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

by Jan Harold Harold Brunvand

  “The Pet Nabber”

  Valdez, Alaska—A bald eagle satisfied its hunger at a Valdez gas station when it snatched up a small dog and flew away, leaving the dog’s owner screaming in horror.

  The dog, identified in the Valdez Star as Chihuahua-like, had been let out of a motorhome to run around in the station’s parking lot while the owners, an unidentified tourist couple from Georgia passing through last week, cleaned the windshield.

  The woman owner clutched her hands to her face and cried, “Oh, my God,” while station attendant Dennis Fleming tried to console her.

  However, Fleming said as her husband walked around the side of the camper, out of sight of his wife, he began to grin and chopped his hands in the air and exclaimed, “Yeah! Yeah!”

  This was a widely reprinted and much-discussed AP news story of June 19, 1993; it may, of course, be true, but the mention of an “unidentified tourist couple,” and the husband’s undisguised glee at the loss of his wife’s pet are suspicious details. Besides, there is a history of unlikely and unverified stories about small pets carried off by large birds going back at least a decade. I first heard of an owl carrying off a pet cat from a backyard patio in Albuquerque in 1985, but Australian folklorist Bill Scott reported hearing about a pelican carrying off a chihuahua two years earlier. By 1996, when Scott published a book of urban legends, he had collected so many versions of the story that he titled his book Pelicans & Chihuahuas. He reported on a baker’s dozen such stories, some of them involving eagles carrying off miniature dachshunds, and a few reported from England, the United States, and Germany. So frequent were the reports from Down Under, however, that Scott commented, “unfortunate canines, in Australia at least, seem to need to spend their lives looking over their shoulders if they do not wish to be carried off and eaten by unlikely predators.” The pet owners in the Australian stories are invariably tourists, and in some of them they cry out for their pet: “Pancho! Pancho!” A couple of the stories mention the wife’s distress as greater than her husband’s. My conclusion is that even if we have a real pet problem here, the accounts of the incidents have acquired a strong “folk” style.

  “The Flying Kitten”

  Oldest truth of all: Hairdressers tell clients great—and true—stories. Here’s one that qualifies on both counts, told by Carole Taylor of DiGiovanni Coiffures to Lynn Schrichte of Northwest.

  A couple Carole knows found a darling kitten and decided to keep it. A few days later, the animal climbed to the top branch of a birch tree and refused to come down. After several hours of coaxing, with no results, the couple decided to toss a rope across the branch and pull it down to where the kitten was reachable.

  Nice plan—except that when the cat was almost within reach, the rope broke suddenly, and the cat was catapulted out of sight.

  Days of searching followed—all for naught. A week later, one of the former cat owners ran into a neighbor at the grocery store. The neighbor was stocking up on cat food.

  “I didn’t know you had a cat,” said the former owner.

  “You’re not going to believe this,” replied the neighbor, “but my husband and I were sitting in the back yard about a week ago, having a drink, when suddenly this kitten just dropped out of the sky and landed in Joe’s lap.”

  No word on which woman got to keep the cat. Just glad he survived his airborne training. Eight lives to go….

  This is the full text of a story that I paraphrased in Curses! Broiled Again! from the “Bob Levey’s Washington” column in the Washington Post, June 1, 1987. I’ve heard several versions of “The Flying Kitten” since then, but none as well told as Levey’s. A reader informed me that the same story appeared in Loyal Jones’s and Billy Edd Wheeler’s 1987 book Laughter in Appalachia, and another sent me a press account of a launched cat from Simi Valley, California, in 1991; this feline flier, however, landed safely on a nearby roof and was rescued by its owner.

  “The Missionaries and the Cat”

  I’ve heard this from about five different returned Mormon missionaries, all of whom went to different mission locations. This missionary and his companion visited an elderly lady who had a prize cat that was the love of her life and her only companion. But this cat was obnoxious and always sharpening its claws on the missionaries’ legs or getting fur on their dark suits, or whatever.

