0:00

Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve

0:02

Camray. It's ready. Are you welcome

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to Stuff you should Know? From

0:08

house Stuff Works dot com.

0:15

Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh

0:17

Clark. There's all right, this is stuff you should

0:20

know. Let's get to the intro. Yeah,

0:22

Jerry said, we're wasting too much time at the beginning. Yeah.

0:24

She said that she wished she had a third mix

0:27

so she could ask a question every once in a while so

0:29

we could get to the intro. Right, So what you have for

0:31

lunch? Josh? I have not eaten

0:33

lunch yet, actually, CenTra. I had a Gara Deli square

0:36

chocolate caramel in sibs for I

0:39

had a baby baby ruth. Um.

0:42

I a granola bar courtesy of Discovery

0:44

Channel. Thank you, yeah, raising

0:46

d bar. Um. I had a cherry

0:49

coke and um,

0:52

that's healthy. My think that's it I've

0:55

had forever. Had a green apple

0:57

and some almonds, yeah, and green

0:59

tea. You're all about the almonds

1:01

right now, aren't you. It's a super food that

1:03

reminds me. I've got to give you a recipe

1:05

for roasted almonds. One of my friends told

1:07

me last night it sounds really good, don't

1:09

you just roast him? Well, there's some

1:12

other stuff mixed together, so Alton Brown recipe.

1:14

He's on the Alton Brown diet. I watched

1:16

me the Seaweed Salad last night, and

1:19

I was just like, he's gonna weep at any moment.

1:23

Jerry is so frustrated, right she is. Her

1:26

calf muscles are about to burst out of her legs.

1:28

Well, maybe we should send her to Vegas. No,

1:31

no, no, I got something else, Chuck.

1:33

Yes, did you know that National

1:35

Gang Week has come and gone? Is

1:38

there such a thing that

1:41

just ruined the whole thing? Well, Josh,

1:43

tell me about National Gang Week? Okay? Um.

1:46

National Gang Week is when all of the gangs

1:48

around the United States get together and come

1:50

up with a clever, pant plan to murder unwitting

1:53

and innocent people. Some

1:56

of the crips and the bloods get together. One

1:58

imagines what the Mongols and the Hell's ain't jewels

2:00

and M fourteen,

2:03

M thirteen, I'm gonna get shot in the head

2:05

for this again? What is it? I

2:07

can't remember? Like MS thirteen? Sure,

2:11

man um. Anyway,

2:14

all the gangs get together and they come up

2:16

with the plan that they're all going to perpetrate this

2:18

year. This December. It

2:20

was a baby, a

2:22

fake baby or possibly a real

2:24

live baby if they had any female gang members

2:27

who are willing to give up their infant child for a little

2:29

while in a baby seat on

2:31

the side of the road, covered in blood,

2:33

although uninjured, just just kind of doctored

2:36

to look like they're bleeding in

2:38

an effort to trap female motorists.

2:40

Who would you know, inevitably stop

2:42

female what female

2:46

motorists? Yeah, that curse

2:49

my thick tongue. Um. The

2:52

drivers by, not to be

2:54

confused with the drive by, which is a gang

2:56

activity. Um, the

2:58

too to trap female to risks um

3:01

who would stop and try to, you know, see

3:03

if the baby's okay, help it? And then out

3:05

of the bushes comes from gang members who beat

3:07

and rape and murder her. That

3:10

sounds to me like an urban legend, Josh

3:12

too. Two

3:16

police departments issued

3:18

warnings about this. Really, this past

3:20

December is so ridiculous. When pressed

3:23

about their sources, they both said, you know, actually

3:25

we can't verify any of this, so don't pass it along.

3:28

It was just an idea somebody had, Yeah, you know, the other

3:30

big gang. When I remember hearing this one myself was

3:33

if someone flashes their headlights at you and

3:36

you flash them back, then it's a gang and they'll turn

3:38

around and follow you and kill you. The one I

3:40

heard was, um, if they if you see somebody driving

3:42

without headlights on and you flash them, they'll turn around

3:44

and kill you. It's part of a gang initiation.

3:47

It's so not true. No, it's not. And

3:50

what we're talking about obviously are urban legends,

3:52

but more specifically, the article is called

3:54

how Urban Legends Work. We decided

3:57

to call this podcast, why do we Believe

3:59

Urban Legends? Yeah, you know, yeah,

4:01

we'll get to that for sure. I

4:04

mentioned Vegas early on though, because of the very

4:06

popular old story that the

4:08

man goes to Vegas and he chats it up with

4:10

a nice lady at the bar and goes back to

4:13

the room with her, and then he wakes up

4:15

dazed and confused in a tub of ice the

4:17

next day with a side hurting and

4:20

uh with a note saying call nine one one and

4:22

clearly his kidneys have been removed.

