C.G.K: Shot himself?
Virginia: They say in another part of the movie you can see the rifle that they didn’t know was there, the gun he used.
C.G.K: Did you see the gun?
Virginia: We haven’t looked yet.
Kim: The only reason I saw the boy is because somebody told me exactly where it was. I never saw it. I watched like three times before that, and I never noticed. You can see him real clear. I don’t see how I missed it.
C.G.K.: What does he look like?
Virginia: He looks like about a thirteen-year-old, fourteen-year-old boy.
AP/Wide World Photos
Kim: He was about thirteen, and he had dark hair, and he was standing there was like a window, and he was standing in the curtains—like standing in between the curtains. They interviewed Ted Danson, and they asked him what he thought about it. He said it scared the shit out of him. He said that he didn’t notice it. He didn’t see it there until they were watching the movie.
C.G.K.: How did it get past the editors?
Virginia: That’s what was weird about it. They didn’t see it when they edited it.
Kim: The mother of the little boy saw it, and she said that’s him.
Virginia: Do you think it’s a plant?
Kim: It can’t, well it might be.
Virginia: What I don’t understand is, though, why the people at the movies didn’t catch it. First run, nobody ever caught it. Nobody ever noticed it.
Kim: I didn’t catch it. I watched it a bunch of times, and I didn’t see it until somebody told me it was there. It’s just like in the background. I can see how they missed it. But he’s just staring at them. I mean I turned the movie off. I turned it off, and I came downstairs with everybody else because I was watching it up there [laughter].
C.G.K.: You can see his face?
Kim: Yeah. Clearly.
From Charles Greg Kelley, “Three Men, A Baby, and a Boy Behind the Curtain: A Tradition in the Making,” Midwestern Folklore, vol. 17, pp. 6–13; this is text “L” on pages 12–13, “Collected from Virginia Jamison, an art supply store manager, and her daughter Kim, a high school senior. Birmingham, Alabama. November 17, 1990.” This transcription of an interview is a fine example of the “discussion” mode of transmitting urban rumors and legends; nobody actually “tells” the story, but instead they talk it over. In the summer of 1990, shortly after the 1987 film Three Men and a Baby was released on videotape, people noticed a shadowy figure looking like a young boy that appears briefly in the background of one scene. Videotape allowed viewers to search for and freeze the frame with the image, options not available in a movie theater. The rumor quickly spread that it was the image of a boy who was killed or committed suicide in the apartment in which the scene was filmed. The film’s producers, the Touchstone Pictures division of the Walt Disney studios, explained that the image was a cardboard stand-up cutout of actor Ted Danson and that the New York City “apartment” was actually a sound stage in Toronto. In further versions of the story, new details emerged, including the suspicion that the “ghost” may have been planted as a publicity ploy by the film’s distributors. Some people also claimed to have seen the boy’s mother interviewed by Barbara Walters on 20/20. Another factor to consider is that spectral images in photographs have been described in traditional legends almost since the invention of photography. In some strange way this old motif was recycled to fit a new situation.
“A Dirt-Cheap Way to Sell Real Estate”
He outsells his closest competitor, the Blessed Virgin, five to one at the downtown Tonini Church Supply Co. He is sought by people who can’t tell a scapular from a rosary.
He is St. Joseph, the patron saint of family and household needs—and underground real estate agent.
More and more Louisville-area home sellers and agents are burying statues of St. Joseph in yards and asking for his intercession to bring buyers. The practice—which is popular in Chicago and on the East and West coasts—is spreading locally by word of mouth.
“It’s gone crazy. We can hardly keep the statues in stock,” said Bill Tonini, vice president of the firm that calls itself the largest religious-goods supplier in the South. “A lot of real estate agents swear by it.”
Tonini said that each week he sells 250 to 300 statues of St. Joseph, who was a carpenter by trade. Tonini carries the statues in several sizes and materials, ranging in price from $1 to $8.
The saint’s popularity has even spawned a mail-order firm in Modesto, California, that sells a 3 1/2 inch plastic statue and burial instructions for $8. Karin Reenstierna, co-owner of the firm, Inner Circle Marketing, said her company has sold more than 4,000 of the statues since December.
According to Reenstierna, the practice of burying the saint’s image began centuries ago in Europe, where nuns buried their St. Joseph medals and prayed for more land for their convents….
The Roman Catholic Church has no official stance on the practice of burying saints for commerce, according to Rosemary Bisig Smith, director of communications for the Archdiocese of Louisville.
But after consulting with several priests, Smith said, “We certainly don’t mind having this personal devotion to St. Joseph, we are concerned about people using this practice for personal profit.”
Reenstierna instructs her customers to bury St. Joseph head first with his feet toward heaven and his face toward the street. He should be wrapped in plastic and placed near the “for sale” sign.
To prod St. Joseph into action, sellers are instructed to say the following words over the saint before shoveling in the dirt:
“O St. Joseph, guardian of household needs, we know you don’t like to be upside down in the ground, but the sooner escrow closes the sooner we will dig you up and put you in a place of honor in our new home. Please bring us an acceptable offer (or any offer!) and help sustain our faith in the real estate market.”
