FOAFTALE NEWS
NEWSLETTER
OF
THE INTERNATIONAL SOCIETY FOR
CONTEMPORARY LEGEND RESEARCH
ISSN 1026-1001
IN
THIS ISSUE
2001 Perspectives on
Contemporary Legend Conference Abstracts
“Who Is the Man in the Mountain?: The Commodification and
Variation of a Local Legend”
John Ashton
jashton@swgc.mun.ca
A few kilometers to the east of the city of
To
accommodate the site’s many summer-time visitors, a viewing area has been
constructed complete with parking spaces, picnic tables and a plaque
elaborating the etiological legend which has become attached to the
location. “The Old Man” is said to be
standing guard over pirate’s treasure that now lies buried on
Versions of
this narrative vary in complexity and detail and feature prominently on
postcards and other souvenirs as well as websites and videos promoting the area
as a tourist destination.
Oral
accounts of this phenomenon, however, particularly those that reference the
landmark’s status twenty or more years ago, tend to be considerably less
colorful, and frequently lack a narrative framework, taking instead the form of
simple belief propositions; “There’s a ghost at Breakfast Point,” “You can see
someone’s face in the Cliff at
This paper
will explore the relationship of the legend’s various manifestations and
articulations to its commodification within the
context of the burgeoning tourist industry in
Jan Harold Brunvand
Jan.Brunvand@m.cc.utah.edu
The “urban
legend” (a term enclosed in quotation marks in some ISCLR statements) has much
less vitality as an oral-narrative genre than in its glory days from the l960s
through the l980s. “Urban legends” have
mostly migrated from folklore into popular culture where they are stereotyped,
standardized, exploited, commodified, and
repackaged. The most common medium for
their circulation has become the Internet.
“The Kidney
Heist” offers a good example of how the oral tradition of an urban legend dries
up as popular culture absorbs it. From
1991, when the legend emerged, to the present, this story has gone from oral
narrative to other forms: television and film exploitation, literary and popcult allusion, Internet bogus warning, and eventually
merely a quip in a popular comic strip.
The media,
while embracing the general idea of urban legends, often misuse the term and intermix legends with rumor, trivia, misinformation, and
sensationalized current events or the stock subjects of tabloid journalism like
Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster.
Recent popular anthologies of urban legends borrow from folklorists’
collections while criticizing academic approaches and further confusing genuine
legends with other miscellaneous material.
Professional storytellers who adopt urban legends over-dramatize their
performances, combine texts, and invent plot details.
Such
popularization of folklore is nothing new, and the “vanishing” of “urban
legends” (if this truly is occurring) does not mean that we have nothing left
to study. Our collected material has not
been fully analyzed, and recent developments open up new areas for research.
This presentation
concludes with slides illustrating the points made in the paper and showing how
published images of “urban legends” help to shape the public perception of
them.
Frances Cattermole-Tally
UCLA
Tally@humnet.ucla.edu
Some deaths
are reported prematurely as was the case with Mark Twain who, in 1897, cabled
from
But the
media alone is not always the culprit in these mistaken reports. An article in The Journal of Popular
Culture, points out that the questioning of the deaths of prominent figures
is widespread in out culture. For
example, when Bob Dylan had an accident on his motorcycle speculation was rife
that he had died, while James Dean, who did indeed die in a car crash was reported to be alive. An accident is not always necessary to start
such rumors. The well-known Beatle, Paul
McCartney, was reported to be dead and his fans worked assiduously collecting
evidence of his supposed demise. So far
as I know these ideas are never attached to female entertainers.
Similar
stories often attach themselves to wealthy eccentric recluses especially when
the control of a business or the control of money is involved as in the case of
the late Howard Hughes. Although he is
not a recluse, economics also played a role in the death of L. Ron Hubbard, the
founder of Scientology. He was reported
to have died as early as the l940's. In
1983 he was again thought to be dead because he refused to appear in
court. In 1986 there was an interesting
reversal of thought. Hubbard really died
and it was claimed that he was still alive.
He may fit into the classic legends of heroes who live on after they
took their last breath.
Premature reports of death are
more rumor and gossip than legend, although in many instances well-defined
stories arise from speculations and beliefs which surround popular figures such
as Paul McCartney.
The classic
legend of the hero or villain surviving after death dates back to Roman
times. The legend seem
to be world wide. Nero, Charlemagne,
Friedrich Barbarossa, King Arthur, Pancho Villa, Hitler and John F. Kennedy are just a few
examples of heroes who supposedly still survive.
This paper
is an investigation into the meaning of the popular accounts of premature death
and their opposites, the classic legends of people who are believed to be alive
after they have died. The paper will
attempt to analyze the differences between these contrasting death legends and
seek to find the reasons, economic, psychological and religious for their
existence and repetition.
Frances Cooper
c07fc@mun.ca
The
The first
reported sighting of the Honey Island Swamp Monster occurred in 1974, when
Harlan Ford returned from the swamp with plaster casts of unusual
footprints. Since that time, other
individuals have come forward to report their encounters with the
creature. Some describe face-to-face
meetings, and some claim to have seen the three-toed footprints that have come
to be thought of as belonging to the monster.
Hunters have discovered wild boars killed in a way that could not
conceivably have been done by the common animals known to live in the
swamp. Others tell stories of being
frightened by hearing wailing cries during the night. The details of these accounts and the plaster
casts made of the footprints have led scientists to formulate general
information about the Honey Island Swamp Monster. The scientific data indicates that the
creature resembles the traditional bigfoot
in some ways but possesses unique and individual features of its own. The stories of this creature, referred to
locally as a wookie, a thing and a monster, have
influenced not only the lives of those in the swamp, but the lives of all who
are interested in the possibility of what might be.
