1105 Urban Legends

Saturday, February 03, 2007

It's definitely way past time to clean up around here. Last Monday night when I couldn't sleep I was off and on reading a novel in bed. I got interested in it, and at some point on Wednesday I carried it out of the bedroom to somewhere else in the house. Now I can't find it. I've looked everywhere.

I got absolutely no sleep Thursday night, either. This time my mind wasn't spinning, it was just too much iced coffee and a fear that I wouldn't wake up early enough on Friday morning to both wash my hair and ensure that the Aerio would start. So I was reading a book about urban legends in bed, and got interested in it. On Friday I took it with me to the service garage, in a canvas tote bag. I distinctly remember taking it out of the bag this morning, when I was on my way to meet Piper for lunch and needed my gloves. They were in the bag, too. Now I can't find the book.

The mess has reached a critical point, what the scientists call a tipping point.

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So anyway, the book has all kinds of urban legends, with the author's analysis, and his research to track down the origins. Most of them, of course, either never happened, or are updated versions of ancient tales. One thing that bothers me about his method, however, is that if he can find the same or a very similar story turning up here and there all over the country or in other countries, then he concludes that it's just the same story circulating over and over and therefore not true, never happened, no matter how reasonable or possible it sounds.

Sorry, fella, but that doesn't make it not true. It still could have happened.

He says that there are stories about, say, a woman whose purse is stolen, and then a few days later the woman gets a call from the manager of the store where the purse was lifted, saying that the purse has been found, minus the money but with everything else still in it. (It IS true that purse snatchers will often quickly remove all cash and then throw the purse and contents into the nearest wastebasket.) The manager asks her if it would be convenient
for her to come and get it at such-and-such a time, and in the course of the conversation (will you need a sitter?) discovers whether or not children and husbands will be home at that time. The woman goes to the store, the store manager knows nothing about it, and she comes home to find her house has been burglarized. Of course, it was the purse snatcher, with her address and house key, who had called her.

The author of the book concludes that this has never actually happened, because the stories almost always have a town mentioned, and police in those towns always deny the story.

Well, that doesn't mean it never happened! In fact, thieves hearing the story are likely to try it.

I know they will, because it happened to me.

We were living in Germantown, Maryland, north of Washington, DC. One morning, my purse was stolen in the local grocery store. What's really weird is that I had a very bad feeling, a premonition, and I purposely put my purse in the shopping cart to prove to myself how silly I was being (I never do that!), but then I got nervous, so I buried it under frozen foods, but I was still nervous, and felt even sillier, so I turned my back on the cart for a full three seconds. When I turned around the purse was gone. I totally freaked - not because the purse was gone so much as because I had known it was going to happen. That's freaky. Anyway, police were called, all wastebaskets were checked, and all along the sides of the road up to the next intersections, and that was that.

Within an hour of returning home, I got a call from a guy at the department of energy, which was around the corner from the grocery store. He said he had been jogging at lunch and found the purse along the road. There was no money in it, but there were credit cards, a gold pocket watch, driver's license, checkbook. If I would come to the DOE and ask for him the next day, he'd bring it out for me.

Sociopaths, by the way, are very charming. He did charm me out of the information that my daughter was in school (so going to the DOE was not a problem) and that my husband worked days (in the context of where he worked, no, not DOE or near DOE). He kept emphasizing that "everything" was still in the purse, so it would not be necessary for me to cancel credit cards or anything like that. I told him I had already canceled them and had
notified my bank, and I wondered how he knew "everything" was there, if he didn't know what had started out there.

I went. Of course, the receptionist at DOE had never heard of the name I had been given. When I got home, my neighbor said we'd had a visitor come to the door.

Even though he had a key, he didn't get into the house, because when he was discovering whether there'd be anyone home, he never asked about dogs. We had a nice big Austrailian Kelpie with long teeth and a protective attitude. I had put her in the house when I went to the DOE, because the phone call had left me suspicious, and I hadn't yet been able to change the locks. Her furious barking had brought the neighbor to her door. She was able to describe him and his car, which matched the description of a stolen car.

A lot more happened with this guy, some really strange stuff, but I'll write that up sometime later. The main point right now is that just because police deny it, or somebody got the town wrong, doesn't mean a story didn't happen.

When the author of the urban legends book finds a true story that turns into an expanded UL, he admits that at least one version is true. I was amused to find that one of the most unbelievable happened right around here, in Poughkeepsie. There's even a transcript of the actual call to the police.

A man hit a deer on the road. He put it in the back seat of his car (why waste all that venison?), but the deer was only stunned and came to, rather upset. The guy pulled over near an enclosed telephone booth (this was obviously a very long time ago), where he made a very strange and profanity-filled call to the police.

When the deer had regained consciousness, it had thrashed around, and it bit him on the back of the neck. He pulled over, intending to let the deer out, but before he could get the back door open, a big dog came out of nowhere and bit him on the leg. The dog was very excited by the deer, and the guy kept saying "The f***ing deer bit me on the f***ing neck, and now the f***ing dog wants the f***ing deer! He won't let me near the f***ing car!" He was unable to tell the police where he was. The dog had him trapped in the phone booth, and at one point there's a disruption in the call, somehow the booth door got opened and the dog had bit the guy again, this time "on the f***ing a*s!!!" In the meantime the deer is tearing up the interior of the guy's car.

And that's the truth.
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