Too Good to Be True: The Colossal Book of Urban Legends

by Jan Harold Harold Brunvand

  This beautifully elaborated version of a classic automobile revenge legend was written by Roger Ann Jones, managing editor of the Columbus (Georgia) Enquirer for the October 10, 1983, edition. Ann Landers published a reader’s version in a 1979 column, commenting “truth is stranger than fiction.” When she reran that column in 1990 both she and I were inundated with letters from readers who recognized a legend they had heard. So Landers then published a comment from a reader who remembered back when the story featured a $20 Packard. My own files contain mostly $50 Porsches, but also prices running from a mere $10 up to $500 and cars including Cadillacs, BMWs, Karman Ghias, and Volvos. Often the husband has run off with his secretary. In England, the story has been documented back to the late 1940s; prices range from 5 to 50 pounds sterling for either a Rolls Royce or a Jaguar. Sometimes the terms of the Englishman’s will specify that his widow sell the car and give the proceeds to his mistress. I heard singer John McCutcheon perform his own variation on A Prairie Home Companion; it began:

  One morning while reading the paper,

  In search of a new set of wheels,

  The classifieds had a most curious ad,

  In their listing of automobiles.

  What seemed like a wild stroke of luck:

  “Corvette Stingray,” it said,

  “Low mileage—bright red,

  83 model: 65 bucks.”

  “Dial R-E-V-E-N-G-E”

  At the sound of the beep: A Dallas wife did this two weeks ago, but it shows Houston kind of genius. Learning her husband was on a three-week stay in the Caribbean with another woman instead of in London on business as he had said, the Mrs. quietly packed up her things, retrieved a number from directory assistance, dialed it and then left the line open for the Mr. to find when his trip was over. The number? That of the Hong Kong continual time and weather recording….

  Garfield © Paws, Inc. Reprinted with permission of Universal Press Syndicate. All rights reserved.

  One woman was visiting her out-of-town boyfriend, only to be abandoned as he supposedly went to visit his mother in the hospital. But when it was revealed that the mother was in perfect health and Mr. Two-Timing Rat actually was on a romantic rendezvous, this woman’s solution was to call time and temperature in Tokyo, then leave the phone off the hook.

  Version one was published in the Houston Post some time in 1990; version two was in a Chicago Tribune article by Marla Donato headlined “Nifty ways to leave your lover,” and published as a Valentine’s Day item on February 12, 1993. I’ve collected references to this ploy—usually used to get rid of an unwanted live-in lover—going back to 1982. Foreign versions, such as a comical poem based on the legend published in the English journal New Statesman in 1986, usually mention calling the New York City number for the “speaking clock.” The legend became the basis of a “Garfield” cartoon on Sunday June 2, 1996. Telephone company experts assure me that the trick would not work, since calls to the time and temperature service have an automatic cutoff after a specified period, usually one minute.

  “Revenge of the Rich”

  As told by Paul Harvey

  Our For What It’s Worth Department hears from Hershey, Pennsylvania—where the woman in the Mercedes had been waiting patiently for a parking place to open up.

  The shopping mall was crowded.

  The woman in the Mercedes zigzagged between rows—then up ahead she saw a man with a load of packages head for his car.

  She drove up and parked behind him and waited while he opened his trunk and loaded it with packages.

  Finally he got in his car and backed out of the stall.

  But before the woman in the Mercedes could drive into the parking space…

  Deseret News

  A young man in a shiny new Corvette zipped past and around her and HE pulled into the empty space and got out and started walking away.

  “Hey!” shouted the woman in the Mercedes, “I’ve been waiting for that parking place!”

  The college-ager responded, “Sorry lady; that’s how it is when you’re young and quick.”

  At that instant she put her Mercedes in gear, floorboarded it, and crashed into and crushed the right rear fender and corner panel of the flashy new Corvette.

  Now the young man is jumping up and down shouting, “You can’t do that!”

  The lady in the Mercedes said, “That’s how it is when you’re old and rich!”

  Paul Harvey broadcast this story on May 22, 1987, but I quote the text from his 1991 book, For What It’s Worth, p. 1. After I published a version of “Old vs. Young” in a 1985 newspaper column I heard from readers who said they remembered the story with varying details from the 1960s and ’70s. It’s usually localized to a specific community, either American or European, but lacks the names of participants. An insurance adjuster wrote me saying he was convinced it had really happened until he checked back with his source, another adjuster. The source, of course, only knew the story from a FOAF. A similar incident was included in the 1991 film Fried Green Tomatoes, based on the novel by Fannie Flagg. This is another example of the numerous stories that Paul Harvey receives from his legions of listeners writing “from Main Street, USA.” Journalist Dan Wilson analyzed some of Harvey’s stories in the September/October 1997 issue of Extra and documented how this “broadcasting icon” not only fails to verify many of his supposed news items, but also injects “a conservative kick” into some of them.

  “Gag Me with a Siphon”

  This guy had a big RV that he had converted to propane during the 1970s gas shortage. The conversion left a huge gas tank unused, so he modified it to use as a sewage holding tank instead.

