Urban Legends are fascinating things – they can spread across the globe like wildfire, or they can occupy a small but important place in the culture of a local community.

At Drury University in Springfield, Missouri, there’s a story that is told to explain why the University cancelled its football program many years ago.

According to Dr Bill Garvin, a popular version goes something like this:

A persistent “campus legend” here at Drury is that Drury’s football program was canceled after a student was killed playing in a game.  One common variation of the story is that a rich alumnus was so horrified by the death of the student that she gave a million dollars to the college on the condition that Drury’s football program would be shut down.

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When you think about dangerous jobs, you probably think of someone who defuses bombs, or astronauts, or perhaps even accountants [1].

You might not, however, immediately think of dentists.

And yet, according to a popular piece of ‘common knowledge’, dentists apparently suffer a suicide rate several times higher than any other profession, making dentistry one of the most dangerous professions out there, and not just because you spend all day with your hands in the mouths of people with questionable oral hygiene.

But is there any truth to it?

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Footnotes:

1.	Obviously I’m not being completely serious here. After all, what’s dangerous about being an astronaut?
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“ALL DOGS GO TO HEAVEN,” the first picture reads, but the second is quick to disagree: “ONLY HUMANS GO TO HEAVEN READ THE BIBLE”.

So begins what appears to be a rather quirky theological debate about the souls of dogs (and eventually of rocks!), carried out entirely on church signs.

But, we ask ourselves, is it real? Did the religious communities represented by Our Lady of Martyrs Catholic Church and Beulah Cumberland Presbyterian Church really go to war with each other over whether or not pets can go to paradise?

As it happens, the answer is no, they didn’t…

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Barry Williams, Supreme Universal Skeptic Of The 12th Magisterial Order [1], has sent in another interesting variant of the infamous Nigerian Scam.

As Barry mentions in his email:

Murray

I despair for the continuing deterioration of literacy among barristers admitted to the bar in the UK.

Barry

I can understand Barry’s emotional distress, since the email asks you to believe that it has been sent by a barrister located in the UK, while simultaneously being pockmarked with a truly impressive variety of misspellings and grammatical errors.

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Footnotes:

1.	And owner-operator of the Barry Williams Blog.
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If you’re a fan of scary stories about the Bloody Mary ritual, you might enjoy resonanttantei’s fun retelling of a group of friends calling on Bloody Mary, and the terrifying results.

You can read the full story at: “Bloody Mary Bloody Mary Bloody Mary….oh crap” (note: language may be a little unsuitable to some in some places).

After a while, we summoned up our courage and went back to school, went into the bathrooms and of course, since I’m the “Legend Tripper” I had to say what we do.

I liked resonanttantei’s idea of being a “Legend Tripper”, and while I don’t know exactly what he intended to convey with the term, I thought it was perhaps meant to be a way of describing someone who’s something of an expert in various legends, but who also may be just a little bit unpredictable with it as well.

Jake being the bravest, looked up and his eyes went BIG. I looked up as well, I gasped and I almost screamed. Cori took her hand and covered mine. “Don’t scream, don’t..” She said to me.

Photograph courtesy of peskymac