Obviously nothing says you’ve had a great time on a business trip more than coming home missing an organ. You and all the other guys in the office can compare scars where your kidneys used to be and reminisce about “Good old Ralph”, who was stupid enough to let it happen to him twice.

And yet, as much fun as that situation sounds like, grim stories of commercial organ harvesting are turning out to be very real, although perhaps a little less sensationally dramatic than the popular urban legend version above.

News site Bloomberg recently ran a piece about organ gangs preying on people living in poverty, offering them cash in return for harvesting a healthy kidney.

Aliaksei Yafimau shudders at the memory of the burly thug who threatened to kill his relatives. Yafimau, who installs satellite television systems in Babrujsk, Belarus, answered an advertisement in 2010 offering easy money to anyone willing to sell a kidney.

This particular piece focused on a black market ring that was selling the harvested organs to Israeli patients desperately in need of kidney transplants, but other news items have also surfaced telling similar stories from other parts of the world.

The interesting folklore question [1] about this is: doesn’t the existence of a global black market in illegally harvested and transplanted organs make this Urban Legend true? I mean, doesn’t it?

The answer, as far as I’m concerned, is ‘Not really.’

…Okay, I can tell you’re a little disappointed, but let me explain.

To understand why this doesn’t exactly verify the Urban Legend, we need to consider that despite their similarities, these two stories are still quite different.

The Urban Legend version — a traveling businessman meets a pretty woman in a bar who seems instantly, probably even unexpectedly, attracted to him — is as much a morality story as anything else. In some versions of the story the businessman is married, and the consequences of his infidelity, and for being foolish enough to allow his personal safety to be compromised by the promise of a night with a pretty stranger, are predictably awful. It’s kind of like someone taking the “What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas” thing to a whole new and disturbing level of literal interpretation.

The real-life stories are more conventional and mundane and, let’s face it, all the more sad and terrible because of it. The simple reality is that there are people in the world who are willing to sell a kidney due to poverty. And wait, there’s also the complexity of the organ transplant process to consider. The idea that people are randomly harvesting some stranger’s kidney in a hotel room on the premise that it might be used in a transplant within a very small timeframe is almost as unrealistic as when Kim Kardashian promises to stay married for longer than a week. For a transplant to be successful, matching between donor and recipient must be done before the operation can have any chance of success.

So, ya, I personally don’t consider the classic Urban Legend story to have been substantiated by these stories of black market organ harvesting rings. The randomness of the way in which people are targetted for harvesting is so much a part of the morality warning [2] of the Urban Legend version that the fact that it’s missing from the news stories means the Urban Legend stays ‘False’ for now.

Further Reading

• Organ Gangs Force Poor to Sell Kidneys for Desperate Israelis
• The Kidney Thieves
• Kidney Theft
• Requirements of a Kidney Donor

Footnotes:

1.	I promise, this really is interesting stuff to people who study contemporary folklore.
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2.	In other words, the “Dude, it could happen to you!” part of the story.
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Don’t stop for any reason. Whatever you do… DON’T STOP FOR ANY REASON!!

That’s the frantic advice being given by a chain email that made its way into my inbox today [1].

Your life depends on it.

You are not safe.

If you pull your car over, if you stop, you are going to become a victim of a gang robbery, rape or perhaps even murder.

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Email warnings about gang tactics and initiation rituals are nothing new. Not only have they been floating around the internet for a number of years, there is every likelihood they were shared via photocopiers and fax machines before email became the de facto way of forwarding alarming advice.

Over the years, we have been warned that gang members have begun to hide in the back seats of cars when motorists stop to fill up with gas, only to attack and murder the driver once he or she has arrived home.

We have been told to never flash our car lights back at someone who puts theirs onto high beam because a gang initiation ritual requires gang members to drive around at night flashing their headlights, and to pursue and murder the first motorist who flashes their lights back.

And we’ve been told about various gang initiation crimes centred on car parks and shopping malls, in which women and children are to be abducted and murdered by new members to a gang.

Now we have an email that claims that gangs have developed two new techniques:

• Leaving a baby / infant car seat by the side of the road to force concerned motorists to pull over to investigate
• Throwing eggs at windshields with the knowledge that if the motorist attempts to clean the egg off with their wipers he or she will make the situation worse and will be forced to pull over anyway

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Collected via email on 13 January 2011:

Subject: FW: Police warning when driving.!!

While driving on a rural end of the roadway on Thursday morning, I saw an infant car seat on the side of the road with a blanket draped over it.

For whatever reason, I did not stop, even though I had all kinds of thoughts running through my head. But when I got to my destination, I called the Police and they were going to check it out. But, this is what the Police advised even before they went out there to check….

"There are several things to be aware of … gangs and thieves are now
plotting different ways to get a person (mostly women) to stop their
vehicle and get out of the car.

"There is a gang initiation reported by the local Police where gangs are
placing a car seat by the road…with a fake baby in it…waiting for a woman, of course, to stop and check on the abandoned baby.