From an article by Kyung M. Song in the Courier-Journal of Louisville, Kentucky, April 12, 1991. The burying of St. Joseph to stimulate a real estate sale is known even more widely across the United States than this article suggests, and starting in 1990 it was written about by publications ranging from the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post to supermarket tabloids. I have found no evidence for the supposed centuries-old European origin of the practice mentioned above, but I have found other mail-order catalogs offering inexpensive statues suitable for burying. While the planting of statues can be accepted as a genuine folk custom that was spread via example and word-of-mouth and varied in execution, the prayer to St. Joseph quoted above has not been collected elsewhere and sounds like the invention of a realtor or a seller of statues intending to make a better “ritual” out of the practice.
“The Devil in the Disco”
My brother was involved in a car accident and was taken to the hospital. My mother went to see him that day, that is when she overheard some nurses speaking of a girl that was being treated there for mental disturbance and burns claimed to have been given to her by the devil.
That afternoon my mother told me about the saying [rumors] but she didn’t know exactly what had happened. So I called a few friends and got more or less a complete story.
According to the information I obtained, this girl had told her mother that she was going dancing at Boccaccios 2000 [a discotheque]. Her mother objected and the girl very determined, said she was going. So right before the girl walked out of the door, her mother yelled out, “Well if you go I hope you meet with the devil.”
After the girl had arrived at Boccaccios she was sitting down when all the girls started a commotion about a young man who had walked in the door. Everyone claims he was so handsome, it was unreal. It is also said that he was dressed extremely well.
After a while the young man came and asked the girl to dance, she was thrilled at the thought that she was the one he had chosen. So while they were dancing the girl noticed that everyone on the dance floor was walking away and staring at them. When sh
e turned to look at her partner she noticed he was not dancing on the floor [i.e., he was floating in the air].
She was puzzled, so she looked again and then she noticed he had animal feet. So she began to scream and tried to run away from him, but the young man began to laugh very loud and mysterious, and he grabbed her. When he grabbed her he burned her shoulders. Another man tried to help the girl and he was also burned. So much commotion was made that the young man, by then known as the devil, had disappeared. No one knows how or when. The only thing was that he had left an odor of sulfur. And a laughter of horror was heard. But no one knows how he left.
SOMETHING EVIL IS ON THE PROWL IN OUR CASINOS HARRISON FLETCHER
This story comes from my wife, who heard it from my sister, who has a friend, who knows this lady, who says she saw the whole thing.
A while ago—it could have been Good Friday—an elderly woman and her best friend were playing the slots at Isleta Gaming Palace. They had been there all day long and had been winning off and on.
Toward the end of the day, one of the women put all her money in a machine and lost. Just as she was getting ready to leave, a handsome old man, who had sat behind her the entire time, tapped her on the shoulder.
“Here’s $3,” he said. “I have a feeling you might win.”
“No thanks,” the old woman said. “I’m getting ready to leave. But you go ahead and play.”
The man smiled a handsome smile. “Please,” he said. “I insist.”
So the woman took the $3 and began to play. No sooner had she punched the first button than the winning words flashed on her screen: Jackpot: $3,000!
The woman was amazed.
Stunned.
What luck!
She turned to thank the man and share her winnings—as is the casino custom—but he was gone. She searched the entire casino, but he had vanished. Just like that.
The woman cashed her winnings and headed to the parking lot, when suddenly, she saw the old man sitting in his car and rummaging through his glove compartment. She walked up and tapped gently on the window. The man slowly turned to face her.
“He had these burning red eyes and pointy horns!” the woman recalled later. “It was…the devil!”
The woman is resting at a local hospital now. The collection box at her church is $3,000 richer.
But wait.
There’s more.
That same day—and it could have been Good Friday—another woman was playing blackjack at Isleta Gaming Palace. She too had been gambling all day and losing her money. Just as she stood to leave, a tall, dark and handsome man in a black coat tapped her shoulder.
“Why don’t you play the slots?” he said. “The one in the corner will win.”
At first, the woman refused, but she too relented. Two minutes later, a $5,000 jackpot! She wheeled around to thank the man, but he had begun walking away into a crowd. Just before he disappeared, she noticed something peculiar poking from the back of his coat: a pointed tail!
“Give me a break,” says Conrad Granito, the general manager of Isleta Gaming Palace. “I’ve heard about 16 different versions of that story.”