This paper
analyzes the various reported sightings that have occurred and compares and
contrasts the elements of the legend variants to identify how the story has
developed and become a more fictional account of the alleged sightings. The connections with legends of other cryptozoological phenomena are also examined. Most significantly, however, this paper
explores the beliefs of the people that live in
“‘Me and The Devil’: The
Holly Everett &
h64he@mun.ca &
“The
Johnson
(1911‑1938), the most celebrated and influential African‑American
blues performer (Barlow; Guralnick; Palmer; Titon), undoubtedly cultivated the view that he had
otherworldly associations through the performance of two songs that directly
refer to Satan, namely, “Hellhound on My Trail” and “Me and the Devil Blues.”
It has been “Cross Road Blues,” however, which Johnson recorded in
This paper
will examine key components of the legend as gathered from aural, published and
Internet sources, discuss their probable sources, and posit reasons for the
international dissemination of the narrative. In part, our paper will argue
that beyond maintaining the legend’s diffusion, the “negative legend” motifs
(Dégh), i.e., arguments against the legend that cite the legend and therefore
also transmit it, have sometimes been as spurious as the legend itself and that
they parallel negative legend motifs concerning Paganini,
thus reflecting a dialogical discursive tradition concerning music, its sources
and its performance. Finally, it will be shown that the
REFERENCES
Barlow,
William. "Looking up at Down": The
Emergence of Blues Culture.
Black,
Allison. Personal communication.
Dégh, Linda and Andrew Vázsonyi. The Dialectics of the Legend. Folklore Preprint Series, I.6.
Guralnick, Peter. Searching for
Titon, Jeff Todd. Early Downhome Blues: A Musical and Cultural Analysis. Second
ed.
Palmer,
Stratton,
Stephen Samuel. Niccole Paganini:
His Life and Work. 1907.
“‘1½ Hours
of Horror for £6'” Legend-Telling on Ghost
Joy Fraser
e99jf@mun.ca
Ghost tours
can be broadly defined as guided walking tours in which one or more performers
conduct a group of audience members through the downtown area of a city or
town, presenting supernatural and other stories associated with a number of
locations along the route. The recent
dramatic growth of this form of “dark tourism” provides a fascinating case
study of the ways in which folk traditions have been incorporated within the
productions of the contemporary tourism and heritage industries. In this paper, I explore the particular interest
which the study of ghost tours holds for contemporary legend scholarship. A glance at a sample of ghost tour
advertisements reveals that legend, however vaguely the term is defined,
is regarded by tour companies as a highly marketable concept. Such advertisements are filled with promises
to guide audiences through a “history ... steeped in legends”, to introduce
them to a “rich tradition of folklore and legend”, or to entertain them with “true
legends, tales of haunts, and lore”.
Analysis of ghost tour performances confirms many of the narratives
performed on such tours can, indeed, be categorized as legends. Drawing my examples from fieldwork conducted
with ghost tour companies in
In particular, I consider the
significance of the fact that ghost tour audiences pay to hear such narratives
told in the “genuine haunted locations” to which they relate. In several cases, tour companies have
generated their own legends by incorporating into their performances accounts
of supernatural incidents experienced by participants on previous tours. In considering this issue, I focus in
particular on one Edinburgh-based tour company, City of the Dead, which
promises its audiences an experience “You won’t forget,” that of being “locked
in a graveyard at night with an active poltergeist”. This tour culminates in a section of a local
cemetery to which only the tour has access and which houses the “Black
Mausoleum”, the reputed site of an entity which the company has named the
McKenzie Poltergeist. During the tour’s
two-year history, participants have fallen victim to more than sixty alleged
poltergeist attacks, with over twenty of these involving loss of
consciousness. I explore the strategies
by which the tour company constructs its representation of the McKenzie
Poltergeist, examining its role in the creation of a legend in which the
members of the tour group are key players, and in ensuring the continuation of
this legend through the very act of taking tours into the Mausoleum.
“Food and Gender: Food Contamination Legends in the
Hispanic Community of the
Mark Glazer & Steve Liebowitz
mglazer@panam1.panam.edu
The goal of
this paper is to review data on contemporary food contamination legends
systematically collected in a given geographical area. This type of research
has not been undertaken in urban legend studies, leaving this sub field of folkloristics devoid of systematic information. This paper
tests the hypothesis that a systematic survey of these legends will lead to
important information about the tellers and the social context of these
narratives. All of the food contamination legends in this study are from the
Lower Rio Grande Valley of Texas. The area has a population of 939,660, and 98%
of this population is Mexican American.
With this
purpose in mind the narratives which are the basis for this paper were
collected with a questionnaire entitled, "The Contemporary Legend
Information Sheet." This survey includes questions on demographic and
contextual information as well as on the contemporary legends themselves. This
process has resulted in a collection of 846 urban legends in the Lower Rio
Grande Valley of Texas. Of these 846 narratives in our sample, 230 (27%) are
food contamination legends. These food contamination narratives represent the
largest group of any urban legend type in the area. As in much of the folklore
collected in this area most of the informants in these 230 legends are female.
In this case, 65% of our informants are female and 35% are male.
Our results
show that hamburgers are more commonly viewed as being contaminated than other
foods. This is followed by Chinese food, chicken, tacos and coke. We find that
most commonly dog meat or insects contaminate hamburgers. While bodily fluids
usually contaminate Chinese food, chicken by rats, tacos by cockroaches or dog
food, and rodents or body parts contaminate coke.
