In this thread, Mangetout posted this Snopes reference. I’ve been hearing this UL in Greece, well before the advent of the Internet. And this is not the only one. I’ve also heared a variation of this UL, and some others.
Are there UL’s with the same themes in other countries? How did they spread?
Newspapers, radio and TV.
http://www.snopes.com/horrors/drugs/bluestar.htm
http://www.snopes.com/horrors/drugs/babysit.htm
I actually remember around 1970 a cop giving an anti-drug lecture in my school telling the babysitter on LSD baking the baby UL.
Don’t forget “faxlore”. (I’d link, but Wikipedia’s crawling today)
Back in the 1970s and 1980s, I used to see government/corporate safety bulletins on things like the electrician who fused his contact lenses to his eyeballs, or the welder who blew himself up when a spark landed on his disposable butane lighter. Once one of these stories showed up in one safety bulletin, it would quickly propagate to other companies and government agencies. Nobody can resist a good story.
Also, before the Internet, instead of e-mailing or texting, people used to “talk” to each other. “This weird thing happened to my brother’s co-worker’s uncle’s mechanic’s dog . . .”
And the copy machine. I remember someone in my office passing out copies of the “don’t flash your brights or the gangs will follow you home and kill you” legend 15 years ago.
I remember getting chain letters and ponzi schemes in the mail, as well.
Also remember the pulpit and classroom. Not many preachers or teachers would pass up a good story if it made the point they were working at.
Interoffice (paper) mail too.
I get a book about urban legends that is older than the intenet. They only study a half a dozen of these, but quite in depth, and in particular the way they spread. They could spread quite quickly by word of mouth, or, in the case of UL related to a safety hazard, for instance the disney decals supposed to contain LSD, they were photocopied and distributed.
They tracked closely the spreading of this one in France, and the first known appearance of a photocopied document warning about the LSD decals (IIRC in the meditteranean port of Marseilles) was a direct translation of one of these warnings circulating on the american west coast. So, the UL was directly imported in France from the US.
These copies were from time to time rewritten (at some point, people had to type again the text, since copies of copies of copies become impossible to read, and some of them change some of the content for some reason of their own), and sometimes printed on some official looking paper (an hospital letter paper, for instance). People with good intents would want their friends, colleagues, relatives to be aware of the “danger” and would distritibute them. Someone in a company (the guy in charge of health issues or maybe the worried owner) could make sure that all the employees would be warned, and so on. As a result, the UL spread extremely quickly all over the place.
Others ULs would just spread orally. One of these case was studied. The UL (about the abduction of young women in cloth stores) appeared in some town in central France, and within days all the town was “aware of the danger”. Very quickly, the UL “contaminated” other french towns, loosing a little accuracy (originally the UL was about some specific shops, and in other towns, it became either unspecified shops or cloth stores owned by sephardic Jews).
In this case, the UL appeared and spread quickly, but I would want to point out that some UL are extremely old, hence had all the time in the world to spread everywhere. For instance, the “ghost hitchiker” story is a variation on an old tale (a farmer coming back from the nearby town market with his cart pick up a woman who warn him about an impeding danger, a fire, for instance. He latter discovers the unknown woman is long dead. Change the cart for a car, the fire for a road accident, and you get the modern version of this ghost tale). This story has probably been told for some thousands years. Similarily, the story about a guy who drink alcohol from a barrel where, unbestknown to him, a human corpse is kept was already been told during the middle-ages, and , I would suspect, probably earlier.
If Dr. Jan Brunvand is to be believed, *Reader’s Digest * is one of the primary vectors by which urban legends are spread.
Either that, or people tend to think they read them there… usually in the “Life In These United States” section.
Before the internet or the fax, most ULs were spread by a very insidious method. One man was responsible for most of them. And his name is:
Bloke down pub.
Don’t forget Paul Harvey. He ranks right up there with dishing 'em out over his 50+ year run.
Dear Abby and Ann Landers are notorious for having printed several of the more common ones, although most national columnists have been burned enough times to check these days.
And I remember seeing the cookie recipe thing going around as faxlore some 20 years ago.
Qne circulating TODAY is about two guys approaching a girl in a parking lot and asking her “What kind of perfume are you wearing?” I won’t give any more details of the scam here lest it be seen by potential perps. The gist is to beware and not smell it and to walk away to save one’s money and perhaps virtue. Anyone else heard that one?
I’m guessing the LSD decal scare began from this police warning from 1980:
http://users.lycaeum.org/~sputnik/tattoo/police.html
Note that just says “children may be susceptible to this type of cartoon stamp believing it a tattoo transfer”. The police weren’t saying these were actually being marketed to small kids as lick on tatoos, merely they were concerned that kids who happen upon them (say, they find their older sibling’s stash), assume they were lick on tatoos, and disaster would result. This then mutated into the UL that LSD was knowingly being marketed to small children as lick on tatoos.
Circulating since at least 2001.