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.

There is something oddly charming to me in this tale. Yes, at it’s core, there’s the sad death of a young man, but there’s also the sense of an unofficial tradition of passing the story from one year to the next, until it has very probably outlived anyone who was alive at the time the tale is thought to have taken place.

Dr Bill Garvin again:

Like many urban legends, this campus legend does have a grain of truth to it. A Drury student was killed playing football in 1899. It would be decades, however, before Drury’s football team would be disbanded, and by that time the death of John C. Allen would be a faint memory.

Urban Legends often grow to fill a void, as though the collective conscious demands, even hungers for an explanation; any explanation. Of course, the truth is often much less stranger than fiction.

Dr Bill Garvin:

Campus legend to the contrary, the death of John Allen had no effect on the football program at Drury. The sport wasn’t dropped until 33 years later, after the 1932 season, when the hardships brought on by the Great Depression made it increasingly difficult for Drury College to field and fund a winning team.

I’m sure almost every institute of education has its own ecosystem of extraordinary explanations — if you happen on this post and you’d like to share a similar tale from your own days at university or college, please feel free to do so in the comments below!

Link to Dr Bill Garvin’s article: Reflections from the Past

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?

To get to the root of this particular urban legend, I turned to the wonderful pages of Cecil Adam’s Straight Dope column.

Cecil looked at this legend back in 2001, and his research indicated that dentists actually are likely to commit suicide at a rate slightly higher than the general population, however medical doctors reportedly had a higher suicide rate than dentists. Neither profession, however, was several times higher than the general suicide rate.

In all fairness, it’s difficult to be 100% accurate about comparative suicide rates. There is no central reporting and statistical analysis body responsible for maintaining these statistics, and not every person who sadly takes his or her own life will have his or her profession reported. But at least we can say that of the stats available, there isn’t some bizarre upward jump in suicide rates among dentists.

Interestingly enough, I’ve personally heard this same claim made about Air Traffic Controllers and Teachers, and the simple fact that there are multiple versions of this story floating around should give us enough reason to be at least cautious about its credibility.

Linkage: The Straight Dope – Do dentists have the highest suicide rate?

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Have you heard this story? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

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…

It was a funny email, one that made me laugh out loud when it bounced into my email inbox a couple of weeks ago. The text went something like this:

At first glance it seemed like a charming and harmless little disagreement, the type of which you might have encountered on an episode of The Vicar Of Dibley.

The photos themselves seem realistic enough — there’s little doubt that we’re looking at pictures of real church signs. But if the signs themselves look real, it turns out that the words on them aren’t.

The detail that made me suspicious at first was the fact that the pictures of each sign appear to have been taken from exactly the same position in all of the frames.

In an of itself, this detail alone would be hard to pull off without some very careful setting up. Even a slight difference between a picture of one sign and the next picture of that sign would potentially stand out.

Not only that, but the pictures also appear to have been taken at the exact same time of day with, in the case of Our Lady of Martyrs Catholic Church, the exact same cars in the background, on the left, in every picture!

So, we can be reasonably certain, just on these details alone, that the images have been faked. It’s much more likely that the same images are being used for each message. However, to make absolutely certain, we head to the intertubes!

One quick Google search later and the top result returned is a site called “Church Sign Generator“. [1]

As it happens, this is a novelty web site that allows visitors to create their own messages on a variety of ‘stock image’ church signs — including images of the signs outside Our Lady of Martyrs and Beulah Cumberland Presbyterian Church.

Normally the Church Sign Generator web site stamps the images it creates with its web address, but whoever was responsible for the “All Dogs Go To Heaven” strip also covered his or her tracks by removing this clue.

Conclusion

Pretty much an open-and-shut case. Someone discovered the Church Sign Generator web site, created an amusing disagreement between two churches on the matter of dogs and rocks and whether or not they can get into heaven, and an Internet Meme was born!

It’s worth mentioning that we could have attacked this particular project from at least one other direction. If we had been able to establish that Our Lady of Martyrs and Beulah Cumberland Presbyterian Church don’t belong to the same community, then the likelihood of a public disagreement of this nature — where claims are being made back and forth — would probably be very slim.

