Despite their name, there is nothing exclusively urban about urban legends. While some urban legends, such as “Alligators in the Sewers,” are set in cities, others such as “Bloody Mary” (the ghost of a murdered girl that appears after one recites “Bloody Mary” thirteen times in a dark room) or “The Hook” (the legend of a psychotic killer who slew his victims with a hook that replaced his missing hand) are not typically defined by an urban setting. Rather, they are told in suburban or even rural settings. Urban legends acquired the “urban” modifier as they circulated among teenagers, city folk, and the well educated of modern society. The urbanity of urban legends thus relates to the identities of the believers rather than the environmental context of the tales. Furthermore, the “urban” modifier is used to differentiate modern (urban) legends (otherwise known as contemporary legends) from traditional folklore in preindustrial times (before the development of Western urbanized capitalist society).
Many observers regard urban legends as something distinctly American, even though they might have spread internationally. American folklorists began collecting and analyzing urban belief tales in the 1940s and 1950s when the tradition was first perceived as an oral tradition. However, scholars soon realized that urban beliefs or legends pervaded a larger swath of society. They found that mass media disseminated legends across the country. In academia, the study of contemporary legends became a useful tool to investigate complex sociopsychological beliefs such as attitudes toward race, crime, and gender biases in American society.
Indiana University in Bloomington became the eminent center for collecting and interpreting urban legends in America when Professor Linda Dégh and her students began publishing their findings in 1968. The study of contemporary American folklore spread through the 1970s: the first international conference on contemporary legends took place in 1982, and then the International Society for Contemporary Legend Research (ISCLR) was founded in 1988. American folklorist Jan Harold Brunvand introduced the term “urban legend” to the general public through a series of popular books beginning with The Vanishing Hitchhiker in 1981. His books are credited not only for expanding the study of urban legends to mainstream society but also for establishing that legends and folklore play a vital role in so-called primitive or traditional societies and in contemporary Western society. Moreover, the study of urban legends can reveal much about modern culture. Brunvand’s books are still cited as foundational texts in the study of urban legends.
By the 1990s, the popularity of urban legends expanded when shows about urban legends appeared on cable television. Urban Legends, Beyond Belief: Fact or Fiction, which aired on the Fox Network from 1997 to 2002, and later Mostly True Stories: Urban Legends Revealed, which aired from 2002 to 2004, featured reenactments of urban legends detailing tales and revealing any factual basis they held. Similarly MythBusters, which aired on the Discovery Channel from 2004 to 2016, analyzed a wide array of urban myths by reproducing the experience of the myth using scientific methods. The expansion of the study of urban legends from academe into popular culture not only illustrates the cultural potency of urban legends and contemporary mythology, it reveals a collective curiosity in Western society to understand the subtle mythology that gives meaning, however irrational, to life experiences.
The Ghost Children of Gravity Hill
There are numerous “gravity hills” in the United States, locations where cars seem to roll up the road and water appears to flow uphill. To test such phenomena, Americans generally come to a stop on the hill and put their cars into neutral, at which point the cars seem to their passengers to roll uphill. Such occurrences are generally attributed to optical illusions and slight disorientation on the part of those involved, although in this era of on-demand GPS and altitude readings, the mystery is sometimes compounded by the fact that the car does, indeed, appear to be gaining altitude as it rolls. In addition, local traditions sometimes ascribe supernatural causes. At the gravity hill on Pleasant View Road in Lewisberry, Pennsylvania, for instance, ghost children from a doomed school bus are purported to push cars uphill, although locals deny any triggering tragedy.