We have also
discovered that both men and women report contaminated hamburgers in the same
proportions, while more women report contaminated Chinese food. This is in
counterbalance with men who report on rats in chicken. Women report tacos more
often, and women and men in similar percentages report coke.
The two
hundred and thirty legends were mostly heard from friends. 52% of the sample have heard the story from friends, 24% from
relatives, and almost 5% claim the story to be a personal experience. However
males are more likely to have heard a food contamination story from a friend
63% than women 58%. Women hear the story from relatives 26% of the time while
men hear it only 20% of the time. Personal experience narratives are about the
same in proportion for both men and women. It is worth noting that the big
majority of cases (62%) just having a conversation or talking is the usual
context for this followed by talking at school (11%) and talking at gatherings
7%.
Another area
which has a very significant difference between male and female populations is
belief in the veracity of the rumors. Women are by far more likely to believe
that these stories are true. Of the women 60% believe in the veracity of the
narrative while only 46% of the men believe that they are true.
Our findings demonstrate how
this type of research and analysis based on a combination of legend materials
and contextual information can lead to new information on contemporary legend by
clearly showing social distinctions between the legends and how the tellers can
be differentiated in a given population; in this case the Mexican Americans of
the Lower Rio Grande Valley of Texas. The conclusions which can be drawn from
this type of information give us new insight to the legends and their tellers.
It also demonstrates that folklore studies should systematically emphasize
regions and localities rather than draw conclusions from materials which do not
represent well delineated populations.
“Who’s Minding Your Kids?: Tinky Winky, Harry Potter and
other Media Legends Concerning
Children’s Characters that Threaten Child Welfare”
Diane E. Goldstein
dianeg@mun.ca
The February
1999 edition of The National Liberty Journal (a
far-right magazine edited and published by conservative Christian crusader,
Reverend Jerry Falwell) contained an article warning
parents that the character named “Tinky Winky” from the children’s television show Teletubbies, may be a gay role model intentionally
designed to inculcate children into a gay lifestyle. The article pointed out that Tinky Winky has the voice of a
boy but carries a purse, is purple - the color of gay pride, and has an antenna
shaped like a triangle, a symbol which, the article argued, is a gay pride
icon. Falwell’s
proclamation of concern about the sexual orientation and motivation of a
children’s television character takes its place beside a number of contemporary
legends concerning media manipulation of children’s popular culture for morally
subversive purposes. Like stories of the
sexual orientation of the “muppets” - “Bert and
Ernie”, hidden satanic messages in the popular “Harry Potter” books, narratives
about children’s television hosts such as Soupy Sales or Bozo the clown making
inappropriate comments, and stories of exposed breasts hidden in the dense
illustrations of Where’s Waldo, the Tinky Winky story articulates a common theme of adult concern
about the care and control of innocent minds at the hands of literary and
television media.
Contemporary
Legends about children’s popular culture seem to have occurred with great
regularity over time, resulting in accusations in the early 20th
century that children’s books such as The Bobbsey
Twins and The Hardy Boys were encouraging children to challenge
authority; that true crime comic books lead to child crime and delinquency;
and, warning that radio was negatively affecting children’s’ abilities to
distinguish between fantasy and reality.
In keeping with recent studies by Joel Best (1990), Cathy Preston (1999)
and Michael Preston (1999), this paper will examine adult concerns about
threats to our children as they are constructed in contemporary legend. In particular, this paper will focus on the
confusion of adult culture for kids and “kid culture” (McDonnell 1994).
“
grider@tamu.edu
The
Because of
the nature of the battle itself and the turmoil of the ensuing brief Texas War
for
Although Texans
chauvinistically and zealously defend and preserve all minutiae concerning the
This
blending of genres and political agendas continues to keep controversy alive
regarding the
“Emotional Selection in Memes: The Case of Urban
Legends”
heath_chip@gsb.stanford.edu
We explore
to what extent memes like contemporary legends succeed based on informational
selection (i.e., truth or a moral lesson) and emotional selection
(i.e., the ability to evoke emotions like anger, fear, or disgust). We focus on the emotion of disgust because it
represents the least intuitive form of emotional selection and because the
psychology literature has precisely described its elicitors.
In Study 1,
we select a sample of legends that contain one or more of the disgust motifs
that have been identified by the psychology literature (e.g., contact with bodily
substances, ingestion of a contaminated substance; death; cutting or piercing
of the skin). People rated a variety of
aspects of each legend—informational factors like truth, practical utility, or
the presence of a moral lesson; emotional factors like anger, joy, fear or
disgust; and story characteristics like the richness of the plot or the
presence of an unexpected ending. After
statistically controlling for the informational factors, story characteristics,
and other emotions, people were still more willing to pass along stories that
elicited stronger disgust.
In Study 2,
we randomly sampled legends and created versions that varied in disgust by
manipulating one of the central disgust motifs found in the original
legend. For example, in the original
legend of the Rat in the Coke bottle, the victim spots the rat after drinking
the liquid and tasting something bad.
For this legend we created two additional versions, one where the victim
spotted the rat before he drank (low disgust) or after he drank and swallowed
something lumpy (high disgust). In
general, people preferred to pass along versions that produced the highest
level of disgust.
In Study 3, we coded legends
for the presence or absence of individual story motifs that produce
disgust. Legends that contained more
disgust motifs were distributed more widely on urban legend web sites.