4:24

Yeah, upon examination, as kidneys are

4:27

removed. This actually gave me

4:29

a moment of terror, chuck, because if you remember

4:31

in the organ donation podcast. We

4:33

talked about a guy named Mohammed Seline Khan

4:36

who had his kidney removed, and I thought,

4:39

Um, did we get taken and pass

4:42

along bad information that tom she

4:44

right? Turns out Tommy was right. I

4:46

went and double checked his sources, and I

4:48

saw a picture of the guy with like the huge

4:51

sewn up um incision where

4:54

his kidney was removed. It was an ABC

4:56

News story. Yeah, yeah, that was real. That

4:59

is pretty much fair fiable, right, But that

5:01

that story was around long before that

5:03

happened to him. Yeah, And I think we even um

5:05

postulated that that urban legend

5:07

gave rise to actual fact, right, Yes,

5:10

yeah, and that does happen. Sometimes life

5:12

imitates art and the other way around. Sometimes it's

5:15

uh, something from a plot of a horror

5:17

movie, or sometimes an urban legend

5:19

is inserted into the plot of a horror movie,

5:22

like the hook Killer. You

5:24

want to tell that one? Well, yeah, that one's been

5:26

around since the nineteen fifties when um teenagers

5:28

first started going parking, which is when

5:30

they would drive out to inspiration Point

5:33

and and make out neck and

5:35

m The story goes that the they

5:38

hear the story, it's always some someone who's

5:40

escaped from an insane asylum

5:42

back when you hooked hand

5:45

hooked hand. And then the they

5:47

hear someone scratching on the car and

5:49

they don't do anything and they just leave and

5:51

they get home later and find that a hook

5:53

is sticking into like the door handle. Not

5:57

no, and it's a that and the

5:59

biggest one, the Vegas kidney one

6:01

are considered cautionary tales. Right.

6:04

You have very common hallmark of many urban

6:06

legends that they are called cautionary tales, right.

6:08

And and most cautionary tales also

6:10

involve some sort of morality

6:12

twist to him, right, Like in

6:15

in the most extreme cases, the guy who

6:17

was in Vegas who was chatting with the

6:19

girl was actually married and he went

6:21

back to her hotel room. So the moral

6:23

of the story is don't cheat on your wife,

6:25

right, or else something really horrible is going to happen to you.

6:28

Uh. In the case of the teenagers in the fifties,

6:31

um, it was teenagers

6:33

necking as you put it, old man,

6:36

um and uh, the the the

6:38

more, the moral of the story is don't

6:41

have premarital sex. Right, we'll go

6:43

park your car and do things like this. You shouldn't

6:46

know, um nothing right,

6:48

So the the the What's interesting

6:51

about this is that urban legends um

6:54

reflect our own morality,

6:56

our own values. Think

6:58

about that, from the fifties to the when

7:01

the first folk folklorist um

7:03

I Guess chronicled that

7:06

Vegas kidney story. Right in forty years,

7:08

it went from necking to cheating

7:10

on your wife, right, And one

7:13

could argue that our values had expanded

7:15

like that or devolved to that

7:17

same degree in that same period of time. It's

7:19

a good point. Yeah, did you hear a bunch of them when

7:22

you were first going to college? When

7:25

I look back on some of the stories

7:27

I've passed along as fact, I

7:29

couldn't be more ashamed I heard

7:31

these. I never passed them along. You didn't. Even

7:34

if I didn't pass them along, I believe some of them.

7:36

Yeah, that there's a couple of common ones. One

7:39

is the be careful if you're in a dorm room

7:41

man with someone you don't know, because you wake

7:43

up every day and feel all

7:45

groggy and like you've been taking

7:47

advantage of for a very good reason, because

7:50

your roommate was knocking you out and performing

7:53

indecent acts on you. What you slept not

7:56

true very much an urban legend, as

7:59

is the

8:02

the if your roommate kills themselves,

8:04

you get straight. A's that quarter, which I

8:07

have to say, forms the premise of

8:09

one of the greatest um

8:12

Zach Morris movies of all time, what's

8:14

that Dead Man on Campus? Dude?

8:17

Did you ever see that? No? That was

8:19

a great movie. That was the plot

8:21

though, Yeah, that was the whole plot. He smokes

8:23

a bong in that movie. It's kind of startling for

8:25

having grown up on Saved

8:28

by the Bell? Oh he is

8:30

that his character name? Is that his real name? Yeah? I don't remember

8:33

his real name? Oh? Zach was his character? And

8:35

Saved by the Bell? Is Zach? A blond guy? Zack?