C. Fee
Folklore: An Encyclopedia of Beliefs, Tales, Music, and Art defines an urban legend as “a popular term for a narrative concerning some aspect of modern life that is believed by its teller but is actually untrue.” Urban legends are narratives that persist over time. They share a consistency of form with a clear beginning, middle, and end. In each urban myth, there is a conflict that characters in the story deal with but that is not always resolved, perpetuating the relevance of the legend in contemporary society. “Ghosts of Gully Road,” for instance, is a story of a historically haunted road in central New Jersey, where the ghosts of witches and Revolutionary War soldiers have terrorized residents since the nineteenth century. Though it has long since been abandoned, Gully Road is still purportedly haunted, and as the urban legend dictates, any flame near the road mysteriously dies. In addition to a clear narrative structure, urban legends always deliver their punchlines at the end of the story and through irony. The “Legend of Charles Drew,” for example, is the story of a black medical researcher who died outside a segregated Southern hospital in 1950. Drew was famous for developing a method of preserving blood plasma so that it could be used in transfusions, and yet, according to the urban legend, he bled to death outside a hospital.
Urban legends are supposedly based on true events or facts, but most stories are so far-fetched as to defy logic or reason. Many urban legends are essentially extended jokes or exaggerated social or cultural prejudices or fears that are believed to be true. Some, like the legend of the “Negro Cocaine Fiend,” illustrate historic racial discrimination and slander in American society and are worth studying to understand how the legends transform over time and influence contemporary society. According to the legend, which can be traced back to the end of the Civil War, black males living in cities are more likely to abuse cocaine than whites, and when they do, they aggressively attack bystanders, while becoming physically stronger and more resistant to police restraint. While empirically ungrounded, this legend has justified discrimination in America and deleterious social policies like “stop and frisk” that disproportionally affect blacks living in cities.
While the legend of the “Negro Cocaine Fiend” perpetuated the oppression of blacks, the “Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm” preserved a culture of female domesticity and subservience to males, but whereas the former was based on suspicion and anecdotal evidence, the latter was supported by scientific fact and objective academic inquiry. In her landmark essay, “The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm,” Anne Koedt reacted to long-standing theories in Freudian psychology that assumed that the locus of female orgasm was in the vagina, and not (as we now know) in the clitoris. Moreover, “it was Freud’s feelings about women’s secondary and inferior relationship to men that formed the basis for his theories on female sexuality,” Koedt argued. “Once having laid down the law about the nature of our sexuality, Freud not so strangely discovered a tremendous problem of frigidity in women. His recommended cure for a woman who was frigid was psychiatric care. She was suffering from failure to mentally adjust to her ‘natural’ role as a woman.” Mainstream clinical practice since the nineteenth century, Koedt’s argument implied, was thus based on the subjugation of female sexual autonomy and the preservation of patriarchal society. Koedt’s essay was seminal to the Sexual Revolution of the 1960s, yet debates over the veracity of her claims and their implications continue today.
During the 1940s, when urban legends were studied for the first time, scholars believed that the stories circulated by word-of-mouth. Over time, legends traveled as if by a telephone game; each retelling of the tale added new variables and characteristics deviating from the original story while preserving the central themes and components. It wasn’t till the late 1950s and early 1960s that folklorists discovered that mass media played a vital role in the dissemination of urban legends. The most famous instance was in 1937 when filmmaker Orson Welles directed and narrated a radio broadcast adaptation of H. G. Wells’s novel The War of the Worlds. The broadcast caused a panic, and because of its realism listeners fled their homes in desperate confusion, believing that aliens actually had landed on earth as they did in the novel. The legend of the “Negro Cocaine Fiend” circulated primarily through print media. Full-length newspaper articles describing violent, drug-addicted black men, replete with cartoon caricatures, reached a mainstream audience in the early twentieth century, and since the 1970s the “Black Drug Addict” and “Criminal Rapper” tropes have circulated through news media as variations of the legend of the “Negro Cocaine Fiend.” The “Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm,” however, while not as explicitly prevalent in news media, was transmitted in medical papers and academic journals.
