It goes without saying that most people on these boards are fairly sceptic.
However, there are times when even the best sceptic lets his or her guard down, and well, falls for an old UL. I’m not talking about vaguely considering the story potentially credible, but believing to the point of swearing on your pet’s grave that the damn thing is true.
My father is a veterinarian and some years ago he told us a hilarious story about a client’s crazy rottweiler that (supposedly) killed the neighbor’s rabbit.
The owner took the dead lagomorph from the dog’s jaws, cleaned it and put it back in its cage, which was in the neighbor’s back yard.
Hours later, an excited little old lady showed up at the guy’s door screaming, “My rabbit, my rabbit!”
“Your rabbit?” the man asked.
“It died!” the little old lady replied.
“You know, these little things don’t live very old and. . .”
“You don’t understand! It died, I buried it and IT CAME BACK!”
Ummm…OK…I’ve been wanting to confess this for a while.
The thing is, all children tend to believe urban legends. Growing up, I had the cutest little 4 pound poodle, who I would not let NEAR the microwave. But grownups know better, right?
…WELL…
about 5, well, maybe 8 years ago, when I first heard about the black market kidney stealing vixen and the tub of ice and the phone and the lipstick on the mirror, I kinda believed it. Heard it from a good source. I am scarred nowe, though. A nonbeliever. Friends forward their questionables to me now, as I am the resident debunker of my crowd. Not gonna fool ME twice…
Actually, isnt that how I ended up on Straight Dope in the first place? Yep! Got an email about Cleopatra being “black.”
Well, I don’t know if this really counts as an UL, but I thought the “‘Ring Around the Rosie’ is really about the plague” thing was true for years – mainly because it was mentioned in my eighth-grade world history book. It’s actually pretty plausible if you don’t know the history of the rhyme in print (the first recorded version a) only dates back to 1881 b) is American c) has variant words that don’t work with the plague interpretation at all).
I believed most of the movie legends until I either read the truth on Snopes or saw/heard them for myself. These included:
*Wizard of Oz–The suicidal munchkin. It’s really a crane.
*Three Men and a Baby–The boy ghost. It’s really Ted Danson’s cut out in the background, left over from something.
*And the Disney legends, which are too numerous to list.
In high school I would overhear people telling these legends, and believing them. By then I read the truths on Snopes and told them the truth. Or at least tried to. Someone said, “You’re lying. I know it’s true [about the suicidal munchkin] because I heard it on TV.” I just groaned and put my head on my desk.
I should have spotted this one, but it was back before I was a big fan of critical thinking.
Our French teacher was telling the class about a group trip to France. Now, of course, this story didn’t happen to her, but the travel agent she planned the trip knew someone that it happened to. The one about an exchange student mistaking a sink in the bathroom for a toilet, and while trying to use the sink/toilet had it come off the wall . . . and kill the family pet (it was a cat this time).
::raises hand hesitantly at back of class::
I fell for the Chocolate chip cookie recipe one. In my defense, I was pretty new to the net at the time, and hadn’t really even heard of Urban Legends at that time. Now, I look up pretty much all the crap people send me on Snopes (and I can thank this Board for my knowledge of the Snopes website), and send them messages back if they’re passing on UL’s. The latest one I de-bunked was about all the parking lot scams that people are supposedly pulling on women.
Poinsettas are incredibly poisonous
Yes, they are poisonous, but you’d have to eat a wheelbarrow full to kill you.
The story that the glass slipper in Cinderella was actually a mistranslation, verre = glass, vair = fur and her slipper was really a FUR slipper. I really enjoyed that interpretation, the idea of a foot penetrating a fur slipper was so full of symbolism!
I swallowed the JATO-car story hook, line, and sinker, but that’s one of the finest urban legends ever so I don’t feel bad about it. Even if 'tain’t true, it’s a damn funny story. There was a big long article about it in Wired a while back about the guy who claims to have started it (as in, helped build a car with a rocket strapped to it). I took that with a grain of salt.
I believed in the plague origin of “Ring Around the Rosie.” It’s hard not to, when that’s what everyone, including teachers, is telling you! I used to be a sucker about that and lots of other “factoids” but these days I think my BS meter is better calibrated, due in large part to Uncle Cecil and Snopes.
BTW, I still believe in cow-tipping, though that has been the cause of many a controversial thread here. . .
I remember my mom getting the $250 Neiman-Marcus cookie recipe from a friend (who I assume got it from a friend of a friend ) in the early '70s, and thinking it was so cool that we had such a famous and expensive recipe for free.
When I was a freshman in college (1982) my roommate told me a story that she swore happened in her town. Some guy had picked up a female hitchhiker, gave her his coat, dropped her off at her house, and when he went back for his coat, he learned that the girl had died years ago, and he found his coat on her grave. I had never heard it before, and it really creeped me out.
The Mr. Ed being a zebra one. What? Don’t look at me that way, snopes.com said it themselves! It’s not my fault they like to screw with the minds of the very (when it comes to black and white television) naive. :o
Most of them I know to be false because I read them off the website. It pisses me off to no end when people spread them around as truth. I think it’s the SDMB that gives me the whole knee jerk reaction for a cite when you say something. In psych class someone brought up the Jamie Lee Curtis being born a hermaphrodite…ugh. Too bad you can’t link in real life.
