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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This is probably old news for some, but I thought I’d mention it as a friend on Facebook shared this video as being true.

It isn’t.

This video was produced by French marketing company, LastFools, for mobile accessory manufacturer, Cardo Systems, who make headset systems.

The video, of course, went viral, and while there are a lot of demonstrations on sites like YouTube that you can’t pop popcorn with mobile / cell phones (my favourite one demonstrates that you can ‘do’ the same thing with bananas), there are obviously people who are still encountering the original viral marketing campaign for the first time.

Further reading: Videos of ‘popcorn’ mobile phones faked

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

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

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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Take, for example, the tale below – something spooky is said to happen on the campus of Adelaide University, in South Australia. Something to do with the professor who died late one night on the 6th floor, and who is rumored to be there still.

If only in spirit…

Do you have a Ghost Story you’d like to share? Send it in via the submit a ghost story link!

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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