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

by Jan Harold Harold Brunvand

  JB: The person who told you said it happened to whom? To himself?

  DL: No, to a fellow employee.

  JB: Yeah. We have here what we call the FOAF. The F-O-A-F, the “friend of a friend.”

  Version #2: 1984, DL briefly alluded to the same legend in an interview with JB.

  Version #3: 1986

  DL: Years ago I heard one that I think we discussed one time on this program before, and that is the woman—usually a woman—pulls into a filling station to get gas and the gasoline attendant fills up the tank and asks her to step out of the car. And he says, “There’s a problem with your credit card.” And I heard this as happening, again, to somebody I knew that they worked with. And it turns out that there’s some kind of maniacal ax murderer in the back seat.

  Version #4: 1987

  DL: This is fascinating stuff. I remember, actually when I was a kid living in Indianapolis, I heard one of the classic stories about the woman pulls in for gas, and…

  JB: [interrupting] You know what?…

  DL:…the gasoline attendant says…

  JB: You know, this is the third time you’ve told me that story…. I’m sorry I broke into it, maybe you’ve got a different ending. Let’s hear how it ends.

  DL: What say we have a number from the band now…. You seem to have been here five times now, so…

  JB: I’ve probably worn out my welcome.

  DL: You see everybody doesn’t watch every night. I’m just trying to participate…

  JB: That’s true. You really did hear it?

  DL: I’m trying to feign interest in this whole damn topic, and to tell you the truth, I don’t give a rat’s ass.

  It appears that this is Letterman’s favorite urban legend and one that he remembered spontaneously from his boyhood. My reaction to hearing it told repeatedly is a case study in how not to listen to a storyteller; whoever says, “Stop me if you’ve heard this,” doesn’t really mean it. In the next segment of the program Letterman apologized for his comment, and I responded by saying I was glad to have his version of the legend to use in one of my books. The freeway-pursuit version of the legend dates from the mid-1960s, while the gas station versions come later, first mentioning a suspected counterfeit bill, then a faulty credit card. In the early 1990s, tellers of the legend began to claim that the hidden assailant was a gang member, often a racial minority, undergoing initiation. Numerous local law-enforcement groups repeated this story, warning women always to check the back seats of their cars. This, of course, is perfectly good advice for any driver, whether or not the incident ever really happened. “The Killer in the Back Seat” is the first story enacted in the 1998 slasher film Urban Legend. Publicity for the film explained that “Urban legends—modern day folktales that seem to arise spontaneously and spread by word-of-mouth—range from the silly…to the sinister.” This definition was far superior to the depiction of a college folklore class shown in the film.

  “The Hairy-Armed Hitchhiker”

  The woman, an employee of the Fred S. James & Co., goes to her car after work. But when she gets there, she sees an elderly woman sitting in the back seat.

  “I’m cold and wet,” says the old woman, “and I need a ride home.”

  The old woman—she must be 85 or so—says she’s sorry about getting into the car, but it was unlocked and she was so cold. “Please help me,” she says.

  “Why, of course,” says the woman from Fred S. James. (Since we aren’t certain of her real name, we will call her Jamie.) “But first I have to call my husband, so he’ll know why I’m late.”

  The old woman has already told her she lives way out on Southeast 122nd.

  So Jamie walks back to the office to make the call. It’s a couple of blocks away, and she walks briskly because it’s cold. It’s already dark, and traffic is starting to thin out, leaving the city deserted.

  She shivers. The poor old woman. How she got there is something of a mystery. The Fred S. James & Co., an insurance agency, is in the heart of downtown Portland, and that’s a long way from 122nd Avenue.

  She must be disoriented. Yes, that’s it, says Jamie to herself. Oh, the poor dear.

  Back inside her office she gets her husband on the phone and explains the situation to him.

  “No way,” he says. He is very upset. “No way are you giving a stranger a ride home.”

  Furthermore, he says, she should call building security. She doesn’t want to, but she does.

  Security tells her to call the police, because the car is parked on a city street, not in the company parking lot, which she does.

  The police arrive at Jamie’s car just as she does—two squad cars with flashing blue lights—and the little old lady is still sitting in the back seat, waiting for a ride.

  But as the police quickly discover, the little old lady is actually a 25-year-old man, and he has a machete taped to his leg, and he is sitting on an ax….

  That’s how it goes.

  The first time I heard it was last week, when a letter arrived at the office. “I heard a chilling story,” it began, “and thought the public should know it.”

  Unfortunately, the letter was unsigned, and as the writer explained, he or she “did not get it directly from the woman it happened to.”

  But it was obviously such a great story I thought I’d track it down.

  So I called the Fred S. James & Co. A woman there spent a day checking around and called back.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, “but I can’t find anyone who’s heard anything about it.”

  Building security didn’t know anything, so I called central precinct, which covers the downtown area, and talked with the sergeant who handles all the reports. He hadn’t seen anything like that come across his desk, he said, but he’d ask around.

  The next day he called to say he had struck out. “But it sure is a great story,” he said. “Sort of chills your bones, doesn’t it?”