  One day, while the elderly lady was getting the nice young elders some refreshments, one of the LDS elders reached down and flicked kitty on the nose. And as everybody supposedly knows, if you flick a cat on the nose you can kill it by driving its “nose bone” into its brain. This is exactly what happened.

  The horrified missionary shoved kitty under the sofa and tried to act as though nothing had happened. On their next visit the missionaries were greeted by a distraught elderly lady mourning the demise of her beloved pet.

  Sent to me by Allison Myers of Tucson, Arizona, in 1990. One year earlier I had received the story from Dr. Will Waterhouse, a U.S. Army ophthalmologist then stationed in Landstuhl, West Germany, who had heard it from a friend who had served a Mormon mission in Scotland; in his version the cat had been pawing at illustrations that the missionaries had attached to their low-tech teaching aid, a flannel-covered board. Other versions mention flip charts. Sometimes the cat’s corpse is concealed by the missionaries, but in other versions they simply prop the dead kitty up and keep on petting it until it’s time to leave. In 1991, Sharon Northern of Portland, Oregon, wrote me to ask if I had heard about the old lady in Germany who had slammed her front door in the faces of two Mormon missionaries, breaking the neck of her small dog, which had stuck its head out to see who was on the porch. And in 1993 Jennifer Lewandowski of Elmhurst, Illinois, sent me the story of a piano tuner who rapped a bothersome dog on the head with his tuning fork, accidentally killing the beloved pet. This time the pet’s body was hidden under a bed.

  “The Bungled Rescue of the Cat”

  THE LEAST SUCCESSFUL ANIMAL RESCUE

  The firemen’s strike of 1978 made possible one of the great animal rescue attempts of all time. Valiantly, the British Army had taken over emergency firefighting and on January 14, they were called out by an elderly lady in South London to retrieve her cat which had become trapped up a tree. They arrived with impressive haste and soon discharged their duty. So grateful was the lady that she invited them all in for tea. Driving off later, with fond farewells completed, they ran over the cat and killed it.

  Quoted from Stephen Pile’s 1979 book The Incomplete Book of Failures. There was, indeed, a British firefighters’ strike in 1978, and this story—which may be true—began circulating the same year. However, different versions are told about both regular firemen and substitutes in the United States as well as in England.

  “The Eaten Pets”

  Do Vietnamese residing in San Antonio carry on a well-known culinary practice of their native land—killing and eating dogs?

  In the Remount Drive and Dinn Drive area, not far from Windsor Park Mall, strange cooking odors have led to a great deal of conscientious sniffing of late on the part of animal lovers.

  “It’s the smell of roasted or boiled puppy dog. Friends of mine living in the neighborhood near all those homes of newly arrived Vietnamese swear to it, and I agree,” says Kathleen Hastings of 358 Savannah Drive, who elaborates:

  “Puppies in the same residential blocks are seen for a few weeks, frisking and fattening up in their yards. Then, poof!, they’re gone, never to be seen again, replaced by the aforementioned cooking odors.”

  Said Kathleen Walthall of the local Humane Society, “There’s no Texas law against eating dogs so long as they are killed humanely. I wouldn’t do it myself. But if the practice exists here, I have no power to stop it.”

  City veterinarian Dr. Annelda Baetz concurred, saying, “Why, the Chow dog was originally bred by the Chinese for purposes of ‘good eating.’ You can’t legally throw dogs to lions or crocodiles in America, but killing them in a humane way in order to prepare
a gastronomic delicacy is OK.”

  Grumps Kathleen Hastings, “If we don’t have a law protecting defenseless dogs from the jaws of cannibals, we had better pass one—and fast!”

  Lansing—It may be OK for man’s best friend to whimper for scraps under the dinner table, but Fido had better not be the main course.

  That’s the message from a state lawmaker who has proposed closing a loophole in Michigan law that allows people to indulge in meals composed of dogs and cats.

  The extent of the problem hasn’t been gauged in Michigan, though there are documented cases in other states such as California.