I good friend of mine told me the story of the “Wildcat in the Suitcase” as if it had actually happened to him.
This was in the late 1970s. He said he had been doing a wildlife study in Arizona on bobcats. He and an assistant caught one in a live trap and for some reason had to get it back to their lab while leaving the cage in place. The only container they had was an old suitcase, so they anesthetized the cat, put it inside, and put the suitcase on the back seat of their cat.
On the way back they decided to have lunch at a diner. While they were inside, somebody ran in and shouted “Three guys are stealing your car!” The guy gave them a lift and they raced off in pursuit. Five miles down the road they saw their car in a ditch. The two front doors were wide open. There was no sign of two of the thieves or the bobcat, but the remaining robber was sitting in the back seat in a state of shock with the empty, pried-open suitcase in his lap. He looked like he had been in a razor fight. My friend chortled: “It had been a cold day too, so all the windows had been rolled up.”
I used to love re-telling that story, until I read the version on Snopes. At least I didn’t hear it from a Friend of a Friend, but as an ostensibly first-hand story.
Oh, another one that I heard a lot as an undergrad at the University of Michigan (though I never believed it) was the one in which some psychic supposedly went on the Oprah Winfrey show that on Halloween night, sometime before the year 2000, there would be a mass murder at a Midwestern university that had an H-shaped dorm and a graveyard on campus. The usual response to “It’s just an urban legend” was “Yeah, but it could give people ideas!” (Snopes points out that this story was big in 1998, which is definitely true.)
2000 has come and gone, however, and U-M remains refreshingly massacre-free…
I’ve fallen for one or two, usually the factoid ones (like “Ring around the rosy,” which I can’t remember if I believed or not). Since Jan Brunvand was favorite reading at my house when I was a kid, I was kind of forearmed.
But I’m really posting to tell about the time I picked up a Seventeen magazine last year. I was skimming through, and there was a page where you could send in your most embarrassing moment. Most of them were about farting in front of the guy the writer secretly loved, but one was…the blow-dried, resurrected dead rabbit story! It was a first-person account of babysitting some kids, finding the dead rabbit, etc. etc. I’ve always wondered if someone sent it in as a hoax, or if the editors just needed more stuff to fill the page.
While I was dating a girl in grad school 10 years back or so the story came out about Richard Gere getting a gerbil stuck up his butt.
My girlfriend’s father was the hospital admin for the place they took Gere to and he told us that the story was absolutely true.
Snopes says they’ve not been able to get anyone to confirm it and, therefore, they think it’s a legend. I, however, don’t think this man of integrity had much reason to tell his daughter and her friend an outright lie so I guess that’s one “story” I’m still falling for.
I was a sucker for many of the Darwin awards. They Guy being fried in the Microwave radio dish was a favorite of mine. The guy’s name is Baker and that should have raised a few alarm bells. I should have been more scepitcal.
I got suckered in by the Bonsai Kitten website. That’s how I found snopes; I did a company wide e-mail asking if the site was for real and someone sent me a link.
The first one I can remember falling for was that McDonald’s shakes contain no milk. Who can blame me? I got it from my eighth grade science teacher. :rolleyes: Snopes debunks it here: http://www.snopes.com/horrors/food/mcdshake.htm
Interestingly, I heard the one about the stray cats and the Chinese restaurant the same year, but never really believed it. My older sister did, though.
I fell for most college urban legends until my junior year when I saw a poster describing legends at different campuses–all of which I had heard about the university I attended! From that, I started investigating more and more.
I got hooked on the Straight Dope when I found that the equinox had nothing to do with being able to balance an egg on end. Thanks a lot 5th grade teacher.
I’m glad I’m not the only one ;). I still get teased about this, and every time I say ‘Guess what’ to my brother in law, he says “what, is Mr Ed a zebra?”.
The big one I fell for was a long involved story about a cactus imported from South America that had massive spiders growing inside it who were released one day when the plant exploded. This was told by a smart-ass DJ in Melbourne on radio once, and I was sucked in. I then realised pretty much every story he told about his life and friends were BS, so that put me on the road to healthy skepticism.
Mine was really recent! My sister is a foster care support worker, and was on the phone with one of her foster parents. When she got off the phone, she told me that the foster parent she had just spoken to told her that her Afghani boyfriend had recently left (Sept 6 to be exact) and he left her a note that told her not to fly on the 11th, or go to the mall on Halloween. It creeped me right out! Of course, I freaked out in my livejournal, and it was only about ten minutes before someone kindly debunked it for me.
My disclaimer? I’ve been too busy since I started school again to check Snopes (I used to read the recent additions everyday!) and I’m not used to hearing urban legends first hand anymore. They’re usually in my inbox.
I think it goes without saying that I felt really stupid.
) in the early '70s, and thinking it was so cool that we had such a famous and expensive recipe for free.