Urban Legends: Upcoming Publication

The canonization process in The Serpentine History of the Saint involves my investigators in urban legends. 

In a sense, all fairy tales and folktales are urban legends, not due to their setting but in their production. Rather than strumming gondoliers and courtly poets and even lecturing ministers, folktales originate in "have you heard about?! can you believe it?!" gossip.

Actually, they originate in both high and low cultures. But gossip is the fuel for these tales. 

And comeuppance is so often the pay-off. The urban legend my investigators encounter falls under Stolen Debris: a family puts a body or stool sample or dead pet or, at the most extreme, dead granny in a bag or suitcase or box. It gets left on a seat or strapped to the roof of a car. And it gets stolen. Ha ha! Joke is on the thieves! 

In fact, the tale often ends with the climax: "And it was gone." The comeuppance/joke is implied as listeners can imagine unwrapping...that. Oh, gross!

In fact, many urban legends rely on the "Tell-Tale Heart" final line--the confession (rather than the arrest). Take the urban legend popular when I was growing up: Man sleeps with a beautiful woman. Next day he wakes up and scrawled on the bathroom mirror in lipstick is, "Welcome to AIDS."

Tales like this are often attributed to the need to warn, the same purpose often attributed to Little Red Riding Hood. But the truth is, hardly anyone ever dwells on the lesson. They never did with the AIDs story when I was a teen. 

I suggest that the tales are closer to Stephen King's hypothesis about horror movies: the tale may come from the same place as the "warning" part of the psyche, but the telling is more about catharsis, releasing a worry, than alerting others to danger. 

Urban legends aren't about logic. They are hardly about social understanding. They are, I would argue, almost entirely atavistic and self-serving. 

As one of my investigators says about the Stolen Debris tale (the "debris" in this case is a bone):

Phillipe said, "Part ghost story, part I can tell you exactly what happened with my excessive detail baloney. A worn-out trope. People wrapping up dead pets and grandmothers and stool samples in pretty paper and what do you know, the item gets stolen by thieves.”

“Thieves would surely go for the unwrapped items in the car,” Victor agreed solemnly. 

“Carjacks. Air compressors. Leather seat covers,” Justin murmured. 

He and Victor grinned. Phillipe grimaced and bobbed his head. But he added, “The family is trying to excuse their jerk ancestor for not returning the bone.”