it "a classic windfall legend." Oscar Wilde used it in a story published in 1891. In fact, says Simon Fraser University psychology professor Barry Beyerstein, it expresses our desire for Good Samaritans to be rewarded, and in that sense it goes back to Biblical times. - - - Other kinds of urban legends contain some kind of warning or express our fears, and many of them are gruesome. Warning: here comes one now. Cecil Adams, who will tackle almost any reader question for his Chicago-based, semi-underground newspaper column The Straight Dope, put it this way: "Did a vacuum-flush commode once suck a woman's insides out?" The answer unfortunately is yes, more or less, and it happened right here during Vancouver's world fair, Expo 86. The cruise ship Pegasus was moored at New Westminster, serving as an overflow hotel for Expo visitors. A passenger called in a medical emergency, and the doctor who responded found an elderly woman in pain on her bed, a length of intestine protruding behind her. The woman, who was overweight, had sat on a vacuum toilet, completely sealing it. She flushed while seated, with horrific results. But it was a freak accident and not something most people need worry about, says Dan VanKeeken, who at the time handled public relations for Royal Columbian Hospital, where the woman was taken. "It actually did happen," said VanKeeken, now with the Alberta Motor Association. But the woman had a pre-existing medical condition involving loose connective tissue that would have caused something similar to happen sooner or later. "It was just exacerbated by the fact that she was large and she sat on a small vacuum toilet." VanKeeken said the woman recovered and left the hospital in apparent good health. Similar stories circulate about vacuum toilets on airliners, and the suction drains in swimming pools and Jacuzzis. Most are fictional, but there have been enough confirmed incidents to keep the cautionary tales in circulation. - - - Urban legends are basically folklore on the hoof, says Beyerstein, who chairs the B.C. Skeptics Society and often shares platforms with Jan Harold Brunvand, the father of the study of current folklore as urban legends. Before Brunvand, folklore was merely part of ancient times. Now we know that when we hear about a friend of a friend whose kidney was stolen, we're encountering an urban legend in the wild. "They've always spread by the best means available," Beyerstein said. "When it was the telegraph, that's how they moved. Then it was the telephone, or the radio, or the fax machine. Now it's the Internet. "They circulate at a much faster rate and disseminate much more widely. But by and large it's the same old thing, just updated." Beyerstein, who teaches biopsychology, has written his own chapter in urban legend lore, providing the definitive debunking of the notion that we use only 10 per cent our brains. He points out that electric stimulation of the brain reveals each area touched by a probe has a function, from storing emotions and memories to stimulating body movements. So as a literal statement it is "blatantly false" to say that we use only 10 per of our brains. But as an optimistic statement that human beings have untapped potential, it's hard to argue with. - - - One hallmark of urban legends is that you can rarely find the person they happened to. It's always a friend of a friend or someone who told the tale to somebody's hairdresser. Seek out the friend and you find that the source of the story is always one more step away. In 1997, the late advice columnist Ann Landers published a story related in a letter by a B.C. woman who said it had happened to a woman who works for her aunt and uncle's company in Kamloops. She was riding the ferry from Victoria to Vancouver, sitting outside on the upper deck with her newspaper and chocolate bar on the empty seat beside her. A man sat on the next chair over. After a while, the man picked up the chocolate bar and as the woman watched, dumfounded, proceeded to eat it. Then he picked up the newspaper and read it for a while, tucked it under his arm and walked away. The woman was too shocked to protest. But later in the ferry's cafeteria, she noticed the man reading the paper and eating a submarine sandwich. She walked to his table, took the sandwich out of his hand, took a big bite out of it and gave it back. Then she turned her back and marched off. When she returned to her car she found, sitting on the passenger seat where she had forgotten them, her chocolate bar and newspaper. Something like it might have happened somewhere, some time. There are variations on this legend in Great Britain, the U.S., Canada and Australia. Science fiction writer Douglas Adams insisted it happened to him in 1976, and he put a version in his 1984 book So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish. But the legend is known to have circulated in Britain at least as early as 1972. The "victim" is usually a woman, according to Snopes (www.snopes.com, a comprehensive Internet repository of urban legends.) The presumed thief is always male and often described as black, or a "punk," or, Beyerstein, adds, a member of any group that the people relating the story fear or are prejudiced against. - - - Some urban legends are set in B.C., many are told here, and some are known for being debunked here. The Vancouver Sun helped debunk one hoary old legend and confirm a related one involving lemmings. The original urban legend: At times of overpopulation, lemmings will commit mass suicide by jumping off cliffs, into the sea. The offshoot: During filming of the 1958 Walt Disney nature film White Wilderness, a film crew faked scenes that show the Arctic rodents migrating and jumping off a cliff. The original legend is false. Lemmings do go through population explosions and on migrations, and very likely some of them fall off cliffs. But they do not commit mass suicide. The offshoot legend, however, is true. The filmmakers bought a few dozen lemmings in the far north, shipped them to Alberta where they were shooting, and used them to fake the migration and suicide scenes. One of the sources cited by the UL Reference Pages is a 1992 Vancouver Sun story by now-retired writer Douglas Sagi, who quoted University of B.C. zoology professor Charles Krebs dismissing the lemming-suicide legend as bunk and declaring that the Disney lemming footage was "totally staged." - - - Invading bullfrogs the size of dinner plates are cleaning out local goldfish ponds, feasting on ducklings and attacking small pets. The story was featured in the "news from the fringe" section of