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

by Jan Harold Harold Brunvand

  Letter from a reader as incorporated into my newspaper column. The prototype for this legend circulated in Europe starting in the early 1970s; a 1990 German collection of urban legends is titled The Spider in the Yucca Palm. I give a detailed history of this legend in my 1993 book The Baby Train, pp. 278–87, concluding with a brief reference to Ms. Beiting’s letter. During the seven years that the story was popular in this country, I received 65 letters, clippings, or other queries about it. The release of the horror film Arachnophobia in 1990 may partly explain the interest in “The Spider in the Cactus” that year. The problems that Ikea, the home-furnishings chain, suffered from the legend were mentioned in Business Week for February 11, 1991, with the headline “So, Let’s Go Hunt Alligators in the Sewers.”

  Copyright 1998 Children’s Television Workshop (New York, New York). All rights reserved.

  “The Poison Dress”

  My cousin’s cousin who works in Fine Women’s Wear at Neiman Marcus in Beverly Hills told me this “true” story last Thanksgiving. He told me that since Neiman’s has a very lenient return policy, many wealthy women put $10,000 dresses on their charge accounts, wear them once, have them dry cleaned, and then return them to the store for a refund.

  Someone at the store told him what happened one time because of this practice before he started working there. After a woman returned a very expensive designer dress, another woman bought the same dress, and she later broke out in a horrible rash while wearing it.

  She went to a dermatologist who said he had to treat her skin for exposure to formaldehyde, and so she sued Neiman’s for the doctor’s charge. The store traced the dress to the first woman, who admitted that her mother had wanted to be buried in that dress. But the daughter didn’t want to bury such an expensive dress, so she got it back from the mortician after the funeral service and returned it to the store.

  The second woman had been exposed to formaldehyde that soaked into the fabric from the corpse.

  I thought this was true until my girlfriend told me just the other day that her grandmother wouldn’t let her buy dresses from thrift shops because of a woman who had died from formaldehyde in a second-hand dress. So this hot new story turned out to be at least 60 years old!

  Sent to me in 1991 by a reader in Los Angeles. “The Poison Dress”—also called “Embalmed Alive” and “Dressed to Kill”—was one of the first American urban legends to come to the attention of folklorists. In the 1940s and ’50s several folklore journals described a rash of reports, so to speak, of the story, and some informants remembered hearing it in the 1930s. Often, the woman who “borrows” the dress for a funeral is from an ethnic or racial minority, and she is usually poorer than the woman who sickens and/or dies from wearing the dress the second time. Formaldehyde, which many people encounter only in high school biology classes, is not used for embalming. As for the threat of real embalming fluid, often mentioned in the story, I heard from a Chicago journalist who had asked a mortician about this point in the story. The mortician opened a bottle of the fluid and splashed some over his own face, saying, “Does this answer your question?” The modern legend may derive from older stories about disease-infected blankets or clothing given to native peoples in order to eliminate them. These stories, in turn, may derive from various ancient Greek stories about poisoned or “burning” garments given to someone as an act of revenge. Classical folklorist Adrienne Mayor discusses these background traditions in one article in the Journal of American Folklore (winter 1995) and another in Archaeology (March/April 1997). Bennett Cerf included an embellished version of this legend in his 1944 book Famous Ghost Stories, saying that it was a favorite among New York literary circles of the time.

  “The Corpse in the Cask”

  Some years ago, the father of a friend of mine bought a fairly enormous house in the middle of Bodmin Moor, a sort of Georgian/Regency house built on the site of an older farmhouse.

  In the capacious cellars they found half a dozen very large barrels. “Oh, good!” said the mother. “We can cut them in half and plant orange trees in them.”

  So they set to work to cut the barrels in half, but they found that one of them was not empty, so they set it up and borrowed the necessary equipment from the local pub. The cellar filled with a rich, heady Jamaican odour.

  “Rum, by God!” said the father. It was indeed, so they decided to take advantage of some fifty gallons of the stuff before cutting the barrel in half.

  About a year later, after gallons of rum punch, flip and butter had been consumed, it was getting hard to get any more rum out of the barrel, even by tipping it up with wedges. So they cut it in half, and in it found the well-preserved body of a man.

  People who died in the colonies and had expressed a wish to be buried at home were shipped back in spirits, which was much more effective than brine.

  From Rodney Dale’s 1978 book The Tumour in the Whale, pp. 64–65. Dale characterizes this story as a “Whale Tumour Story,” his term for urban legend, despite its being told to him as true by an individual whom he names. Probably it is an English legend derived from the reality that corpses were sometimes shipped home from abroad preserved in barrels of spirits. After Admiral Horatio Nelson fell at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805, for example, his body was preserved in a barrel of brandy and sent back to England, with the brandy replaced at Gibraltar with wine. According to legend, some of the wine serving as Lord Nelson’s impromptu embalming fluid was tapped off by thirsty sailors. A similar legend is told in France regarding a corpse found inside a tank of cheap bulk wine shipped from Algeria to France. Supposedly the body of a man either has a knife in its back or a hangman’s noose around its neck. The American equivalent to these stories describes a decomposed body found in a town’s water tank when it is opened for cleaning or to clear an obstruction in the outlet pipe.

