“Did you use my name?”
“Why, yes, but how’d you find out?”
“She died and left me her estate.”
From the Reader’s Digest section “Laughter, the Best Medicine,” August 1989, p. 70; contributed by Gaylen K. Bunker. While it sounds like merely a variation on the old traveling-salesman jokes, this story is based on an urban legend that’s especially popular in Ireland, where it’s called “The Kilkenny Widow.” A version appeared in the Irish folklore journal Béaloideas in 1983, categorized with “Legends of Revenge” I regard it more as a story of promiscuity rewarded. The Irish novelist Edna O’Brien claimed in a New York Times column on September 26, 1985, to have heard the story told in Rome, but she may have been simply remembering the gist of the Irish legend. Her version has the incident occur on a sleeper train and the woman involved giving a false name.
4
Automania
Folklorist Richard M. Dorson was one of the first to identify and study American urban legends. In thinking about them, he noticed how many latched onto “the chief symbol of modern America”—the car. While I’ve quoted several car yarns already, there are many yet to come, even more than those parked in this chapter.
There are urban legends about virtually every aspect of cars and drivers, from assembly plants to road rage, from compact cars to vintage vehicles, and from freeways and rest stops to parking lots and garages. Car advertising, car dealers, car thefts, and car breakdowns are all subjects of urban legends, as are seat belts, car alarms, and traffic cops. No sooner is some new feature added to cars—like automatic transmission, for example—than a legend springs up concerning it (see “Push-Starting the Car” in Chapter 14). If I were to categorize legends solely by their contents, about one-third of the stories would be in the automobile section.
In the urban legend business, nothing piles up faster than generic car tales—odd stories about autos that may or may not be true. Some of these plausible but unverified accounts of supposed situations involving cars become genuine urban legends that “traverse the country,” as Dorson put it. Other car tales are simpler and more localized, part of the anecdotal or joke repertoire of a community.
Here are some samples from my miscellaneous car-story file, all of them (in my humble opinion) too good to be true.
“Block that Ambulance”
An editorial in the Syracuse (New York) Post-Standard in 1990, criticizing New Yorkers’ failure to yield to emergency vehicles, concluded with this ironic shocker: “Several years ago, a driver in the Bronx refused to yield to an ambulance responding to a reported heart attack. After slowing down the ambulance with his pigheadedness, the man reached home—only to find that the ambulance was on its way to help his own mother.”
“Rotten to the Big Apple Core”
This was the headline in a 1991 British car magazine above the following item:
Britain’s car theft problems pale into insignificance when compared with those faced by the good citizens of New York.
Car owners desperate not to have their cars broken into are, it seems, no longer bothering to replace the radio after it has been crow-barred from the facia [the dashboard]. Instead, they leave a board behind the windscreen stating “No Radio.”
A pal of mine living in the Mad Apple left his board behind the windscreen one night. The next morning, he was horrified to find that his car’s side window had been smashed.
“The note left on the front seat said, “Just Checkin.”
“Have You Heard?”
In his letter a Texas reader asked me, “Have you heard the one about the guy who bought a used auto part and found his Social Security number engraved on it (his previous car having been stolen)?…How about the lady who totaled her car because it was possessed? The auto dealer had neglected to tell her about the verbal warning systems in the car, and the recording or whatever was faulty. All she heard was a garbled voice coming from her dashboard, so she ran it into a lightpost to destroy the demon.”
“If You Can Beat Me”
Several readers sent me variations of a story about a beautiful blonde woman in (usually) a red Corvette who drives around challenging men to drag-races, promising a hot date to any guy who can catch her. Sometimes she is supposed to have a personalized license plate or a bumper sticker that poses the offer thus, “If you can beat me, you can have me.”
“Dealing with ‘Mr. Wiseguy’”
This was in the Los Angeles Times in 1991, identified there as an Urban Folk Tale (or UFT) and credited to the monthly bulletin of the local chapter of the California Society of Certified Public Accountants. CPAs, of course, would never ever, tell a legend. Wanna bet? Here’s one:
The latest UFT…involves a motorist ticketed by a photo-radar system. Officials in Pasadena, which has such an apparatus, said they hadn’t heard the story.
Anyway, the motorist receives a snapshot of his license plate, along with the ticket, in the mail.
“Mr. Wiseguy,” goes the bulletin’s version, “sends back a picture of a $40 check.”
In return, Mr. Wiseguy receives a photo of a pair of handcuffs.
This time, he pays with real money.
“High Octane Revenge”
At one of those gas stations where you must pay first, then pump, a guy in a Mercedes 560SL cuts off a guy in a little Toyota saying, “Don’t use that pump; I need to fill up fast.”
The Mercedes driver takes off his gas cap and goes in to pay the cashier.
The Toyota driver takes off his own locking gas cap, locks it onto the Mercedes’s open filler spout, and drives off, stranding the other guy at the pump.
