Ben Radford: Welcome to Squaring the Strange, the podcast that examines all manner of the mysterious and the mundane through a critical lens. So let’s square the strange.

Pascual Romero: So today we’re going to be talking about urban legends, but we’ve got an angle. And what’s that angle, Ben?

BR: That angle is deadly urban legends. Yes, yes, one of my favorite topics, as you know, urban legends are a specialty of mine. I’ve always been fascinated by folklore and legends and fairy tales. We’ve of course done episodes on various stuff before, including the Emperor’s New Club. One of my personal favorite episodes that we’ve done so far.

0:01:10
I’ve spoken at American Folklore Society and Contemporary Legend conferences in the past, and they’re just a fascinating group of people. I always really enjoy being around folklorists. They’re far more interesting than you would think.

PR: My dad is one, so I definitely know what you’re talking about.

BR: You know exactly how fun they are.

PR: So this is all very close to my heart, not only in theme, but in spirit. So, walk us right into this.

0:02:13
Let’s see what we’re getting into.

BR: Sure. So, let me just sort of begin with a little primer on folklore, because you and I know what it is, but it’s sort of a little inchoate for a lot of people. What exactly is that? Is that just stories or is that legends? And the answer is that it’s all that and more. Folklore can encompass anything from jokes, riddles, insults, fairy tales, stories, myths, legends, in some cases, dances, music, a wide variety of oral traditions passed along, or also musical traditions.

0:02:57
They’re typically thought of as the people’s stories. Folklore of the people, the legends that are told in small towns and hamlets and little villages around the world, the stories that people tell about themselves and about other people. And folklore is, I’ve always found that folklore really informs my investigations, particularly into ghost stories, for example, and monster stories. You and I have a shared love of ghost and monster stories. And the more you know about folklore, the more you learn about these other stories. Whether it’s about leprechauns or Bigfoot or ghosts, it’s all… oftentimes it’s part and parcel of that.

0:03:46
So that’s what folklore is, and one of the forms of folklore is urban legends. And the designation urban legend is a fairly recent phenomenon. I mean, it’s been around for, of course, quite a while, but in terms of being a specific area of study, it’s fairly recent in terms of its designation. Jan Brunvand is considered the godfather of urban legends, and he’s written six or eight, maybe ten books on urban legends. The Choking Doberman, the Vanishing Hitchhiker, and many other ones.

0:04:29
He’s authored a couple encyclopedias and he was kind enough to help – be blurbed in a couple of my books and I quote him in my Clowns book and elsewhere. So I’ve met him a couple of times. He’s just a great, lovely guy. He’s now retired, he spends his days skiing, trying to break his hips and ankles. Seems to be doing well at that. Anyway, urban legends are, there’s a couple of different definitions, but one simple one is that it’s an apocryphal story told as true but incorporating traditional motifs, usually attributed to like a friend of a friend. And they were previously called contemporary legends or urban belief tales.

0:05:17
And they usually are about topics that are involved in modern life. They’re everyday occurrences. So for example, there are no urban legends about aliens. The urban legends are about everyday things. Crime, professions, sex, current events, celebrities, government, just sort of things we deal with all the time. There’s a wide variety of types of urban legends and oftentimes they fall into a handful of particular themes. Oftentimes, there’s a strong xenophobic element to them.

0:05:54
Lots of urban legends are about the evil other. The dirty other, the contamination.

PR: Yeah, we did actually talk about that at one point in a previous episode, as a matter of fact.

BR: That’s right. That’s right. And they deal with revenge. They deal with humor.

0:06:14
Oftentimes, urban legends have a twist at the end. A funny, humorous, ironic, you know, and “that happened, oh my God!” Urban legends is a bit of a misnomer. I mean, they’re not necessarily urban. They’re not necessarily legends and they’re not always told as true. They usually are, but there’s variance. But again, typically they’re told as something that happened to a friend. They’re the sort of thing where if it didn’t happen, then it should have happened.

0:06:55
It’s like, I don’t think that happened, but I wish it had! You just love those come uppance stories. Anyway, there’s a whole bunch of them. Many of them are X-rated, or at least R-rated. And we’ll do a show on that at one point. But today we’re going to be talking about deadly urban legends, or at least dangerous ones. And so many urban legends deal with scary topics. Death, hook-handed serial killers.

0:07:26
And really, I’m just thinking about that. I can’t think of any hook-handed serial killers. There’s Captain Hook, but number one, he’s fictional. Number two, I don’t think he’s really serial killer. No no so can you? I have encyclopedia of serial killers at home and Tonight after the show I’m gonna go home just cuz I’m curious I’m gonna flip through there see if any of them only have a hook for a hand. I’m guessing it’s none or one Yeah, but anyway Anyway.

PR: That actually makes me really curious now.

0:08:00
Is there a correlation between having two hands and being a serial killer?

BR: There you go. Ooh. Inquiring minds want to know. You were here first, folks. No, but there’s, you know, oftentimes, as I said, urban legends deal with scary things. There’s the flashing headlights of the oncoming cars as part of a gang initiation warning. I remember that one. I got that in my inbox more than once from a concerned consumer.

0:08:29
Like, you know, if you’re driving down the freeway and someone flashes your lights, don’t flash them back. Why? Well, it’s all part of an elaborate gang initiation. And if you do that, then they’re going to pull you over and kill you. Like, really? Really? I don’t know about that. But urban legends have sort of, they’ve taken on common parlance and sort of, the definition of them has expanded to these days, oftentimes in the public and also in journalism, people use the term urban legends much more loosely than folklores.