8:37

If you're listening, um, send us an email telling

8:40

us your real name. Now we we'll look it up in a second,

8:42

So don't bother email. I prefer an email from him.

8:44

Okay, So um,

8:47

Chuck, Like, we said that these things kind of tend to reflect

8:49

our own morality, our own values,

8:51

and you said they reflect our fears,

8:53

and that's absolutely true. There's a lot

8:56

of urban legends. I would even say the vast

8:58

majority of them have to do with some

9:00

sort of fear, right right, And that's

9:02

one reason we pass them along is because they

9:05

resonate with us. We have loved

9:07

ones in our lives. There's people we care about,

9:09

or at the very least, we're having a good day

9:11

and we don't want some stranger to fall into some

9:13

horrible misfortune. So we pass these along.

9:16

And if they're passed along to a person who maintains

9:18

the same kind of fears and maybe the same

9:21

level of fears and the same um

9:23

dope believability um,

9:26

they'll absorb them, fear them, and

9:28

pass them along themselves. Many

9:30

times, it's also regionalized, so what

9:33

maybe if you're in Seattle, it

9:35

could be a neighborhood in Seattle where this happened.

9:37

If you're in Atlanta, it could be East Lake. So

9:39

they get regionalized, and all of a sudden you think, well, I

9:42

it may not be true, but I should tell my friends

9:44

this um on the internet, such as

9:46

in an email out just in case, because it's

9:48

happening right here, right and because

9:51

it's in a place that you can visualize, it

9:53

has that much greater of an impact on you.

9:55

Fear. Once again, sure, I mean, if

9:57

you can visualize your fear, you

10:00

can fear even more. Yeah, good point.

10:02

Thanks, that's gonna be on my

10:04

tombstone. Should we talk about some

10:07

some dead giveaways that you're in

10:09

fact hearing an urban legend and not the real thing.

10:11

Tots, Uh, it

10:13

happened to a friend of a friend. That's the classic

10:16

definite is what they call it. And actually,

10:18

um, if it happens to a friend of a

10:20

friend, usually when you pass

10:22

it along, you're not gonna say a friend of a

10:25

friend because you just immediately lost credibility

10:27

right there. Um, so you're going to say

10:29

it happened to my my

10:31

friend, Chuck's friend, or it happened to Chuck's

10:34

friend. You know, Chuck, it happened to one of his friends who neither

10:36

one of us have ever met. Right. That

10:38

that personalizes it a little more, brings it home a

10:40

little further. Or if I were

10:43

a real liar, right or

10:45

really desperate for attention, I

10:47

would say it happened to Chuck, even though

10:49

Chuck told me it happened to a friend of his. But

10:51

I'm just gonna gloss over that part because I really

10:54

want you to believe what I'm saying, because

10:56

if you believe what I'm saying, then I can

10:58

more easily believe what i'm saying, Right,

11:00

and people innately want to believe their

11:02

friends when they hear things, and people

11:05

innately want to tell a good yarn. So

11:07

a couple of those together spin a good

11:09

yarn, and then, uh, is that what the

11:11

it's called spinning yarn? Put

11:15

those two together and you get urban legends. Yeah.

11:17

I actually remember the first urban legend I

11:19

heard. And my buddy rad

11:22

in Montana, my best friend in high school, actually Radford.

11:26

He uh he told me, I

11:28

remember this so distinctly about the Eddie Murphy

11:31

and the elevator. It used to be Reggie

11:33

Jackson before that. The story is the lady gets

11:36

on the elevator and it's it's some African

11:38

American with his large entourage or

11:41

a dog. It's a dog. It's a dog.