And there you have it! Personally, I don’t know if dogs do go to heaven or not, but I do believe one thing I’ve seen printed on a (fake) church sign:

Footnotes:

1.	You can view a PDF screengrab here, in case the site itself is ever taken offline.
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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.

Aside from the UK barrister detail, this variant is pretty standard for a Nigerian Scam:

• Someone has passed away who had access to buckets of money
• The person who now has access to the money needs a co-conspirator to get the money out of the country
• The reward for being of help is generous beyond all expectation (35% of $9.5 million is $3.3 million and some small change — not a bad return if the money ever existed)
• You need to supply your contact details so further details can be sent

Of course, what really happens if you send your details is a complex confidence game in which you are constantly promised that you are about to receive a very large sum of money but not before some ‘unexpected fees’ are paid, to which you will be asked to contribute. Once these ‘fees’ are paid, more ‘fees’ will arise, and still more, until you are unwilling or, in many cases, unable to provide any more money into the scam.

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

So, oh yes, imagine my excitement when I discovered two new variants in my inbox this morning! [1]

Both are courtesy of Barry Williams, Lord Imperial Ruler Of The Australian Skeptics [2] and writer of the excellently skeptical Barry Williams Blog.

As Barry points out in his original email about the “bussness magnet” specimen:

While the full email is typically riddled with translation errors, there really is something charming about the idea of a “business magnet”, as opposed to a “business magnate”, which is the idea I suspect the writer was attempting to convey.

I love the image of a business person trying to walk down the street, struggling along because bank managers and real estate developers and investment brokers are stuck all over him or her due to the horrible effects of business magnetism! Arrggh! NoooOOoo!

The rest of the email is pretty much what you’d expect from a Nigerian Scam — sudden death, buckets of money, a need for someone ‘abroad’ [3] to help with various transactions, please send your details and so on.

And now for the complete email itself:

What a brilliant variant! Many thanks to Barry for sending it through. I’ll post his other specimen a little later in the week.

Until then, much warmth!

Murray By Moonlight

Footnotes:

1.	I didn’t actually jump up and down and clap my hands, if that’s what you’re imagining, but I definitely did smile and also possibly did rub my hands together and say, “Aha! The game’s afoot!”, or something equally silly.
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2.	I think his official title is “Executive Officer”, but I like my version better.
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3.	That’s you, in case you’re not paying attention.
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In this rendition, Bloody Mary is a witch who lives in a forest and who lures children from a nearby village to use them in black magic that will give her back her youth.

Predictably, things don’t go well at all for the wicked witch once the villagers discover that she has been lying, and she is burned alive for murdering their children.

Before she dies, however, Bloody Mary curses the village, and to this very day anyone who chants her name three times in front of a darkened mirror will summon her vengeful spirit from the grave.

You can read the tale in full over at: Bloody Mary: A Scary Urban Legend from Pennsylvania Folklore

When I first wrote about the Perfumed Bandits email hoax we were living in a different century. It was November 1999, and the same email that has gone on to cause so much concern and alarm around the world was making its way into unsuspecting email inboxes for the very first time.

And this email didn’t mess about. It went straight for the psychologic jugular and didn’t let go, delivering its payload of anxiety and alarm to a host audience that was still trying to adapt to the idea that not everything you receive in your inbox is true or real. Even if it claims otherwise in very big letters…

So, seriously, how alarming is the idea of sinister people lurking in carparks, drugging and robbing victims in broad daylight? Certainly alarming enough that the email above flashed all over the world like wildfire, and in the dying months of 1999 you were a lucky person indeed if you were connected to the internet and hadn’t received a copy of this warning multiple times.

But of course, it simply wasn’t true. To the best of anyone’s knowledge, there is no widespread conspiracy to systematically assault and rob unsuspecting victims using ether disguised as perfume.

And yet, just when you thought it was safe to start sniffing perfume samples from random strangers lurking in your local mall’s carpark, there is one story that just might have been the inspiration for the original email.

The Truth Behind The Lie?

Meet Bertha Johnson. In 1999 she was aged 54, and she was a resident of Mobile, Alabama. Bertha made the news in November of 1999 by claiming that she was robbed of $800 after sniffing a perfume or cologne sample offered to her by a stranger while she was on the way to a bank.