0:09:06
So as you know, it’s like, you know, oftentimes it’s, you know, that’s an urban legend, by which they mean it’s a mistaken fact.

PR: Yeah a rumor.

BR: Right a factoid a fake news Technically those are not urban legends, but you know, I mean folklorists there they’re pretty easy going bunch – they’re not going to spend a lot of time like “Excuse me, sir, that’s not…” And oftentimes we’re too busy collecting and analyzing urban legends than trying to disabuse people of them.

0:09:43
So anyway, I want to give an overview of some of the cases. Some of these are really in-depth cases that I want to save for a future episode, just because there’s a lot to get into. They’re really interesting in terms of the nuances. There’s lots of different angles to it. I want to save some of them in terms of getting the deeper stuff for another episode. Here, I just want to sort of touch on some of the cases that I’ve come across and researched that, again, they have an angle to either where people have actually been killed or nearly killed because of false rumors. many legends and rumors going back, in some cases, millennia.

0:10:27
Particularly when you’re talking about dangerous ones, there’s, for example, the blood libel myth, the anti-Jewish.

PR: Yeah, so blood libel, that was the accusation that, well, in the stories that I had originally heard it was gypsies, but also it’s known for being about Jews, which if you know the history of of anti-semitism in Germany and during World War II and all that, that Jews and gypsies were both very much persecuted against, so it stands to reason that those stories may have kind of propagated. But yeah, it was the idea that they kidnapped and murdered Christians, specifically children, right, and to use their blood for various things.

BR: Apparently the Gentile baby blood is especially good for pastries, breads, you know, a wide variety of things.

PR: Yeah, it says, I just brought it up, it says that Jews require human blood for the baking of matzah for Passover. So that’s…

0:11:34
number one, I’ve seen a lot of matzah out there. I’ve eaten a lot of matzah too, so that’s a little scary when you think about it. But anyway, yeah, that’s one very, very big, very scary one that was quite anti-Semitic, I guess.

BR: Yeah, and so that’s always, you know, that’s sort of like the classic go-to in terms of, you know, a dangerous rumor that was either widely believed or was used as a cover for Persecution right it’s always hard to hard to tease out how much of that was did they really think was true? And how much of that was hey? Good enough reason right yeah any excuse for a tyrant you know and then of course you have other other rumors and legends for example the hoaxed document the protocols the elders of Zion another anti-Semitic tract, allegedly part of a Jewish conspiracy to take over the world, of course, later determined to be a complete fabrication and hoax.

0:12:34
But anyway, so there’s all sorts of areas we could go into. In previous shows, we’ve talked some about the dangers of rumors in Africa, particularly the Muti murders and the killing of albinos.

PR: Which is a real problem. It’s quite a scary real problem out there.

BR: It is, absolutely. And there’s several groups including, I think, Under the Same Sun, which is founded by a Canadian albino man, if I’m not mistaken, man with albinism, I guess is the other way to put it, that’s helping Tanzanians, and I think some in Kenya, to deal with that.

0:13:15
And apparently, I didn’t know this, there was a recent article in National Geographic that talked about this. Apparently there is an unusually high incidence of albinism among certain groups in Tanzania. In East Africa. So it’s not just that they’re albino, which of course stand out in the continent of dark skin people, but there’s actually more than you would expect.

0:13:42
So there’s those cases as well. In a previous episode, we talked about the torching of the bakery in South Africa. Where there were rumors shared on social media that, I think it was white owners in somewhere in South Africa, I think KwaZulu-Natal or something, had just, the place just burned down. Because, you know, people see something and, well, they’re there.

0:14:13
And I think it was, if I’m not mistaken, it was kidnapping children.

PR: I believe that’s exactly what that was, yeah.

BR: And so again there’s lots of cases where rumors and legeneds can inspire people to attack others. Because they, again, usually it’s people who are trying to do good. They sincerely think, I don’t know why, because they have not researched it, they have not spoken to a folklorist, but they sincerely, they believe what they say.

0:14:38
They lack skepticism and critical thinking and media literacy, and so they just assume that whatever comes over the social media, well, this is an outrage, right? And so they use that as an excuse. I’ve also written pretty extensively on witchcraft accusations in India and Pakistan and also in Brazil. And again, it’s not tied, it’s actually tied more to belief in magical thinking and witchcraft, although there’s quite a bit of crossover, of course, between folklore and urban legends. But yeah, I mean, there’s been many cases, even in the modern day, a couple months ago, last year, where you have people, often women, who are accused of being witches. And again, we’re not talking the 1600s Salem.

0:15:40
We’re talking the modern day. And there’s very real consequences of these. And particularly, I think the worst cases that I’ve written about are in rural Pakistan. Not only do you have a very patriarchal society in which women are subjugated anyway. But layered on top of that are the witchcraft accusations. So it’s just all the more excuse to persecute these women, as has always been the case, often as a pretext to take what little they have.

0:16:18
There’s a real strong misogynistic, sexist, undercurrent to that. And again, who knows how much of this is genuinely believed. I mean, certainly, if you look back at the Salem Witch Trials, you know, that worldview was very real. I mean, that was a… The worldview they had encouraged them to believe that Satan was literally walking around at night. It sounds, it’s sort of pat and easy to talk about in 2017, like, ooh, wasn’t that antiquated? But you have to understand the Puritan’s point of view.