"Note that the location of this car seat is usually beside a wooded or grassy (field) area and the person — woman — will be dragged into the woods, beaten and raped, and usually left for dead. If it’s a man,
they’re usually beaten and robbed and maybe left for dead, too.

DO NOT STOP FOR ANY REASON!!!

DIAL 0-0-0 AND REPORT WHAT YOU SAW, BUT DON’T EVEN SLOW DOWN.

"IF YOU ARE DRIVING AT NIGHT AND EGGS ARE THROWN AT YOUR WINDSCREEN, DO NOT STOP TO CHECK THE CAR, DO NOT OPERATE THE WIPER AND DO NOT SPRAY ANY WATER BECAUSE EGGS MIXED
WITH WATER BECOME MILKY AND BLOCK YOUR VISION UP TO 92.5%, AND YOU ARE THEN FORCED TO STOP BESIDE THE ROAD AND BECOME A VICTIM OF THESE CRIMINALS.

THIS IS A NEW TECHNIQUE USED BY GANGS, SO PLEASE INFORM YOUR FRIENDS AND RELATIVES.

THESE ARE DESPERATE TIMES AND THESE ARE UNSAVOURY INDIVIDUALS WHO WILL TAKE DESPERATE MEASURES TO GET WHAT THEY WANT."

Please talk to your loved ones about this. This is a new tactic used. Please be safe.

Get started NOW — SEND THIS MESSAGE TO ALL YOUR FRIENDS AND LOVED ONES TO BE CAREFUL AND AWARE OF EVERYTHING AROUND THEM SO AS NOT TO BECOME A VICTIM.

∗∗∗

Thankfully, you only need to spend a couple of minutes on Google to turn up results that clearly indicate that this email is a hoax.

The DesMoines Register, for example, spoke to the DesMoines Police Department who confirmed that the email is a hoax.

The Tennessee Department Of Corrections issued a statement indicating that an employee had privately forwarded the email, but there was no evidence to consider it as true.

And of course the excellent reference sites of snopes.com and urbanlegends.about.com have both tagged the email as false.

∗∗∗

So, please be assured that there really is no widespread global [2] gang initiation ritual taking place in which infant car seats and eggs are being used to waylay motorists.

Footnotes:

1.	Thanks to Darren K
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2.	In case you’re interested, the example of the email that I have used above has been modified for an Australian audience – according to this list on Wikipedia, Australia is the only country that uses “000” as its emergency number.
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While not a new theory in itself, the article reports the research of two Oceanographers into the likelihood that the disappearances have been caused by massive releases of methane gas from the ocean floor.

For the article: How Brilliant Computer Scientists Solved the Bermuda Triangle Mystery

Okay, so if you ever spent an evening sitting around a campfire listening to ghost stories, then the chances that you’ve heard the story of ‘The Man With The Hook’ are somewhere around about 2 billion percent. It’s one of those wonderfully chilling tales that never fails to send a tingle up the spine, and it has made its way into any number of folk stories told all over the world [1].

I recently discovered a wonderful retelling of the tale over on AmericanFolklore.net, and I’d love to encourage you to go over and read the story, if for no better reason than it might remind you (as it did me) of some great times you spent at a younger age being scared out of your wits by a good tale.

Interestingly, I’ve encountered two different main retellings of this tale in my life. The first is very much like the version over on American Folklore, where the young couple discover the psychopath’s bloodied hook attached to the car door handle, indicating a very narrow escape.

The second, which may well have been borrowed from some other tale of a terrible encounter with a maniac, is even grislier still!

In this version the boyfriend leaves the young woman to go for help. A few minutes later she hears a sound on the top of the car, and moments after that a police loud hailer instructs her to run from the car for her life, and that whatever she does, she’s not to look back. Of course, she does risk a glance back at the car as she flees, and the story ends with her screams as she sees the The Man With The Hook standing on the roof of the car, holding the severed head of her unfortunate boyfriend [2].

Hope you enjoy the read, and I’d love to hear about your own encounters with the story of ‘The Man With The Hook’ in the comments below.

Photo courtesy of TJ Scott.

Footnotes:

1.	For example, I first heard it when I was about 12, at a Christmas Camp I attended just south of Brisbane, here in Australia.
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2.	Seriously, when I look back on stories like these, is it any wonder we all had nightmares as children?
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I’m sure most of you are familiar with the story in one form or another from your childhood years. Sometimes the name changes [1], sometimes the details of the ritual changes, but in most cases the core elements of the story remain largely the same.

To summon Bloody Mary you have to go into a bathroom at the stroke of midnight and stand in front of the mirror with a lit candle and with the lights turned off. You chant her name 3 times, “Bloody Mary… Bloody Mary… Bloody Mary…” and then you shout, “I stole your baby!”

And then… in the mirror… you will see the face of a horribly disfigured woman — and she’ll claw your face with razor-sharp nails, leaving you just as terribly mutilated as she is!