Orson Welles produced one of the most successful hoaxes in history when his radio broadcast convinced millions of listeners that aliens had taken over the Earth. He demonstrated the power of mass media in disseminating urban legends. (Bettmann/Corbis)
In the twenty-first century, the most common medium for the circulation of urban legends has been the Internet. The legend of the “Good Times Virus” was circulated by email. The legend claimed that there was a computer virus so powerful that it could destroy a hard drive in seconds. Such legends not only circulated on the Internet but their content also pertained to telecommunications and digital technologies. The “Y2K Scare” (otherwise known as the “Year 2000 Problem”) is another such legend in which people feared the failure of digital technologies. According to the urban legend, at the turn of the century, computer systems would crash because of their faulty date logic. What was a legitimate concern for computer scientists and programmers, however, became a sensationalistic media event and online scaremongering. Pandemonium ensued, and yet at the stroke of midnight, nothing happened.
Whether transmitted by email, television, radio broadcast, or in newspaper articles, the dissemination of urban legends ultimately reverts back to oral tradition. The mechanics of this oral dissemination, though, are particular. Often the authenticity of the urban legend is qualified by the caveat that it happened to a friend of a friend, which not only personalizes the story but also enhances the power of the narrative. Such distance from the teller and the story is enough the make the legend plausible yet unverifiable, thus perpetuating the mystique and impact of the legend. Vagueness is a definable characteristic—time frames are usually confusing or nonexistent. A distinct sense of place, though, is important. As an urban legend travels throughout society, tellers incorporate real locations, historical events, and real people.
MythBusters (2003–2016)
Perhaps no contemporary cultural artifact speaks to the pervasiveness and abiding popularity of the urban legend in American society like the Discovery Channel series MythBusters, which was on the air between 2003 and 2016. Each week Jamie Hyneman and Adam Savage—two Hollywood special effects experts—along with their cast of jolly experimenters took aim at well-established folk beliefs and put them to the test. Attempting to apply the scientific method to folklore (with the cameras running all the while), the MythBusters team developed what might be termed “laboratory conditions” under which they examined whether—for example—running quickly through the rain keeps one from getting as wet as walking through it, or if urinating on the third rail of a train track will electrocute one. After completing each experiment, the MythBusters determined whether a given concept was busted, plausible, or confirmed.
C. Fee
The stories often transform according to the context in which they are told; tellers include local references to make the stories more believable, and to intensify their relevance to the contemporary setting. Moreover, the perpetuation of the urban legend depends on its emotional impact and contemporary relevance. This is often achieved through inciting fear. The legend of “The Hook,” for instance, holds as much relevance and impending danger for modern lovers as it did for those in the 1950s when the legend first circulated. Finally, urban legends often convey a sense of moral judgment and consequence. Legends such as “Alligators in Sewers” warn against exploring potentially dangerous spaces. Similarly, parents often tell their children about the Bogeyman or other ghosts who will appear if the child misbehaves.
Ryan Donovan Purcell
See also Alligators in the Sewers; Baby Train; Bloody Mary or I Believe in Mary Worth; Buried Alive; Hook, The; Kidney Heist, The; Killer in the Backseat; Licked Hand, The; Microwaved Pet; Racism in Urban Legends; Slasher under the Car; Small World Legend; Vanishing Hitchhiker
Further Reading
Brunvand, Jan Harold. 1981. The Vanishing Hitchhiker: American Urban Legends and Their Meanings. New York: W. W. Norton.
Craughwell, Thomas J. 2002. Urban Legends: 666 Absolutely True Stories That Happened to a Friend … of a Friend … of a Friend. New York: Black Dog & Leventhal.
Ellis, Bill. 1997. “Legend, Urban.” In Folklore: An Encyclopedia of Beliefs, Customs, Tales, Music and Art, edited by Thomas A. Green. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO.
Genge, N. E. 2000. The As-Complete-As-One-Could-Be Guide to Modern Myths. New York: Three Rivers Press.
Koedt, Anne. 1970. The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm. Somerville, MA: New England Free Press.