0:17:04
And in that worldview, in that cultural context, witchcraft accusations were almost inevitable. I mean, when you have a group of people that really is that concerned about the devil and evil influences, that’s what happens.

PR: So what are some other things that you can talk about in terms of urban legends and hoaxes leading to death and danger?

BR: Sure, there was another case that I wrote about in Heptin in August 2014 and it was the strange confluence of social media hoax and disease panic and it was about it was a social media message that claimed that salt water could cure or prevent Ebola and of course this was during the height of the Ebola panic in 2014 as you recall.

0:18:02
And it was, it ended up, it went up going viral and causing illnesses and deaths in West Africa. And what happened was, it was, I wrote about this for Discovery, it was a again, an interesting blend of social media hoax that turned deadly. And what happened was there was a message spread throughout Nigeria offering bogus advice about what to do to prevent the spread of Ebola, and it was to bathe in salt water and also to drink it. Not a good idea. And the message urged people to drink as much salt water as possible as protection against the deadly virus.

0:18:53
The idea of using salt as a cure preventative for Ebola spread not only over the internet but also of course by well-meaning neighbors. As I mentioned before, oftentimes these messages, these urban legends, these social media warnings are spread by people trying to do good. They’re not malicious people. They’re genuinely concerned that there’s someone out there trying to abduct children to kill them and drink their blood. They’re genuinely concerned that the people down the road get this important information about drinking salt water to prevent Ebola. So there’s this weird altruism aspect to it. And it’s like, you’re like, I know you want to do good, but think. Just don’t, it’s just, these are just some of the most frustrating ones.

0:19:47
PR: It’s like the, the, the old saying, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

BR: And of course, rumors, respect no political boundaries. And so pretty soon you had many countries in West Africa, including in Lagos, Nigeria, and Liberia, that this rumor was sharing all over the place. And there was a NPR story. I’ll just read a quick section here. It says, it was on Saturday morning. Mothers were calling their grown children up at 1, 2, 3 o’clock in the morning to pray over salt water and then bathe in it. Some were told to drink it.

0:20:25
People were being woken up out of a deep sleep to perform this ritual literally in the middle of the night. And there were instances of town criers going up and down the streets instructing everyone to bathe and in some cases drink the hot salt water. Babies were being bathed in it. And so it was… I’m thinking, how does this happen? I mean, it’s just the idea of salt water curing Ebola is absurd.

0:20:56
And it goes to the magical thing. We want to think that something’s, it’s the lure of home remedies. We would prefer to have something that’s in our cabinets, something that we all have. It’s cheap, it’s easy, we don’t need to go to a medical doctor, a western doctor who’s going to ignore us and charge us a fortune. There’s this strong, powerful allure to the easy and the simple. Unfortunately, it often leads us astray.

0:21:34
It turns out that the warning began as a joke. A text message by a female student in Nigeria. Astounding really. That’s how folklore works. It begins as a joke or a satire. We see this on social media all the time. Someone writes something that is patently not true. For example, the Pizza Gate story, the ping pong, the pizza place in DC, this bogus news story again involving children being endangered by Clinton and whatever the hell. And you have people who take it seriously and they go in and do it. So, you know, it’s not clear whether, what the motivation was. Probably the woman that wrote it, the female student, I mean, I don’t know how old she is, doesn’t say, but probably in her teens, she probably thought that no one would believe this.

0:22:44
It’s like, no one would ever believe that drinking salt water can cure Ebola, but it did. And unfortunately that happened. And recognizing the public health threat, the health agencies soon initiated their own campaign. By that time, it was too late. Because, and I want to be clear, there aren’t hundreds of people that died, but there were several people that did get sick and apparently did die. And what’s interesting, again, in all these cases, I’m always curious, you know, why did the belief take root? Why would anybody think that bathing in salt water would cure Ebola?

0:23:27
And one answer is that, one of the beliefs that circulated at the time was that Americans already had a cure for Ebola that had been developed in America, but that was being withheld from Africans. And it’s the notion that, well, you know, the rich Americans, they protect themselves, but us poor Africans are left here to die.

0:24:03
Because of traditional racism or the colonial exploitation of Africa, which is absolutely true. You don’t need to make that up. But again, so there’s other elements. For example, there’s a general destructive doctors. Patients around the world avoid going to doctors out of fear of what they might find out, preferring not to know if something is wrong. So, you know, if there’s, even if you don’t think you’re exposed to Ebola, it was such a terrifying disease, and there was so much panic about it in America and around the world.

0:24:39
I mean, it’s a horrifying, I mean, your insides are melting. You know, just bleeding out. It’s horrific.

PR: Yeah, it’s one of the worst things you can go through.

BR: Yeah, and so obviously if you’re in a rural area and that’s what you’re facing, okay, salt water. I mean, to a lot of them, they’re like, what’s the harm?

0:25:05
Well, the harm is if you drink it, it can kill you. I think it’s an important reminder about the damage that hoaxes and rumors can have.

PR: And I can’t imagine what it would, what it must feel like to be a person who, you know, starts a joke that snowballs into something that causes something, you know, that kills some people, you know. And I know that girl obviously had, you know, it didn’t seem like she had any ill intent. I’m sure she didn’t. So, you know, but it’s like it really illustrates the power of rumor and the power of belief in any number of things.

