“The Stuffed Baby”
The most memorable legend I recall is one that my mother told me about 15 years ago [around 1971]. It seems that a friend of hers was on a flight—I believe the departure point was in the States and the destination in Canada. One young couple of “hippies” boarded with a baby wrapped in a blanket. The woman kept the baby wrapped in the blanket and held it tightly. More than once the stewardess asked if she would like a bottle or some food heated, but the woman refused.
Over the course of several hours the stewardess became suspicious since the baby did not eat or cry. She notified the authorities, who detained the couple at the airport. The baby, of course, was dead, and had been gutted and stuffed with marijuana.
This past Christmas [1989] I heard a story of a Georgia State Patrolman stopping a northbound motorist on I-75 between Tifton and Valdosta for speeding. Next to the driver was a baby strapped in a car seat. The patrolman noticed that the baby was not moving, and when he inquired about this, he was told that the baby was sick and the motorist was trying to get the baby home quickly.
The patrolman let the man go, but he began to have second thoughts about the baby’s well being, so he radioed ahead to another patrolman to pull the motorist over again and see if he could be of any assistance to the sick baby. When the second patrolman stopped the car he discovered that the baby was dead and had been disemboweled, filled with cocaine, and sewn back up.
These stories were sent to me in 1986 and 1990 from readers in Canada and Georgia, respectively. This is the domesticated version of a legend that usually describes the smuggling of drugs into North America from South America or elsewhere. In 1985 the incident, said to have happened on a Miami-bound flight, was reported in Life, New Republic, and the Washington Post; the latter publication quickly retracted the story, quoting customs officials who traced it as far back as 1973 but said that they were unable to confirm it and believed it to be mere rumor. In a National Geographic article on emeralds, published in the July 1990 issue, a story is told about a Senegalese family smuggling these precious gems abroad in the body of a dead child being sent home for burial; supposedly, these criminals were caught on the folklorically appropriate third commission of the crime.
11
Strange Things Happen
Very few modern urban legends that are collected and studied by today’s folklorists concern the supernatural; instead, most such stories are plausible accounts of fairly ordinary experiences that have a bizarre or ironic twist. “The Runaway Grandmother,” “The Hook,” or “The Crushed Dog,” for example, are weird legends, but their weirdness does not stem from the presence of ghosts, ghouls, or gremlins—it was plain old theft, crime, or bad luck that caused the problems.
In part, this shortage of the supernatural in ULs is a matter of definition, since folklorists tend to assign the supernatural stories people tell to other categories like “scary stories” or “ghost stories,” implying that these tales are told merely to scare someone and not with any real sense of belief. Belief, of course, is an individual matter, so that one person’s fictional scary story may be another person’s trusted true incident. Also, in a typical storytelling context—say, a slumber party or a campfire circle—a story like “The Baby-Sitter and the Man Upstairs” may be told either as a believed legend or as a spooky joke. But in either case, the tellers never introduce a witch or ghost as the threat to the baby-sitter; it’s always some guy hiding upstairs calling on the telephone extension.
Another distinction folklorists make is between standard urban legends that are widely told among a diverse population and other, equally bizarre stories that circulate mostly among fringe groups, often in the first person. In this category would go the stories of Bigfoot, lake monsters, UFOs, alien abductions, cattle mutilations, Satanic cults, conspiracies, the Bermuda Triangle, Elvis sightings, and so forth. There’s plenty of supernaturalism involved in such stories, rich material for folklorists to investigate, but the style, content, and function are clearly different from the typical urban legend. Furthermore, such topics are exploited in the media, so that it’s difficult to say where oral tradition and mass media treatments diverge.
Tabloids, science fiction, and film and television treatments of supposed paranormal topics—all aided nowadays by freewheeling Internet communication—have taken over many of the supernatural themes formerly reserved for folk tradition; one might even speculate that the genre of genuine supernatural legend is a dead issue, so to speak. Well, not quite, although certainly some individual stories have died out in the oral tradition.
The legend called “The Dream Warning” is a good example of what may happen to a specific supernatural legend. In the 1940s and ’50s this story was a living legend in the United States. One version, published in the journal Arkansas Folklore in 1953, was heard “from the mouths of friends” some years earlier in a big city, as the collector Albert Howard Carter explained. Carter was told it by more than one person with different details, and all of the storytellers regarded their tales “as true accounts of actual happenings,” except that they supposedly had happened “to a friend of a friend.” Clearly, Carter had defined an urban legend here, and he attributed it to a FOAF years before these terms came into use. Here is his story:
This girl—she was a friend of [another friend]—was at a house party, and late one night after everyone had gone to bed, she was awakened by the brightness of the moon shining into her room. So she rose to pull the shade further down, but while at the window she looked out to see a coach, of all things, coming up the drive, with a coachman with the most haunting kind of face. She was extremely puzzled, and the more she thought about it the more mysterious it seemed to her, especially the fact that the coach had made no sound whatsoever. The next day, she looked on the gravel drive for horses’ hoof prints and wheel tracks, but there were none. At first she thought it was part of the entertainment, a surprise, and so she didn’t mention it to her hostess. As a matter of fact she dismissed it as part of a dream. But some time later, she was in Marshall Field’s [department store] waiting for an elevator. One came, and the operator called out, “Going down?” She gave one look at him and saw that he had the face of the coachman she had seen at the house party. She was so taken aback that she walked away from the elevator and didn’t get on. The doors closed, and the elevator crashed to the basement, killing all the occupants.