While it seems very likely that this is the story on which the popular hoax was based, it bears mentioning that the Mobile Police Department never followed up on Ms Johnson’s allegations by issuing further press releases, nor is there any material in the public domain to suggest that the events that day truly unfolded the way Ms Johnson described them.

Either way, even if the core story is true, it doesn’t stop the email from being an Urban Legend or a hoax.

The thing to understand here is that Urban Legends can definitely be based on true stories. What makes a story an Urban Legend isn’t whether or not it ever happened, it’s whether or not it happens the way the person or email claims it happens [1]. That having been said, the great adventure of Urban Legend research has always been the question, “Where did this story come from?”

So, we can definitely be forgiven for getting a little excited about this press release:

WOMAN DAZED AFTER BEING ASKED TO SMELL UNKNOWN SUBSTANCE

November 8, 1999

File Number: 99-11-1543

On Monday, November 8, 1999, at approximately 2:30 p.m. Officers from the Third Precinct responded to the World of Wicker, at 3055 Dauphin Street. When the Officers arrived the victim, 54-year-old Bertha Johnson of the 2400 block of St. Stephens Road, advised she was rendered unconscious after smelling an unknown substance. Johnson was approached by an unknown black female, who was described as follows: slim build, 120-130 pounds, 5 feet 7 inches tall and was last seen wearing a Leopard print wrap on her head and large gold loop earrings. The victim told Investigators the incident occurred at the Amsouth Bank at 2326 Saint Stephens Road. After the victim-regained consciousness she discovered her property missing from her purse and her vehicle. The MOBILE POLICE DEPARTMENT is advising the public to be on alert for this type of activity.

Corporal Paul Soulier is currently investigating this case anyone with additional information regarding this case is asked to contact the Mobile Police Department at (334) 208-7211 or (334) 208-1770.

Officer DaVon Grey
Public Information Officer

Source: Mobile Police Department Press Release (archive.org)

Wait a minute! That sounds like this story is true!

Okay, let’s take a break from our impromptu celebration and talk a little bit about why we would still think this Urban Legend is false, even though we found an example in which it looks very much like it was true.

To do that, we should compare the two pieces of information we have, the email and the press release, against each other to see what falls out.

Straight away you can see that the email doesn’t mention where the event took place, while the press release is very specific with these details. Let’s say you lived in Mobile, Alabama, and you sent that email to a friend a couple of towns away. That sounds reasonable, right? After all, maybe they should be concerned too? But your friend, wanting to help, sends the email onto a relative who lives in a neighbouring state. Still probably not too far away for the information to have lost its usefulness. But that person forwards the email to a dozen other people, some of whom live in Denver, or Seattle, or San Francisco, or El Paso and so on. Pretty soon, people in Australia, England, New Zealand, South Africa – all over the globe! — are opening an email that is warning them about the danger of accepting an invitation from a stranger to test some cheap perfumes.

That’s a good reason to think of the email as an Urban Legend – because instead of communicating to a specific group of people, it shares alarming information in a very generalised way and relies upon the very human tendency to share information ‘just in case’.

Back to the present…

Almost 10 years have passed since this email was first seen in the wild, and incredibly it’s still floating around in email inboxes to this very day.

In fact, I was prompted to write this post because my partner received an updated version of it in her inbox at work just a few days ago!

I’ll post this newer version of the email over the next couple of days, but for now I’m going to wrap up this post by inviting you to leave comments below, and also if you encounter other versions of this email please send them in via the Submit an Urban Legend link and I’ll post them up as well.

Further reading…

Okay, well maybe I’ll add one more bit. There is some excellent reading to be found on the internet that examines this hoax from every possible direction including sideways.

To point out just a few:

• Parking Lot Perfume Robbers from the always amazing Snopes.com
• The Knockout Perfume from the incredible David Emery at About.com

That should keep you busy until the next time I have something to post to ULBlog! See you then!

Murray By Moonlight

Photograph by Melody

Footnotes:

1.	There are some other factors that need to be present before you can definitively say you’re dealing with an Urban Legend, but I’ll talk about them about at greater length in other posts.
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