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Urban Legends: Stories
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Urban legends are sometimes repeated in news stories and, in recent years, distributed by e-mail. People frequently allege that such tales happened to a "friend of a friend"—so often, in fact, that "friend of a friend", or "FOAF", has become a commonly used term when recounting this type of story.
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Arguably, the most classic of all urban legends is the story of “Bloody Mary”. This story possibly originated in 1978 (Wells 1999). According to legend, Bloody Mary was a woman named Mary Worth who was either (depending on the version) a witch executed a hundred years ago, or a woman who was disfigured and killed in a car accident (Lauren 2001). Her spirit can be summoned by chanting “Bloody Mary” in front of a mirror, in a bathroom lighted by only candlelight. The actual number of chants varies, but is most commonly thirteen. On the last chant, Mary will appear in the mirror and viciously scratch the chanters face.
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After supernatural events, the most common topic for urban legends has to do with murdering madmen. This is the case in the legend about the killer hiding in the backseat of a car, as well as in the story about the babysitter receiving threatening phone calls that turn out to be from an upstairs room. A few years ago, a rumor spread about a gang that would drive around without headlights and kill anybody who flashed them. Many of these urban legends originated as cautionary tales or warnings from worried parents.
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[One] popular urban legend originated in the mid 1950’s (Wells 1999). Known simply as “The Hook”, this story has stayed on the collective conscience of young lovers for decades. The story goes like this, two young lovers travel to an isolated spot to partake in some ‘necking’. They hear a news broadcast on the radio about a killer with a hook for a hand, who just escaped from an insane asylum. The girl keeps hearing noises outside the car, becomes afraid and wants to leave. Her boyfriend tries to convince her to stay, and when that fails, he gets angry, pulls away quickly and drives home at top speed.
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This popular urban legend of an ordinary woman getting revenge on a corporate giant has been around in one form or another since the late 1940s. It began shortly after the end of World War II (1945) with a woman being charged with an exorbitant bill after requesting the recipe for fudge cake from a railroad diner car. In the 1960s, the legend evolved to a woman customer receiving a bill for $350.00 from New York's Waldorf-Astoria Hotel for a dessert known as "Red Velvet Cake." In the 1970s, Mrs. Fields became the villain for having sold the recipe for chocolate chip cookies to a customer for $250.00. The story regarding Mrs. Fields became so widely circulated that in 1987 the company issued a public denial, insisting that all of their cookie recipes remained trade secrets. In each of the fictional instances, the urban legend had it that an ordinary person who had been taken advantage of by a haughty big business had gleefully taken her revenge by distributing the once-sacrosanct recipes to whomever wished to use them.
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“Architects’ Blunders” is another subject heading in Encyclopedia of Urban Legends. “Sometimes these alleged problems are said to be flaws in the original designs - as when an architect fails to allow for the weight of the books to be stored in a new library.”
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