Have you ever been a part of something that would sound really far-fetched to most people? Or been in a situation that would be perfect for a glurgy email? If you’ve* ever experienced something that would make people run to snopes, share it here.
*It needs to have happened to you, or you need to have seen it happen.
There is one that I can think of. Although I have done many stupid and plain odd things, in my life, I wouldn’t have believed this was possible unless I was a primary participant.
This didn’t play out as offensively as it sounds. This was as sick joke that I never thought in a million years we would be able to pull off and that is part of the reason I went along with it.
My senior year of high school, I had a friend who a continuous on-again, off-again relationship with his girlfriend. I was friends with his girlfriend too although I never thought of her that way before.
It was Halloween and our friends hosted a private hayride through backroads. This was to be followed by a party at an older friends house. Apparently, my friend (I will call him Greg) wanted to be more off-again with Shelley that day and he had given some thought to the matter. On the hayride, he proposed that he get her into bed and then we somehow switch places without her knowing.
Like you, I assumed that was impossible except in movies. However, he explained that we were the same build, same hair color, and were dressed very similar that night. Furthermore the house that we were going to after had a bedroom that was unusually dark with the the super-shades closed.
I agreed to give it a try assuming it wouldn’t work. We went to the house for the party, I went into the bedroom, removed my shirt, and hid in the closet. He brought her into the bedroom, they laid on the bed and started making out real heavy. At some point he said “Let me take off my shirt”, stood up, and I knew it was my cue like we rehearsed it and he got in the closet.
You would assume that a woman could tell a substitution in lovers but she could not. We made out for a good 20 minutes and I gently grunted and groaned if talking came into play. The good news is that I didn’t want to get too deep into this whole thing and as luck would have it, she was on her period that night so there was no actual sex and I would not have done that anyway. It was mainly kissing and light petting.
After a while, I decided that had gone on long enough and I just get up silently. She asked “What are you doing?” and Greg knew that was his cue and he stepped out of the closet, I stepped in and he replied to her.
She never found out the scoop that night at all. Greg and I probably would have never told her but other people thought that it was a little much not to share so they told her. She did not believe them. Would you?
I never really knew if she believed the story was real or if the story itself was the joke. In any case, we remained friends after that and I we never talked about it at all.
Okay, that story is so not cool. I’m glad you said you wouldn’t have had sex with her anyway because, of course, that would have made you a rapist. I hope you realize that.
You know that one where they pull away from the campground and there’s a hook hand stuck in their car door?
That was my hand.
May 11, 1984: My buddy Russ and I were doing what we did almost every day after school – driving over to Six Flags Great Adventure. This was a Friday, which meant that our friend Sam wouldn’t be the DJ on the Music Express. Since someone else would be playing the music, the tunes would certainly suck, so no hanging out there trying to pick up girls. Instead, we’d be going with Plan B – hanging out inside the Haunted House – jumping out, scaring people, and basically acting like 17-year-old jerks.
However, Russ’ ever-dependable Chevette broke down halfway there – we never made it to the park, so we didn’t wind up spending the evening hanging out deep inside the Haunted House.
You know the one about the “designated decoy”? That was me.
Seriously, if you can find a reference to it before January of 1995, I would be interested.
The situation was thus: I had just found out I was pregnant. I went off on a prearranged girls’ night out with one friend who came to town once or twice a year and another friend I got together with a bit more often, and what we always did was, we went somewhere and ate and drank. Since I’m not much into food, nor is my in-town friend, this led to quite a lot of drinking, usually, but that was it–drinking, smoking, eating, and talking. No really wild stuff.
But I had just found out I was pregnant, so no drinking and no smoking. I sat with my friends for about three hours drinking various non-alcoholic things and absorbing second-hand smoke only, and then we walked out of the bar into a snowstorm. (This wasn’t a surprise, as it was snowing when we went into the bar.)
Being a total klutz I promptly slipped going down the front steps, and my friends, both of whom were quite toasted but who were walking properly, grabbed me and walked me down. We said goodbye and went off to the parking lot to clean several inches of snow off our various cars. I did a whole Buster Keaton slipping routine while doing that because, although pregnant, I was wearing silly shoes.
When I pulled out of the parking lot I first veered right, then I thought: Hmm, a left turn onto Colorado Blvd. in this mess? I don’t think so. So I did a wide circular turn and went to the left instead. There were lights of one car behind me, but I assumed it was one of my friends since we’d all left together.
But there was no other traffic, so I did a couple of movements designed to let me know just how slick it was–pretty slick–and I can certainly see how any observer might see that as wavering across the lane line. Not that you could see the lane line under three inches of snow. The horizontal visibility was about 1/4 block. The headlights were still behind me and my thinking went, Hmm, guess Ann didn’t want to do a left onto Colorado either.