Egad, what could be creepier than that!

It’s easy to imagine that some form of this ritual has been performed an endless number of times by children from vastly different backgrounds in the decades since it made its way into popular folklore.

But what about the legend itself?

A look at the legend

It’s interesting that for such a widely told and retold story, detailed descriptions of who Bloody Mary was, and why or how she came to haunt mirrors, are unusually scarce. In a way, this scarcity of detail may well lend to the ritual’s flexibility and adaptability to new audiences and new locations.

In some versions a very basic story is given that she was once a young mother whose baby was stolen from her. She went mad in her grief and eventually committed suicide, and this explains why, in those versions where the ritual calls for you to cry out that it was you who stole her baby, she will attack you from the mirror.

In other versions she is described as a young woman who simply died a tragic and gruesome death, while in still others almost no background story or explanation is given. In many of these the ritual concludes simply with the statement, “I believe in you!”, and by declaring your belief you allow Bloody Mary to appear in the mirror.

Most versions of the ritual, however, do have at least several things in common.

A mirror is an essential prop in every version I’ve encountered thus far. Usually the ritual is conducted in gloom or darkness, with the only source of light often being a candle, adding to the eerie ambience. Most versions require an element of chanting and repetition [2], and many versions conclude with a taunt or affirmation.

And, lol, it probably goes without saying that just about every version has a spookiness-factor somewhere in the neighborhood of “Watching Candyman at home, alone, in the dark.” [3]

Behind the mirror

Jan Harold Brunvand’s third book devoted to urban legends, The Mexican Pet, mentions the work of Indiana folklorist Janet Langlois, whose article “Mary Whales I Believe In You: Myth And Ritual Subdued” appeared in Indiana Folklore in 1978. Langlois theorized that the Mary Wales story originated from a Mexican supernatural tale, entitled La Llorana – a story in which a young mother drowns her children and then goes mad from despair, eventually killing herself and haunting others.

Noted folklorist Alan Dundes suggests that many aspects of the Bloody Mary ritual suggest an unconscious expression of fear and anxiety on behalf of pre-adolescent girls facing the onsent of puberty and menstruation. He cites the popularity of the ritual amongst girls of that age, along with versions of the tale collected from girls who have told or been told the tale in which poorly-defined warnings that “blood will appear” are mentioned.

Using Dundes’ theory as a starting point, you could equally suggest that the Bloody Mary ritual more readily expresses anxiety about issues of virginity than menstruation, depending on the exact age at which the tale generally becomes popular amongst girls. Certainly the elements of fear, pain, the appearance of blood, and the common theme involving a baby, lend themselves as much to this interpretation as to that of Dundes’. And, of course, it’s entirely possible that the Bloody Mary ritual may well express a range of developmental anxieties amongst girls, some of which might be more centered on issues of social conformity, than of physical changes and rites of passage.

Boys, of course, aren’t immune to the story either, though their experiences with it – such as what age they first heard it, whether or not they participated in a recreation of the ritual, the popularity of the tale among social groups of boys etc – tend to be more varied.

Regardless of exactly why the tale is so enduringly popular, it’s obvious that it touches on common themes of fright and anxiety in childhood that often last well into adulthood. In fact, over the years I’ve communicated with a number of adults who will admit that while they ‘know’ the story isn’t true, the last thing they could ever bring themselves to do would be to go into a darkened bathroom with a lit candle to stand in front of a mirror and chant the name of Bloody Mary.

Through the mists of time

Back in the days of the ULRC, the entry I posted on Bloody Mary was, without a doubt, the most popular and controversial topic on the site.

It generated a great deal of comment and feedback from many people wanting to share their memories of when they first heard the tale, and also much scathing criticism from those who were certain the story is true.

I hope that tradition continues over here on ulblog.org. If you have a memory of the Bloody Mary ritual, or a variant of the tale you’d like to share, or you’d just like to send some death threats because you disagree about whether Bloody Mary is real or not, please feel free to use the comment and feedback links.

Actually, lol, thinking about it, it might be best if the death threats were sent via the feedback link.

Some further reading:

If you’d like to learn more about Bloody Mary, the following links are worth visiting:

• The Face In The Mirror
• Bloody Mary on Wikipedia – examines both the historical Bloody Mary (ie Mary I, Queen of England during the 16th century) as well as the folklore tale.

Footnotes:

1.	I’ve encountered the story using the name Bloody Mary, Hell Mary, Mary Worth, Mary Whales, Mary Wolf, and Black Aggie, just to name a few.
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2.	Sometimes requiring you to chant Bloody Mary’s name 3 times, sometimes 9, 12, 15, or 21 times and so on.
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3.	If you’ve never seen this movie, it borrows heavily from several popular Urban Legend / scare stories, with Bloody Mary being the most obvious tale from which it draws inspiration. It’s also a pretty scary movie as well!
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