11:43

Dog. Yeah, it's the crux of it. Okay,

11:46

well, and see it changes. That's the hallmark of an urban

11:48

legend to it changes per story,

11:50

but the lady will clutch her person fear, and

11:52

then later on she finds

11:54

out it's at a hotel that her hotel stay

11:57

was paid for. It's like, courtesy of Eddie

11:59

Murphy. We got the best laugh I've had in

12:01

weeks because we scared you. Oh yeah,

12:03

that's not how a mom told it. She

12:06

said that, um, and I think,

12:08

if I remember correctly, she told me that it had

12:10

happened to a friend of hers or someone she works

12:12

with. Friends. Well, that's what Rat said. I remember it was his

12:15

mom, someone his mom worked with. Well, in

12:17

this case, it was Lionel Ritchie or

12:20

Reggie Jackson. I think the other variation

12:22

I heard was Reggie Jackson, Lionel Richie. I

12:24

never heard Eddie Murphy. But he's

12:27

in there there in like a very nice

12:29

hotel that allows huge dogs, and the guy has

12:31

a dog with him, so he's

12:33

he's even more intimidating, and

12:36

uh, the the woman is trying to avoid

12:38

eye contact, is scared clutching her first, that kind

12:40

of thing. Um. And then all of a sudden, the guy

12:43

goes sit lady, and the

12:45

woman sits down in the elevator and

12:47

the guys like I was talking to my dog. And

12:49

then her hotel stay is paid for by

12:51

Reggie Jackson or Lionel Ritchie or

12:53

Eddie Murphy or one imagines

12:56

P Diddy, yeah, or

12:58

jay Z. But I just rad,

13:00

if you're listening, you lied to me, buddy,

13:03

way back when when we were eating turkey

13:05

sandwiches after school. You lied to me, I remember distinctly,

13:08

and I'll never forget it. So, Josh,

13:10

that was a lot of time to uh,

13:12

to give up the one dead giveaway friend

13:14

of a friend. So we'll go through some

13:16

of these other ones quickly. Actually we already

13:18

did. There are many variations. That's a

13:20

dead giveaway. The topic

13:23

is one that is often on the news or

13:25

one that people gossip about. Yeah, that's

13:27

a big one. Like we Got Stuff

13:30

podcast, got a forwarded email about

13:32

UM census workers. Yeah, yeah, the

13:34

census is about to happen, so now don't open

13:36

your door unless they have a

13:38

confidentiality agreement and certain other things.

13:41

They'll murder you. Yeah, we got it this morning. Okay,

13:43

was that when that ironic? Yeah, but that actually

13:45

happened when the census worker we thought was

13:47

killed, but it turns out it's a suicide. So

13:50

oftentimes it will spin off of a real news story

13:52

and get morphed. Yeah, which is kind

13:54

of scary because a lot of urban legends

13:56

have been portrayed as fact

13:59

in the news the newspapers.

14:01

Well, that's another reason people believe them is because

14:03

they trust the news when they ought

14:06

not, which is sad because

14:08

really, frankly, you shouldn't. You shouldn't.

14:10

You should take all news stories with a green as salt.

14:13

You know, it's just some dude or chick reporting

14:15

something kind of file a story, just like we do.

14:17

We get things wrong all the time. Clearly,

14:20

why shaking your head?

14:21

Just people know, we

14:24

call ourselves out. But it's true. I

14:26

think it's funny that we do that, and we need to

14:28

do that because in the in this day and

14:30

age, pretty much our entire job,

14:33

or at least a significant portion of it, chuck

14:35

is avoiding giving out false

14:38

information. Yeah, we have to go through

14:40

and verify it, which is getting increasingly

14:42

harder. Yeah, we try, We definitely

14:44

do. We were talking about pop

14:46

culture, and sometimes movies

14:49

will work it in or the other way around. In

14:51

the movie Goodwill Hunting, remember they

14:53

tell the story about the guy who gets pulled

14:55

over by the cop because he's drunk, and

14:57

then an accident happens in the cop

15:00

as to run to the accident, and

15:02

the guy jumps in his car goes home.

15:04

The cop comes the next morning and the

15:06

guy denies that he was ever out drinking until

15:08

he looks and notices that in his driveway

15:11

he had jumped in the squad car by accident. Not

15:13

true, but it's an urban legend. It

15:15

was in good will hunting the Simpsons,

15:19

which one. You know how you always hear the story about

15:21

like a mouse in a in a coke bottle?

15:24

Remember the Simpsons when they Barney and Homer

15:27

visit the Duff Brewery and the guys

15:29

on the line fills on the line checking the bottles as

15:31

they go by. He's like, good, good

15:33

nose, good needle. And then he turns

15:35

his head and like Hitler's head, it goes by the bottle.

15:38

That's a good one. Did you see the YouTube

15:40

clip of Hitler finding out that Scott

15:42

Brown won the Massachusetts

15:44

Senate seat? I did? You sent it to me? Good?

15:46

Is that an urban legend? Or did Scott Brown really

15:49

win the Senate seat? He really did? I

15:51

thought was made up? Um? Oh, there's a

15:53

pretty It's pretty much impossible to trace

15:56

the origin of a um

15:58

any urban legend, really, no one ever

16:00

knows where they come from. One of the reasons why is because

16:03

it follows oral tradition or it used to generally

16:05

right right folk It

16:08

is folklore, and it's actually studied by cultural

16:10

anthropologists and folkloreist, which I

16:12

think is probably a sub set

16:14

of cultural anthropology.

