Urban folklore
By Eddie Whitlock
In my twenties, I discovered a category of stories called “urban folklore.” You’ve probably heard of it, but it wasn’t as well-known back then.
These were typically stories that were outrageous, but the teller swore they were true. I collected the stories myself before I stumbled on author Jan Harold Brunvand.
Dr. Brunvand collected these stories and published them in a series of books. His background was in folklore and mythology. He was a genuine academic who brought scholarly study to the stories that I thought were just fascinating nonsense.
I’ll steal a little from him now, but I want to encourage you to read his books. They have great titles like The Vanishing Hitchhiker: American Urban Legends and Their Meanings and The Baby Train and Other Lusty Urban Legends.
The dude is still alive but retired. He made a career out of my hobby, and I’m glad he did.
Before that, I would give speeches on urban folklore for civic clubs. It was popular because the stories were funny and weird and – invariably – someone in the audience would swear it had really happened.
Dr. Brunvand said tellers of these tales usually had one of two sources. Either it came from a “friend of a friend” or someone “read it in the paper.”
One of my favorites was the story of red velvet cake.
You see, there was this lady who went to New York and ate at her hotel’s very fancy restaurant. For dessert, she had the red velvet cake. It was so delicious that she asked for the recipe and it was given to her.
When she checked out, her bill was too high by $100, a shocking amount in the days the story was told. Why? she demanded to know.
“You purchased the recipe for the red velvet cake,” she was told.
The lady is livid, calls her lawyer back home, and finds out that – under the circumstances – she must pay the exorbitant fee.
To get even, she comes home and makes copies of the recipe and gives them away for free to everyone she knows.
Great story.
Didn’t happen.
Although my mother-in-law at the time told me it did happen but with a cookie recipe, not a cake recipe.
My own encounter with such a story came around 1990, when I was meeting with the director of our local United Way. The UPS guy comes in and asks us if we heard about what happened at their Atlanta shipping center. We had not.
“There was big glass jar from the CDC on the conveyer belt, and it slipped off and it hit the floor and busted open and there was this human head inside it and it went rolling across the floor ‘blip-blip-blip’ and all the workers went running out of the building.”
Damn. Wow. That is a great story. My mouth hung open, and I was really into it, especially the “blip-blip-blip” noise the head made rolling across the floor because I figured that was the neck stub doing that.
I get home that night and tell my then-wife the story, including the “blip-blip-blip,” and then I waited for her to be impressed.
She was not.
She rolled her eyes and said, “That didn’t happen. You know that didn’t happen. It’s an urban folktale.” My mouth is still hanging open, of course. She says, “Think about it.”
Damn. Wow. She was right, as women usually are.
Of course, the CDC does not ship human heads in glass jars. I still think “blip-blip-blip” sounds plausible, but I let it go. I kicked myself for falling for this ridiculous story.
My time of being a local speaker on urban folklore ended with the advent of the internet. It wasn’t that people could learn about urban folktales themselves. It was that the line between true and false became blurry.
When I see a social media post that says a politician I don’t like was involved in a scandal, I try to find a source for the story before I pass it on. Sometimes I find a source. Sometimes I don’t.
Sometimes I find a source that I have my doubts about. Or I find a source that itself has no supporting information.
Very often, I find contradictory stories from a variety of sources that I am not sure whether to trust or not. I am at the mercy of other questionable sources when I try to ascertain the trustworthiness of a source.
Say what you will about the old days of “journalism,” but when there were only a few sources for information, you at least knew the reputation of the source.
All of this comes to mind because Mitch McConnell died.
No, he didn’t.
At this point, I must mention one of my favorite zombie movies, the 2004 remake of “Dawn of the Dead.” One character asks another if everyone at a certain location is dead. “Well,” says actor Ty Burrell, “dead-ish.”
Seeing Mitch McConnell wheeled from his home and taken to vote at the Capitol was not a reassuring answer to the question, “Is he dead?”
In the hours following that appearance, I’ve read everything from acceptance of his amazing (and ongoing) recovery to claims that the “person” was actually an animatronic replica of McConnell. None of the stories cited reliable sources.
I’ve been reading a lot of articles about “artificial intelligence,” technology that allows computers to mimic human learning, reasoning, and decision-making. The computers will be able to do it on a global scale with no way they can be stopped.
It makes me wish they’d found something better to mimic than us.
Eddie Whitlock is a Georgia native, graduate of UGA, and wannabe writer. He retired in 2021 from the Athens-Clarke County Library, where he worked as coordinator of volunteers, community service supervisor, and vending machine scapegoat.
