Laura Wright 
Urban Legends
Urban legends thrive because they occupy the uncomfortable territory between the impossible and the merely improbable.
A traveler notices a terrible smell in a hotel room and discovers a body hidden beneath the bed.
Visitors walk past a remarkably realistic Halloween decoration without realizing they are looking at an actual corpse.
Someone receives telephone calls apparently originating from a person who has already died.
We hear stories like these and instinctively dismiss them.
Surely somebody invented them.
Often, somebody did.
But occasionally investigators discover something considerably more unsettling.
The urban legend has happened in real life.
That doesn’t necessarily mean the familiar story we’ve heard for decades is true. Urban legends change constantly, and a genuine incident can easily become incorporated into an older piece of folklore.
But reality occasionally produces events every bit as bizarre as the legends.
Here are several disturbing examples.
The Body Beneath the Hotel Bed
Few hotel legends are more unpleasant than the corpse beneath the bed.
The story usually begins with guests checking into a motel or inexpensive hotel room.
Something seems wrong.
There is an odor.
Perhaps the guests complain, but hotel employees initially find nothing unusual.
Eventually someone looks beneath the bed or investigates the mattress.
A human body is discovered.
It sounds precisely like the kind of story designed to make travelers inspect their rooms before unpacking.
Unfortunately, bodies really have been discovered beneath or inside hotel beds.
The original article linked to a documented example as evidence that this supposedly ridiculous urban legend had a basis in reality.
What makes these cases particularly disturbing is that the discovery sometimes occurs after other guests have occupied the room.
People slept only a short distance from a corpse without knowing it was there.
Suddenly checking beneath the hotel bed doesn’t seem quite so paranoid.
When the Halloween Decoration Is Real
Halloween creates another recurring urban legend.
Someone hangs an extraordinarily realistic corpse outside a house.
Neighbors admire the decoration.
Children pass it while trick-or-treating.
Nobody realizes that it isn’t a decoration at all.
Again, variations of this have actually occurred.
Bodies have been mistaken for Halloween displays, particularly when a death occurs in a conspicuous location during the Halloween season. The circumstances themselves provide the camouflage.
People see what they expect to see.
A body hanging outside a house in April would probably generate an emergency call.
On October 31, the same sight might earn compliments for the homeowner’s decorating skills.
The original article pointed readers toward real cases involving bodies initially mistaken for Halloween decorations.
It is a grim demonstration of how strongly context shapes perception.
Sometimes the best place to hide something horrifying is where everyone expects to see something horrifying.
The Corpse in the Funhouse
An even stranger case concerns an amusement attraction where a real human body was displayed without people recognizing what it was.
The story sounds almost too perfectly constructed to be true.
It wasn’t.
In 1976, workers preparing a funhouse attraction at The Pike amusement park in Long Beach, California, discovered that what had long been assumed to be a mannequin was actually the mummified body of a man.
The body was eventually identified as Elmer McCurdy, an outlaw who had been killed in Oklahoma in 1911.
McCurdy’s corpse had experienced an extraordinary journey after his death.
His embalmed body became a sideshow attraction and subsequently passed through various owners. Somewhere along the way, knowledge that the figure was an actual human corpse disappeared.
Eventually he became another prop.
When a crew member attempted to move the supposedly artificial body, part of an arm broke away.
Bone was visible inside.
The mannequin wasn’t a mannequin.
McCurdy had been dead for more than sixty years.
The Phone Calls After Death
One of the strangest stories in the original article concerned a California man whose telephone supposedly placed numerous calls after his death.
This particular kind of story occupies especially fertile ground for supernatural interpretation.
The dead telephone someone they loved.
A final message arrives.
A call appears in the middle of the night.
There is nobody on the other end.
Modern telecommunications provide numerous technical possibilities for strange call records, delayed messages and apparent calls from unexpected numbers.
But before those explanations are known, the experience can be profoundly unsettling.
A familiar number appears on the screen.
The owner of that phone is dead.
Do you answer?
Most of us probably would.
Dangerous Halloween Candy
Perhaps no Halloween legend frightened parents more effectively than the warning about razor blades in candy.
Generations of children were told to inspect apples, candy bars and other treats before eating them.