16:17

UM. And the the Hey,

16:19

Dave, have you seen the Encyclopedia of Urban Legends?

16:21

No. I used to have a cartoon book though,

16:24

of urban legends. It was pretty cool, nice. Well,

16:26

the Encyclopedia of Urban Legends is fairly

16:28

anthropological in nature. It's pretty

16:31

thick tone. It's on Google Books. We

16:33

can check it out. But the author of it,

16:35

Jan Harold brun

16:37

Van, Harold, why

16:39

are you doing this to me today? Are

16:42

you talking to your mouth or to me both?

16:45

Um? The the author Jan Harold brun

16:47

Van Um kind of laments

16:50

that the the internet has removed

16:52

that aspect the oral tradition by

16:56

digitizing it. And now I'll just

16:58

click forward and and uh

17:00

broom Van suggests that the golden

17:02

age of

17:04

uh of um

17:06

urban legends was the sixties of the eighties,

17:09

although they've been around a lot longer than that, right,

17:11

yeah, since the thirties and forties. I said, I found

17:14

even further back than that. Um.

17:16

Apparently at Scott Fitzgerald and the twenties

17:18

referred to contemporary legends the

17:21

the the critic took to mean the same

17:23

thing as an urban legend. Sure. And then even before

17:26

that, I think in uh the eighteen nineties

17:28

there was a French columnists who asked to

17:31

cities maintain folklore just as

17:33

rural areas to interesting the answer

17:35

that is a big fat yes obviously. Yeah.

17:38

So that's when they were actually called out as urban legends.

17:40

Like we said, it goes back centuries tradition

17:42

of folklore. Historians

17:44

are big on verifying and writing

17:47

things down, and folklore's tell

17:49

stories with their mouths. Yeah, like

17:51

we do, right, that sounds like a T shirt.

17:53

Folklore's do it with their mouths. Um.

17:57

And like you said, check, these things go back centuries, if

17:59

not further. Um. And again, all

18:02

legends reflect um,

18:05

the feelings, the fears, that kind of thing of the culture

18:07

at the time. So we're before

18:10

uh, in the you know, pre

18:12

industrial age. Most fairy

18:15

tales that had something bad happening to them, we're set

18:17

in the woods, like Handling Gretel

18:19

or snow White or whatever. These fairy

18:21

tales were set in the woods because the woods were

18:23

still very scary places, filled with bandits

18:26

and bears and scary monsters,

18:28

super freaks. Yeah. Yeah.

18:31

One thing I thought was interesting is the

18:34

famous website snopes dot

18:36

Com clearly can put an end to a

18:38

lot of these Internet if you're smart enough to

18:40

good look at Snopes these Internet rumors that get

18:42

started. But one thing I thought was interesting

18:44

was reading this article is that Snopes evidentally

18:47

gets a lot of angry emails because

18:49

people want to believe their friends so much that

18:51

their friends not made this up, that they will

18:54

email Snopes angrily and say, you're

18:56

calling my friend a liar. This really happened. He

18:59

said, it happened to his best friend, and

19:01

snubs just like doubt. They even respond

19:03

to those, and they like, send us your address so we

19:05

can send a guy to come hit you with a tack hammer.

19:07

Right, and I have some swamp land in Florida, I can tell

19:09

you exactly. Um. We

19:12

were talking about the origins of these things, chuck

19:14

right. Um. Right, So folklore's

19:17

anthropologists and uh,

19:19

pretty much any smart person can

19:21

point to actual advance

19:24

that are maybe misinterpreted or expanded upon

19:27

become the source of urban legends. E

19:29

g. Uh, temporary tattoos

19:32

laced with LSD. Right, that could

19:34

have been birthed out of the real

19:36

practice of a chemist who make

19:38

LSD would oftentimes put it on I guests

19:40

still do put it on like a stamp with a

19:42

cartoon character, and so that

19:44

might have gotten confused with um

19:47

temporary tattoos. So the word spreads and all

19:49

of a sudden, And what I love is that the

19:51

story goes is they give them these LSD

19:54

tattoos to get the kids hooked on LSD,

19:57

which is just silly. Yeah, it's not physically

19:59

addicted ing at all, north psychologically

20:01

addicting. I imagine it's

20:04

much more psychologically aversive than anything

20:06

I'm getting nostalgic Halloween.

20:09

Lots of urban legends around Halloween. Yeah,

20:12

with the tainted candy and the razor blades in the apple.