  The Michigan Humane Society has received a few complaints from residents in Detroit’s southern suburbs and Lansing who fear their disappearing pets may have ended up on someone’s dinner plate.

  “There are some people taking people’s pets off the street and killing them and eating them,” said Eileen Liska, director of research and legislation for Michigan Humane Society.

  “They’re not documented cases; we can’t justify undercover surveillance because there isn’t anything in the law that specifically deters it.”

  She said officials suspect a few immigrants from southeast Asia, because in their native countries dog is considered a delicacy.

  The first example is from Paul Thompson’s column in the San Antonio Express-News for April 13, 1988. In a follow-up column published three days later Thompson reported “a whole lot of sniffing…without concrete proof that anyone goes in for ‘roast puppy.’” Four Vietnamese readers who called Thompson insisted that, since meat is plentiful in the United States “no Oriental will be tempted to seek out dogs as a culinary adjunct.” The second example is an Associated Press story of October 8, 1990. Both of these items are typical of many similar articles that have appeared in the American press since Southeast Asian refugees began arriving in large numbers during the 1970s and ’80s. Vague rumors about disappearing pets, strange cooking odors, and supposedly larger problems with pet-eating in another state—usually California—are standard features of such stories. The relationship of the dog breed “Chow” to anyone “chowing down” on dogs is tenuous at best, and the charge that dog eaters are “cannibals,” although ludicrous, illustrates how people regard their pets. Two indisputable facts make the rumors seem credible; first, that pets do sometimes disappear for no apparent reason, and second, that in some Asian countries dogs are sometimes eaten. Efforts to pass laws outlawing the eating of cats and dogs have failed, usually because such legislation could pave the way for laws prohibiting the eating of any animals, as advocated by some animal-rights advocates. Stealing of pets and cruelty to animals are already crimes in most places, but there is no proof that either action is involved in whatever rare instances of dog-eating may have occurred in this country. Another eaten-dog story, “The Swiss Charred Poodle” appeared in Chapter 2, and there is a larger genre of stories about unusual meat dishes served in foreign or fast-food restaurants. Another persistent story tells about an immigrant buying a pet pony and, before the eyes of the horrified sellers, killing it to serve at an ethnic feast. I have heard this one over a period of several years in New York, Utah, and (of course) California. The killer is said to have used a two-by-four, a baseball bat, or a gun to kill the pony; the homeland of the killer is said to have been Samoa, Tonga, Vietnam, or “some island,” but, significantly, never France, a country where horse meat is eaten. The prejudices displayed in American “eaten pet” stories are generally directed against Asians, and occasionally against immigrants from southern or eastern Europe.

  “The Pet and the Naked Man”

  We are told, through the news media, to take extra precaution during this cold weather. One advice is to take care of our plants. Sometimes that can be hazardous, as evidenced by this article in the Batesville (Arkansas) Daily Guard:

  Seems the weather turned cold in Houston, Texas, so one man brought an outside hanging plant into the house to keep it from freezing. Said plant contained a small green snake.

  The snake warmed up, then slithered onto the floor and under the sofa. The man’s wife screamed. The man, who was taking a shower, ran naked into the front room. He bent down to look for the snake. His dog cold-nosed him in the rear end. The man thought it was the snake, and fainted.

  His wife figured it was a heart attack. She called the ambulance. When it showed up the attendants loaded the man on a stretcher. About this time, the snake reappeared scaring the attendants. They dropped the stretcher breaking the man’s leg. And that’s how he landed in the hospital.

  From a letter to the editor signed Lydia Sisk, Pasco, Washington, in the Tri-City Herald, sent to me in March 1989 by Ellen Schmittroth of Richland. (The third of the tri-cities is Kennewick.) Schmittroth commented that “This smells suspiciously like a myth. It was so funny that I made several copies and sent them all over the place. When I read it to my mother over the phone, she laughed so hard she dislocated her jaw. Maybe the surgeon general should do something about putting warning labels on such stories.” The set-up for this slapstick story is usually a snake that gets into a house, sometimes hidden in the root ball of a living Christmas tree; non-snake versions begin with a clogged sink drain or a broken hot-water heater. The pet involved is either a cold-nosed dog or a curious cat that takes a swipe at the naked man’s testicles. The inevitable conclusion to the story involves startled or laughing paramedics who drop the stretcher and further injure the victim. The above version and Ms. Schmittroth’s note nicely illustrate the channels through which such stories move from person to person and place to place, both in print and by oral tradition.