Hospitals sometimes offered to X-ray Halloween candy.
Parents searched wrappers for tiny punctures.
The fear became so widespread that poisoned or booby-trapped candy became almost inseparable from Halloween itself.
The reality is complicated.
The classic image of anonymous strangers routinely handing poisoned candy to neighborhood children has never been supported by anything resembling the epidemic once feared.
But deliberate tampering incidents involving pins, needles and other sharp objects have occurred. The original article specifically highlighted documented cases involving such objects.
That distinction matters.
The widespread legend exaggerated the risk enormously.
But “the legend exaggerated the danger” is not quite the same as saying nothing like it ever happened.
The Amusement Park Accident
Amusement parks generate their own distinctive folklore.
A ride becomes unsafe.
Someone stands when they shouldn’t.
Long hair becomes caught in machinery.
A rider is thrown from a car.
A terrible accident occurs while everyone else continues enjoying the park.
Many such stories are exaggerated or migrate from one amusement park to another.
But amusement rides involve real machinery moving human beings at considerable speed.
Serious accidents do happen.
The original article pointed to a particularly horrifying documented incident involving a girl whose hair became caught during a ride, resulting in a severe scalp injury.
The story acquired the structure of an urban legend because it already contained everything one required.
An ordinary recreational activity.
A seemingly harmless mistake.
And an unimaginably gruesome consequence.
Reality didn’t need much assistance.
The Deadly Golf Tee
One of the more peculiar incidents in the original collection involved something as harmless as a golf tee.
The story concerns a golfer who habitually placed his tee in his mouth.
That small habit reportedly became fatal after chemicals associated with the golf course entered his system through the tee.
Stories of people dying because of tiny everyday habits are a particularly durable form of urban legend.
Someone licks an envelope.
Someone chews a pen.
Someone drinks directly from a bottle.
Something poisonous, infectious or otherwise dangerous enters the body.
Usually the story ends with an admonition:
Never do this.
Even when the specific story proves false, the warning survives because it transforms an invisible danger into something memorable.
The Goat That Fought Back
The original article also included one of those stories that seems designed specifically to punish exceptionally poor judgment.
A man abused a goat.
The goat retaliated.
The man died.
There is an ancient quality to stories like this.
Human beings mistreat an animal and eventually receive an almost perfectly appropriate punishment from the animal itself.
Folklore loves symmetry.
So does dark humor.
Sometimes reality apparently does too.
When Reality Becomes Folklore
What makes these cases interesting isn’t simply that bizarre things happen.
They demonstrate how difficult it can be to separate urban legend from documented event.
Sometimes a legend exists first.
Then something remarkably similar happens in reality.
The real incident becomes evidence that the legend was “true,” even though the original story may still have been fictional.
Other times, a genuine event becomes detached from its names, dates and location.
People retell it.
Details change.
The incident moves from California to Ohio.
A hotel becomes a motel.
One victim becomes three.
Twenty years later, somebody hears the story from a friend’s cousin and assumes it happened the previous weekend.
A documented event has become folklore.
Why We Believe Urban Legends
Urban legends usually contain something familiar.
A hotel room.
A telephone.
Halloween candy.
An amusement park.
A golf course.
They take ordinary environments and introduce one terrible possibility.
That is why they survive.
We don’t need to believe in ghosts or monsters.
We only need to believe that someone might fail to look beneath a bed.
And occasionally reality provides just enough evidence to keep us wondering about all the other stories we’ve dismissed.
Stranger Than Fiction
Most urban legends should not be accepted as factual merely because somebody insists they happened to a friend of a friend.
That is how folklore works.
Names disappear.
Locations change.
Details become more dramatic.
Coincidences become warnings.
And eventually nobody remembers where the story originated.
But every so often, researchers trace one of these supposedly impossible stories backward and encounter something unexpected.
A newspaper article.
A police investigation.
A death certificate.
A real person.
The corpse really was beneath the bed.
The mannequin really was a dead man.
The Halloween decoration really wasn’t a decoration.
Perhaps that’s why urban legends remain so effective.
Most aren’t true.
Some contain fragments of truth.
And a very small number leave us with the most uncomfortable possibility of all:
Someone told us the story because it actually happened.
About the Author
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