I just received this email and I know it has to be an Urban Legend. It’s just too much to believe. It’s too vague for a jaded person like me to swallow.
"IMPORTANT NOTICE TO ALL PARENTS!!!
Even if you do not have little kids pass this one on to everyone you can think of. You never know who you might save by sending this email!
Please take the time and forward this to any friend
who has children & grandchildren! Thanks!
I wanted to share something that happened today while
shopping at Sam’s club. A mother was leaning over looking for meat and turned
around to find her 4yr. old daughter was missing, I was standing there right beside her, and she was calling her daughter with no luck.
I asked a man who worked at Sam’s to announce it over the
loud speaker for Katie. He did, and let me say he immediately walked right
past me when I asked and went to a pole where there was a phone.
He made an announcement for all the doors and gates to be locked at code something, so they locked all the doors at once. This took all of 3 min after
I asked the guy to do this.
They found the little girl 5-mins later in a bathroom stall.
Her head was half shaved, and she was dressed in her underwear with a bag of
clothes, a razor, and wig sitting on the floor beside her (to make her look different).
Whoever this person was, took the little girl, brought her into the bathroom,
shaved half her head, undressed her in a matter of less than 10 min.
This makes me shake to no end. Please keep a close eye on your kids when in
big places where it’s easy for you to get separated.
It only took a few minutes to do all of this–another 5 minutes and she
would have been out the door…I am still in shock that some sick person
could do this, let alone in a matter of minutes…
The days are over when our little ones could run rampant all over the
place and nothing worse would happen than them annoying people.
The little girl is fine.Thank God for fast workers who didn’t take any
chances.
Thanks for reading. >>"
Got a similar email about 2 weeks ago…don’t think it was Sam’s club and it was not written in first person…still a very scary story esp. if you have kids
This is similar to another old UL about kids getting kidnapped from Disneyland and the kidnappers changing the kids clothes and dying their hair but always not changing the shoes and the parent noticing them or something like that. I believe it’s on Snopes.
It usually takes place at a huge shopping mall, so it goes back at least to the mid '60s/early '70s, when those behemoths were built. I wouldn’t be surprised if there were earlier variants set in places like Macy’s and Wanamaker’s and Hudson’s, the classic Big Stores.
The mall variants have appeared in Brunevand’s books (don’t have 'em here with me, so I can’t give the appropriate title), and even in cartoon form in THE BIG BOOK OF URBAN LEGENDS, which was published in 1994.
This is similar to another old UL about kids getting kidnapped from Disneyland and the kidnappers changing the kids clothes and dying their hair but always not changing the shoes and the parent noticing them or something like that. I believe it’s on Snopes.
I’ve waded through Snopes and naturally, become side tracked at the total tonnage of crap people out there believe.
What leads me to beleive it is an UL is 1) First person account. 2) No names or other pertinent details given. 3) No mention of arrest or severe beating at least of the perp in this case. 4) Doesn’t say where it happened.
I just hate getting these emails. It makes me lose faith in my friends because they beleive everything.
Manny years ago ( like 10, at least) I had a stat that I clipped from the newspaper that stated the odds of your child being kidnapped and a host of other parental nightmares (like razors in Halloween candy stuff). The odds were so low it really blew my mind. Naturally, I cannot locate this article, and I am sure it is out of date due to the nutjobs out there.
I particularly enjoyed the downbeat variation, where the proprietors of the amusement park where the kid’s been successfully kidnapped say “Your child is gone forever and the police are powerless to recover her, so here’s a coupla free passes to keep your mouth shut.”
Different versions of this story have been circulating for years. I first heard it when my son was a baby, he’s almost 19 years old now. That version supposedly happened at a local mall.
I have also heard a version with a little twist. A bunch of teenage girls are hanging out at the mall. One wanders off to meet some unknown boy she met on the internet. Thanks to good luck, one of her friends happened to be waiting outside a locked restroom. Soon a man and girl walked out together, the other girl happened to recognize her as her friend and called out to her. This frightened the man away.
Her friend’s hair had been cut and she was now wearing a wig, her clothes had been changed, and she was drugged. Somehow or another the cops were able to determine that she had almost been kidnapped by a huge ring of pornographers that scan the country for teenage girls. They kidnap them using the same method as on this girl then send them overseas as prostitutes and sex slaves.
I have yet to see or hear of valid proof of any version, but the e-mail panic attackers sure do like the story.
Although I can understand the urban-legendiness of this story, it does remind me of the story of the small boy in England, enticed away from his mom by two pre-teen boys and murdered. Unfortunately that was true. And what is a legend for anyway but to heighten our awareness of something that is potentially harmful. No one believes that roaches can be cooked inside a burger and still live to deposit eggs inside the comsumer’s mouth, but there are health inspectors for good reason. IMHO, legends are hyperbolic to must the warnings stick in our memory.
Yes, I have a friend who is constantly sending me crap e-mail about tumors in fast food chicken or whatever the current bullshit going around is. He usually receives a link to the About.com UL page in return, most of the time with the exact legend as the feature. lol. The worst thing of all was that the company I used to work for used to photocopy these and send them out to all the theaters, (Be on the lookout for infected needles in your payphones! etc) and these came from a corporate office where you’d expect people to know better! SHEESH!
Hi everyone, this is my first post on the SD MB.
I remember hearing this UL about our local mall, usually around Christmas time. It is an oldie.
VogueVixen, do we have the same friends? I have 2 friends who CONSTANTLY send me this crap, the needles in the ball pit at Burger King…or was it Taco Bell? Deodorants cause breast cancer, the stupid missing child alerts, I could go on and on, but I’s sure you all know what I mean.
I always send them the link to the About.com site, also!!
I feel like a cranky pants party pooper, too. Oh, well…
Hey, if you want your paranoia fueled, you don’t have to
stick with urban legends. Just this week in Providence, RI, a woman left her 4 year-old in the (running) car while she ran in to get some fast food. In those couple of minutes, ome lowlife stole the car, with kid. The story ends relatively happily, the kidnapper let the kid out of the car a few miles away, and then proceeded to kill himself in a car wreck while trying to elude police.
I am another crankypants party pooper (thanks for the laugh, Shirly – I LOVE this phrase!). I get a ton of this crap myself and have a standard debunking letter that I shoot back along with a link to Snopes and a list of Jan Brunvand’s books. Maybe we should have tee-shirts printed up “Warning: I am a crankypants party pooper. Do NOT tell me any stupid urban legends.”