I made a right. The headlights followed me. About ten seconds later the car that I thought was Ann’s revealed itself to be a car with flashing lights. The cop pulled me over and I’m sitting there thinking things like damn, I shouldn’t have done that little sliding act. I rolled the window down about half an inch so snow wouldn’t get in, and of course that looked suspicious. I was chomping on a Certs (because I wasn’t smoking) and that looked suspicious. I had just left a bar…the cop had been parked in the next lot just hoping to nab someone, and he thought he’d won the door prize.
But for the moment I was clueless and also innocent, so when he asked if I’d like to get out of the car I said no, because I didn’t think I could stand up–meaning because of the snow and my silly shoes.
Eventually I ended up explaining that no, I was not drunk, had not had even ONE drink because I was pregnant (but not very pregnant), and he let me go. But all this took about 20 minutes, during which time Ann did in fact drive by. A few minutes after I got home she called and laughed and thanked me for being the “designated drunk” and diverting attention away from the real drunks, herself and Debbie.
(Lest you think I am being cavalier about letting my friends drive drunk, Ann is a lousy driver, grew up in NYC and didn’t learn to drive until she was 25, which is too late, and she doesn’t really bother about things like red lights unless she really, really doesn’t want to get stopped. In other words she’s actually a marginally better driver when drunk. And Debbie, who had to drive way into the mountains, is Norwegian and holds her booze really well. Everybody made it home just fine, as I knew they would.)
Wanna hear something strange? I was there on May 10th. It was a class trip. When I went through the haunted house I started channeling my father and thought “this is a firetrap”.
Hey, I’m the guy with the knife in the back seat! We should totally hang out.
Really? Guys lie to girls all the time about who they are to have sex with them.
Every day of my life is an urban legend.
I read about the designated decoy in one of a stack of Reader’s Digest magazines from the 80’s.
You owe me a new car door!!!
I heard it was a foot.
Not me, specifically, but one of my best friends.
On Independence Day several years ago, he and three of his buddies were filling balloons up using his dad’s welding tanks. They had some fun for awhile, blowing up the balloons by touching them off with a lit cigarette attached to a long stick. Then this got boring.
So the four of them decide that they’ll fill up a bunch of these balloons, put them in the cavernous trunk of a 1960-somthing Impala and take them down to the beach. They packed a bunch in before static electricity caused the whole lot of them to blow up, nearly tearing the trunk lid off and putting all four of them on the floor.
One temporarily lost his hearing. One rolled around on the ground for 15 minutes clutching his nuts. The other two were unhurt, save for a ringing in their ears.
Makes a funny story, but often sounds like an “honorable mention” for the Darwin Awards or some such thing.
This is not like telling someone you are a doorgunner on the space shuttle when you meet them at a bar. This is closer to sneaking into someones house, climbing into bed and having sex with them. She might not protest because she thinks its her husband. Its still rape.
I’m not going to go into any details but take my advice, if you wake up in a tub of icewater with a phone next to you DON’T GET UP! Call 911 fast. I learned the hard way.
I’m one of the “cover-up people” in a local urban legend.
I work in a museum which used to be an old house. In the late 1970s, they installed a case in a doorway, hinged so that it could swing open and admit a staff person to the storage areas. Guests who saw this “secret door” in use were fascinated by it and a legend grew up about its origins.
About half a year ago, a woman came into the museum and asked to see the “secret door.” Rennovations had been done since then and the door no longer existed. “I’m sorry-- I really don’t know what you’re referring to,” I said. “We don’t have any secret doors.”
The woman gave me a skeptical, impatient look. “I know it’s here,” she said. “It’s the door the little girl used to escape when her family was murdered in the 1800s.”
I blinked. “Ma’am, no one was ever murdered in this house.”
“Yes, they were! It was the whole family! The little girl was the only one who made it because she went through the secret door and ran to the neighbor’s.”
“I’m sorry. You must be thinking of some other location. We know every person who ever lived in this house and none of them were ever murdered.” Really-- we can prove it.
The woman rolled her eyes and snapped, “I* know* it was here.” She left in an ostentatiously indignant huff.
I aked my curator about the “secret door” after he left and he shook his head in irritation. He said he’d never understood people’s fascination with that stupid hinged case and that even while it was there, they had to continually insist that it was something installed by the museum staff-- not part of the original house. There was even an incident with an old lady who insisted most vehemently that the “secret door” had been there when she was a child and that she remembered playing games involving it. (An amazing memory to have, considering the museum took over the house right around the time this woman was born.)
Later, another guest asked me about the same story and said that she’d heard that the staff are all trying to cover up the house’s “sordid past.” I laughed and told her that if it was actually true, we’d most likely have an exhibit dedicated to it.
I got a call once - and the call originated from inside my house!
Then I yelled at my daughter for being lazy & wasting her cell minutes…
I once shot myself with a shotgun that I thought was unloaded as I passed the window of my apartment after having jumped off the roof to commit suicide. Unbeknownst to me, I had erected a safety net, and would have survived the fall, had I not secretly loaded the shotgun in an effort to kill myself.
I’m Bill Gates and I’ve been trying to pay people for forwarding e-mails. The money was supposed to go to that sick kid in Georgia who cut off his own face while high on PCP. Poor kid.