0:25:43
But the power of just belief in rumor, I guess is what I’m trying to say. And I feel kind of bad for that girl because I’m sure she didn’t mean anything by it. And now she has, in an indirect way, a death toll. hole. And so that’s something that I think is really sad about the whole thing and kind of helps illustrate the dangers of being too… I don’t want to say the dangers of making jokes or the dangers of… but the dangers of things like fake, hoaxy articles that aren’t real humorous.

BR: Right, why do that? I mean, even if you think it’s cute or funny to write some satirical thing about, oh, wouldn’t it be silly if saltwater cured Ebola? Well, first of all, that’s not that funny. No. Second of all, the cost benefit doesn’t doesn’t doesn’t weigh out. Because that’s exactly the sort of thing that someone could take. You know, it could take seriously. And I think it just goes to, you know, I mean, we could all use a reminder about not, you know, sharing silly things on social media.

0:26:55
I could use that reminder.

PR: We all can.

BR: But let me give you another example. There were some community health workers that were shot dead in February 2013 in Pakistan. And the reason was that there were rumors and conspiracy theories and legends being spread that the people were only pretending to offer medical help, but were instead trying to harm or kill people. And again, there’s a couple of roots here. One of them is destructive doctors, and particularly Western doctors.

0:27:34
In a lot of places, particularly the third world, Pakistan, elsewhere, medical doctors are looked upon with suspicion. Again, particularly American doctors. Sure, lots of conspiracy theories about them. And it’s true that in many parts of the world, for example, the slums, the favelas surrounding Rio de Janeiro in Brazil, people won’t go to doctors in part because of urban legends about organ theft. I’ll talk about that a little bit later. But you know when rumors spread in these in these shanty towns, there’s a real concern like if I go in for a broken leg, how do I know what they’re gonna do to me? I’m not feeling well, but you know my best friend or my best friend’s mother warned me that she knows somebody who went in there with a cold and ended up dead with the organ removed.

0:28:36
PR: Yeah, and it’s not hard to see where they get their, they can get a little confirmation bias here and there because it’s not uncommon to go into a doctor or a hospital for a seemingly innocuous thing and, you know, turn out that you’re in, you know, in a critical condition or you’re suffering from a life-threatening issue or, you know, it’s something that you have to get your leg amputated for or something and so, you know, they come back into the community with these stories or they or they pass away at the hospital and, you know, and it just feeds it, you know, and that’s one of the scariest things about that. And it’s not even something that in this country we’re necessarily immune from.

0:29:22
I think there is a lot of skepticism towards medicine and the medical community. Big pharma and doctors and conspiracies. No, they want to keep you sick. But, yeah, so I can definitely relate to the issues with that for sure.

BR: And it’s just a shame because, again, in Pakistan, the community health workers, they’re trying to do good. I mean, they’re vaccinating children, which is good. That’s saving the children. And so it’s especially damaging when you have these rumors and urban legends going around that they’re trying to do harm.

0:30:02
And in some cases, and this is sort of where there’s a little twist at the end, that in some cases there’s a grain of truth to the rumors. For example, if you saw the film Zero Dark Thirty, there’s a scene, a couple scenes in there, where a Pakistani doctor was hired by the CIA to give out hepatitis B vaccine while actively trying to collect DNA evidence to locate Osama bin Laden. And that actually happened. That was, yeah, that’s, that was real. And when that came out, there was an uproar and doctors, medical organizations implored the government, I think it was the Obama administration, if I’m not mistaken, at the time, to don’t do that.

0:30:51
I know you’re trying to find bin Laden. Do not hire doctors who are pretending to do one thing and doing something else. That will deeply damage and undermine our credibility among vulnerable populations. So there was a huge backlash. In fact, deans of America’s top medical universities, including Harvard and Johns Hopkins, sent a letter to Obama condemning the CIA program and just saying, you’re doing enormous damage to our credibility because if any time we go in there to help vaccinate kids, the rumors are, the assumption is that there’s some CIA operative doing who knows what.

0:31:35
And I don’t remember the follow-up to that. I believe Obama did. We can double-check that. I think he did put the kibosh on that. But again, that’s exactly the sort of thing that undermines the credibility of health organizations because, again, it provides fodder like, well, there you go. That’s what’s going on so in the wake of that Muslim clerics were really doing their best to reassure concerned patients that the vaccinators who are mostly women by the way meant no harm and in some cases the vaccinations were resumed so there was hopefully there was no lasting damage but it very clearly shows the sorts of how these sorts of rumors can can can take hold and be bolstered by real life actions.

0:32:29
PR: And I can only imagine, I know we saw in India, polio was a very recent, very contemporary epidemic and also very recently, they approached the situation with an extremely thorough vaccination campaign and have done tremendous things in reducing it to the point that it’s not, it’s currently no longer a major problem in India, whereas it was not very long ago. And you look at the evidence that shows that this was a good thing, but a lot of it was because there was a lot of public trust in the program and people just said, okay, if it’s going to cure this, if it’s going to prevent other children from dealing with this horrible disease in a world where, you know, here in the U.S. if you thought polio was bad when we had it, it’s even worse there because of the conditions that a lot of people live in.

0:33:35
They don’t have the medical aid to deal with it. And so for for something as simple as or not simple but something as as small and concentrated as a small collection of doctors in a small region using vaccines as a way to do something clandestine it it ruins it for everyone. And you know and now Pakistan you know is having to fight to regain traction with vaccinations and things like that. So it’s really just horrible that that happens.