  One night, camped at an RV park, he heard a ruckus outside. He got up, threw on his robe, and emerged from the camper just as a car went screeching off into the night.

  The guy went back inside for a flashlight and came back out to investigate. What he found was a five-gallon gas can, a siphon hose dangling from the spout of his former fuel tank, and on the ground evidence of somebody having been very, very sick.

  Sent to me in 1989 by David Allard of Gag Harbor—I mean Gig Harbor—Washington, who said he heard it about 1980. I first heard “The Unfortunate Gas Thief” in 1978 and first saw it published in a small-town Kansas newspaper in 1982 as something that happened to a man from Iola. Some versions of the story mention that the RV owner had not removed the “Unleaded fuel only” decal from the tank’s spout. A version attributed to an unnamed motor-home owner in Seattle made the rounds of print and broadcast media in 1991 and ’92. These tellings usually ended, “The motor home’s owner declined to press charges. ‘It’s the best laugh I’ve ever had,’ he explained to the cops.” After Road & Track published the Seattle story in November 1991, readers wrote to inform the editors that it was merely an urban legend. As the Seattle version entered oral tradition, storytellers continued to elaborate details of the owner’s reason for adapting his tanks and the thief’s behavior after sucking on the misplaced siphon hose. Through all of these variations, the message is always clear: Served him right!

  “The Stolen Specimen”

  A man coming out of a supermarket carrying his groceries noticed a pregnant woman get into her car, then suddenly slump over her steering wheel and begin shaking. She appeared to be crying or having some kind of convulsions.

  Believing that she was starting to have her baby, the man dropped his grocery bags, ran over to the car, and tapped on the window, asking if the woman wanted him to call for help.

  “No, no, I’m all right,” the woman said. “I’m just laughing. You won’t believe what just happened.”

  The woman explained that she was on the way to an appointment with her gynecologist, who had asked her to bring in a urine sample. But the only clean container the woman could find in the house was an old wine bottle.

  So she had used the bottle for her specimen, and brought it with her. She left the bottle on the front seat of her car while she went into the supermarket to p
ick up a few items.

  The pregnant woman had come out of the store just in time to see a man reach into her car, grab the bottle, and run away.

  If the opening scene of this story sounds familiar, that’s because it’s also the way the legend of “The Brain Drain” (Chapter 1) begins: person in store parking lot offers to help woman in apparent distress. Both legends are resolved humorously, this time with another instance of someone stealing an undesirable item, like the dead cat, grandmother’s corpse, or contents of an RV sewage tank. In an English version of “The Stolen Specimen,” the woman—sometimes pregnant, sometimes not—is bicycling to the doctor’s office with her sample in a Haig whiskey bottle, stowed in full view in the handlebar basket. Someone nabs it. A version was once told in Utah, back when restaurants still were required to dispense liquor only in “mini-bottles,” and some drinkers bought their own minis in the state-owned liquor stores to bring to restaurants. At that time, the Utah woman in the legend carried her sample in a mini-bottle; how she managed to hit this tiny target was never adequately explained. Another instance of ingested urine appears in the box “Now Urine Trouble” in Chapter 22, and the same notion occurs in the old prank in which someone has apple juice in a specimen jar, then drinks it in front of witnesses, saying, “Looks a little thin; I’d better run it through again.”

  “The Videotaped Theft”

  Dear Abby: Recently I attended the wedding of a good friend. Because I am a photojournalist by trade, she asked me if I would videotape her wedding, and I gladly agreed.

  The wedding was beautiful and the reception went smoothly until the bride’s father stopped the band to make an announcement. He said he had “lost” his wallet, which contained $1,500 with which he had intended to pay the band. He said if anyone found the money, it could be returned simply by leaving it in the men’s lavatory, and no questions would be asked. No money was turned in.

  The following day, I looked over the footage I had taken at the reception and was astonished to see that while filming a couple’s conversation, in the background was the groom removing a wallet from the evening coat of the bride’s father!

  Now I don’t know what to do. The couple is away for two weeks on their honeymoon. Should I tell my friend? Should I tell her father? Or should I just keep it to myself?

  For the bride’s sake, please do not use my name or address.

  —No Name, No Address

  Dear No Name: Call the bride’s father and invite him to view the lovely video you took of his daughter’s wedding—and you won’t have to tell anybody anything.

  “Dear Abby” column for October 30, 1991. Despite this anonymous, supposedly first-person report, virtually the same story has been around since 1982–83, when two sources published it; since then lots of people have sent me versions that they’ve heard, and Time published yet another one in an article on big weddings in the July 7, 1986, edition. Among the variations, the couple are Jewish, Catholic, Polish, Italian, Iranian—you name it. The money may have been stolen from the bride or from her father, and the thief may be the groom’s father or the groom himself. Sometimes the camcorder was left unattended and running on a tripod. The amount stolen varies from $1,500 to as high as $20,000, which seems like a huge sum for a person to carry around in cash. The bill—whether for the band, the caterer, or the reception hall—is then usually paid with a check, a credit card, or with cash borrowed from a relative attending the wedding. Sometimes people say the wedding was annulled; in other cases there’s an early divorce. A few couples, according to the story, work things out and live happily ever after. They’re probably the ones who are savvy to urban legends about poetic justice.

