Urban Legend: An Experiment in Transmission December 6, 2017
Author: Beach Combing | in : Actualite , trackback
How do urban legends spread and how quickly? The following is a suggestion for an experiment involving the creation and propagation of a new urban legend. First phase: a team creates a credible story and each member changes details but not narratives. Second phase: they, then, on a given day, release the story on an unsuspecting world: emails to five or six people in their email accounts; release on Facebook accounts; etc etc. There are also attempts to contact the kind of journalists – typically those with columns – who might publish the story. Third phase: every month for twelve months and then every three months for the next ten years the different variants of the story are tracked with Google.
A suggestion for a possible story. Strangehistory recently offered a forgotten urban legend ‘the missing clock’: a departing female lodger leaves house and a valuable chamber clock goes missing; the landlord chases departing lodger who furiously denies that she took the clock; the two are taken before a judge; the lodger stands up decries the landlord and denies any wrongdoing; as she is speaking, at 12 pm on the dot, the chamber clock begins to sound from her bustle (wicker framework on the bottom). This urban legend is a good choice for any modern experiment because: (i) it no longer exists; (ii) it is memorable; and (iii) it can easily be adapted to modern circumstances.
The modern story would go something like follows.
My friend’s cousin’s boss* is a wealthy American* businessman who, for reasons you’ll soon understand, I won’t name. He was recently in Paris* and invited a beautiful young woman for a drink. The man is a little garish having a painfully loud version of *Beethoven’s ninth on his bejeweled smartphone. In the bar the phone was constantly going off and the Parisians were rolling their eyes, as the French typically do when confronted with New World vulgarity. The businessman and the girl talked for half an hour and, then, the man went to the bathroom, leaving his phone and wallet on the table with his new friend. When he returned he found that the woman had vanished and that while his wallet was still there his extremely expensive smartphone had vanished, too. He raced down the street and found the woman walking away while talking on her own mobile and he stopped her. She apologized for having left the bar but revealed that her friend had just had an emergency. She began to cry when the man accused her of having stolen his smartphone, but the business man insisted and called the local police over who, despite the girl emptying her pockets and handbag, brought both the accuser and accused before the local judge. The woman, when her turn came to speak, berated the man and had the judge nodding and the American blushing until the unmistakable notes of Beethoven’s Ninth emerged from her general crotch area.
Never written an urban legend before and not sure if this works: perhaps expectations in the tale are managed badly. The ‘*’ marks points where variants could be easily introduced. Note that the language would have to be changed throughout just to stop Google searches tracking any online UR version down: perhaps, in fact, it would be best not to publish the UR story online in any form! That alone might be reason for choosing another story. Interest, advice or help: drbeachcombing At gmail DOT com
Floodmouse, 30 Dec 2017: I’ve always wanted to write an urban legend ‘My friend has an uncle who worked at a genetics lab. They were doing some kind of hush-hush research, and the uncle wasn’t supposed to let anyone into the lab. But he left home that morning without his smart phone, so he had to use the landline to phone home. My friend was staying over at the uncle’s house, and the uncle asked him to pick up the phone and bring it to the lab. My friend was about 14 years old at the time. So my friend picks up the smart phone from the house and takes it over to his uncle at the lab, but he is only 14 so he doesn’t have his driver’s license yet, and he has to take the city bus. The uncle is working there alone that day, and the boss is out. The uncle buzzes my friend into the lab, even though he’s not supposed to, so my friend can drop off the smart phone. Apparently he’s waiting for a really important call. So anyway, just as my friend is giving him the phone, the phone starts to ring. The uncle says he has to take his call, and he turns his back for a minute while he’s talking to this supplier. My friend is looking around the lab, and they have all these really cute white mice in cages. My friend thinks it would be cool to have one of these as a pet, and the lab has more than enough, so he sticks his hand in one of the cages and puts the mouse in his pocket. The mouse is really tame. The uncle doesn’t see him take the mouse, and he lets him out of the lab just like nothing has happened. Then what happens is, my friend gets on the city bus to go to the mall. But the bus driver sees this mouse sticking out of his pocket, and he makes my friend let the mouse go by the side of the road, before he can get on the bus. Then a couple of weeks later, my friend is coming home after dark, and he sees this green glow coming from an alley over by the bus stop. He goes back there, and he swears that he sees this glow-in-the-dark green mouse, and it runs behind the dumpster. A couple of weeks after that, he is passing by there again and sees two or three mice that are all glowing in the dark. He tries to catch one, but they all get away. He is afraid to tell his uncle what happened. Then I went over there with a bunch of friends, and we looked through the window of this empty building, and we all saw these little green specks of light, moving around in the dark. And my friend thinks it’s no big deal, because what if the mice ARE glowing in the dark, so what? But then a couple of weeks after that, the uncle is over for dinner, and he’s talking just in a general way about his work, without going into details, and he says how they use photoluminescence to make the mice glow in the dark when a certain gene is activated, and that gene is only activated in the presence of antibodies for whatever disease they’re studying. But he didn’t say what the disease was. So now I’m afraid to go to that part of town. I’m afraid to tell anyone, because my friend would get in trouble, and so would his uncle. What do you think I should do?