BR: Yeah, and there’s probably always going to be suspicion. I mean, unfortunately, that’s just the nature of the beast. I mean, there’s always concern. I mean, people universally distrust doctors. That’s just how it is.

0:34:25
For better or worse, we don’t like doctors. We often feel like they prescribe stuff for us that we don’t need. I have never had that problem. I’ve been fortunate in that I know several doctors and they’re good doctors. I sort of hear both sides. doctors complaining, it’s really got to be disheartening to them to hear the big pharma bashing and big doctor bashing as if they’re all money-grubbing, heartless people who are hiding cures for cancer. At the same time, they’re out there trying to do good and save people’s lives. It’s always that contradiction.

0:35:09
Celestia Ward: Hey Squares and hey strangers, Celestia here with a handful of skeptical fortune cookies. Let’s pick one out and crack it open. Nothing is so obvious it’s obvious. This isn’t ancient wisdom, but rather a gem that comes to us from the modern medium of podcasting. In the 2012 Radiolab episode titled The Fact of the Matter, filmmaker Errol Morris recounts his obsessive search for the truth about a 150-year-old photograph titled The Valley of the Shadow of Death. The photo by Roger Fenton shows a desolate road covered in cannonballs, presumably from the constant shelling of the Crimean War.

0:36:07
After uncovering a second photograph without cannonballs, Morris finds a mystery. Some historians thought it was obvious that the cannonballs had been rolled there by Fenton to make the scene look more dangerous. Others thought the cannonballs had obviously been placed there by soldiers so they could be collected and reused. After checking, rechecking, and even taking a trip to the site where he restaged photos using borrowed cannonballs, Morris finally found evidence that Fenton had been the ball mover. Errol Morris has been described as a man blessed or cursed with a dogged, almost pathological need need to figure things out. He does not like the word obvious, and he says the pursuit of truth, properly considered, shouldn’t stop short of insanity. He has directed dozens of movies and short films and won an Academy Award for his 2004 documentary, The Fog of War. The story about uncovering Roger Fenton’s photographic manipulation appears in his 2011 book, Believing is Seeing, Observations on the Mystery of Photography. It’s also revisited in a Radiolab episode released earlier this month titled Truth Warriors. Anyone who is willing to put in the work necessary to truly investigate any topic, claim, or photograph would do well to start with Errol Morris’ premise, nothing is so obvious it’s obvious.

0:37:38
Now, let’s get you back to Ben and Pascual.

BR:So, there are other cases as well, for example, where urban legends have led to a handful of people’s deaths when they’re, for example, searching for monsters. Again, this is not the classic urban legend, but the certainly rumored urban legend. For example, a young woman was killed in April 2016 outside Louisville when she and her boyfriend were walking along elevated train tracks searching for a legendary monster repeated to dwell there. It was a couple from Ohio and they were looking for a beast called the Pope Lick Monster.

PR: That’s an interesting name.

BR: The Pope Licker Monster.

0:38:36
No, but it’s a sad story. It was a woman named Raquel Bain and her boyfriend, who I think were 26 and 28. They were on the tracks looking for this monster on elevated tracks and a train came by and hit them. And, or it hit her anyway. The boyfriend told officials that they come down from Dayton on a paranormal tour. They were actually there to see the Waverly Hills Sanitarium.

PR: Oh, sure. Famous place.

BR: Famous place, right.

0:39:07
And there’s, of course, ghost tours there. And they decided as long as they were there, they would go to look for the Pope Lake monster. The monster is supposed to be like a part human, part goat, part sheep thing. Huh, okay. So picture that.

PR: It kind of looks like a fawn. Is that the word?

BR: Yes, a fawn. Yes. So again, obviously it could happen to anybody. Kids not looking for monsters also get hit by trains on LA tracks. So that’s not something inherent in that, except that the reason they were on the tracks was to look for a creature that does not exist.

0:39:53
And actually, something very similar happened in North Carolina a couple of years before that. There was a guy who was part of a ghosting group who had hoped to see a ghost train. There are of course ghost trains, there are ghost cars.

PR: Yeah, I’m familiar with some local regional ghost train legends in northern Wisconsin that my family has told over the years. My brother actually busted one of those legends about 10 years ago.

BR: We gotta do a show on that!

0:40:27
But no, there was a guy who was part of a ghost thing and they, allegedly there was a ghost train that comes along on the anniversary of the crash. You know, on a full moon night, that type of thing. And unfortunately, a real train, not a ghost train, came along and hit him, who couldn’t get away on time. And there’s also a case where there was a young woman who in 2006, I think it was an Ohio girl, was shot and critically wounded by a homeowner who mistook them for intruders or vandals, or at least claimed that he did.

0:41:10
Anyway, the girl and her friends were going into a property that they weren’t supposed to be at looking for ghosts. I think Brian Parsons wrote about that. He’s a ghost hunter. Anyway, so there’s a couple of cases like that. So those are a couple of examples of sort of a hodgepodge of rumors and legends that have led to serious injury and or death. There’s two other cases that I want to go into some depth. The first one is a topic that I’ve written extensively on. That is the organ theft urban legends.

0:41:47
PR: Those are very, very famous, very widespread urban legends.