  Yes it does. It rings true. The only problem, apparently, is that it isn’t.

  A couple of days later I was talking with a friend. “Did you hear the story about the little old lady?” he said, and proceeded to tell the identical story—down to the machete taped to the man’s leg and the ax he was sitting on.

  It should be easy enough to track her down, he said. He had heard the story from his running partner that morning. It had happened to his running partner’s secretary’s sister-in-law.

  It took a day to get in touch with the sister-in-law, who was more than helpful. Yes, she said, it was true.

  However, there must be some misunderstanding, because it hadn’t actually happened to her, but to her friend’s daughter’s coworker. Would I like her to get me in touch with them?

  Yes, of course. But I already knew what was going to happen, because I was beginning to realize what we were dealing with here.

  And that is more chilling, still, because what we have here is an urban myth for our city and our season—and therefore, in a way, truer than mere fact.

  No need to explain here. But you will be careful, won’t you, the next time you get out of work late and have to walk to your car in the dark?

  And, you’ll look carefully before you open the door, because maybe she’ll be there and maybe she won’t.

  Oh, probably she won’t, and you’ll laugh at yourself for looking before you slide into the front seat. How silly of you.

  But you’ll always think about it now, won’t you?

  Column by Phil Stanford in the Portland Oregonian, February 27, 1989. The details that give this urban legend either the title used above or the alternate title “The Hatchet in the Handbag” are missing here; otherwise, it’s a classic version of this well-known story. On March 1st Stanford’s column summarized letters and calls from readers, responding to his column, claiming that the incident had really happened in Las Vegas (in 1983); in Vancouver, Washington; in Sun City, Arizona; or in Pasadena, California. The story is actually much older and even more widespread than these claims.
It circulated in English newspapers and in folklore in the mid–nineteenth century. An 1834 report, for example, has the disguised assailant riding in a horse-drawn carriage. Horse-travel versions were also collected in the United States as late as the 1940s and 1950s, with the newer versions, using automobiles, surfacing in the 1980s. The most recent versions tend to have the woman driver contrive her own escape from the disguised man without calling either her husband, a security guard, the police, or any other male helper. She simply asks the “old woman” to get out and check her taillights; then she drives away, finding [you guessed it] a hatchet in the handbag left behind. “The Hairy-Armed Hitchhiker” and other car-crime legends are frequently repeated in safety memos within companies or governmental agencies as warnings to drivers to be alert against attacks. In the spring of 1998 a new version of “The Hairy-Armed Hitchhiker” appeared in Columbus, Ohio, and was spread on the Internet. Supposedly, a woman shopping at Columbus’s Tuttle Mall (actually called “Tuttle Crossing”) found a flat tire when she returned to her car. While she was trying to figure out how to change the tire, a man came up and helped her, then he asked for a ride to his own car parked on the other side of the mall. Suspicious, the woman pretended to have other errands in the mall, and she closed her trunk, locked her car, and went back for a security guard. It was discovered that the tire had been deliberately deflated, and in a briefcase the man had left behind was found a coil of rope and a large butcher knife. One version of this legend concluded with the advice, “Learn to change your own tire!”

  “The Boyfriend’s Death”

  This story is about Peter Poore’s grave, which is located in Shelburne, New Hampshire. Peter Poore was supposedly the last white man in the region to be killed by Indians, and legend has it that his grave is haunted.

  The story goes that many years ago, a young couple drove to the deserted road near the site of the grave. They stopped the car and necked for a while. When they were ready to leave, however, the car would not start. The young man decided to go for help while the woman stayed alone in the car. After a while, the woman could hear rain falling on the car. More time passed, but her boyfriend still did not return. She decided to turn on the headlights to see if he was coming down the road. When she did, what she saw was her boyfriend hanging from a tree with a knife sticking out of his abdomen. What she had thought was rain was really his blood dripping onto the car. I first heard this story at least fifteen years ago.

  Maria Gale, age 10 [speaking to a group of her fellow Navajo students] MG: I got one. One of my sisters told me that there was a boy and a girl. They were going to the dance.

  RD: Squaw dance.

  MG: Then…they turned on the radio and the man said, “Watch out for this man that’s a killer.” And then he said, “It’s a hairy one.”

  I: It’s a what?

  MG: A hairy one.

  CY, RD, JD: A skinwalker.

  MG: And then the gas got empty. And then the boy said, “Wait for me. Stay in the pickup and I’ll go get some gasoline.” So the girl went “OK,” and then she went in the back. I guess the skinwalker killed the boy and then chopped off his head. And then the girl was sitting in the back and then she heard something on top of the car and she was scared. Then she didn’t look up. She kept hearing that and then she saw her boyfriend’s head chopped off. It was hanging down.

