How to Create New Urban Legends

by Jim Johnstone

Urban legends are fantastic stories people tell each other.

They hear the story from a friend, who heard it from someone else, and so on.  The result is the same as playing that kid's game of telephone; the stories evolve, often becoming funnier, scarier, or sicker.  They also take on local characteristics, sometimes naming local streets or cities or even names of people.  And, of course, they become impossible to verify.

The growth of the Internet has provided an ideal medium for the transfer of urban legends.  They can now be e-mailed to people around the world quickly and easily.

Common Characteristics of Urban Legends

Many urban legends contain similar characteristics.  Usually they have a moral to tell.

"Don't do this" or "Watch out for this."  Many e-mailed legends coerce people into sending them onwards, often by using guilt or appealing to a sense of ethics.  Some legends are down-right gruesome.  They tap into our sub-conscious fears causing us to exclaim, "I knew it!"

Other urban legends contain subtle and overt humor.  (Like the story of the woman who found a stray dog in New York City.  She took it in to her home, fed it, washed it, bought it a flea collar, and took it to the vet.  The vet examined it and told the woman she had actually caught an oversized wharf rat.)

Three New Urban Stories

The Excited Chiropractor

This happened to my friend's chiropractor instructor at a college in Vancouver, BC.  He said that one day during class the president of the college walked in and announced that the professor had been promoted to head of the department.  Everybody clapped and congratulated the beaming man.

Later that night when he went home and announced his good fortune to his family he was so excited that he gave his five year old son a big bear hug.  He heard a terrible cracking and the boy was rushed to Vancouver Public General Hospital.  The x-rays revealed that the boy had fractured three lower lumbar.  (A broken back.)  Not only did the chiropractor instructor not accept his new promotion, the next day he tearfully announced to the class that he was resigning immediately.

Analysis:  Any story where a kid dies or is hurt gets passed around by anxious parents.  This story works because it's ironic.  It's a chiropractor of all people who broke his kid's back.  He goes from being on top of the world to resigning in disgrace, all in one day.  The story also plays on people's fears about cracking backs.  Every story needs a hook that makes people pass it around.

Moral:  Don't hug people too hard, especially if you are a chiropractor who just got a promotion.

The Miracle Diet

My aunt's friend worked with a woman who was always trying these crash diets.  One day she came across a small classified ad for a revolutionary pill that guaranteed rapid weight loss.  She paid and was sent the pills in the mail about a week later.  To her delight she started losing weight.  Slowly at first then faster and faster.  She went from 200 pounds to 125.

Unfortunately, by the third month, she was feeling more and more nauseous.  One day her doctor took some x-rays of her intestines and found a three-foot tapeworm growing inside her!  The diet company had sent her a pill infested with tapeworm eggs.  She was given anthelmintics, a drug that kills worms, and put on a diet high in iron salts.  The salt caused her to gain all her weight back, and she ballooned again to 215 pounds.

Analysis:  Have you ever imagined what it would be like to have a three-foot worm attached to your insides, slurping up all the food you just digested?  You probably have.  I just took this fear and escalated it.  To add some humor, I made the woman gain all the weight back as punishment for her being so goddamn stupid.

Moral:  Don't try miracle pills or crash diets.  Also notice how I used the word anthelmintics.  Using jargon makes your story more believable.  (I also used jargon in the chiropractor story with lumbar.)

Man Dies Proving Internet is Safe for Children

AP - Jesse Solomon, 55, died yesterday after a bomb that he was building exploded in his arms near Flagstaff, Arizona.  Solomon was apparently proving to a friend that the Internet did not provide dangerous information about how to construct bombs, Molotov cocktails, and poisonous substances.

Jason Riggs, Solomon's friend, said the two had been arguing the week before about the dangers of the Internet.  "I told him that children could find stuff that could do a lot of damage.  I said the net should be more regulated."  According to Riggs, Solomon disagreed.  "I downloaded a text file about how to use household chemicals to make a bomb right in your kitchen," said Riggs.  When he showed Solomon the information, Solomon denied that the recipe would work.  "He called it a hoax and an urban legend and said that he would prove it to me."

The next day Riggs was phoned by Flagstaff police and asked to identify the body of his friend.  Constable Samantha Heathers said that an ambulance was called to Solomon's residence after neighbors complained of an explosion.  Police found remnants of a makeshift bomb and evacuated two nearby apartment buildings.  Solomon was taken to Hotel Dieu Hospital but was pronounced dead on arrival.

"He was trying to prove to his friend that the instructions for making the bomb were bogus," said Heathers.  "People should be very cautious about what they receive on the Internet," she added.  The police are still investigating the incident.

Analysis:  You will notice right away that I made this story sound like a news report.  Don't be afraid to try different styles.  In this case, a news report adds credibility to an otherwise unbelievable story.  Again, I used humor and irony as the catch.  The big thing going for this tale is that it panders to society's fears of technology.

Moral:  The Internet is evil.

Creating your Own Legend

Watch out.  Some people will be upset at you for creating yet another untrue legend that circulates through society.  There is a mass movement on the Internet of people dedicated to debunking urban legends (see Barb Mikkelson's website - www.snopes.com and the Computer Virus Myth's page - kumite.com/myths).  They think we waste our time passing on useless stories or hoaxes - it's also annoying logging on to your e-mail account to 50 messages, half of them silly stories that have been forwarded to hundreds of people before you.  Then again, almost everybody enjoys a good tale.

Generally folklorists don't think it's possible for people to make up an urban legend.  Jan Harold Brunvand, author of several popular books on urban legends, believes that true legends develop from people changing details of a story until the story develops its own oral tradition.  Scholars call this process communal recreation.  But if your story is clever enough, it might get e-mailed to hundreds of different people and develop its own tradition.

Okay, so how do we do it?  Just think of a good story.  Make it funny,disgusting, not too unbelievable, and perhaps add a moral.  Say that it happened to your friend's mother's dentist.  Keep it local, use street names if possible.  I strongly suggest that you don't make it cute and cuddly.  There is nothing more annoying then reading about some women who met the man of her dreams and blah blah blah.  Keep it vicious and sadistic - for entertainment purposes!

Feel free to use the ones I just made up or change them to your liking.  Once they're out there, you can forget about copyright or anything like that.  They are in the public domain.  Just remember that by creating urban stories (they're not legends yet!), you're not exactly making the world a better place to live.