BR: They are, they are. And again, we’re gonna do a whole show on it, so I’m not gonna go into too much depth. But in a nutshell, there’s actually a couple different variances of urban legend story. One of them involves the belief that children’s, again going back to a theme we’ve hit on several times on the show, that children’s organs are taken, basically they’re killed and taken for the organs.

0:42:18
Again, this harkens back to the blood libel myth. I mean, there’s a long tradition of this sort of belief. And the belief is primarily that in Central America, also in South America, Brazil, Honduras, places like that, Guatemala, that Americans specifically, sometimes Europeans, often Americans, are walking around looking for children to abduct in order to take their organs. This is not true. Nonetheless, many people believe it to be true. In fact, there were several people that were accused of doing exactly this sort of activity and who were in some cases beaten and threatened because they were accused of walking around trying to abduct children. There’s actually a woman named Melissa Larson who lives here in New Mexico up in Taos, not far from where he grew up.

0:43:22
And I interviewed her several years back and she was traveling in Guatemala and she became the target of rumors and legends. She got basically caught up in a real life urban legend story. And she was actually taken to jail for her own protection because there were villagers who would surround her and were trying to attack her. There was another woman, a woman named June Weinstock, a native of Fairbanks, Alaska, and she was actually beaten into a coma. What happened was she was 52 years old, and she was beaten unconscious, multiple stab wounds, three skull fractures, a broken arm.

0:44:06
She was attacked by a mob of about 300 people in Guatemala, and she was accused of abducting an eight-year-old boy who was actually at a religious procession and later returned home. And, yeah, so this woman, Weinstock, again, rumors circulated that she was doing something nefarious to children, probably trying to abduct them, and didn’t check the facts. They just, rumors spread, and they, it’s just a terrifying story. One of the saddest parts was, imagine being part of those 300 people that beat this woman nearly to death, and then the boy that she’s accused of abducting shows up home an hour later and says, yeah, I was out of town. What happened?

0:44:59
It’s just terrifying. And there’s other cases as well. I’ll talk about that when we go more into depth on the organ theft legends. But those are, again, cases of where real life rumors and urban legends latch onto people and have innocent victims. And then the last case that we want to talk about is of course the Slender Man story. PR: Oh yes, one of my personal, well I hate to say favorites about a story of violence but one of the more interesting ones that that I’ve come across.

BR: So the Slender Man story occurred in Waukesha, Wisconsin.

0:45:39
There were two 12-year-old girls who lured their friend, another 12-year-old girl, into the woods in order to perform a stabbing, an attempted murder they’d been planning actually for several months. One girl held the victim down while the other one stabbed her 19 times. I’m reading here a segment from the Milwaukee, Wisconsin Journal Sentinel. It says, when confronted by police, Weiser, one of the girls, began explaining about the website Creepypasta. She said she introduced Morgan Geyser, her co-defendant, to the site back in December. A character named Slender Man is the leader of Creepypasta, and below Slender Man is the killer, and below the killer is a proxy.

0:46:28
She explained that in order to be a proxy you need to kill a person in order to show your dedication to Slenderman. And she said that many people don’t believe that Slenderman is real but she wanted to prove the skeptics wrong. So they believe that Slender, as they called him, lived in a mansion in the woods, which is a common… Hansel and Gretel, evil clowns living in woods. This is a common story. And Slender Man is a fascinating topic. I mean, we could do a whole show on that. There’s actually a recent journal called Contemporary Legend, which had an entire…the entire journal was dedicated just to Slender Man.

0:47:13
A fascinating story if anyone was interested in the sort of more academic scholarly look at it. Anyway, in a nutshell, unlike many urban legend figures, we know exactly when Slender Man was created. It was June 8th, 2009. And we know who created Slender Man. It was a person who goes by the name Victor Surge on the Something Awful forums. And so again, we know for a fact, there’s no mystery here.

0:47:43
We know exactly where it came from. It’s like, oh, the origins are lost to the sands of time. Nope, nope, not exactly where it is. No, we’ve got a record. We have a record, because this is the internet. And typically, it was, again, part of this sort of online forums, creepypasta, legends, stories. Oftentimes people, contributors would write their own stories about their experiences with Slender Man. And actually Sharon Hill of 15 Credibility Street and Doubtful News has written on that. She did some really good pieces including for Fortean Times Magazine talking about that.

0:48:17
So Slender Man is sort of, again, this tall, faceless figure, very slender, as you can imagine. The character is primarily, his purpose is to scare kids. That’s what he does. That’s his job description. If he had a card, it would just say, Slender Man scares kids. Call me. That’s all I do. He often is seen in the back of photographs. You know, there’ll be a scene of kids playing in a playground, and they’re in the back, underneath a tree, just out of sight, and kids love it. Adults love it. Everybody loves and so anyways, that’s that’s that’s sort of the nutshell case.

PR: Yeah, and the the creepypasta page Actually got you know understandably got a lot of pushback after this happened but so there was a statement made on the on the stabbing on the creepypasta page by the people that run it.

0:49:38
And it was really interesting because they were talking about how much concern and blame was being just by email or posts on the site and people supporting the site, but also a lot of people really blaming the site for what happened, which is pretty, you know, It’s not, I mean, it doesn’t take a skeptic to really think that that might be a little misguided. But, you know, but the whole entire, you know, piece that they wrote was like several paragraphs of just trying to explain that, site or in the telling of these stories at least, presumed him to be real. I’m sure some kids, obviously these kids, may. And also that, he says here, I am not Slender Man, I did not create Slender Man, and this is not a Slender Man fan site. There are many stories on the site and very few of them are about Slenderman. So it’s a pretty small proportion out of all the stories on the site.