  The first version was sent to me by Denise Day of Center Strafford, New Hampshire, in 1988. The second was tape-recorded by Navajo students of Margaret K. Brady in a reservation school near Window Rock and Fort Defiance, Arizona, in 1976; the initials include those of children listening to the story, while “I” is the interviewer. Both texts are abbreviated versions of the urban legend with a Native American reference incorporated. The Navajo version also uses the radio warning motif of “The Hook.” Contemporary tellings of the story usually conclude with the police arriving to save the girl, warning her “Don’t look back!” She does look, of course, since taboos in folklore are always broken. When the girl sees her boyfriend’s body hanging or lying on top of the car, her hair immediately turns white from fright. “The Boyfriend’s Death” has been a favorite scare story of American teenagers since the early 1960s; many versions include spooky visual and sound effects—scratching, bumping, ghostly shadows, sounds of dripping, etc. In Europe, where the legend is also popular, often the maniacal killer is seated on top of the car bumping the severed head of his victim on the roof. Brady’s students recorded numerous stories for her, some of them in the form of personal experiences or of fictional stories—such as this one—and others being the older traditional legends of the “skinwalker,” a fearsome shape-shifting witchlike character of the native mythology. This text includes modern references, such as the pickup truck, and exhibits some stylistic features of “spontaneous narrative creation” analyzed by Brady: for example, the group’s confirming in chorus that the storyteller had a skinwalker in mind when she hesitated to identify the threatening figure. This story is in Brady’s 1984 book “Some Kind of Power”: Navajo Children’s Skinwalker Narratives, pp. 185–86.

  “The Slasher under the Car”

  RUMORS OF SLASHERS AT MALL DISPUTED

  Nobody can find victims of ‘robbers’ who ‘hide’ under cars. Authorities have heard dozens of reports in recent weeks about robbers at Hanes Mall who hide under cars in the parking lot and slash shoppers’ legs to get at their packages.

  But nobody has found any victims.

  People have called the Winston-Salem Journal, the police, and the mall to try to confirm rumors about the supposed robbers.

  But police and hospital workers say they haven’t seen any such cases.

  The thin thieves supposedly hide under shoppers’ cars until the shoppers approach. As a victim unlocks a car door, the thief slashes the victim’s lower leg. Less vicious versions report that a softer-hearted crook pricks the ankle with a sharp object.

  The slashed person falls, the story goes, and the thief wriggles from under the car, snatches purse and gifts and runs off, arms laden with Christmas booty.

  Someone first called the Journal to ask about the reports about two weeks ago.

  Sgt. Charlie Taylor of the Winston-Salem Police Department reported hearing the same rumor then and checked into it. There were no police reports about such crimes.

  But the exploits of the thieves continued by word of mouth.

  One caller to the Journal said that Hanes Mall was keeping victims from reporting the crimes by giving them $500 gift certificates.

  Monday night, a radio dispatcher in the Forsyth County Sheriff’s Department said that a deputy talked to a doctor who treated 18 slashed patients in the emergency room at Forsyth Memorial Hospital.

  When reached, the deputy said he did not talk to the doctor, but a friend of his had. The friend was unavailable for comment.

  Freda Springs, a spokesman at Forsyth Memorial, talked to emergency-room workers yesterday. They had heard the rumor, she said, they haven’t treated any victims with slashed ankles.

  She said that the head nurse in the emergency room heard that the patients were being treated at Baptist Hospital, even though Forsyth is just across the road from the mall.

  A spokesman at Baptist said that emergency-room workers there have not treated slasher victims and were not even aware of the rumor.

  Thomas E. Winstead, the general manager of the mall, said he has fielded questions about the non-existent crime wave. “I’ve heard it. I’ve had it mentioned to me at parties. Several store personnel have called me to ask about it,” he said.

  He said he heard similar rumors at other shopping centers he has managed.

  “Unfortunately, I can’t do anything to stop the rumor, but fortunately, there’s no truth to it either,” he said.

  Capt. Roscoe Pouncey of the police department said that parking-lot crime at shopping centers actually seems to be lower this year than in previous years. He said last week that there had only been one robbery in the Hanes M
all parking lot during December….

  From an article by Christopher Quinn in the Winston-Salem (North Carolina) Journal of December 16, 1992; the article concludes with advice from the aptly named Capt. Pouncey and others on strategies for avoiding assaults. In The Baby Train I summarized 18 reports of “The Slasher under the Car” from 1984 through 1992 that supposedly occurred in 16 cities in 14 different states. Two sources remembered hearing prototypes for the legend in 1978 and even as far back as 1950. Since then I have received nine more reports from 1992 and 1993, adding ten further cities and five more states to the list. The slashers usually were said to strike the ankle, sometimes aiming for the Achilles tendon, but some grabbed the ankle, or hit the ankles with a tire iron, or crawled out from under the car to slash at the victim’s cheek or cut off a finger. The motive for the attack was usually robbery—often of Christmas gifts—but sometimes the attack led to rape. Occasionally an accomplice joined the attack from under a nearby car, and in one curious version the attackers wrapped the victim in Christmas paper. The idea of a police coverup of the crimes, or of the malls buying off victims to protect their business, is typical. In some communities, notably Tacoma, Washington, during the Christmas season of 1989, police actually set up field stations at the targeted mall, not to combat the fictional crimes, but simply to calm the fears of shoppers.