We think
that it is worth looking for general psychological and sociological processes
that lead to the selection of stories, attitudes, factoids, rumors, legends,
news, ideas, and other such memes. We
suspect that emotional selection may also play a role in propagating memes such
as: fear-inducing information about carcinogens or environmental contaminants;
moral panics about deviant behavior; hysterias about satanic ritual child
abuse; media attention to homicides and auto accidents but not diabetes or
stomach cancer. We think that
researchers in these literatures would benefit from more active contact with
each other.
ehenken@arches.uga.edu
Scholars
have long been aware that contemporary legends update themselves, changing to
reflect new styles (spiders in the beehive hairdo/hippies’ long hair
/dreadlocks), new technologies (pets in the oven/ clothes drier/microwave), and
new perils (AIDS). We have further been
aware of legends presenting cultural judgments (even if, at times, ambiguous)
on behavior, and that these, too, reflect cultural changes. Certain legends are showing an escalation of
However, as already mentioned,
there’s also an escalation in the hazards people face, particularly in the “Ew, gross” factor.
For example, the person ejaculating into the mayonnaise at a fast food
restaurant became a person with AIDS ejaculating into the mayonnaise, became
three or four people (one of whom has an STD) ejaculating into the Chinese
food. (A confluence of xenophobia, food
contamination, and disease legends is creating new, more potent hybrids.) Rumors of spider eggs in the Bubble Yum have
turned into stories not only of roach eggs in the tacos but of the eggs
maturing and hatching in the victim’s mouth.
Warnings to young women have escalated from stories about Rohypnol, the
“rape drug” which causes unconsciousness and amnesia, to stories about Progesterex, which adds permanent sterility to the mix.
The latter
group of legends reflects changes not in a culture’s moral values but rather in
its aesthetic expectations. Moreover,
the escalation of
Lindahlc9@aol.com
Ostension–the
process through which people live out legend, making it real in the most
palpable sense–has come to be understood as the most terrifying evidence
imaginable of the negative potential of folk narrative. Linda Dégh’s landmark essay, “Does the Word
‘Dog’ Bite?” (1982), examined ostension primarily as a criminal act: In
Nevertheless, there is ample
evidence that ostension can transcend horror and inspire a sense of wonder with
in those who bring legends to life. Like
role-playing criminals, would-be saints create for themselves a scripted world
infected with violence, but the saint enters that world ostensively
as the victim rather than the villain, and in the
process of death is transformed into a spiritual hero. Similarly, pilgrims to such shrines as Saint
Patrick’s Purgatory pass through a ritualized death and resurrection,
mortifying themselves into another world that they regard as far better, not
far worse, than the world they have temporarily left behind.
This paper
examines a phenomenon in which legend-tripping blends into ostension, and in
which ostension inspires both terror and wonder. Lydia Zamora, a student at the
mc
Long after
the days when lonely older women with cats were burned at the stake as witches,
society is still not ready to accept feline‑loving eccentric
females. The "crazy cat lady"
as she is commonly known is a legendary figure that most people expect to find,
and therefore always do find, in their own neighborhoods. Defined by her advancing age, the filth of
her abode, her apparent eccentricities, and her abun
The
connection of cats to women is nothing new; history, religion, jokes, and folk
speech offer abun
The difference between men and
women’s relationships with felines illustrates an interesting point: women are
allied with the animal that men are violently against. I feel that because the cat alone is often a
powerful figure in legend and folk belief, the opposing relationships this
animal has with men and with women serve as insightful illustrations of the
greater power struggle between the genders.
This paper
explores the nature of this power struggle as illustrated in cat legends and
seeks to determine the ways in which the cat's unique position as both a
supernatural and natural creature allows it's
perceived power to be transferred to others and why women are so often the
recipients of this transference.
gsmohan1949@rediffmail.com
The main
objective of this paper is to explain toponomical
significance of some of the Telugu legends.
Legend being a fact or fiction, which sets in the past and centers on
remarkable incidents, becomes responsible in the formulation of place names in
any given society and region. There are
innumerable place names in Telugu, the language spoken in the state of Andhra
Pradesh originating with the background of legends. A study of the place names and the
significant role of legends in the formation of place names reveals
many interesting facts. An attempt has
been made in the paper to study various factors involving the formation of
place names.
In Andhra
Pradesh, mainly there are three geographical regions, one in the north (Telangana), one in the East (the
coastal region) and another one in the West (Rayalaseema). All these three regions have a history of
their own, both oral and written, playing an important role in deciding the
name of a place. For example, the dry,
hilly regions of Rayalaseema give rise to particular
type of legends and further these legends take the form of a place name. Such interesting instances are taken note of
and this type of study leads to an important contribution to oral history.
There are
varieties of place names with legendary background such as women sacrificing
for the sake of her village, geographical regions such as Puttaparthy
(a place of ant-hills) due to the curse of a serpent, villages in the name of
the rulers (bukkarayasamudram), places of
famous forts (rayadurgam) etc.
It is
significant to note that village goddesses who are worshipped in all the places
of
An attempt
has been made in the paper to study the transformations in the legends leading
to renaming of places, modernity influencing the renaming of legendary place
names, and linguistic changes in the place names due to the influence of
Sanskrit, Persian, English, French and other languages.
The main
objective of the paper is to see how the legendary place names and the stories
involved in them contribute to oral history.
University of Wisconsin-Marinette
dailmurr@uwc.edu
The first
version of the story, which surfaced in 1979 in
As a
cultural anthropologist living near the Amish for 20 years, I have been
intrigued by this particular tale: its diffusion, the versions that appeared in
nearby communities several years later, and what it may reflect, albeit
indirectly, about perceptions of the Amish and their economic impact on a rural
place.
