“The Attempted Abduction”
A woman I work with at the Sierra Nevada Museum of Art in Reno came back yesterday from a vacation in Los Angeles with a horrible tale of an occurrence at Disneyland. Her brother told her that a friend of his reported that they turned around for a moment during the Parade of Lights one night at Disneyland, and their very young child disappeared. They searched all over and didn’t find a trace of the child. They notified employees and positioned themselves near the exit gate in order to try and discover the child leaving. The child had been wearing very distinctive plaid tennis shoes. The Disneyland employees were helping them look, and suddenly someone saw one of the shoes and hurried into a nearby restroom where the child was found in new clothes and newly dyed hair. Just in time.
A few years ago as the editor of another newspaper I started getting angry calls from readers wondering why we were “covering up” a news story.
At the big local suburban mall, so the story went, two women were thwarted while trying to kidnap a little girl. Supposedly the women had cut the toddler’s hair and changed her into little boys’ clothes, planning to smuggle her out of the mall. A security guard caught them at it. So the story went.
Why, our callers asked, didn’t the newspaper carry an article about it? Protecting our advertiser?
No! The reason is that there wasn’t a shred of truth to the story. None. Zero. It didn’t happen.
The same story had cropped up all over the nation, including in Muskegon, I’m told.
It was an “urban myth,” one of those rumors that makes its way around the country, person-to-person, often over years’ time. Urban myths are ridiculous, but have just enough plausibility to raise questions—and fears. They “could happen.” That’s what makes them so insidious, and so hard to kill.
After getting several of these calls, I decided to try to track down the rumor.
I asked a woman caller if she had seen the alleged kidnapping attempt take place. No, she said, but her sister had been there. I got her sister’s name and number.
No, the sister said when I called her. She hadn’t seen it happen, but her father-in-law had been at the mall at the time of the crime.
No, the father-in-law said, his daughter-in-law was mistaken. He hadn’t been at the mall, but his neighbor was good friends with the security guard who caught the kidnappers.
No, the neighbor said, it was his buddy who was friends with the security guard.
No, the neighbor’s buddy said. He’d heard the story from a mechanic who worked near the mall in question…
…who heard it from a salesperson……who heard it from her hairdresser……whose boyfriend was a police officer, etc., etc.
In each case the person passing along the rumor was sure it had come from a credible source. Some were absolutely positive the incident had happened; others were skeptical but passed the rumor along anyway.
The first story was sent to me in August 1986 by Nancy Peppin of Reno, Nevada. The second example is from a column written by Gunnar Carlson, editor of the Muskegon (Michigan) Chronicle, for the April 28, 1991, edition; it was sent to me by Cornell “Corky” Beukema, who worked years ago with my father in the Michigan State Highway Department. My files bulge with further versions of “The Attempted Abduction,” one of the oldest and possibly the most enduring of all urban legends concerning crime. I discussed this story’s background and its history up to 1985 in considerable detail in The Choking Doberman and The Mexican Pet. It seems as if every time a new shopping mall or amusement park opens, “The Attempted Abduction” will pop up again on the local level; then, often, citizens become outraged that the newspapers and police are not “doing something” about the problem. Carlson’s editorial is typical of most journalists’ approach to the story: they have heard it so many times without ever finding evidence that it happened in their communities that they can quickly debunk it. The older and much more tragic variation of this story is “The Mutilated Boy,” a legend that goes back to the Middle Ages and beyond; its prototypes were transmitted in ballad, story, and literature. Chaucer’s “Prioress’s Tale” is one anti-Semitic variation on the theme.
“The Unstealable Car”
Detroit (AP)—A Florida motorist concerned about thieves used to keep his sports car chained to two palm trees in his yard each night.
One morning he noticed the rear bumper was chained where the front bumper had been. And there was a note on the windshield: “When we want it, we’ll come back and get it.”
A true story, swears David Manly of LoJack Corp. in Needham, Massachusetts.
Between my junior and senior years in high school—the summer of 1980—I attended a summer program at Wichita State University (WSU) in Wichita, Kansas. One of the RAs in the dorm where I lived told me this story, saying it had happened to a friend of a friend the previous year.
It seems that this guy owned a large new motorcycle. He parked it in the courtyard of the dorm every night. He chained it to a light post with a heavy chain, using a massive padlock. One morning he found his motorcycle chained to a different light post, and there was a note attached that read “If we want it, we’ll take it.”
The Associated Press story on the “LoJack” device, named as a takeoff on “hijack,” was distributed to newspapers in mid-September 1991. Variations of the foiled protection ploy devised for an expensive car are told all over the country. Sometimes the car is chained to huge steel staples embedded into the cement floor of a garage; or, the car is tightly surrounded by other vehicles and locked securely. Nothing works: the car is eventually found turned around or moved across the street with the taunting note attached. The motorcycle variation on the theme came to me from Joel W. Ekis of Lee’s Summit, Missouri, in August 1990.