20:14

You know it's crazy is we were talking about

20:16

how the Oregon thief actually

20:19

probably got the idea from the urban

20:21

legend. There have been instances

20:23

of people tainting Halloween candy

20:27

after the the urban

20:29

legend was around. Interesting,

20:32

most of the ones that have like razor blades,

20:34

and I have to say this is from Snopes. There's

20:36

a pretty long article on Halloween candy

20:38

with razor blades and needles. But

20:41

um, most of the ones that have actually

20:43

been perpetrated

20:45

were hoaxes or they wanted to

20:47

get attention or something like that. Um,

20:50

but poison candy actually

20:52

does. It's come up many many times

20:55

around Halloween, and you

20:57

know, in non Halloween days, the other

20:59

three sixty four days where

21:01

kids have died. Apparently, yes,

21:04

and this is not an urban legend. Apparently uh

21:07

in. I don't remember what state it was

21:09

in, but a friend of a friend told me,

21:11

um that a little kid

21:14

died after getting into his uncle's stash of

21:16

heroin, and so the family

21:18

actually sprinkled his candy Halloween

21:21

candy with hero with heroin

21:23

from the uncle's stash to protect the uncle. Uh

21:26

to make it look like somebody had poisoned

21:28

the kid with with heroin and that really happened.

21:30

It happened. What if

21:32

Snopes is wrong about all this stuff? I don't know. I've had

21:35

that horrible feeling before, horrible

21:37

thoughts, sat upright in bed, been like tis

21:39

roll pops, Like Snopes is just this one dude,

21:44

He's just like this inclusion, he's

21:46

like the wizard behind the curtain. That'd be pretty

21:48

cool. I guess we should point out a few

21:51

of these email urban legends, just so you don't

21:53

forward them around to your your

21:55

friends and family. Be wary

21:57

of anything free obviously that's

22:00

a that's a dead giveaway. Usually. Well,

22:02

that's just like the pigeon drop.

22:05

Yeah, sure, yeah, you just you if

22:07

anybody starts talking to you about money and you've never

22:09

met them, you don't want to respond, right.

22:12

Another dead giveaway, Josh, is if you ever get an

22:14

email that starts with a line if

22:16

you for this email, colon, or

22:19

if it says this is not an urban legend,

22:21

colon, then it's probably an urban legend.

22:24

Yeah. And then of course there is

22:26

a the famous Nemon Marcus

22:29

cookies email, which

22:31

I've actually received. I have received this one as well.

22:33

I've never made him of you. No,

22:35

well, they're just regular cookies. Tom Harris

22:38

is they're delicious. I think he made

22:40

them before this article. That is research

22:42

pal. Yeah, well, detail this one. This is a very famous

22:44

one. So back in I think

22:46

the nineties, uh late

22:48

nineties, there was an email that was sent

22:50

around where it talked about the

22:52

Neiman Marcus chocolate chip cookie

22:55

recipe which made some delicious chocolate chips

22:57

they say, or chocolate chip cookies. Um.

22:59

And a woman apparently asked

23:01

for name and Marcus, uh

23:04

somebody at the store to give her the recipe for the cookies

23:07

and they gave it to her, but they charged her for

23:09

it, they said to fifty And when she, you

23:11

know, gets her bill later that month, she sees

23:13

that they charged two hundred and fifty dollars

23:16

instead of two dollars and fifty cents for this recipe.

23:19

The woman finds it outrageous. Contact

23:21

Name and Marcus and they're like, well, our cookies are really

23:23

good. We're not going to refund your money.

23:25

Uh. So she decided that to get them

23:27

back, she would forward the email

23:30

with the recipe and an email to everybody

23:33

and spread it around to get back at

23:35

Niman Marcus, you were my crutch,

23:37

Chuck. Not true, Josh. They didn't

23:40

even make the chocolate chip cookie at the

23:42

time. In the eighties it was Mrs

23:44

Fields, not Name and Marcus, and before

23:46

that it was the Waldorf Astoria

23:49

Hotels red velvet cake. Take

23:51

that. Stupid people who believe forward

23:53

an emails who I'm sad

23:56

to say, not only did my mom

23:58

pass along bunk information with the line old Richie

24:00

slash Reggie Jackson story. Um,

24:03

but my dad, I found out, is

24:05

a birther. Really

24:08

are you kidding me? Yeah, he's not in any kind

24:10

of structured to organized capacity

24:13

in As a matter of fact, he wasn't even aware of the term

24:15

birther, but he believed af forwarded

24:17

email that was birth in nature,

24:21

which again that was a

24:23

real occurrence. There were people out there who wanted

24:25

to see Barack Obama's birth

24:27

certificate claiming he was not born in

24:29

this country. Is originally said that his

24:31

birth certificate was doctor that he was really

24:34

a born in Kenya. Um YadA,

24:36

YadA, YadA, and therefore he shouldn't be president.