“No Tag—You’re It”
A man chooses “None” for his vanity license plate and never gets any tickets because when the people who process tickets at the Police Department see “None” in the license-plate-number space, they assume the car was unlicensed and cannot be traced.
Another man hears about this and chooses “No Tag” for his own vanity plate. But he gets all the tickets meant for cars without a legitimate plate.
This last tale reminds me of the man whose real complete name was R. B. Jones. When he entered military service his records were marked R(only) B(only) to clarify the situation—except that for his entire military career he was called Ronly Bonly Jones.
The latest full-sized urban legend about a car that was circulating on the Internet in the mid to late 1990s was this:
The Arizona Highway Patrol came upon a pile of smoldering metal embedded into the side of a cliff rising above the road at the apex of a curve. The lab finally figured out that it was a car, and they reconstructed what must have happened.
It seems that a guy had somehow gotten hold of a JATO unit used to give heavy military transport planes an extra push for taking off from short airfields. He had driven his Chevy Impala out into the desert and found a long straight stretch of road. He attached the JATO unit to his car, jumped in, got up some speed, and fired off the rocket.
It appeared that he had hit the JATO ignition about three miles before the crash site. There was scorched and melted asphalt at that location, and the JATO would have reached maximum thrust in about five seconds, causing the Chevy to reach speeds in excess of 350 mph and continuing at full power for about twenty to twenty-five seconds. The driver most likely would have experienced G-forces similar to a dog fighting F-14 under full afterburners.
The automobile remained on the straight highway for about two and one-half miles, fifteen to twenty seconds, before the driver applied and completely melted the brakes. His tires blew, leaving rubber on the road surface, and then the car became airborne for an additional one and one-half miles. It hit the cliff face at a height of about one hundred twenty-five feet, leaving a blackened crater three feet deep in the rock.
Only small fragments of bone, teeth, and hair could be extracted from the crater, and some fingernail and bone shards were removed from a piece of debris believed to be a portion of the steering
wheel.
Most Internet versions of this implausible story concluded, “It only goes to show that speeding never killed anyone, but stopping did.”
* * *
“Sticking Up for One’s Rights”
A sweet, grandmotherly widow was convinced by her son to start carrying a small handgun in her purse for self-protection in these perilous times.
The first week she had the gun she came out of a shopping mall to the parking lot and found two men sitting in her car drinking beer and eating. With a firm, determined, air she pulled the gun, advanced on the car, aimed it directly at the men, and ordered them out.
The men jumped out of the car and ran away in great panic. But when the woman got into the car, she found that her ignition key did not fit.
Then she noticed her own car, identical to theirs, parked one row over in the lot.
* * *
“The Hook”
I heard this story at a fraternity party. I heard this. This guy had this date with this really cool girl, and all he could think about all night was taking her out and parking and having a really good time, so he takes her out in the country, stops the car, turns the lights off, puts the radio on, nice music; he’s really getting her in the mood, and all of the sudden there’s this news flash comes on over the radio and says to the effect that a sex maniac has just escaped from the state insane asylum and the one distinguishing feature of this man is that he has a hook arm, and in the first place this girl is really, really upset, ‘cause she’s just sure this guy is going to come and try and get in the car, so the guy locks all the doors and says it’ll be okay, but she says he could take his arm and break through the window and everything and she just cries and cries and goes just really frantic and the guy finally consents to take her home, but he’s really mad ’cause you know he really had his plans for this girl, so he revs up the car and he goes torquing out of there and they get to her house, and he’s really, really mad and he’s not even going to get out of the car and open the door for her, and she just gets out on her own side of the car and as she gets out she turns around and looks and there’s a hook hanging on the door.
Verbatim, as told in a breathless rush by an Indiana University undergraduate woman to her roommate in 1967. This was the first text published in the first issue of a journal largely devoted to urban legends edited by Indiana University professor Linda Dégh and her students at the Folklore Institute. In Indiana Folklore, vol. I, no. 1 (1968), pp. 92–100, Dégh listed 44 locally collected texts of this legend going back to 1959. “The Hook” was printed in a “Dear Abby” column in November 1960 and continues to be one of the most popular American urban legends, one of the few that many people refer to by specific title rather than merely a descriptive phrase like “the one about the maniac and the teenagers.” Numerous fiction writers have adapted the essential plot of the legend. Bill Murray told “The Hook” in his film Meatballs, and Gary Larson referred to the story in at least two of his “Far Side” cartoons. In 1992 the hook man appeared as the title character of the slick horror film Candyman. Perhaps because of the legend’s improbably tidy plot, most tellers narrate the story nowadays more as a scary story than as a believed legend. Folklorists are divided about whether “The Hook” represents simply a warning story about staying out late in an unknown environment, or whether its details may signify sexual meanings, including symbolic castration of the threatening and deformed phallic symbol—the hook—outside the car at the same time that the boyfriend is trying to “get his hooks into the girl” inside the car.
