|
|
|
|
Story last updated at 1:48 a.m. on Thursday, June 29, 2000
The Internet may be a fast highway for urban legends to travel throughout the world, but Bill Ellis of Pennsylvania State University at Hazleton said the Net also makes it easier to find out if the rumor is true.
"If you get an e-mail about the Klingerman virus," he said, "it will warn you about a mysterious package with a wet sponge and deadly disease. But then all you have to do is go to the U.S. Postal Service's Web site, and there's the report that there is no such thing as the Klingerman virus."
The key to spotting a false rumor, according to Randy Williams, director of the Fife Folklore Archives in Utah, is simply to see where it comes from.
"If it didn't happen to the person who sent it," Williams said, "then you probably don't have to worry about it. If it happened to friend of a friend's cousin who lives in the next town, it's probably a legend."
David Emery of About.com's urban legend site said some, such as the e-mailed warning about spiders under the toilet seat, are obvious jokes.
"The spiders were called Arachnea Gluteus, so that should be obvious enough," Emery said. "They supposedly arrived in the U.S. at Blair International Airport in Chicago, but that doesn't exist. It was really outrageous in many ways. Many people got it and laughed at it. But nothing's too outrageous that someone won't believe."
-- Roger Bull/staff
And don't forget about bananas full of flesh-eating bacteria. That can't be a good thing.
We're talking about urban legends, of course, those rumors that must be true because you've heard them so many times. Besides, it happened to a friend of a friend. And now those rumors are flying around the Internet, passed on by friends and strangers.
Jacksonville has been in the rumor spotlight during the past few weeks since a message went out on the Internet from a "Captain Abraham Sands of the Jacksonville, Florida Police Department" warning about HIV-infected needles hidden in the handles of gas pumps.
There is no Abraham Sands, and neither is there a Jacksonville Police Department. There have been no needles in gas pump handles, but the Jacksonville Sheriff's Office has been busy answering hundreds of calls from all over the country.
Those needle rumors are just the latest variation on a standing theme. A couple of years ago, there were tales of HIV-infected needles planted in theater seats and in the coin return slots of pay phones and vending machines.
It goes back even further, said Bill Ellis, a folklorist at Pennsylvania State University at Hazleton. He's been studying urban legends for 20 years and has a book, A Friend of a Friend, coming out next spring.
"My mother, bless her soul," Ellis said, "when she was in Baltimore in the 1920s, was warned by her mother that if she went to a theater and sat next to a strange man, she'd end up in the white slave trade. He would stick her with a poison needle, she'd pass out, he'd somehow smuggle her out of the theater. Then she'd wake up in a foreign country and be forced into prostitution."
Don't blame the Internet
Urban legends, from poisonous needles to alligators in the sewers of New York, are simply part of human culture, he said. He doesn't blame the Internet.
"To be frank, I'm skeptical of the Internet having a real impact on legends," Ellis said. "The legends have obviously impacted the Internet. But legends have used every single form of mass media to spread. Shakespeare makes reference to scandal sheets being sold. The telephone was a way to spread rumors from one coast to the other. Radio and television have spread rumors. Faxes became a way to put them in writing."
But David Emery, who runs the urban legend site at About.com, said the Internet has certainly changed the speed at which rumors fly.
"I saw one rumor about poisoned ATM envelopes start in Canada," he said, "and within a day I was getting copies from all over the country. If you hear a rumor, you're not going to call 20 people. But you can click on one button on your computer and send it to 20 friends. And if everyone does that, you can reach a billion people in a week."
The key to these rumors, Ellis said, is simple:
"First and foremost," he said, "they're good stories. They're narratable. Sometimes they have a moral: Don't trust strangers. The elements that make it difficult to tell or less memorable fall out and good pieces of earlier stories replace them."
Kidney thief alert
Emery started his site three years ago, planning to focus on classic legends, such as the choking Doberman (the poor dog had bitten off the finger of a burglar found hiding in the closet).
"My readers let me know right away," Emery said, "that they wanted to know about the rumors they were getting in their e-mail, like the kidney thieves."
In that one, a stranger buys you a drink that has been drugged. You wake up in a strange hotel room, sitting in a bathtub of ice, minus a kidney. That tale became so common that the National Kidney Foundation got involved in the debunking.
Emery said he gets about 50 e-mails a day from readers, asking about rumors or offering one for his collection. Most of them, he said, got the rumors through e-mail that quickly spreads across the country.
"In most cases," Emery said, "people think, 'I don't think this is true, but it might be.' So they send it to friends as a warning.
"It's human nature. We just like to scare each other. It's a like telling ghost stories around the campfire. Now we do it at our computer screens."
Constant updates
He first saw the current hypodermic needle story about four weeks ago, and every version has been based in Jacksonville. But rumors eventually evolve; updates are continual.
Back in the 1960s, word was that a woman with a beehive hairdo, made rock hard with hair spray, died after roaches infested the 'do and ate into her brain.
Today, that's been updated to a guy with dreadlocks infested by spiders.
About a year ago, the perfume rumor was big. It went like this: A man approaches a woman in a parking lot and offers a good price on perfume. She sniffs it, passes out and is either robbed or raped.
"In the course of a year," Emery said, "it's change from 'I heard this happened,' to 'I was in a parking lot, and some guys approached me and asked me to smell this perfume. But because I'd heard about it, I didn't and got away.' Now there are half a dozen versions of this going around. It's become a rumor about how good it is to listen to e-mail rumors.
"The problem with the Internet, though, is that a lot of these aren't simply rumors. Most of the stuff is hoaxing. Adolescents, or someone with an adolescent mentality, write something just to scare people. And it's impossible to know where it started."
Brand names help
Rumors are sure to spread if they involve a brand name.
"All you have to do to a rumor is add 'Disney,'" Emery said, "and it starts spreading like wildfire."
When stories about food contamination start, Ellis said, they are usually about a local brand. But they always ends up being about the national brand leader.
So companies have spent years fighting rumors that are so unfair and ridiculous they demand repeating. Did you know:
All untrue.
But Ellis said surveys on the spreading of urban legends have found that denials don't do much good.
"When a legend is denied," he said, "a certain percentage of people who had heard it will then reject it. But a certain percentage who had not heard it will assume there must be some truth to it."
So some people inevitably believe that African-Americans are going to lose their voting rights in 2007, or that President Clinton ordered a recall of Massachusetts commemorative quarters because they feature a portrait of a minuteman holding a gun.
Jeff Stier, associate director the American Council on Science and Health, said his group is continually fighting false rumors such as Nutrasweet causes multiple sclerosis or antiperspirant causes breast cancer.
"It's very easy to spread things around," Stier said, "but things don't get un-spread. Nobody says, 'Oh, remember that thing I sent you last week? It's not true.' And if they do, the people they sent it don't tell everyone they sent it to."
  
|
|
|
'Tube Talk' Archive
Sunday | Monday | Tuesday | Wednesday | Thursday | Friday | Saturday
Brandy Hilboldt Allport |
Dan Macdonald |
Nick Marino |
Nancy McAlister
On TV |
Jax Chat |
Comics |
Horoscopes |
Puzzles |
Lottery |
Crosswords
|
|||