24:38

Right, But the the that

24:41

has taken on a life of its own, so out of this original

24:44

idea, it's become an urban legend

24:46

and a forwarded email urban legend, which

24:48

are really the dregs of urban legend society

24:51

because you're not even taking the time to spend a good yarn

24:53

at that point. No, and that's why um

24:56

brun Van was saying, like it was best

24:58

from the sixties of the eighties. You know, there's there's

25:00

spider eggs and bubble yam and co can's

25:02

hanging from car doors and the calls

25:05

coming from upstairs and the great

25:07

part about it was that everybody was personalizing

25:09

it because it happened in East Lake or it happened

25:11

in Peoria, Illinois, depending on where

25:14

you are, And so there was

25:16

it took effort, and there was there was personalization

25:19

done to it, and so people were engaging

25:21

in oral folklore tradition without

25:23

even realizing it, and it kept it alive and

25:26

vital. Now it's just forwarding. That's

25:28

it. Well, you and I remember clearly. I remember

25:31

Rad lying to me in the night that I'm sorry

25:33

ten or eleventh grade. You remember your mom

25:35

telling me stories like I remember this specifically

25:37

in his kitchen. I remember that day

25:40

specifically, but I don't remember whatever

25:43

Jack asked for? Did me? The

25:45

the gang headlight thing? Should we

25:47

talk about a couple of real ones real quick before you wrap it

25:49

up? Yeah? These are great, Chuck. Chuck found

25:51

some on cracked dot com

25:53

and uh, the more fantastic ones we

25:56

actually did go and double check with Snopes,

25:58

the big fat guy who doesn't check any thing.

26:00

Right. Yes, okay, so Chuck take

26:02

it away. Well one of them, um

26:05

has happened recently? Is that the famous Halloween

26:07

when there's all manner of Halloween ones like we said, where

26:10

someone hung themselves in their yard? Yeah?

26:12

We when what podcast? Did we talk about

26:14

that? I can't remember. I can't either, but we definitely did.

26:16

And the story goes that someone hung themselves

26:18

and people thought it was a Halloween Halloween decoration,

26:21

so they the body stayed there for several

26:23

days until they realized it was real and

26:26

this actually really did happen. Yeah.

26:28

And then there's the uh, the one

26:30

about the couple who spend the night in a

26:33

hotel room and they can't figure

26:35

out where the stench is coming from, and when they

26:37

finally go downstairs to ask for their money back

26:39

the next morning, the hotel management investigates

26:42

and finds a dead body under the bed. Apparently

26:44

it's happened a bunch of times. Kansas City,

26:46

Atlantic City, Florida, California.

26:48

It's very distressing. Yeah, and and the

26:51

Cracked blogger makes a good point

26:54

that in these cases, in just about

26:56

all of them, what's insane is that the people spent

26:58

the night in the room the whole time, the variably

27:00

and they're so great. Tell him the best one, Cracked

27:03

is awesome. They're so funny. Yeah, I love that

27:05

website and that it's one of your faiths. Uh,

27:07

the fun House Mummy, this one is the best

27:10

one ever. Uh. The myth is

27:12

that a prop at a carnival was

27:14

Um, I guess in the in the scary

27:17

fun house was not a

27:20

prop mummy, but it was in fact a real

27:22

dead body. So if this story couldn't

27:24

get any more fantastic, you're

27:26

wrong. Right, here's

27:29

how the urban legend goes. Um.

27:31

The crew for the six Million

27:33

Dollar Man was filming an episode

27:36

and they needed a fun house, so they went down to Long

27:38

Beach to the New Pike Amusement Park, right,

27:41

and there was a dummy hanging in the

27:43

shot, and the director filmed

27:45

the shot. Apparently it was like, I don't like that dummy. There's

27:47

somebody get rid of it. Some guy goes to grab

27:50

it, the arm comes off, and they noticed a human

27:52

bone inside. Right, You thought,

27:54

wow, that's pretty realistic. Yeah,

27:56

And so they did a little more investigating and figured

27:58

out that it was a real corpse, a mummified,

28:01

embalmed human corpse that was actually

28:03

hanging in a fun house being

28:06

that people took as a dummy. Right, six million

28:08

dollar Man, Chuck, is this true? It

28:11

is true? Isn't that crazy? And it

28:13

doesn't in there because apparently the body,

28:16

the undertaker had done such a swell

28:18

job with the embalming process

28:20

that he put this body on display for a matter

28:22

of years, could pay a nickel to come see

28:25

this body. And then two

28:27

guys that worked for the amusement

28:30

park or no traveling carnival

28:32

disguise themselves as

28:35

what his brothers his brothers

28:37

to come claim the body, and they actually

28:39

stole the body and it traveled around the country,

28:41

eventually ending up in Long Beach.