The
legendary character of this particular oral drama accrues from the proportions
of social response to it. The local
sheriff made a personal visit to the purported victim due to the number of
calls his office had received about the rumored incident. The news director of a popular radio station
in
In the first
version, the victim was specific and well known, the son of the farmer who,
acting as an entrepreneur, sold ten farms to the Amish families who first
established the settlement in the mid-1960s.
Some folks “blamed” this particular man (and by broad stroke
implication–his entire family) for the “Amish invasion.”
Several
years later, while teaching in nearby county where there is a smaller Amish
settlement, my students told me another version of the story, which, like the
classic urban legend, concerns, a “friend’s cousin,” or “a guy from the next
ridge over.”
What does it say, this tale of unmanning, of impotence at the hands of
the Amish, about unarticulated anxieties about the Amish in general? I don’t know.
But I would enjoy discussing some possibilities with people who have
studied cultural phenomena such as this.
vcksou@blr.vsnl.net.in
The present study is an effort
to examine the local legends in the socially and culturally rich but
economically poor Royalaseema Region namely Chittoor District of Andhra Pradesh. The researcher proposes to report the
research findings of a part of the intensive and extensive fieldwork done to
collect and document legends (in oral tradition) in the Chittoor
Region. The task of research spanned six
years from 1993 to 1999. This study
covers legends in oral history in the region covering place names, water
bodies, hills, forts, caves, stones and village deities. The data collected and discerning
interpretation of legends have revealed irrefutable evidence leading to facts
and events hitherto suppressed because of historical forces. The researcher will present legends and
findings based on these which will shed new light on the societal living,
culture and history of the region.
The research
paper will report findings of the legends and analysis in a few cases to
highlight the rich legends which have survived in the oral tradition and not
withstanding the British imperialist and post independence days. This researcher found irrefragable evidence
with regard to life of people in settlements (Nagari’s)
after the war of Thalikote (1565) which were headed
by Chieftains locally known as Doras. After 18th century, the British
rulers razed the Nagari’s and it is believed that the
inhabitants were chased to forests.
Living legends rife in the region reveal history in their own way. Six years of the research in the area has
strongly convinced this researcher that these legends must be taken up for a
serious examination by linguists and Anthropologists. The findings, I believe will reveal a layer
of history hidden under the garbled versions of local history distorted by eurocentric writers and their
followers. The paper will present
variety of legends hitherto unpublished and analyzed them to throw more light
on this very significant but totally neglected area of research.
Based on the
findings of this study it suggests that there is a greater scope for
undertaking many more studies on legends in the culturally regions like Rayalaseema. It can
also suggested that what ever the hearsay information
on legends is available may be recorded for understanding the palegars in a comprehensive manner. All these will help the researchers who
pursue local legends.
Folkminnesavdelningen,
SOFI
bodil.nildin-wall@sofi.uu.se
From 1933 to
1937 rumors of a Ghost Pilot were rife in
In 1946
another light phenomenon that was reported from over the Nordic countries
attracted a far more extensive international attention than had the Ghost
Pilot. The second World War lay between the phenomena and the Cold War had
started. The first reports of bright balls of fire in the sky came in February
and during the spring and summer of that year they steadily increased in
number. Military circles considered it unlikely that all the sightings could be
explained as natural phenomena such as meteors. There are depositions that
describe metal objects shaped like airplanes or cigars. In
Newspapers
wrote of ghost airplanes, ghost rockets and ghost bombs. The objects were said
to be able to move at different speeds and to be able to accelerate as well as
change their directions.
A theory
that was considered highly plausible was that the rockets were a further
development of the German V-bombs. German scientists who had worked with the
V-bombs were supposed to have continued their experiments in Soviet Russia
after the war. Now rockets were said to be launched over the Nordic countries
from Peenemûnde or the frontier between
A peculiar
quality of these Ghost Rockets were that they showed a tendency to explode and
dissolve completely leaving no debris, or crash into lakes at high speed. The
military made a very thorough investigation of one of these latter cases but
could find no trace of the rocket that eyewitnesses had seen and heard crash
into the lake.
After the
climax in July the number of reports decreased and ceased totally at the end of
1946. It was never fully explained, what had frightened the people in the
Nordic countries that year. It is quite clear that some of the observations had
been of meteors, but they cannot all be explained in that way. Many newspapers
continued their speculations on Soviet missiles. In international press the
rockets were linked to a Swedish-Russian trade agreement. With the help of the
Ghost Rockets Sweden was to be frightened into delivering enormous consignments
on credit.
Are there
other explanations?
“‘The secret’s in the sauce’: Legend as
Joke/Joke as Legend in Fannie Flagg’s Fried Green
Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café”
Set in
Birmingham, Alabama, in 1985, but also nostalgically inscribing the community
“doings” of Whistle Stop, Alabama from 1924 forward, Fannie Flagg’s
Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café (1987) celebrates
story-telling as being mixed media (oral and print), mixed genre (personal
narrative and life history, tall tale, joke, legend, local news, novelistic
narrative), and multivocal (in addition to the
novel’s omniscient narrator, many characters–variously situated by differences
in gender, sexuality, age, class, and race–in this novel tell stories). In relation to legend research, it is
precisely this mix of media, genre, and voice that intrigues me (see Smith
1981, Bennett 1989, Oring
1996[1990]).
At the
center of the story is the developing friendship between Evelyn Couch (a
middle-aged woman who is overweight, menopausal, afraid of death, afraid of
life, afraid of her body, and afraid of being called names) and Mrs. Cleo Threadgoode (a feisty, eighty-six-year-old woman who
doesn’t seem to be afraid of much of anything).