The disco story was collected from a Mexican-American male, age 21, in Edinburg, Texas, fall 1978, and published in 1984 by Mark Glazer in “Continuity and Change in Legendry: Two Mexican-American Examples,” Perspectives on Contemporary Legend: Proceedings of the Conference on Contemporary Legend, Sheffield (England), July 1982, pp. 123–27. Other disco versions of the story appear in the third Perspectives collection, published in 1988, in an article by Maria Herrera-Sobek, “The Devil in the Discotheque: A Semiotic Analysis of a Contemporary Legend,” pp. 147–57. Fletcher’s column on the devil in an Indian casino appeared in the Albuquerque Tribune on May 9, 1996. Both stories are modernizations of old traditional devil legends; they recycle such motifs as the mother’s curse, the diabolical well-dressed stranger, floating in air, physical characteristics (flashing eyes, horns, animal’s feet and tail), burning, a smell of sulfur, and dancing being forbidden on Good Friday. Although these themes are consistent with Mexican-American culture in the Southwest, I have heard of the devil visiting a tavern in a small town near Yakima, Washington, and there are several published stories about the devil coming to a Cajun party in Louisiana or to a French-Canadian dance in Quebec. In the movie Meet Joe Black, Brad Pitt is a very handsome devil who also ends up at a disco. The devil is described in many older European legends as playing cards with gamblers; there he is recognized by his cloven hoof when a player drops a card and reaches under the table to pick it up. I won’t be surprised if the dark, mysterious, and dangerous stranger shows up eventually in sushi bars, espresso shops, and aerobics classes.
12
Funny Business
Judging from the topics of urban rumors and legends concerning the business world, Americans don’t trust big business either to behave honorably or to avoid doing things that are just plain silly. Chapter 8 illustrated how contamination stories have plagued some companies, but modern folklore goes beyond these claims to levy charges that businesses have supposedly mistreated, misled, and misinformed their employees and clients on a regular basis. There are also turnabout stories—equally unverified—about how people have fought back against big business. A letter from a company executive published in Time (May 11, 1992) demonstrates how one such story leapt from anonymous tradition to the pages of a major publication:
I was very disappointed in your article [on April 20, concerning Wal-Mart stores]. What Hugh Sidey referred to as a Wal-Mart employee chant—“Stack it deep, sell it cheap, stack it high and watch it fly! Hear those downtown merchants cry!”—is a figment of someone’s imagination. It was erroneously reported some time ago; it was simply not chanted then and never has been. You have done your readers a disservice.
Don E. Shinkle
Vice President for Corporate Affairs
Wal-Mart
Bentonville, Ark.
Very likely what we have here is a piece of anti-Wal-Mart folklore—a story passed among the teeming millions who both shop at Wal-Mart (or similar huge chain stores) and, yet, at the same time regret the decline of downtown business districts and small, locally owned companies. The apocryphal chant, parodying an athletic cheer, sums up the buyers’ dilemma: whether to support the downtown locals or to save money at the place where they “stack it deep/sell it cheap.” The solution is to save the money, but also to chant the chant. Did a Wal-Mart employee ever actually chant this cheer? It’s hard to know for sure, but my rule is “Never say never.”
The bigger a company is, the more likely there will eventually be some derogatory stories circulating about it. You can’t sell all those Big Macs or Whoppers or Domino’s Pizzas without someone sooner or later starting rumors about things like worms or worse getting into the ingredients. And whenever a big company changes something, like its name, logo, or product line, watch out! Example: Why did Kentucky Fried Chicken alter its name to just KFC? Ask around, and you’ll hear:
They developed a mutant four-legged chicken, and now the government won’t allow them to use the word “chicken” for the creature.
Colonel Sanders had a rule that as long as the company kept the word “Kentucky” in its name, they could never refuse service to someone who lacked money, and too many homeless people were taking advantage of the free food.
A psychic advised the company that the old name had bad vibes.
Or is it just because the word “fried” carries negative health connotations? Yes, probably, but that isn’t nearly as interesting as the rumors.
Sometimes there’s such perfect logic to a business rumor that you yearn to believe it, whether or not there’s proof—or even the possibility of proof. Is it true that the Apple computer company uses a Cray supercomputer to design its hardware systems and, conversely, that the Cray company uses an Apple? The Internet newsgroup alt.folklore.urban marks this one as “true,” and, as a devoted Macintosh user, I really want to beli
eve it.
Speaking of the Internet, this marvelous electronic data conduit and grapevine for gossip is simply crawling with folklore. Cartoonist Scott Adams, that leading satirist of business foibles, alluded to the Internet’s lore-sharing potential in his book The Dilbert Future (1997):
About three times a day, different people forward the same e-mail to me about an alleged incident involving Neiman-Marcus and their secret cookie recipe. This is a famous urban legend…. I want my Bozo Filter to look for the words “Neiman Marcus” and “cookies” and reject those messages. And I want a mild electric shock sent back through the Internet to whoever thought I needed to see that.
(If you don’t know what Adams is referring to, the answer is just three stories down in this chapter.)
Even when the company is not named in a legend, the type of business involved, and its supposed chicanery, may be made perfectly clear. Consider the role of the insurance company (not to overlook the actions of the cigar smoker and the legal authorities) in the story related in this piece of E-mail I received recently:
A Charlotte, North Carolina, man, having purchased a case of rare, very expensive cigars, insured them against…get this…fire. Within a month, having smoked his entire stockpile of fabulous cigars, and having yet to make a single premium payment on the policy, the man filed a claim against the insurance company. In his claim the man stated that he had lost the cigars in “a series of small fires.”
Too Good to Be True: The Colossal Book of Urban Legends Page 25
