Urban Legends

Urban legends are those fanciful tales that grip listeners and are spread widely across continents and oceans while repeated by individuals often claiming the facts reported in the tale happened to a “friend of a friend,” or are based on “facts” reported in news reports that the teller of the tale had allegedly read in the past. A classic example of an enduring urban legend is the enduring tale of the blind, white alligators that inhabit the sewers of New York. In the legends, sun-seeking tourist return from Florida with pet alligators, small babies that quickly became unmanageable and their owners, unwilling to kill them, simply flush them down the toilet. In this environment rich in food (rats), but lacking in sunlight, the alligators became blind albinos, witnessed by the occasional unwary New Yorker of urban legend.

Although urban legends are seen as modern manifestations, in terms of structure and role, they are not necessarily urban nor are they legends in the strict sense of the term. What they are is popular folklore that seeks to transmit popular lore—the knowledge or wisdom of the people—that are spread from individual to individual usually through narrative retelling of the tales. Academic interest in urban legends began in the first half of the 20th century as folklorists shifted their interests from the rural folk to cities where the majority of Americans and Canadians lived after World War I. Two scholars can be credited for coining and propagating the term urban legend. The first is Richard Mercer Dorson, who is credited with having coined the term, and who was already, in his 1959 book, American Folklore, writing about the legends in the big city and the legends of college students (active propagators and audience for urban legends). The other is one of Dorson's students, Jan Harold Brunvand, who popularized contemporary research on urban legends with a series [Page 2257]of publications examining American urban legends, beginning in 1981 with The Vanishing Hitchhiker:American Urban Legends and their Meanings.

Unlike traditional legends, urban legends are reported as contemporary events: the narrative power is derived from the narrative performance of the urban legend in which the audience—a friend, a group of colleagues on break, or fellow students in a dorm—are recounted a story that “actually” happened. Although urban legends spread thousands of kilometers, even over the ocean from England to North America or from North America to Australia, urban legends are invariably localized and contemporized: though the underlying story remains unchanged, the facts are changed to make it fit into the locality and the time period.

Although an urban legend may have a grain of truth, the origins of the legend—if it can be found—is often far removed from the tale that the listener will hear and has often been changed considerably as local details will be added to localize the legend. A case in point is “The Philanderer's Porsche” an urban legend that was recounted as “fact” in an Ann Landers' syndicated column that was published worldwide in 1979. In the letter Landers published, a man in California is said to have seen an ad in the paper for an “almost new” Porsche for the measly price of $50. Although skeptical, he nevertheless visits the woman selling the Porsche, and when he discovers that it is a legitimate car and sale, he buys the Porsche. However, curious, he returns to the woman who explains that her husband had run off with his secretary and instructed her (the wife), to sell the Porsche and send him the money. The author of the letter claimed to have read the ad in his local newspaper (theChicago Tribune); in turn, Ann Landers' managing editor thought that he had read the story. Upon subsequent fact checking, the story was shown to never have existed, though both the person who sent the letter and the newspaper's editor sincerely believed they had read the account in the news.

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