“The Severed Fingers”
A young couple were out together in a classic VW Beetle. Whilst parked in a deserted country lane, after some kissing and cuddling, they heard a noise near the exit to the lane. Looking up they saw, strung across the lane, a menacing group of Hell’s Angels, all grinning and leering in a hideous manner, dressed in black leather and swinging tire chains, carrying knives and clubs. The gang advanced towards the car, blocking the exit to the lane.
The girl screamed, and the guy was shocked out of his senses. He started the engine and gunned it, driving straight at the intruders as fast as he could make the little car move. The bikers slashed at the car with their chains and grabbed at it with their hands as it sped past, but they were shaken off by the speeding Bug.
Gaining the safety of the main highway, the couple stopped to look for possible damage to their car. They saw, either:
Version A: Four severed fingers stuck in the air vents at the back of the car, cut off by the cooling fan.
Or:
Version B: A chain with four severed fingers caught in the chrome trim on the car.
Sent to me in 1987 by a reader in Reading, England, who was careful to point out that Hell’s Angels are uncommon in England, that the air vents on a VW Beetle are too small for fingers to get through, and that other compact cars are much more common in England than VW Bugs ever were. Other readers pointed out that the Renault Dauphine model of the late 1950s and early 1960s did have wider rear ventilation slots. “The Severed Fingers” has, indeed, been documented back to 1960 in England, although usually without a specific car model mentioned. The story is also popular in Australia, where it was enacted in the 1979 film Mad Max. In 1988 Phil Twyford, an Auckland, New Zealand, journalist, gave me copies of two versions sent to him after he published an article about modern legends. One of these had the fingers caught in the door frame of the car, while the other had them stuck in a bicycle chain that was caught on the “boot handle.” The chain version seems to be better known in the United States. This legend is similar to “The Hook,” and also to “The Robber Who Was Hurt,” quoted in Chapter 15. Other severed fingers appear in “The Choking Doberman” (Chapter 2) while a severed head occurs in the next legend.
“Decapitated Drivers and Riders”
Heads, heads—take care of your heads!” cried the loquacious stranger, as they came out under the low archway, which in those days formed the entrance to the coach-yard. “Terrible place—dangerous work—other day—five children—mother—tall lady, eating sandwiches—forgot the arch—crash—knock—children look round—mother’s head off—sandwich in her hand—no mouth to put it in—head of a family off—shocking, shocking!”
Bill Tidy
A classic WTS [Whale Tumour Story] tells of an extraordinary incident on the East Lancs Road (A580) [the highway number]. Apparently, a motorcyclist was riding behind a lorry which was carrying a load of thin steel plates. He decided to overtake the lorry, but as he moved out towards the centre of the road, one of the steel sheets became dislodged and decapitated him. However, his momentum carried him alongside the lorry, the lorry-driver glanced from his window, saw the headless motorcyclist passing, had a heart-attack, ran off the road and was killed.
The first story is told by Alfred Jingle in Chapter 2 of Charles Dickens’s The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club (1836). The second, the modern automobile version of the former, is from Rodney Dale’s The Tumour in the Whale (1978), p. 148. Although Dale’s term “Whale Tumour Stories”—referring to a specific World War II British legend—never caught on as a name for such apocryphal anecdotes, his coinage “FOAF” became a standard reference in UL studies to the claimed sources of these incidents. In other versions of the decapitated motorcyclist story, the truck driver not only dies himself in the crash, but his truck plows into a crowd of people at the roadside, killing many more. In American variations on the theme of vehicular dismemberment, it may be a dog that loses its head while riding in a car with the window open, ears flapping in the breeze. The loss of Rover’s head is so quick and neat that a child sitting next to it in the back seat continues to pet the dog for several miles before the tragedy is discovered.
“The Killer in the Back Seat”
As told on Late Night with David Letterman
Version #1: 1982
David Letterman: What about “The Killer in the Back Seat?”
Jan Brunvand: Yeah, that’s anot
her car story, another horror story. There’s a woman driving home alone at night, she needs to stop for gas. She gets to a gas station, and the attendant fills the tank and takes her credit card. And he looks a little funny, and he says, “I’m sorry, lady, there’s something a little funny about this credit card. Would you step into the station, let’s check it against the numbers of…” discontinued cards or something. And she’s puzzled by this, but she goes in. And as soon as she gets in the station, he locks the door and says, “There’s a guy in the back seat with a meat cleaver!”
DL: Oh, a meat cleaver…
JB: Or a knife…
DL: Or a hook and a poisonous snake and a discount garment…
JB: Sometimes somebody follows her home on the freeway, flashing the lights behind her, and when she gets home the car’s right behind her—the pursuing car—a man jumps out, opens the back door of the car and pulls this guy out. Says, “I flashed the lights to keep him from killing you.”
DL: Now this one, up until the time I read your book, I believed.
JB: You believed it?
DL: Someone had told me that they were working in a store, working late one night, and that very thing happened. But more than likely, again, it never happened anywhere.
Too Good to Be True: The Colossal Book of Urban Legends Page 9