Although there were varying renditions of “The Dream Warning” circulating orally, it had been published earlier as a sort of literary ghost story; the tale was Bennett Cerf’s contribution to a 1944 anthology titled Famous Ghost Stories. Cerf couldn’t resist souping up the style as he retold the legend:
…a familiar voice rang in her ear. “There is room for one more!” it said. The operator was the coachman who had pointed at her! She saw his chalk-white face, the livid scar, the beaked nose! She drew back and screamed, and the elevator door banged shut in her face….
As Cerf explained in his introduction, he had heard the stories told “more than once” over a period of years, and although details of the tellings varied, he wrote, “the essentials were always the same.”
However “The Dream Warning” has not been reported by folklorists since the 1950s, probably for several reasons. For one thing, some details of the story—house party, coachman, and elevator operator—have become outdated. Secondly, the notion of prophetic dreams is less compelling than it may have been some 50 years ago, and the chances nowadays of a fatal accident in an elevator are minuscule. Another powerful reason for the demise of this legend, I believe, is its own success in another medium, television.
On February 10, 1961, Rod Serling’s famous TV series The Twilight Zone first aired an episode that was a dramatic version of “The Phantom Coachman” variation of “The Dream Warning” legend. Titled “Twenty-Two,” the episode featured a dancer named Liz Powell (played by Barbara Nichols), who was hospitalized for fatigue. She suffered recurring visions of following a nurse
to Room 22—the hospital morgue. And the nurse always said, “Room for one more, honey.”
Her doctor and her agent dismissed her fears as merely bad dreams. But when she was discharged from the hospital, Powell was about to board Flight 22 to Miami when the flight attendant—a woman identical to the nurse in her visions—said, “Room for one more, honey.” Powell ran screaming back to the airport lounge, and the plane exploded in midair just after takeoff.
According to The Twilight Zone Companion, Serling based his plot on Bennett Cerf’s version of the legend in Famous Ghost Stories. And according to my readers when I wrote a newspaper column in 1989 about the old “Dream Warning” legends, The Twilight Zone version was the only one most of them knew. After numerous reruns, the TV episode had virtually replaced the folk legend in the popular mind. Every reader who wrote me following my column mentioned this episode, with one exception, and this person mentioned that he saw the plot enacted in a mid-1940s film called Dead of Night. I’ll bet my legend-hunting license that this film, too, borrowed from the Cerf version.
And yet, and yet…as pop singer Dickey Lee sang in his mournful vanishing-hitchhiker ballad “Laurie” in 1965, “Strange things happen in this…[pause] worrrrrld!” Yes, Bennett, Rod, Liz, and Laurie, there still are a few modern urban legends that at least skirt the edge of the supernatural. Strange things do happen in this world.
* * *
“The Devil in the Ham”
Late one night a mother was fixing lunch for her child for school the next day. She decided to use Underwood Deviled Ham, but as she was opening the can she cut her finger, and she swore, saying “Oh hell!” or “Damn it!” At the same time a drop of her blood fell into the meat. Suddenly a bunch of little devils just like those pictured on the label popped out of the can and began stabbing her with their tridents. The woman was found dead the next morning with tiny little scratches all over her body. (In other versions the mother grabs a Bible and chases the little devils back into the can, then puts the Bible on top of the opened can until the devils are all dead.)
* * *
“The Vanishing Hitchhiker”
Last night I visited on the telephone with a friend who is a retired school librarian. She had a story for me. The woman who lives next door to her has a friend who knows some people to whom this happened. They are a couple who have a business in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, as well as Sioux City, Iowa. (The two towns are about 90 miles apart on Interstate 29.) These people travel the route often and are very familiar with the highway.
One day not long ago they were driving along I-29 toward Sioux Falls when they happened to notice a hitchhiker. They do not normally pick up hitchhikers, but they did stop to pick up this one. They visited with him as they rode along, and then he suddenly announced, “The world is going to end tomorrow!” They looked around, but there was no one in the back seat. They thought he might have opened the door and jumped out, although they had been going 65 miles per hour. So they stopped and reported the incident to a highway patrolman. His comment was, “You know, this is the sixth time that this has been reported to me this month.”
Another friend of mine who is a policewoman in Sioux City reports that she has heard the story nine or ten times from the police community, her church group, and others. The highway patrolman supposedly has heard it 15 or 16 times. Sometimes the message is “The Lord is coming for the second time, and you should prepare yourself.”