  “The Accidental Cannibals”

  I can’t vouch for the authenticity of this story. But Ellis Darley of Cashmere [Washington], retired plant pathologist, says it happened to one of his former colleagues in California.

  The colleague, another scientist, grew up in Yugoslavia. During World War II, his Yugoslavian friend experienced severe food shortages, which were alleviated by CARE packages from relatives living in the United States.

  The food came in tins. It seems that one package arrived without a label. It was a powder, and the Yugoslavian family assumed it to be a food supplement, which was welcomed at that time.

  They tried it out on their meal, found it added some zest to the food, and polished off the whole tin.

  It was many weeks later that a letter arrived describing the sending of the package.

  The letter said that the Yugoslav’s grandmother had died, and that they sent her cremated remains back to her home country in that tin!

  Well, she got back home all right.

  From the “Talking It Over with Wildred R. Woods” column in the Wenatchee (Washington) World, August 27, 1987. Variations of this story are known all over Europe, with the “cremains” being mistaken for an instant powdered drink, soup mix, flour, cake mix, or condiment. In 1990 a BBC radio program included a letter from a listener who claimed his family had mistakenly stirred into their Christmas pudding the cremains of a relative shipped back from Australia, eating half of it before receiving a letter of explanation. A story found in Renaissance sources tells of pieces of the pickled or cured body of a Jew being returned home for burial being mistakenly snacked upon by other shipboard passengers. In modern times, in countries with serious food shortages, there are persistent rumors of human flesh being sold as beef.

  “Hold the Mayo! Hold the Mozzarella!”

  I overheard this in line at a grocery store in Tampa, Florida, in November 1988. One teenager said to another, “You know why Burger King is putting out all those free Whopper coupons? The company is going bankrupt. There is a big lawsuit filed against the company in New England. Some employee had AIDS and decided to get back at people by jacking off in t
he mayonnaise. You can get AIDS eating Whoppers. That’s why they’re giving them away.”

  I am Publicity Director of the local hospital. In June 1993 I received a call from one of the local radio reporters asking that I help him confirm a story. As he told it the story went like this:

  A couple in a neighboring city ordered a pizza from the local Domino’s. It was duly delivered and eaten. After their meal the couple received a phone call from a man identifying himself as the delivery person. He said he was doing a follow-up quality check and asked if they had enjoyed their pizza. They told him yes, at which point he said, “Good. Because I ejaculated on it and I have AIDS.” The couple panicked and—out of embarrassment—came to the hospital in our city for examination. Once there they had their stomachs pumped and it was discovered that there were traces of semen in the stomach content.

  I checked our ER and lab records and no such incident was reported.

  The Burger King story came in a letter from Robert Pomeroy of Tampa, Florida, in 1989. The Domino’s story is from Tim L. Cornett of Pineville, Kentucky, writing in 1993. Folklorist Janet Langlois discussed this cycle of contamination legends in an article published in Contemporary Legend, vol. 1 (1991). Other foods sometimes mentioned are coleslaw, beans, and tacos; other contaminants include sweat, saliva, and urine, and other specific fast-food chains include Hardees, Taco Bell, and Pizza Hut. But the majority of the “Hold the M…!” legends have concerned Burger King and Domino’s Pizza, both of which have been targeted since at least 1987. When the unfounded rumors became rampant, I wrote a short piece for the Domino’s Pizza in-house publication, The Pepperoni Press (April 13, 1990), outlining the usual careers of such negative stories and suggesting how to cope with them. Evidently, I did not help the company much, as the stories broke out again all across the nation in 1993, usually in the version quoted above, in which the pizza defiler telephones his victims to reveal his guilt. Recalling that the Corona Beer Scare mentioned in the introduction to this chapter also began in 1987, we must judge it a bad year for food products, but a good year for contamination legends.

  9

  Sick Humor

  Medical horror legends come in two forms: highly technical stories, bizarre but supposedly true, and widespread accounts of horrendous supposed incidents in the process of “health care delivery” that are in layman’s language. Typical themes are weird injuries and accidents, hellish ERs, inaccurate diagnoses, and treatments that are worse than the original ailments. Often the screw-ups are said to have resulted from human failings like faulty recordkeeping, flopped X rays, overworked hospital personnel, and officious hospital or clinic administrators. Clearly, in these legends there’s the feeling that doctors might sometimes do more harm than good, despite their Hippocratic oath.

  Sometimes the apocryphal stories stem from simple ignorance about how things work. For example, a reader wrote me, “When my sister was about to undergo amniocentesis, a friend advised against it because someone she knew had the procedure, and the energy generated by the machine had caused the amniotic fluid to boil, severely injuring the developing infant.” (What about the mother?!) Another medical legend uses a simple plot to deliver the message that babies, even unborn ones, can be real fighters. It’s the story that babies are sometimes born with an intrauterine birth-control device clutched tightly in their tiny fists. Gynecologists assure me that it cannot happen, since an IUD is always outside the bag of waters containing the baby.