  “Urban Pancake”

  An alert friend recently passed along this story:

  The Modesto [California] couple drove their new BMW to the World Series home opener at Candlestick Park. They parked, found their seats. Then the stadium shook. The earthquake stopped the game.

  They returned to the lot to discover that their new car was gone, stolen. They made their way home to Modesto, no easy trick in the confusion following the quake. Then began the frustrating process of recovering their car.

  The authorities, of course, had other priorities. So the couple waited and waited for word on their missing vehicle.

  Finally, weeks later, they received a call. Workers clearing the debris from the collapsed portion of the Nimitz Freeway had hoisted up one of the last sections of concrete to be removed. Beneath it was the BMW, squashed flat as a pancake.

  Trapped inside was the car thief.

  From Glenn Scott’s column of December 29, 1989, “Wonderful tale; fact or fiction?” in the Modesto Bee. The quake had occurred on October 17, 1989. Scott, who invented the title used here, commented in his column that the story “seems, as we say, too good to be true. Too poetic: the luxury car, the series, the theft and punishment.” So he attempted to trace it with the California Department of Transportation and the Highway Patrol with no success. He also checked with me, explaining how and from whom he had heard the story: “in a bar, a cable TV ad salesman grabbed me and told the story. He’d heard it from a real estate agent at a party.” And my answer? I had already heard it from about a dozen Californians living in the Bay Area or as far away as Fresno, who described luxury cars of several makes and models. In some versions of the story the owners receive notice of the accident from a state trooper who appears at their door with the crumpled license plate in his hand from their flattened car. Typically, there were many other rumors and stories surrounding this earthquake, but “Urban Pancake” was the best developed, most ironic, and neatest poetically justified one to rise from the rubble and tragedies of the event. It represents the ultimate level of a got-what-he-deserved story, and is often tinged with racism when the car thief is said, or implied, to be black.

  “The Will”

  The quirky human-interest story was seized on by editors, repeated in news reports around the world, and had journalists in Spain scrambling for further details. Now some are muttering hoax. The wild-goose chase began when the German tabloid Bild published a heartwarming yarn about a good-natured Spaniard and a lonely Swede. According to Bild, Spanish Catholic Eduardo Sierra stopped at a Stockholm church while visiting Sweden on business. Noticing a coffin in front of the altar, he offered a prayer for the deceased, and entered his name in the blank condolence book nearby. A few weeks later, Sierra received word that he had become a millionaire. The dead stranger, a wealthy but friendless Swedish real estate agent named Jens Svenson, had bequeathed his estate to “Whoever prays for my soul.” Eager to interview Sierra about his windfall, journalists plied the phones—to no avail. Neither the Swedish embassy in Madrid nor the Catholic diocese in Stockholm nor the Swedish press knew anything about the legacy—or Jens Svenson. Last week a German journalist acknowledged that she had altered the names—but claimed the story came straight from the lucky heir, who requested anonymity. After days of chasing false leads, some suspicious journalists wondered how many other facts in Bild’s report were fictitious. “I don’t believe the man ever existed,” sniffed disgruntled Madrid newswoman Isabel Flores. Truth or urban myth, the tale continues to spread. It may be too good to be true, but it is way too good not to be told and retold.

  From Time’s International Edition of October 21, 1996. Except for dubbing the story a “myth” instead of “legend,” this is a good account of how even a doubtful and unverified story may spread in the press and, sometimes, be debunked by journalistic effort. Newsweek, on the other hand, had simply published a paraphrase of the Bild item in its October 14 edition, and Chuck Shepherd’s syndicated “News of the Weird” column used a similar retelling the following month. When I first published the New York City version I heard in 1986, in which a woman received a $10,000 bequest, I received letters from people who either confirmed the New York setting or claimed it had happened in Chicago and even in Honduras 15 years earlier. A column in the July 1990 issue of Spy magazine attri
buted the incident to Iphigene Sulzberger, “grand matriarch of the New York Times,” chiding the Times for not including the story in its 3,000-word obituary for Mrs. Sulzberger, but admitting that the tale was “possibly apocryphal.” Another version, without a name this time, appeared in a 1992 guide to public toilets of Manhattan as a story heard fourth-hand and leading up to a paltry $500 bequest. Also in 1992, a woman wrote to the Muncie (Indiana) Star telling the story as she had heard it from her sister in Tucson; this time a male truck driver, city not mentioned, won a $50,000 inheritance for being the only person attending a funeral.

  “Promiscuity Rewarded”

  Two IRS agents were traveling through a rural area when their car broke down. They walked to a nearby mansion and knocked on the door. A beautiful widow answered and said they were welcome to spend the night while her hired hands worked on the car.

  Months later one of the agents received a package of legal documents. After surveying the contents, he quickly called the other agent.

  “When we were up in the country,” the first agent asked, “did you slip away in the night and go to that widow’s bedroom?”

  “Yes,” the second agent admitted.