  19

  Slapstick Comedy

  Back in 1970 columnist Al Allen of the Sacramento Bee devoted the very first of his “On the Light Side” columns to telling certain humorous, improbable and oft-repeated stories that he called “Mack Sennetts.” He was referring to the kinds of slapstick scenes found in the old Keystone Kops movies directed and produced by Sennett. These farcical flicks were full of sight gags, chases, sudden reversals of direction, and all manner of loony mishaps and near misses. When I contacted Allen after learning of our mutual interest in such slapstick stories, we agreed that many of the comical urban legends were close relatives of “Mack Sennetts.”

  The term “slapstick” actually refers to the sound of two sticks slapping together, or to a sort of paddle, used to create a loud smacking sound that was cued to the climax of silly jokes on the vaudeville stage and in early film comedies. If you got the timing just right, the resounding SMACK! of the slapstick was supposed to give the pie-in-the-face routine or the dropped-drawers gag a bigger comedic punch. In fight scenes, actors might actually slap at each other with a hinged set of sticks so that the force of their feigned blows was underscored by the loud cracking sound. Later the term “slapstick” was applied to the nature of the humorous scene itself, rather than to the background audio. (At least this is what dictionaries say; the whole thing sounds like a theater legend to me.)

  At any rate, obvious elements of slapstick comedy are found in some urban legends, especially the stories that involve what I call “hilarious accidents.” Typically in such stories there is a series of mishaps, each worse than the last, all leading up to some kind of exposure of the victim before others’ eyes. The comedy in these legends is simple, visual, physical, and farcical, yet it’s just believable enough to seem convincing when told by a believer to whose friend’s friend the incident happened. Sometimes a punch line destroys the pretense that the slapstick incident really happened, putting the story more into the genre of jokes than legends. Yet the incidents in slapstick legends usually are plausible enough to pass for truth in the minds of some people, especially when the stories get into print.

  One of my favorite slapstick legends is about a woman who had to take her son’s pet garter snake to him at school for show-and-tell. She put the snake into what she thought was a secure box, and started out in her car. Before long, however, she f
elt something tickling her ankle, and when she looked down she saw that the snake had escaped the box and was slithering up the leg of her slacks.

  The woman frantically kicked her leg and brushed at it with one hand, trying to dislodge the snake, but it didn’t work, and the snake kept creeping up. So she pulled over to the roadside, jumped out of the car, and began jumping around and even rolling on the ground trying to dislodge the snake.

  A man driving by saw her contortions and thought “Oh, my God! That poor woman is having some kind of seizure!” So he stopped his car and ran over to help her. He tackled the woman and tried to hold her still, but she kept screaming and writhing around.

  Another man driving by saw this scene and thought, “Oh, my God! That guy’s attacking that poor woman!” So he too stopped his car, ran over, and punched the first man in the face. The woman was finally able to shake out the snake, and then she explained the situation to the two Good Samaritans. This “Snake-Caused Accident” story sometimes involves a gerbil in a box being transported to school or to a vet. Both of these bizarre scenarios may have been invented for use in law school exams, but they have passed on into urban legend tradition.

  The concluding story in the preceding chapter, “The Pet and the Naked Man,” is another good example of a slapstick urban legend. The sequence of mishaps there goes snake-in-house/naked-man’s rescue/accident caused by curious pet/second accident caused by laughing paramedics. Few people hearing the story really stop to question why the man would try to find the snake while still naked from the shower or how likely it would be for the snake to reappear just as the paramedics are loading the stretcher. But if you start to question the elements of a farce too closely, it isn’t funny anymore.