28:44

Yes. What's even more amazing

28:46

is that we know whose body this is. Yes, we do.

28:48

It was a bank robbing bandit named

28:50

Elmer McCurdy who lived

28:53

out his violent career at the

28:55

about the turn of the last century,

28:57

early twentieth century. Uh.

28:59

He was killed in the shootout for forty

29:02

six bucks and two jugs of whiskey.

29:04

Uh. And like you said, the undertaker did

29:06

such a good job in balming him. He charged

29:08

people in nickel to come look at this bandit. Uh.

29:11

And that was that. So when they finally laid

29:14

him to rest, I think in like two

29:16

thousand six. Really, no, it

29:18

couldn't have been. No, No, it would have been a couple of

29:20

years after the six million dollar man thing in seventy

29:22

six. Okay. Um. They

29:25

they supposedly put cement over

29:27

his casket so that nobody could

29:30

dig him up and do the same thing all over

29:32

again. Yeah, true

29:34

story. Yeah. So Cracked actually has a

29:36

about eleven of them over the span of a

29:38

couple of articles. And then I saw other sites that said

29:40

they had real ones. But um, again,

29:43

you can't always believe everything. I don't know if I believe Cracked.

29:46

No, that's why I went and checked it out. It's snops

29:48

and they they had the same story, uh

29:51

different, slightly different, but all the facts

29:53

were the same, same name, same everything. Friend

29:55

of a friend. Yeah, is

29:57

that it? That's it man? I mean we

30:00

can go on urban life. Yeah, we could just could

30:02

be in eleven our podcast. Um,

30:04

but let's not make it that way. Now, if you

30:06

want to learn more about urban legends, you can

30:09

look it up in the handy search bart how stuffworks

30:11

dot com. Chuck, it's time for listener mint. Now. It's

30:13

not Josh what We are not going

30:16

to do listener mail today because we are going to

30:18

plug this thing like a finger and a

30:20

dike. So Chuck, go ahead, then, if

30:22

you're going to do that, let's do it well.

30:24

First of all, we want to plug the new science podcast

30:27

that we talked about for a while. And it is called

30:29

Stuff from the Science Lab with

30:31

our comrades. Robert Lamb, who you might

30:34

remember from doing me Rendition

30:37

the reading of the Jack the Ripper letter. Yeah

30:40

gotta, he doesn't do that voice in the podcast, so unfortunately.

30:43

And Alison, they do a great job with science e stuff.

30:45

Hell of in ea there. And we're going to plug

30:48

Strickland's podcast tech Stuff. Even though

30:50

he talks smack about us, he

30:52

really does. Then this we are going to plug

30:54

stuff he missed in history class with our colleagues.

30:57

Now Katie used to be Jane and Candice now it's

31:00

eighty and Sarah Dowdy full time. They

31:02

do a great job. And what

31:04

else do we have? High speed stuff?

31:07

Yeah, Scott and Ben Scott and Been do

31:09

a great auto podcast, very funny. Ben

31:11

and Matt also do stuff they

31:13

don't want you to know it video podcast

31:16

on conspiracies, which is awesome. Yeah,

31:18

Coolest Stuff on the Planet is another great travel

31:20

video podcast. And

31:22

what are what are we forgetting? Yeah, Sminty, our sminty

31:25

gals. Yeah, how can we forget? Sminty? Did you

31:27

see that email we accidentally got that was intended

31:29

for them? Today? Uh, stuff mom

31:31

never told you of course? Is uh the

31:35

some people liking it to the female version

31:37

of what we do. Yeah, they have a huge cult

31:39

following to do. They're great, they're really funny quality

31:42

stuff. Oh, of course there's stuff Genius

31:44

and brain Stuff, both of which a feature.

31:46

Are a Steam founder Marshall Brain

31:49

Yeah, and Stuff of Genius is really short. And if

31:51

you're into like cool monty python esque

31:53

graphics, don't like it. Yeah,

31:55

And of course there's the blogs always.

31:57

You can just type in the blogs at how stuff works

31:59

die com. Right, plug

32:02

fest is over. Plug Fest is over.

32:04

You haven't done in a while. If you want

32:06

to send us an email, we

32:09

probably will do reader mail

32:11

again right starting next week.

32:13

Okay, if you want to send us an email

32:16

on absolutely anything, you can wrap

32:18

it up and send it to stuff podcast

32:21

at how stuff works dot com.

32:27

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32:31

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