“Stripping the Car”
My husband, a surgeon at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, came home with this story, not quite first hand, but the guy who told him the story knew the guy it happened to and “He could get more details.” OK. There was a guy who was a surgeon up at Yale; big guy, athletic type, black. He’s driving a BMW down the highway when the engine starts acting up. So he pulls over and lifts the hood to investigate.
Another guy—black too, or Puerto Rican, not sure—stops and taps him on the shoulder. “Hey, man,” says the second guy, “I ain’t gonna hassle you. You can have the engine, I’m just wantin’ the wheels.”
Sounds like an urban legend to me!
From a letter, whose signature is illegible, mailed from Philadelphia on May 15, 1993. Other versions of this story, often with a similar racist slant, specify that the car is a Mercedes or another expensive model stalled or with a flat tire on the Long Island Expressway or the Bronx River Parkway. The oldest report of “Stripping the Car” I have received dates from 1977. This is a story that G. Gordon Liddy also tells; in a 1991 article in Forbes, Liddy claimed that the incident had happened “Recently, in New York City.”
“Get Out of Here!”
I heard this told on Long Island in the mid 1970s:
A man decided to get a free live Christmas tree by digging up one of the small pine trees recently planted along the Southern State parkway. He got as far as wrapping the root ball with burlap when a State Trooper pulled up and asked him what he was doing.
The man said, “My wife is Jewish, and she won’t let me have a Christmas tree in the house. So every year, to celebrate Christmas, I plant a pine tree where the public can enjoy it.”
The trooper replied, “You can’t do that! Take your damn tree and get out of here.”
Sent to me in March 1994 by Tricia Scarnati of Portland, Oregon. In July of the same year Mary A. Hochberg of Eugene, Oregon, wrote to me describing a story she heard as a child in New York City in the 1960s, in which a man using a similar ploy steals some bricks from a pile left near a building site. He tells the policeman that he is leaving some bricks left over from a home-improvement project. Both these writers were responding to a story from Belgium th
at I included in The Baby Train, in which a man following the identical scheme steals cobblestones from a pile left by street-repair workers.
16
Human Nature
It’s just human nature to jump to conclusions (see Chapter 1)—also to seize at opportunities, miss the point, fudge the data, complain, criticize, rationalize, sympathize, brag, gloat, miss the boat, jump ship, blindly follow tradition (yet yearn to be different), and in general to act like the kids and grown-up kids that we are. At least, so the legends tell us. Urban legends reveal our self-image as being just semirational beings, and we tell and retell these legends in order to illustrate our candid view of our nature.
Here is the Chinese-American t’ai chi master Al Chung-liang Huang explaining an ancient principle of Asian wisdom about life, using a modern urban legend heard from one of his disciples:
Living is a continuous rebirth process. If you learn something today, tomorrow morning you have to start all over again. If you accept that, then there’s no need for a binding structure. A good structure should have the flexibility to change and adapt. It will emerge when you practice, but it will look and feel different every day.
Yesterday I asked why can’t we do the whole t’ai chi ch’uan in the reverse of the way it is handed down? Why does the first movement always have to turn to the right? Barry was telling us the story about the woman who always cut off the end of the ham and somebody asked why she did it. She said, “Well, I don’t know, my mother always did it that way.” And they asked her mother and she said, “I don’t know, my mother always did it.” And they asked grandma, and she said, “Well, I did it because otherwise it wouldn’t fit in my biggest pot.”
(From Embrace Tiger, Return to Mountain.) If that story seems familiar, check back in Chapter 6, where the same “Bungling Bride” legend is quoted from a rabbi who used it to encourage his congregation to learn the backgrounds of religious rituals. Whether told in a Zen, Jewish, or secular context, this traditional story illustrates a point about human nature, that sometimes we blindly follow tradition.
Here is another example, also revealing the wisdom of youth in the ways of human nature. This story was quoted in a Salt Lake City newspaper article that was part of a series on family relationships and counseling:
One grandpa, after Grandma died, came to live at his son’s home. He had a slight hand tremor and, as he sat at the dining room table, would occasionally spill soup on the tablecloth. The tremor got worse and finally the son thought the best thing would be for Grandpa to eat in the kitchen.
This was arranged. But the tremor got still worse and Grandpa occasionally dropped and broke a piece of china. Then the son got him some wooden plates and a wooden cup to use at mealtimes.
One day the son came home and found his own little boy, age 7, working at the tool bench in the basement. The boy was chiseling at a chunk of wood.
“What are you making, Son?” he asked.
“I’m making a wooden plate and a wooden cup,” the little boy replied.
“They’re for you, Dad, so when you’re old you can eat in my kitchen.”
Years later, in the same newspaper, a letter to the editor concerning Social Security recounted a variation of the same legend, calling it “an Asian fable.” This time the father made a basket in which to place grandfather so he could throw him in the river and end the drain on the family finances. One of the children commented, “When you dispose of grandfather, bring back the basket, because we will need to use it for you someday.”