BIZARRE TALES OF A MYSTERIOUS HITCHHIKER
Frackville [Pennsylvania]—If someone walked up to you and told you a story about an experience they had or about which they heard concerning a hitchhiker who foretold, “The end is near” and disappeared from “inside” a vehicle, what would you think?
Like most people, you would probably doubt the report or maybe turn the TV set to the popular Unsolved Mysteries show and try to summon its host, Robert Stack, to unravel the bizarre event.
Such a story was brought to the attention of the Evening Herald recently and the reactions of editorial department personnel were predictable: “Yeah, right.”
A check with state police, however, revealed troopers had received several calls relating to the hitchhiker incident.
Sgt. Barry Reed, station commander at Frackville, confirmed receiving three or four calls about the mysterious vanishing hitchhiker, from reliable and credible individuals who all shared the same experience.
The hitchhiker was described as a tall, thin man with long dark hair and wearing a long dark coat. He was picked up on Route 61 near Frackville’s southern end on Monday, Jan. 31, between 6 and 7 a.m.
However, contrary to the “unofficial” reports, state troopers said they received no reports about the “hitchhiker” in conversation about the weather, the turbulence of society or the Angel Gabriel “tooting his horn for the second time.”
However, troopers did say the reports made to them concerned the hitchhiker having said, “I am here to tell you the end is near,” before vanishing into thin air.
Some of the reports relayed to the Evening Herald alleged the mysterious hitchhiker warned, “Jesus is coming! Jesus is coming!” and then disappeared.
Sgt. Reed recalled that while he was stationed in Lancaster County about 10 years ago, a similar “hitchhiker” tale was circulated.
My neighbor who lives across the street from me told me that her boyfriend’s boss’s aunt was driving down I-10, going east toward Baton Rouge about two months ago when she spotted a young man with long hair hitchhiking right around the Breaux Bridge area. Not one to pick up hitchhikers, she surprised herself by pulling over and offering the man a ride. He got into the car. The man stayed quiet throughout the drive, even when the woman questioned him about where he was from, his family, etc.
Suddenly the man looked at her and said, “Gabriel will soon blow his horn.” Then the man vanished into thin air. The woman became hysterical, driving faster and faster, until a Louisiana State Trooper pulled her over. After telling the State Trooper what happened, he told her that hers was the seventh report of the same vanishing hitchhiker that day.
The Iowa story is from Thelma Johnson of Sioux City, in a letter sent in September 1990; the Pennsylvania story is from the Shenandoah Evening Herald for February 4, 1994; and the Louisiana story is from Keigh Granger of Scott, Louisiana, in a letter sent in March 1994. These examples typify the most common recent form of the legend with the FOAF attribution, the precise highway details, the mysterious statement and “vanishing” of the hitchhiker, and the police affirming that several such reports were received. “The Vanishing Hitchhiker” has international distribution as one of the oldest and most widely told of all urban legends; as such, it has long attracted the attention of folklore scholars. In the earliest book that I know of devoted entirely to urban rumors and legends, Maria Bonaparte’s 1947 Myths of War, is a study of “The Corpse in the Car” variation of “The Vanishing Hitchhiker” legend. (“Proof” of the hitchhiker’s prophecy is the truth of a second prediction—that the driver will have a corpse in his car by the end of the day.) My 1981 book bearing the same title as the legend contained 20 pages of discussion and notes on the legend and merely scratched the surface. A published bibliography of contemporary legend studies listed 133 publications concerning “The Vanishing Hitchhiker” up to 1991. Many American versions describe a teenage girl in a light party dress who hitches a ride home; she vanishes and is identified—often from a portrait—as the ghost of a girl who died on the same date many years earlier. A sweater she borrowed from the driver is found draped over her tombstone. This is the version that Dickey Lee turned into a song, as did various other pop singers and groups in their own times and styles. The legend has also inspired films, radio and television dramatizations, short stories, and an unending series of tabloid “reports.” In 1987, after recording a discussion of this and other urban legends for a Salt Lake City radio station, I tuned in to hear the broadcast of my interview a few days later. I was amused that the song aired im
mediately after it was Dickey Lee’s 1965 “Laurie,” so I sent a note to the interviewer complimenting him on digging out this appropriate golden oldie. But it turned out that the selection was not intended; the announcer on duty had just picked this song as the next one up in the regular rotation of new and old favorites, without knowing what had preceded it in the recorded interview. As I said, strange things do happen in this world!
“The Lost Wreck”
Jasper [Alberta, Canada]—The mystery of the Miette Hot Springs Road, along with the four human skeletons who made the tale so intriguing, can finally be laid to rest.
Like many a tantalizing story which gains credibility with repeated tellings, this rumor seems to have sprung from a fertile imagination fed by the clean mountain air.
A story doesn’t have to be true to be told again and again.
According to one resident, who preferred to remain nameless, a friend of a friend heard about a gruesome discovery made by a work crew widening the road to Miette Hot Springs over the summer.
“They were killing time over lunch by pushing boulders over the edge when they heard one of the rocks hitting metal.
Too Good to Be True: The Colossal Book of Urban Legends Page 23