Mrs. Threadgoode’s storytelling recreates the
world of Whistle Stop, Alabama for Evelyn, and it is through her connection
with the characters of that world (in particular, lesbian partners, Idgie Threadgoode and Ruth
Jamison) that Evelyn comes to terms with her own life and body. In other words, in Flagg’s
novel storytelling is good medicine/therapy.
While the
novel has its tragic moments, its overall tone is that of a comic celebration
of life, which is ultimately disruptive and contestive
of the status quo. Comedy is primarily
established through multivocal performances
(sometimes narrative, sometimes enacted) of tall tales (for example, a story
about a lake that freezes around the feet of a flock of geese that in turn fly
away taking the lake with them), practical jokes (for example, putting poker
chips in the collection basket at the Baptist church), and legends (for
example, two young women wearing “Elvis is not dead” t-shirts slip their car
into a parking place that Evelyn has been waiting for, and when confronted by
Evelyn, comment that they are “younger and faster” to which Evelyn responds by
running into their car several times and saying, “I’m older...and have more
insurance” (see, Brunvand’s Type-Index, 1993:326).
Traditional
legends and variations there on, as well as invented legends, abound in Flagg’s novel. While
some (like that mentioned above) are enacted, others are reported as news in
the local weekly bulletin (”My other half tells me that when he was on his run
to Nashville a few days ago, he heard tell of a fellow who bit down on a
blasting cap by mistake and blew his lips off”) or shared in conversation (“And
she said that while the doctor was examining all her insides, he picked up her
liver to get a close look at it, and dropped it right on the floor, and it
bounced four or five times before they got it.
Mrs. Adcock said that she suffered with terrible backaches ever since,
because of it”). When performed
conversationally in the novel, the legend may or may not be believed as true by
its interlocutors, while for the reader the larger framing of the novel
situates the legends as jokes and practical jokes. It is the function of the shifting frame
between legend as belief tale and legend as joke that this paper will
explore. In particular, this shifting
frame will be analyzed in relation to the central legend/joke of the novel–that
of Frank Bennett’s cannibalized body (a tale that merges 1. white people’s
beliefs about the traditional foodways of people with
black bodies with 2. contemporary legends told about foreign matter served as
restaurant food).
“‘Cry, Lady, Cry’: Cemetery Statues and Legends in Historical
Context”
jthomas@english.usu.edu
In order to
better understand legends about gendered statues in cemetery, I began looking
at the material culture associated with them. I visited cemeteries across the
Since the
statues that are the subject of contemporary legends are largely influenced by European
customs, my brief historical overview will begin with some of the ancient,
influential civilizations of
victor@madbbs.com
This paper
will compare contemporary legends about the heterosexual transmission of AIDS
and research on the interpersonal and biological realities of the heterosexual
transmission of AIDS.
I will first
present narratives of the “AIDS Mary” and “AIDS Harry” contemporary legends, in
order to identify the interpersonal and biological expectations that these
legends communicate. Then, I will
describe the circumstances of an actual mini-epidemic of the heterosexual
transmission of AIDS. The case is that
of Nushawn Williams, a young Afro-American man, who
spread AIDS to eleven teenage girls in
The author
is a college professor in
I will present some of the
findings of that research concerning local beliefs about why and how Williams
was able to transmit AIDS to so many teenage girls (most of whom were
white). This will include local
speculations about the motives of Williams and of the teenage girls, and the
nature of their relationships. I will
also present the speculations of local health official about how Williams was
biologically able to transmit AIDS to so many heterosexual partners, in the
light of the low incidence of heterosexual transmission in the
Finally, I
will examine scientific research on the heterosexual transmission of AIDS, in
response to certain central questions.
Why is the heterosexual transmission of AIDS relatively uncommon in the
“Examining the Legendary Base for the
lobolee@earthlink.net
Like other
recovery groups, organized generally within twelve-step programs, the recovery
community that fans out westward and eastward from Telephone Road constitutes a
distinctive sub culture, living and interrelating in terms of values, beliefs,
and modes of behavior that are often strikingly at variance with the culture at
large. In all recovery groups, storytelling–or
the construction and sharing of a personal narrative–is the primary means
through which control over addiction is achieved, a process of life and death
significance; such sharing accounts for the cohesiveness of the group. This emphasis on storytelling is especially
pronounced in the
To an
outsider, this emphasis on the sharing of first-person narratives would be
immediately obvious. Portions or
selected episodes from such narratives are shared in one-on-one conversations
or in casual group discussions; the narratives are presented in their entirety
from the podium in speaker meetings.
Much less obvious is the general legendary base of third person
lore–only gradually accessible at an insider level–which shapes and informs first-person
performances. This lore’s very
inaccessibility reflects the group’s valorization of the Present–“one day at a
time”–and its absolute respect for each individual’s ownership of his or her
first-person narrative. Oddly, Truth is
conceptualized exclusively in terms of the Present and of each individual’s own
perception of his or her life within the fairly rigid paradigm of the recovery
narrative.
Nevertheless,
there are third-person legends (whose “truths” are neither analyzed nor
debated) about the group’s founders, even while these men’s first-person
narratives in The Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous remain inviolate–as well as
legends that recount events in the group’s early history or demonstrate certain
AA principles. There is a legendary
This paper will examine the
intricate connections between the mostly inaccessible legendary base of the
***
FOAFTALE
Miscellany
Albert Braunstein
sbr@labyrinth.net.au
Last week I
was sent an email purportedly from the Australian Red Cross about someone
contracting HIV from needles in movie theatres.
