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Urban legends offer ambiguous morals
It's a tough world out there, but that doesn't mean these stories are true
By Steve Arney
sarney@pantagraph.com
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The following tale is urban legend, which means it is presumed to be fiction.

Two female dormitory roommates consider the options for the night. Both have ample school work - a midterm in a hard science course is the next day. Both want to go out. One roommate stays in and studies. The other stays out late and has a great time.

The roommate returns late. She sees her roommate in bed; she doesn't turn on the light, so as to not disturb her. She slips to bed in the dark room.

The next morning, the roommate who went out partying wakes to a shocking scene. Her roommate has been murdered.

And written in blood on the walls is this message: "Aren't you glad you didn't turn on the light?"

This tale commonly is called "Aren't You Glad You Didn't Turn On the Light?" Urban legends connoisseur David Emery ranks it as his favorite modern-day legend, and he's spent years hearing them all. It's the ultimate close call, he said.

Folklore expert Jan Harold Brunvand writes that nearly every urban legend has some sort of lesson.

But in "Aren't You Glad You Didn't Turn On the Lights?" the message might be a little confusing. Is the teller saying it is better to go party than to stay home and study?

The moral of any urban legend is up to the tellers and listeners to decide, but Emery supposes this one: The world can be a dangerous place. Pure and simple as that.

Common in the horror legends, Emery noted, is the survivor as victim -- the one who has to endure the horror of a gruesome sight and to live through the "what-if" of a close call. The protagonist in the story above is the roommate who lives. The hearer puts herself/himself in the survivor's place.

Emery has worked for 10 years as a freelance writer and blogger for a Web site now called About.com. He initially wanted to explore the classics - alligators in the sewers and such. He quickly discovered that the demand from the public, through e-mail, was for debunking. Is Bill Gates really giving away his fortune to people who merely forward an e-mail? (The answer, of course, is no.)

But as Halloween approaches, it's Emery's season to pull out favorite, classic spine-tinglers.

His Top 10, told versions submitted by bloggers and with accompanying commentary, are posted at his blog site, http://urbanlegends.about.com/. None is a ghost story.

Literal lessons of urban lore: Lock the car doors at all times; avoid lovers' lanes; don't park or camp near an insane asylum.

And never - ever - go out on a date in a car that's almost out of gasoline. In the urban tales, the guy in the car will invariably be murdered while walking with the gas can. The girlfriend has to see the grisly aftermath.

Emery thinks of the lore as having a more universal application: A way to scare young women and, often, an expression of taboo toward or dangers of premarital sex without explicitly talking about sex.

"The Boyfriend's Death"

A young couple is making out at lovers lane. The radio is on. Music stops and a newscast comes on with an alert: A madman, with a hook in place of one hand, has escaped from the insane asylum. The young couple is spooked, so the boy turns on the ignition and floors it. When they get to her house to drop her off, they make this discovery: A hook is jammed in a car door handle.

Urban legends are stories with some degree of plausibility, are presented as fact but didn't really happen or cannot be verified. Wide circulation and longevity make them lore.

Always, the teller is passing hearsay. It happened to someone a friend knows, perhaps. The story may name a town. It may have many other details. But when researched, it will turn out to be, at best, a heavy embellishment of truth.

The tales have passed through generations, but some are more modern tales that incorporate technical advances -- and modern fears.

After several years, Emery still is actively debunking the urban legend that street gang members drive around town at night with their headlights off. Give them a courtesy flash of your headlights to alert them, the fiction goes, and they'll turn around, track you down and beat or even kill you.

The morals in legends can be questionable. Sometimes, they can be racist and homophobic, writes Brunvand, a pioneer in study of urban lore. (He writes on his Web site, but he said in an e-mail that he no longer gives interviews.)

In the following example, also an Emery Top 10, the blogger detects xenophobia, as the victim usually is a salesman traveling outside the United States.

"The Kidney Thieves"

The American salesman, outside the country, has a nightcap at the hotel bar. His vision suddenly blurs. He passes out. He wakes up in his room - but in the bathtub, which is filled with ice. A note left behind advises him to call for an ambulance from the bathroom phone. Don't leave the tub. Try not to move. His kidneys have been removed for organ harvesting in the black market.

Emery said it is true there is black market organ harvesting, but not done in this manner. "It taps into our fear of strangers and a fear of being in a strange place."

Truth is contained within urban legends, sometimes horrible truth. It is true that people have been mistakenly buried alive, and that feeds the fear and puts this tale into classics status for the blogger.

"Buried Alive"

A woman dies. But her husband has a dream that she is alive - and buried alive. The next day, he asks the doctor to have her grave exhumed. The doctor refuses. The husband has the dream again. The doctor again refuses. Finally, after the dreams keep coming, the doctor agrees. The coffin is lifted out of the ground. The lid is opened. The corpse's eyes are wide open. The fingernails are mangled, and the inside of the coffin lid shows the scratches of the panicking, dying wife.

Study of urban legend has grown exponentially in the past decades and it now can be spread instantly across the globe with a mouse click. That makes for work for Emery, as he constantly is debunking or documenting the latest story.

But accessibility doesn't mean improvement.

Emery puts it this way. "We used to do this to the glow of the campfire. Now we do it to the glow of the computer screen."

He thinks something is lost, because he thinks the legends are a vehicle for intimate sharing of fears without having to confront the fears directly. Intimacy suffers as computer accessibility is gained, he added. Thus, the spook element is diminished, he added.

Indeed, it's one thing to read online about spider eggs being laid and hatching inside a girl's cheek; it's quite another to hear the story at night, by campfire light, near spider habitat.



Mysterious starts



How do urban legends originate? Urban legend expert Jan Harold Brunvand offers this answer:

"Some are updating of older traditional legends. Some were probably made up by individuals, and some may even have sprung from an actual incident. Many of them, I believe, just evolved as people talked about some of their concerns and mixed bits of fantasy with real incidents. I also think the 'what if?' principle played a part, as in 'What if someone put a small animal into a microwave oven?' or 'What if someone's grandmother died while a family was driving somewhere on vacation?' To attempt to determine origins of urban legends, one has to study a particular legend in all possible depth and detail. But you still may not be able to figure it out."

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Reader comments on this story - 4 total

Note: All views and opinions expressed in reader comments are solely those of the individual submitting the comment, and not those of the Pantagraph or its staff.

jeez wrote on Oct 25, 2007 7:48 PM:

" You mean the story about the insane killer's hook on the door handle isn't true? Aw shucks. "

RC wrote on Oct 25, 2007 9:48 AM:

" I agree with Gryf. About.com is nothing more than an ad-magnet. Snopes is a well-established, well-researched resource. Brunvand is really the best source for this, as the Mikkelsons (editors of Snopes) agree, but his website is a vehicle for selling books, instead of deseminating information. "

Gryfalia wrote on Oct 24, 2007 10:35 AM:

" Oooor, you could go to THE source for info on Urban Legends, Snopes.com. Seriously, looking anywhere else is just getting second best. Snopes is also great for debunking the 20 emails a week you get from 'that Aunt' who got internet access last year and doesn't realise that not all the emails are true... "

?!?!? wrote on Oct 23, 2007 10:17 PM:

" ""What if someone put a small animal into a microwave oven?'" !!! Oh sure, that's something I would definitely ponder. WTH? Who came up with that thought? "
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