urbanlegends.about.com, another good Internet source, and it is the honest-to-God truth. American bullfrogs are not native to B.C., but they've been around since the 1930s when they were imported and abandoned by a failed entrepreneur trying to sell frogs' legs for human consumption. Now they're all over southwestern B.C. Three years ago in Langley, resident Karen MacGregor accused a bullfrog of trying to drown her one-year-old cat, Boots. She had left Boots at the edge of a pond, staring at a big frog, wrote Sun reporter Nicholas Read. A couple of minutes later, a soaking-wet Boots limped into the barn, howling with pain and dragging an injured hind leg. The bullfrog must have grabbed the cat and tried to drag her under, MacGregor reasoned. "I don't know what else could have happened." Leslie Kristoff, an invasive species specialist with the Langley Environmental Partners Society, said it's quite possible. The American bullfrog can weigh 2.3 to 2.7 kilograms (five or six pounds). With its legs extended, it's as long as your forearm, and it will try to eat anything it can get its very big mouth around. A small cat is not out of the question. - - - But you can't tip a cow, no-how. This one's more of a spoof than an urban legend, but it continues to circulate. The idea of the legend, according to www.skeptic.com, is that cows sleep standing up with their legs locked. Rambunctious young city people sometimes drive into the country at night to find sleeping cows. "Cows are really stupid," the reasoning goes, "so it's real easy to sneak up on them. Then you shove a bunch of them over before they know what's happening. Boy, are they surprised." It's easy enough to debunk. Cows sleep lying down. But they spend so little time in deep sleep that at any given moment, most of them are alert. And being herd animals, they warn each other at the least sign of danger. The cows might well defend themselves against a tipping attack, and they are enormous, powerful animals. If there's a bull in the pasture, tipping becomes ever more dangerous. And how much force do you think it takes to push over a 680-kilogram bovine? That's the Vancouver angle. The skeptics' website includes a direct link to a University of B.C. site and a heavily tongue-in-cheek paper on zoological physics produced by a UBC biology student. The paper crunches numbers to show that a badly balanced cow with its feet together would require three people to push over. A cow in a normal stance -- feet 62.5 centimetres apart -- would require the strength of 4.42 people to tip. And a braced cow -- feet 82.5 cm apart -- could not be tipped by fewer than 5.75 people. Warning: Cow-tipping is not a real pastime. Do not attempt to tip a cow. Either you will be hurt, or the cow will. - - - So many urban legends, so little space. Briefly: - Broadcaster and former Sun columnist Jurgen Gothe is cited as a debunker of the legend that one type of champagne glass was modelled on the breasts of Marie Antoinette. - People have died after falling onto an open dishwasher drawer, with knives or other sharp objects blade-up in the cutlery rack. This one is true: one victim was a man visiting his mother's home in Vernon after the death of his father in 2001. - There is no confirmed instance of a cellphone setting off a fire or an explosion at a gas station. But the legend persists; one persistent legend says it happened in Trail. It didn't. But some oil companies, rather than try to stem the tide, have issued warnings against cellphone use at gas stations. bboei@png.canwest.com TOP 10 HOAXES, URBAN LEGENDS: Here are the 10 most common urban legends, e-mail rumours and hoaxes circulating on the Internet as of early November, according to urbanlegends.about.com. 1. Missing Child: Penny Brown A chain e-mail hoax, purportedly from a woman at the University of Calgary, falsely claiming there is an alert for a missing child named Penny Brown. It asks recipients to pass the message on to everyone they know. 2. Robin Williams paid Christopher Reeve's medical bills. Reeve said before his death it's not true. His good friend Williams says it's not true. Even as a paraplegic, Reeve made a good living from speaking engagements, a book contract, acting appearances and directing films. 3. Giant venomous, flesh-eating camel spiders attack American soldiers in Iraq. There really are camel spiders; they're big and they're found in Iraq. But they're also in the southwestern U.S. and other arid places. They're not venomous, and they do not attack people. 4. Picture of an American soldier in Iraq tending a tiny strip of green lawn, grown from seeds sent by his wife. Almost true. It's a real soldier and real grass, but he's in Qatar, not Iraq. 5. The U.S. flu vaccine shortage is the fault of Democratic vice-presidential candidate John Edwards for suing a U.S. vaccine maker on behalf of a client who got the flu, forcing American companies to stop making vaccine. Not true. Edwards is a lawyer, but has never sued over a flu case. American companies no longer make flu vaccine because it's a high-risk, low-return business. 6. The Hands of God. An e-mail picture shows a dramatic cloudscape taken in the wake of Hurricane Charley, with cloud patterns in the shape of two gigantic hands. The image is an obvious fake and was in circulation for at least a year before Charley hit Florida in late August. 7. Check 21: Stop trying to float a cheque for a few days before payday. From now on, it's going to bounce. If you're American, this one's pretty well true. New U.S. legislation mandates quicker processing of cheques, with banks sending each other electronic images of cheques, instead of the original. 8. Somebody's putting HIV-tainted blood in ketchup dispensers. Use only ketchup from sealed packets. Completely false, and probably seasonal as it surfaced just before Halloween. You can't transmit HIV via food. 9. The Eye of God. A Hubble telescope picture showing a nebula shaped and coloured like a galaxy-sized eye. Mostly true. It was a NASA astronomy picture of the day on May 10, 2003. It shows the Helix Nebula, and does resemble a vast eye. But NASA never called it The Eye of God. 10. Starbucks opposes the war in Iraq and refuses to donate coffee to U.S. Marines. Half true. Starbucks has no record of such a request, but would have refused it -- not because it has a problem with the war, but because under its corporate donation policy, the U.S. military doesn't qualify as a charity. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Join the conversation
You are posting as a guest. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.