  Another hospital story, sent to me by an Ohio reader, cautions volunteers to keep patient information confidential. Supposedly two candy stripers (young female hospital volunteers who traditionally wear striped uniforms) were speaking indiscreetly on an elevator about the patients with whom they were working. One of the girls mentioned an old man in the ward that everyone liked, and the other girl said very sadly that she had just heard a doctor say that the man was expected to die soon. Suddenly another passenger on the elevator fainted. It turned out that she was the old man’s daughter (or wife) who was coming for a visit, and the doctor had not yet explained his condition to her.

  One of the classic medical horror legends involves an accidental patient death caused by a hospital visitor or worker. Merium Malik of San Antonio, Texas, sent me this one in 1991:

  A priest made weekly rounds at a hospital, and one day he was visiting a parishioner in the intensive care unit. The man was connected to many tubes and wires, but he greeted the priest cheerfully.

  However, as the priest stood at his bedside, the man grew visibly worse and seemed to be fighting to breathe. Still, he could gesture for a pencil and paper from the table next to the bed, and he scribbled something and pressed the note into the priest’s hand.

  The priest stuffed the note into his pocket and rang for help, but the man died before anyone arrived to render aid.

  That night as the deeply shaken priest prayed for the man, he remembered the note and pulled it out of his pocket. He uncrumpled it and read, “Please, father! You’re standing on my air hose!”

  A recent variation on this lost-patient story started circulating on the Internet in July 1996. It was credited to a South African newspaper’s report of an incident in a hospital there. Here’s the verbatim wording of one such version:

  “For several months, our nurses have been baffled to find a dead patient in the same bed every Friday morning” a spokeswoman for the Pelonomi Hospital (Free State, South Africa) told reporters. “There was no apparent cause for any of the deaths, and extensive checks on the air conditioning system, and a search for possible bacterial infection, failed to reveal any clues.

  “However, further inquiries have now revealed the cause of these deaths. It seems that every Friday morning a cleaner would enter the ward, remove the plug that powered the patient’s life support system, plug her floor polisher into the vacant socket, then go about her business. When she had finished her chores, she would plug the life support machine back in and leave, unaware that the patient was now dead. She could not, after all, hear the screams and eventual death rattle over the whirring of her polisher.

  “We are sorry, and have sent a strong letter to the cleaner in question. Further, the Free State Health and Welfare Department is arranging for an electrician to fit an extra socket, so there should be no repetition of this incident. The enquiry is now closed.”

  From (Cape Times, 6/13/96)

  BTW [by the way], the headline of the newspaper story was “Cleaner Polishes Off Patients.”

  There was such a story in the Cape Times, but the version that got on the Net failed to include a sentence that mentioned that the incident had not been confirmed. Also, it ignored the fact that the Cape Town story was datelined from another city, Bloemfontein, and the Net text punctuated as actual quotations some of the general information from the newspaper’s account. Arthur Goldstuck, Johannesburg journalist and author of three books on urban legends, tracked down the source of this story and posted his findings on the Net. The Cape Times got its information from an article in Cape Town’s Afrikaans-language newspaper, Die Burger, which had clearly stated that this lost-patients story had been a mere rumor for the past two years and characterized the event as an “alleged incident.” This example illustrates how the Internet may virtually “create” an urban legend by circulating in doctored form, so to speak, an already doubtful news item. There’s more to the story, which you can look up for yourself at http://www.urbanlegends.com/medical/hospital_cleaning_lady.html.

  Finally, from reader Paul Teeples of Richmond, Virginia, a medical horror story with a different twist. He heard it on a job site during his days as a sheetrock installer:

  Another sheetrocker started out, “Did you hear about the local high-school player who fractured his leg so severely that when they took him to MCV [Medical College of Virginia] they had to amputate? But the doctor accidentally amputated the good leg!”

  Everybody stared in disbelief, until somebody chimed in with, “They must have sued the hell ou
tta that place.”

  “Nope, they couldn’t sue,” the first guy said.

  “Why not?” we all asked.

  “He didn’t have a leg to stand on.”

  A story like that (technically, a “catch tale,” not a legend) gives the term “sick humor” a whole new connotation.

  * * *

  “Two Sad ER Stories”

  This guy was brought into the Emergency Room of another hospital here in town late one Saturday afternoon with really bad burns on both his ears. At first, all he would say was that he had been watching football on TV and drinking beer all day. Finally, when they had to fill out an accident report, the man confessed.

  What was there to confess?

  He explained that his wife was ironing at the same time that he was watching the big game, and when she left the room for a minute, the telephone rang. The phone was on the table next to his chair and she had left the hot iron nearby. Without taking his eyes off the screen, the man reached for the phone. “I put it up to my ear” he explained, “thinking it was the telephone.”

  “So how did your other ear get burned?” the medic asked.