Psychologically, urban legends are a way for us to make sense of the world and manage threat in a safe environment. From the perspective of believers, myths act as proof and reinforce existing beliefs. Urban legends also provide a source of entertainment. Sharing them is an important form of social engagement.
Passing apparently important information can make people feel helpful, despite a lack of evidence. Within modern society, due to email and the internet, urban legends spread even more rapidly and indefinitely — constantly adapting to retain relevance, coherence and significance.
With these changes have come a generation of new viral urban legends. You may have heard the story about the two people who have cybersex only to realise months later that they are father and daughter. Another viral one is Slender Man , a creepy character who hangs around in forests and stalks children.
This originated in on an internet forum as part of a Photoshop challenge in which participants edited photographs of everyday objects to make them appear paranormal. Slender Man has since become an internet meme and been referenced in both video games and art.
However, his popularity caused a minor moral panic after it was discovered that violent attackers had been inspired by it. Nonetheless, he illustrates how the internet facilitates the rapid transmission and growth of urban legends. One study analyzed 45 online versions of the ubiquitous Bloody Mary story—say her name to a mirror three times, and she comes out to kill you—and found that the average number of counterintuitive elements was 2.
Exposure breeds familiarity, which fosters credulity—even when you know better [5]. Which is to say, stories about exploding implants might be with us for a while. Skip to content Site Navigation The Atlantic. One of the most widespread contamination stories is the long-standing rumor of rats and mice showing up in soda bottles or other prepackaged food.
There are also a lot of contamination stories that have to do with the unintentional injection of drugs. One particularly pervasive legend reports that drug dealers have been coating temporary tattoos with LSD. The dealers give these tattoos to children, who put them on and absorb the LSD through their skin.
Supposedly, this is a scheme to get the kids addicted to LSD so they become regular customers a particularly doubtful notion, since LSD does not seem to be physically addictive. Despite repeated public announcements that this story is not true, concerned people continue to spread the word about these drug-laced tattoos, posting warnings in police stations, schools and other public places. Not all urban legends deal with such morbid, weighty issues. Many of them have no cautionary or moral element at all: They are simply amusing stories or ordinary jokes told as if they really occurred.
One common "news story" reports that a man took out an insurance policy on an expensive box of cigars, smoked them all and then tried to collect a claim, saying that they had been damaged in a fire.
Another tale tells of a drunk driver who is pulled over by the police. The officer asks the man to step out of the car for a sobriety test , but just as the test is about to begin, a car veers into a ditch up the road. The officer runs to help the other driver, and the drunk man takes the opportunity to flee the scene. When he gets home, he falls fast asleep on the couch. In the morning, he hears a loud knocking on his door and opens it to find the police officer from the night before.
The man swears up and down he was home all night, until the officer asks to have a look in his garage. When he opens the door, he's shocked to see the officer's police cruiser parked there instead of his own car. This story about the police car , in various forms, has spread all over the world. It even made it into the movie "Good Will Hunting," relayed by one of the characters as if it had happened to one of his friends.
In the next section, we'll look at how urban legends like this one spread, and explore why so many people believe them. In the last section, we saw that urban legends are unusual, funny or shocking stories, relayed from person to person as absolute truth.
The most remarkable thing about urban legends is that so many people believe them and pass them on. What is it about these stories that makes people want to spread the word? A lot of it has to do with the particular elements of the story. As we saw in the last section, many urban legends are about particularly heinous crimes , contaminated foods or any number of occurrences that could affect a lot of people if they were true.
If you hear such a story, and you believe it, you feel compelled to warn your friends and family. A person might pass on non-cautionary information simply because it is funny or interesting. When you first hear the story, you are completely amazed that such a thing has occurred.
When told correctly, a good urban legend will have you on the edge of your seat. It's human nature to want to spread this feeling to others, and be the one who's got everyone waiting to hear how the story turns out. Even if you hear it as a made-up joke, you might be tempted to personalize the tale by claiming it happened to a friend.
Basically, people love to tell a good story. But why does an audience take this at face value, instead of recognizing it is a tall tale or unsubstantiated rumor? In most cases, it has to do with how the story is told. If a friend let's call her Jane tells you an urban legend, chances are she will say it happened to a friend of somebody she knows. You trust Jane to tell you the truth, and you know she trusts the person who told her the story.
It seems pretty close to secondhand information, so you treat it as such. Why would Jane lie? Of course, Jane isn't really lying, and her friend wasn't lying to her -- both of them believe the story. They are, however, probably abbreviating the story somewhat, and you will probably abbreviate it yourself when you pass it on. In this situation, the story happened to a friend of one of your friend's friends, but to simplify things, you'll probably just say it happened to a friend of Jane's, or even to Jane herself.
In this way, every person who relays the story gives the impression that he or she is only two people away from one of the characters in the story, when in reality, there are probably hundreds of people between them. The original source of an urban legend can be any number of things. In the case of the LSD-coated temporary tattoos , the story most likely came from a misinterpretation of an actual occurrence.
While there is little evidence of LSD stickers being distributed to kids, it is common practice for drug-dealers to sell acid on small pieces of blotter paper, which dealers often stamp with a trademark cartoon character. It's a good bet that somebody read about these "acid tabs," or saw a picture of one, and thought they were temporary tattoos aimed at kids. It's not clear who originally started the Las Vegas organ thief story.
Most likely, it was just somebody pulling one over on a friend. But we do know something about how the legend really took off. A writer for the show "Law and Order" heard the story somewhere and worked it into an early episode. The show is well known for its "ripped from the headlines" stories, so many viewers may have gotten the impression that the episode depicted a real event. Popular culture and urban legends are often closely related. Old legends end up as plot points in movies, and fictional elements from movies are circulated as real-life tales.
It is only when the bill comes, minus the cost of the meat, that she realises she has eaten her beloved pet. Even a year later, the students were still struck by the tale, she says. Perhaps that can explain why urban legends are so often in very bad taste.
We are also drawn to themes of survival — which is why many stories deal with life and death. That makes sense, given our evolution — stories would have been an important way of transmitting valuable information that could save our skin at a later point.
His participants were given a choice of tales and asked to choose one to read, remember and pass on to another person. Each tale reflected the above biases in a different way, and it seemed to have a big effect on their popularity. One told the story of a woman who died after a poisonous spider made a nest in her unwashed beehive haircut. In contrast, a more memorable story concerned a woman who had cybersex with an unknown man, only to find out months later that it was her father.
Others, along a similar vein, might include the story of the inadvertent biscuit thief that ends in excruciating embarrassment. Slender Man fans like to dress up as the feared character Getty Images. Appealing to both the social and survival biases, the story of a serial killer who lures women to their death, with the sounds of a baby crying proved to be most popular of all.
Surprisingly, Slender Man only partially confirms these findings.
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