0:50:59
So it’s a little under 2%, I guess. It’s kind of wild just how much people just dumped on the site. And I’m like, these kids are obviously not… The site never said anything about sacrifice. And these are also very commonly, most of these sites are user submitted. So even then, it’s like, how do you even control for that?

BR: I mean, that’s the nature of publicly owned properties. I mean, no one owns Slender Man. And the figure is out there.

PR: And the very term creepypasta is a play on copypasta Which is a term used for

0:51:44
stories and and and quips that are just copied and pasted and copying as a copypasta and Creepypasta is the same thing It’s just these stories that just get copied and pasted and spread around and they’re usually urban legends or you know Ghost stories, and they’re everywhere. I mean, the Creepypasta website is not the only place you can find a Slender Man. You know, that’s not even where Slender Man started. So it’s pretty crazy that, you know, they have to go through that much, you know, and thankfully nobody died.

0:52:17
That’s, you know, the important thing here, but the amount of blowback that they got just for having the story on their site and then these girls, you know, basically thrown under the bus by saying, we got it from this site.

BR: Well, it was interesting. You would think that, I mean, look, two 12-year-old girls, people believe weird things. From my understanding, I followed the trial somewhat, one or both of them probably have mental issues.

0:52:48
You know, that’s not to say that ordinary people who are not mentally ill do things, but that seems to be the case here. And so it’s not beyond the realm of possibility and expectation that this sort of thing might happen. I was, however, surprised to find that a pastor in Erie, Pennsylvania, also believes in Slender Man. Reverend Robin Swope, a pastor at St. Paul’s United Church of Christ in Erie, Pennsylvania, believes that the internet-generated monster is real. At least, it says he does, in a book titled Slender Man, From Fiction to Fact. Swope states that after years of reviewing stories sent to him by people who claim to have encountered the elusive monster, he’s concluded that Slenderman is a literal demonic entity.

0:53:41
Yes, so he’s co-opting this fictional creature for his own Christian worldview. Yeah, so which is actually interesting. I found this in the Chupacabra. There were several people, including Pentecostals, that co-opted the Chupacabra legend for their own purposes and into Christian theology. Yeah, talking about how it was a symbol of the Antichrist and the coming of the…

PR: They have a long history of that.

0:54:16
They love that. The devil as we know it is one of those stories.

BR: Exactly. And so anyway, according to Reverend Swope, Christian faith and prayer are the only defenses against Slender Man. So make of that what you will. You know, so anyway, let’s talk just a bit about what happened here. So you know, what we saw in the Slender Man case was what folklorists call ostention, or it’s also known as like legend tripping, as you know. It’s an activity where people will enact a legend.

0:54:52
There’s a pre-existing narrative that they insert themselves into. We see this, for example, with a lot of ghost hunters. You know this is what I was gonna say, right? So ghost hunters will hear some local legend and go like, hey, let’s go do that. Right? Let’s go be there when the ghost train comes through. Let’s go do this and that. Or I mean the other example that I often use is Bloody Mary.

PR: That was a fun one.

BR: Did you ever do that?

PR: Oh I did it all the time. I was just a little background on me. I am pretty notorious for finding weakness in my group of friends and just preying upon it.

0:55:40
And I don’t mean this, not in a, not in a, not in a bullying, horrible way. But usually if someone showed even just a little bit of hesitation or a little bit of worry over over an urban legend or a ghost story, I would I would really do my best to play it up. And yeah, I said I would do Bloody Mary all the time and try to figure out ways to scare my friends. And, you know, I was always the one that moved the Ouija.

BR: That was you!

PR: Always, always. But yeah, so I always, I always did things like Bloody Mary or, you know, just anytime there was some scary thing that, you know, you weren’t supposed to do or say, I was always the first one to give it a shot, which I think led pretty well to my being a skeptic because I just was like, whatever, I’m going to do it.

0:56:32
I don’t know. I never thought anything was going to happen and I think that maybe was a product of how I was raised, but it was always, you know, you still do, when you’re a kid, there’s just that little voice in the back of your head and the second time you say Bloody Mary, like right before you’re about to spit it out the third time, you still hear it. You’re like, if this is real, this is going to suck.

BR: But let’s do it anyway, right?

PR: Of course. Oh, I love that stuff.

0:57:00
BR: Well, what’s interesting is in a lot of these cases, particularly with ostention and legend tripping, you have an element of what’s sometimes called proof. It’s a courage test, right? Can you, are you courageous and bold enough to say Bloody Mary the third time? Are you brave enough to be at the haunted house, at the stroke of midnight, on a full moon?

0:57:29
And we also saw this, of course, in the Slenderman case, where it was in a disturbing way. It was, you know, the girls were trying to prove to themselves and their friends they weren’t afraid to go ahead and stab their friend. So again, there’s a real double-edged sword here.

PR: For the record, I would have never taken it that far.

BR: I appreciate that.

0:57:58
Next time we go out hiking, I’ll keep that in mind. But anyway, so just a couple of final notes on the Slenderman case for me. You know, in the end, and this is one thing that I tried to explain to people when that whole story came out, was that there’s nothing necessarily unusual or pathological about as a character. And you know I encountered the same sort of suspicion when I played Dungeons and Dragons. There were people who didn’t understand what we were doing. It was like you’re an elf? You’re a chaotic evil elf? You killed a troll? What is this? Out, demon? I’m like, no, no, no, it’s a story. And so, it’s like, to people who don’t understand it, it’s bizarre.