Characteristic of both the ancient stories and the modern legends of this type is that they reveal how people supposedly behave, but generally end abruptly without describing the reaction of the character whose inhumane human nature is exposed. Incidentally, these wooden-utensil/basket-casket stories are, in fact, both ancient fables and modern legends, since their plots can be traced widely in time and space and (as my examples demonstrate) they continue to be told.
Another aspect of human nature that is revealed in legends is our tendency to want to have a more glorious past. Many families tell stories of this kind to account for their average economic status when, of course, they would prefer to be—and feel they deserve to be—filthy rich:
“If Grandpa had held on to that piece of property, we’d be millionaires today.”
“Uncle Ed invented an improved widget, but he let a big company develop it, and he lost the profits that should have been his.”
“Our ancestors were English nobles, but they gave it all up to immigrate to the States.”
Although these “family misfortune stories” may contain some grains of truth, they become exaggerated and stylized as they’re retold through the generations. In short, they become wishful-thinking legends. Eventually that parcel of downtown Chicago property that Grandpa once owned becomes in the story “the exact piece of land where the Marshall Field’s department store stands today.” Uncle Ed’s widget is said to be the key ingredient in the success of General Electric, General Motors, or another giant corporation, though the details of the device are always sketchy.
The family nobility, it is explained, was forsaken many generations ago, so that by now nobody is quite sure how it happened. Perhaps some ancestor ran off with a commoner, or lost the family fortune for love, or differed with the king, forfeiting wealth in order to uphold some moral principle. According to other stories, the land became worthless, the business went bust, or the railroad went elsewhere, leaving Grandpa and his descendants stuck in the middle class.
People tell such stories because they really believe that hard work and persistence—not just blind luck—should pay off. If we’re not rich (industrious people that we are), then an ancestor must have done something wrong. That’s just human nature, no matter how you look at it.
* * *
“THE COPIER IS OUT OF ORDER”
YES—We have called the serviceman
YES—He will be in today
NO—We cannot fix it
NO—We do not know how long it will take
NO—We do not know what caused it
NO—We do not know who broke it
YES—We are keeping it
NO—We do not know what you are going to do now
Thank You
* * *
“The Baby Train”
The first thing you hear mornings in Manitou is the early Q train to Chicago. It’s too early to get up and too late to go to sleep again. They have a legend out there that the morning yells of that rattler do a good deal to keep up the birth-rate.
Dear Ann Landers: If you think this is as funny as I do, go ahead and print it.
—Longtime Reader in Bentonville, Ark.
Dear Ark: I do, and I will. Here it is:
“I asked my Uncle Jeb why he and Aunt Tessie had so many kids. He replied ‘We lived down by the tracks. The train woke me up at 6 a.m., and I didn’t have to be anywhere ‘til 7.’”
The first is from Christopher Morley’s novel Kitty Foyle, published in 1939; the second is from Ann Landers’s column of July 9, 1996. In my book of the same title I print longer versions of “The Baby Train” from the United States, England, South Africa, and Australia. This story, illustrating how people will presumably seize any opportunity for sex, goes back at least to the early Industrial Revolution, when train travel was just developing. Some Canadian versions describe a French-Canadian train engineer who deliberately blows his whistle long and loud early in the mornings, waking people up and leading them to do what comes naturally. The punch line in Canada is often something like “Gawdam that Jean-Pierre!” The baby-train legend has long been a favorite on college campuses, told to explain the supposedly high birth rate in certain married-student apartment units. In coastal locations the same story is told, with a fog horn waking up the couples. The English term “whistle babies” is sometimes used to refer to the results of these early morning incidents; it has a counterpart in the German Jagd kinder or “hunt children,” referring to
conceptions occurring during the hunting season. Contradicting the legends, demographers generally deny that events such as blackouts, earthquakes, and major snowstorms often spur a huge increase in births nine months later. However, following Hurricane Andrew in 1993 news stories claimed that hundreds of people in southern Florida had conceived unexpected babies during the storm. A Knight-Ridder article circulated in May of that year quoted a Florida obstetrician saying, “Major snowstorms, blackouts, anything that shuts business down…if you’re stuck at home and there’s nothing else to do, these kind of things do happen.”
“The Trained Professor”
There is an ancient legend that has been showing up in college classrooms for at least 20 years. According to the story, a group of psychology students was being lectured on the principle of positive reinforcement. The lecturer was boring, so to relieve the tedium, the students concocted a scheme whereby they would all look up and smile whenever the instructor spoke from the left-hand side of the room. According to another version, by the end of the semester they had trained him to lecture with one hand stuck into his coat à la Napoleon Bonaparte, speaking in terse, clipped sentences.
I heard the “Trained Professor” story from our psychology teacher in Psych 101 at Princeton sometime between 1963 and 1967. He said it was true. The behavior induced was lecturing from one side of the platform. Several of us in his class decided to test his hypothesis, and we succeeded in inducing the same behavior from him within about two weeks.
Too Good to Be True: The Colossal Book of Urban Legends Page 32