"HIV
Warning - A few weeks ago, in a movie theatre in Melbourne, a person sat on
something that was poking out of one of the seats. When she got up to see what
it was, she found a needle sticking out of the seat with a note attached
saying... "You have just been infected by HIV". The Disease Control
Centre in
The Centre also reports that needles have been
found in the cash dispensers in ATMs. We ask everyone to use extreme caution
when faced with this kind of situation. All public chairs/seats should be
inspected with vigilance and caution before use. A careful visual inspection
should be enough. In addition, they ask that each of you pass this message
along to all members of your family and your friends of the potential
When I
checked with the Red Cross they confirmed that it is a hoax and that a similar
message had been circulating in the
I also asked
a friend who is an HIV specialist and he said that he has not heard of anyone
contracting HIV from needles in movie theatres in
Sam Umland
umlands@unk.edu
One of my
students brought to my attention an alleged internet rumor that MGM was going
to digitally alter John Carpenter's Escape From New
York prior to releasing the Special Edition DVD later this year or early
next. For those who by chance do not know the film, a group of terrorists
hijack Air Force One and fly it into one of the
[and from DVDfile…,
mjk]
Yesterday,
we reported on an alleged news item quickly spreading around the Internet
regarding possible digital alterations to the upcoming DVD special edition of
John Carpenter's Escape From New York, due
sometime next year, MGM has responded to the story and stated that it is not
true. Reportedly director John Carpenter was quoted as telling Fangoria magazine that the DVD would be reedited
following last month's terrorist attacks on 9-11. But according to an MGM
spokesperson, "We have no plans nor did we ever have any plans" to
alter or change Escape From New York in any
form. Neither John carpenter's office nor Fangoria
magazine confirmed this alleged story, so we can chalk this one up to just
another Internet rumor. Stay tuned for any further word.
Norine
Dresser
norined@earthlink.net
I don't mean
to alarm anyone, but...
Don't go to
the bathroom on October 28th. CIA intelligence reports that a major plot is
planned for that day. Anyone who uses
the bathroom on the 28th will be bitten on the butt by an alligator. Reports
indicate that organized groups of alligators hired by Bin Laden are planning to
rise up into unsuspecting Americans' toilet bowls and bite them in the butt
while they are doing their business.
I usually
don't send emails like this, but I got this information from a reliable source.
It came from a friend of a friend whose cousin is dating this girl whose
brother knows this guy whose wife knows this lady whose husband buys hotdogs
from this guy who knows a shoeshine guy who shines the shoes of a mailroom
worker who has a friend who's drug dealer who sells drugs to another mailroom
worker who works in the CIA building. He apparently overheard two guys talking
in the bathroom about alligators and came to the conclusion that we are going
to be attacked.
So it must
be true.
Brian Chapman
wt046@victoria.tc.ca
[The following originally appeared in the Weekly
World News,
URBAN LEGENDS THAT ARE TRUE!
By Michael Chiron
"Many
of these tales have been kicking around so long that details such as names,
places, and dates have been lost -- and so sociologists assume they were made
up," says researcher Brian Trigley, author of
the upcoming book, True Urban Legends.
"But
with some effort, it was possible to establish the origins of many of the
stories."
Here, from
the London-based expert, are nine urban "legends" that are totally
true:
THE KILLER
IN THE BACK SEAT -- You've heard a million versions of this --but it actually
happened to Mary-Ellen Soterhand of
"I'd
stopped on the road for gas and as I pulled away, I glanced in the rearview
mirror and noticed this big brute of a man run to his car and jump in,"
Mrs. Soterhand, now 47, recalls in the book. "As
I looked back, I saw that he was following me with this wild look in his eyes.
I tried going faster to try and lose him, but he kept closing the gap.
"He was
honking like a lunatic and waving at me to pull over -- I was terrified."
The chase
went on for nine miles and ended when the frantic housewife pulled into her
driveway. She got her husband, who charged out with his gun to confront the
stranger.
"That's
when the man pointed to my backseat -- where there was a creepy little guy
clutching a meat cleaver," she said. "He turned out to be an escaped
mental patient."
THE MEXICAN
PET -- Animal lover Lucille Davisport never imagined
she'd be enshrined in an urban legend when she adopted a tiny, pitiful-looking
stray she found in an alley while visiting
The
soft-hearted
A few weeks
later, when she took her pet to a veterinarian for his shots, she got the shock
of her life: The vet told her Pepe wasn't a
I SLEPT WITH
THE WRONG HUBBY -- In 1986, a
"We
made love in a closet and then left separately," Sara, now 68, told the
researcher. "When I got home I asked Phil if he had a 'good time' at the
party, ready to blast him.
"He
told me he'd been playing poker -- and had lent another guy his Devil
costume!"
ALLIGATORS
IN THE SEWERS OF
"Back
in the early '60s, tourists returning from
Most experts
insist none of the reptiles survived. But in 1982, Lucowbiec,
while supervising a crew in a sewer under 57th street in
"A huge
gator splashed out of the water and chased us," he said. "It nipped
my rear."
THE
TOOTHBRUSH SHOCKER -- A British couple named Bill and Francine Lorwood returned home from a two-week 1989 honeymoon in
"One of
the photos showed the mischievous thief mooning the camera – with the stems of
the couple's toothbrushes sticking out of his butt," Trigley
says.
THE DANCING
DEVIL -- This oft-told tale took place in 1931 in a
A sexy
senorita named Carmen Di Silva was delighted when a
dashing stranger invited her to
Near sunup,
the stranger asked if she would be his, body and soul. Just when she was about
to say yes, she noticed that instead of feet he had hoofs. "She screamed
and he disappeared," says Trigley. "It
sounds unbelievable, but 11 people witnessed this."
