Toronto Reference Library Blog

Last week there were reports of a car being hit by a falling tree on a highway in Prince Edward Island. The tree was downed by a beaver. Now, this story has names, a date, a place, and no serious injuries. And the beaver—well he’d done his work sometime earlier and was long gone. The tree just happened to give way as the car came along. An unusual story, and a true one.

Still, it has all the makings of an urban legend, and someday—I guarantee it—you’ll l hear that story again, and the beaver will be right there pushing the tree over as the car goes by, and all the people will be killed. Or all the people but a poor orphaned little child will be killed. Or the beaver will be captured, and put on display in a museum in Charlottetown, Toronto, or Poughkeepsie.

That’s one of the ways urban legends evolve. Something real but unusual, becomes something unreal but compelling—or funny, or spooky, or enraging, or just plain strange. What’s more, it’s something that maybe did happen once, but in a rather more prosaic and unflamboyant way. Whatever the source, there's some kernel that captures our imagination and our gullibility.

Heard the story of the cat in the microwave? The phantom hitchhiker? The diner from the 1950s on the backroad to Kenora…or was it Highway 69? Or maybe it was in Spokane…

While these stories have been passed down for decades, the internet has given them a whole new life, not to mention reach. While some are ridiculous, many have a certain strange plausibility. Some grow out of real incidents, but are wildly and fantastically embellished. Others are created out of whole cloth. But all of them shed light on the tensions, stresses, uncertainties, longings, nostalgias, confusions, and fears that live in our modern minds. Like the myths and fairy tales they’re akin to, they tell us about ourselves, not about “what happened.”

That's the scholarly side to urban legends. Folklorists call them contemporary or modern legends and there are courses, encyclopedias and academic articles devoted to them. Then there’s the entertainment side–scary movies, television shows and Mythbusters.

A couple of years ago I received an online petition from a good friend. She’d passed it on from another friend (the classic urban legend pattern) who called it “One of the few things worth responding to on the internet”. It claimed famed atheist Madalyn Murray O’Hair had petitioned the Federal Communications Commission to ban all religious programming. Now was the time for all good Christians to fight this depravity.  

Only problem is, O’Hair died—actually, she was murdered—in 1995. She never petitioned the FCC about programming, although there was a petition from someone else in 1974 about religious educational stations. (Their request was dismissed.) The FCC has denied this legend for years, but still receives so many letters yearly that they’ve received permission from the US Postal Service to discard all envelopes that refer to it. Before her death, O’Hair, who did know of the legend, was quoted as saying “I think it’s fabulous. This craziness seems to have life everlasting.” Now the internet has given it (and her) a whole new life everlasting.

Then there’s the kidney heist. A friend visited Chicago recently (or maybe it was Vancouver). He met a young woman at the bar in his hotel, and well, he’s unattached, so he invited her up to his room. Next morning he woke with a headache, blood on the sheets, and a neatly stitched incision in his side. He called the desk for help, and they called an ambulance. At the hospital he was told his kidney had been removed very expertly, and was probably now headed for the black market.

 
Or maybe it was my brother-in law’s friend’s cousin that happened to.

I told this story to my 22 year old son, and he said, “But, that has really happened, right?” Well, it was an episode of Law & Order,(season 1,episode 21) and has been told in Canada, the US, Sweden and Holland in varying versions. According to medical sociologist Robert Dingwall, the story provides “useful insights into lay thinking about professional work and its strategies for the informal social control of medicine.” (!!)

My professional favourite though, is the “sinking library”. You see, because of an architect’s mistake, the weight of the books was not factored into the design, and so, the library building is slowly sinking into the earth.  That story has been told for, among others, Yale, Syracuse and Brown University libraries, the University of Toronto and the University of Waterloo. So far, Toronto Reference Library, with its 4 million items, hasn’t turned up on the list (or sagged one bit).

So, whether you’re afraid of beavers, atheists, organ thieves or losing your library, you could do worse with your summer than explore the urban legends of our fractured and endlessly fascinating modern world.

And don’t miss the 1998 movie Urban Legend, where a beautiful folklore student finds the answer to recent murders in the library copy of The Encyclopedia of Urban Legends. Such a book didn’t exist in 1998, but was actually in the works, and published in 2001. You can find the latest update (2012) at the (not sinking) Toronto Reference Library and the (also not sinking) North York Central Library.