0:59:01
I mean, I see this at DragonCon, when you’ve got cosplayers. You’ve got people dressed up as everything from Xena to Wonder Woman to Robin Hood walking down the streets of downtown Atlanta. And, you know, much to the amusement of passersby who are trying to get to work. But, you know, so it’s all fun. I mean, well, but a lot of them don’t, they think, oh, that’s weird. They must be crazy.

0:59:36
There’s something wrong. No, it’s cosplaying. It’s role-playing. It’s not nefarious. It’s not evil. It’s not pathological. It’s fun. Can people take it too far? Of course they can. Probably.

0:59:51
But there’s nothing inherently evil or malevolent about Slender Man or even role-playing things with Slender Man. You know, people dress up as everything, Star Wars, Star Trek, Harry Potter, you know, that may not be your cup of tea. That doesn’t mean anything. But you know, as with mental illnesses, it’s a continuum. It’s not black or white.

1:00:18
The vast majority of Slender Man fans enjoy the character and nothing happens. The vast majority of people who listen to heavy metal and death metal don’t kill their families. A couple of them do. A couple of people listen that to, you know, to Yanni do that. That’s just what they do. That’s how the world works.

PR: That’s their thing, man.

BR: That’s their gig. One question is, why is it such a compelling character? And there’s a couple answers to that. And I’ve given it some thought, and there’s been interesting folkloric analysis. Keep in mind that the character was designed to be scary. It wasn’t accidentally scary. It was intended to scare kids. Much in the way that a Hollywood monster, Freddy Krueger, you know, Jason Friday the 13th, classic horror monsters are intended to be scary.

1:01:12
Why are they scary? Because they’re supposed to be scary. Slenderman was never cutesy. You can do whatever you want. You can make a cutesy Slenderman, but that wasn’t the original thing. You have this image of a tall, thin, silent, menacing figure in a prim suit. That’s iconic. You saw this in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the gentleman. In UFO Folklore, you have

PR: The tall man from Fantasmic. Angus Scrimm, if I’m not mistaken.

BR: Horror nerd! There you go, boom! UFO Folklore, the man in black.

1:01:55
It’s no wonder that it’s such an evocative figure and so versatile, right? It can be terrifying, it can be funny, it can be cute. I’m sure there’s weird slash fiction. Now I’m going to go Google that. But it’s such a versatile character and it’s made for fans to do with it what they will. Unfortunately, these two girls took it too far, but the other 99.98% of the time, it’s not an issue.

PR: It’s interesting sometimes to see the panic that I am so very used to in the heavy metal world, you know, be kind of tossed at other things like this, especially something like internet folklore and urban legend. I mean, it’s to me such a non thing and I’m like, we know where it started.

1:02:56
We know where it all happens and we know that, the nature of it. And, you know, so it’s interesting to me to see kind of that backlash that, you know, we saw back when people were mishearing Ozzy lyrics. And it’s all very interesting. And it is every creative world, it seems like there’s gonna be those things that happen from time to time. But in Urban Legends, it’s especially interesting because there’s that little bit of credibility that they get for existing in this sort of friend of a friend, happened to someone I know thing, you know.

1:03:39
It’s fascinating when we see it manifest itself in the real world in some way, you know. Not necessarily a good thing, but it is fascinating.

BR: Yeah, it’s just a fascinating topic. And we’ve hit on a whole bunch of things in this episode, everything from the Mutti murder to Slender Man to Ebola hoaxes, urban legend thesis. There’s so many different ways in which rumor and urban legend, even though we normally think of them as sort of being cute or funny, they can have real consequences.

1:04:10
That’s one thing that I always try to encourage people to remember is before you share that story, especially one that might have consequences if taken seriously, maybe don’t share it or you just he’s just think before you just assume that you know, no one would take this seriously because somebody might someone might.

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PR: That about does it for episode 20. Thank you for tuning in listening and next week we are gonna cover something that’s hits real close to home for me and we just watched a documentary about it Ben. You want to take it away?

BR: Sure. We’ll be talking about sleep paralysis which of course is often implicated in many skepticism related topics ranging from alien abductions to hypnosis, succubi, popo bawa attacks, we talked about that in the episode of popo bawa. Lots of strange events attributed to sleep paralysis. It’s happened to me once or twice. Apparently it happens to you regularly or used to.

1:06:02
PR: Used to. It happened to me quite a bit growing up and then in my 20s, particularly in my mid-20s, it happened with some frequency, at least a couple times a week for probably three years. And it is a very strange experience. tell you that for someone who is susceptible to any kind of UFO or ghost and alien abduction kind of beliefs, it could be terrifying. And frankly, it is fairly terrifying even for a person who knows what’s happening when it’s happening because it is not a state of necessary paralysis so much as it’s a state of a kind of waking dream or sort of a lucid nightmare that happens in the space you’re in, which is pretty crazy, pretty scary. But I actually really enjoy talking about it and we just watched the documentary The Nightmare.

1:07:07
BR: Yes. So if you’re interested in the topic and you’d like to check out the documentary before we talk about it on the show. There you go.

PR: Yeah, so definitely check out the documentary if you get a chance and until then, we’ll see you next time.

BR: Bye bye.