THE
LIE-DETECTING HELMET -- When grilling a suspect who doesn't seem too bright,
cunning cops in
They slap a
plastic helmet on the guy and every time he claims he's innocent, they tell
him, "The helmet says you're lying."
"A
stupid criminal will break down and confess -- although the helmet is in
reality nothing more than a plastic kitchen bowl with some wires
attached," says Trigley.
THE JINXED
GUINEA PIG -- In 1990, Lenore Ussels of
Bridge, the
tiny rodent slipped out of its cage -- and as she tried to catch it, it
scrambled inside her blouse.
"Miss Ussels stopped the car and, as she thrashed around, trying
to dislodge the guinea pig, a Good Samaritan leapt out of his car and tried to
help," says Trigley.
"Unfortunately
for him, a passing truck driver thought the guy was attacking her and punched
him out. In all the confusion, the guinea pig escaped."
THE CAT IN
THE BAG -- A Danish couple named the Nielsens,
vacationing in
On the way,
they stopped for a quick bite to eat and left their car unlocked outside.
While they
were dining, they glanced through the window and were surprised to see an old
homeless woman reach into the car and steal the bag.
"They
followed her around the block and found the woman lying on the street with a
crowd around her," says Trigley.
"She'd
opened the bag and keeled over from shock!"
MORE MODERN MYTHS THAT WON'T GO AWAY
"LOUIE,
LOUIE" DOESN'T HAVE A SINGLE CURSE WORD IN IT. False, says author Brian Trigley. The hit song by the Kingsmen
alarmed parents back in 1963 because they couldn't understand the mumbling
singers and were convinced the lyrics were dirty.
According to
urban legend, there's actually nothing sexual about the song. "But,"
says Trigley, "the truth is, the band members
can be heard singing the words, 'They f@#* all those
girls all kinds of ways.'"
CAPTAIN KIRK
NEVER SAID "BEAM ME UP, SCOTTY" -- Nonsense! The intrepid space hero
played on TV by William Shatner in the original Star
Trek series uttered the famous line at least twice, the expert says.
[Editor’s note: I checked both with Amazon and with
Books in Print and could find no reference to the book cited or to author Brian
Trigley. Now is that an urban legend, or what? mjk]
***
Joel Best
joelbest@udel.edu
Rebecca A. Weldon, "An 'Urban Legend' of Global
Proportion: An Analysis of Nonfiction
Accounts of the Ebola Virus," Journal Of
Health Communication 6 (2001): 281-94.
Kimberly R. McNeil, Olenda
E. Johnson, and Ann Y. Johnson, "'Did You Hear What Tommy Hilfiger Said?': Urban Legend,
Urban Fashion, and African-American Generation Xers,"
Journal Of Fashion Marketing And Management 5 (2001): 234-40.
Diana
Preston, The Boxer Rebellion.
Mikel J. Koven
mik@aber.ac.uk
The FOAFtale News
offices, well actually my office – let’s not make this sound any grander
than it really is - has received two copies, so far, of the British magazine Magonia, which according to its front cover is
dedicated to “interpreting contemporary vision and belief”. This publication
deals primarily with debunking UFO, cryptozoological,
and other strange belief-based phenomena. The editor is John Rimmer. Subscriptions are £5.00 in the
***
FTN
needs your contributions!
Please
send me news, queries, research notes, clippings, calls for papers, book and
movie reviews, or notes about local rumor and legend cycles for inclusion in FTN.
Deadline
for next issue:
January
2002
Next
Issue Out:
February
2002
FoafTale
News (FTN) is the newsletter of the International
Society for Contemporary Legend Research.
We study "modern" and "urban" legends, and also any
legend circulating actively. To join,
send a cheque made out to "ISCLR" for
US$30.00 or UK£18 to Mark Glazer, Arts & Sciences, University of Texas -
Pan-American, Edinburgh TX 78539-2999, USA for North American subscriptions, or
Sandy Hobbs, ASS Department, University of Paisley, Paisley, Scotland, PA1 2BE
for European subscriptions. Institutional rates available
upon request. Members also
receive Contemporary Legend, a refereed academic journal. Most back issues of FTN are available
from the Editor at a charge of US$3 each.
FoafTale News is indexed in the MLA
Bibliography.
This newsletter is called FoafTale
News for the jocular term current among legend scholars for over twenty
years. The term "foaf" was introduced by Rodney Dale (in his 1978 book,
The Tumour in the Whale) for an oft-attributed
but anonymous source of contemporary legends: a "friend of a
friend." Dale pointed out that
contemporary legends always seemed to be about someone just two or three steps
from the teller — a boyfriend’s cousin,
a co‑worker’s aunt, or a neighbor of the teller’s mechanic. "Foaf"
became a popular term at the
FoafTale
News welcomes contributions, including those documenting
legends” travels on electronic media and in the press. All research notes and articles are
copyright by the individual authors who reserve all rights. For permission to reprint, contact them at
the addresses given in the headnote of the article.
Send queries, notices, and research reports to a maximum of 3000 words to the
Editor; clippings, offprints, and citations are also
encouraged.
The opinions expressed in FoafTale
News are those of the authors and do not in any necessary way represent
those of the editor, the contributing compilers, the International Society for
the Study of Contemporary Legends, its Council, or its members.
Editor: Mikel J. Koven, Department of Theatre, Film
and Television Studies, Parry-Williams, Building, Penglais Campus, University
of Wales, Aberystwyth, United Kingdom, SY23 2AJ
Email:
Web page:
www.panam.edu/faculty/mglazer/isclr/isclr.htm
ISSN 1026-1001