Last week there were reports of a car being hit by a falling tree on a highway in Prince Edward Island. The tree was downed by a beaver. Now, this story has names, a date, a place, and no serious injuries. And the beaver—well he’d done his work sometime earlier and was long gone. The tree just happened to give way as the car came along. An unusual story, and a true one.

Still, it has all the makings of an urban legend, and someday—I guarantee it—you’ll l hear that story again, and the beaver will be right there pushing the tree over as the car goes by, and all the people will be killed. Or all the people but a poor orphaned little child will be killed. Or the beaver will be captured, and put on display in a museum in Charlottetown, Toronto, or Poughkeepsie.

That’s one of the ways urban legends evolve. Something real but unusual, becomes something unreal but compelling—or funny, or spooky, or enraging, or just plain strange. What’s more, it’s something that maybe did happen once, but in a rather more prosaic and unflamboyant way. Whatever the source, there's some kernel that captures our imagination and our gullibility.

Heard the story of the cat in the microwave? The phantom hitchhiker? The diner from the 1950s on the backroad to Kenora…or was it Highway 69? Or maybe it was in Spokane…

While these stories have been passed down for decades, the internet has given them a whole new life, not to mention reach. While some are ridiculous, many have a certain strange plausibility. Some grow out of real incidents, but are wildly and fantastically embellished. Others are created out of whole cloth. But all of them shed light on the tensions, stresses, uncertainties, longings, nostalgias, confusions, and fears that live in our modern minds. Like the myths and fairy tales they’re akin to, they tell us about ourselves, not about “what happened.”

That's the scholarly side to urban legends. Folklorists call them contemporary or modern legends and there are courses, encyclopedias and academic articles devoted to them. Then there’s the entertainment side–scary movies, television shows and Mythbusters.

A couple of years ago I received an online petition from a good friend. She’d passed it on from another friend (the classic urban legend pattern) who called it “One of the few things worth responding to on the internet”. It claimed famed atheist Madalyn Murray O’Hair had petitioned the Federal Communications Commission to ban all religious programming. Now was the time for all good Christians to fight this depravity.  

Only problem is, O’Hair died—actually, she was murdered—in 1995. She never petitioned the FCC about programming, although there was a petition from someone else in 1974 about religious educational stations. (Their request was dismissed.) The FCC has denied this legend for years, but still receives so many letters yearly that they’ve received permission from the US Postal Service to discard all envelopes that refer to it. Before her death, O’Hair, who did know of the legend, was quoted as saying “I think it’s fabulous. This craziness seems to have life everlasting.” Now the internet has given it (and her) a whole new life everlasting.

Then there’s the kidney heist. A friend visited Chicago recently (or maybe it was Vancouver). He met a young woman at the bar in his hotel, and well, he’s unattached, so he invited her up to his room. Next morning he woke with a headache, blood on the sheets, and a neatly stitched incision in his side. He called the desk for help, and they called an ambulance. At the hospital he was told his kidney had been removed very expertly, and was probably now headed for the black market.

 
Or maybe it was my brother-in law’s friend’s cousin that happened to.

I told this story to my 22 year old son, and he said, “But, that has really happened, right?” Well, it was an episode of Law & Order,(season 1,episode 21) and has been told in Canada, the US, Sweden and Holland in varying versions. According to medical sociologist Robert Dingwall, the story provides “useful insights into lay thinking about professional work and its strategies for the informal social control of medicine.” (!!)

My professional favourite though, is the “sinking library”. You see, because of an architect’s mistake, the weight of the books was not factored into the design, and so, the library building is slowly sinking into the earth.  That story has been told for, among others, Yale, Syracuse and Brown University libraries, the University of Toronto and the University of Waterloo. So far, Toronto Reference Library, with its 4 million items, hasn’t turned up on the list (or sagged one bit).

So, whether you’re afraid of beavers, atheists, organ thieves or losing your library, you could do worse with your summer than explore the urban legends of our fractured and endlessly fascinating modern world.

And don’t miss the 1998 movie Urban Legend, where a beautiful folklore student finds the answer to recent murders in the library copy of The Encyclopedia of Urban Legends. Such a book didn’t exist in 1998, but was actually in the works, and published in 2001. You can find the latest update (2012) at the (not sinking) Toronto Reference Library and the (also not sinking) North York Central Library.