You Wouldn't Believe This...

You Wouldn’t Believe It If You Heard It… Or Maybe You Would



This is a warning from the Florida Biological Health Association. A young boy was rushed to the Tallahassee Emergency Room. Over a dozen bleeding bites covered his anus and legs. He received them from the Haemadipsa keenelis, a vicious species of leech smuggled from South America into the United States. The boy yelled for his parents from their bathroom. When mom and dad came in, they gasped at the leeches crawling inside and under the toilet bowl. Be on the lookout, the Haemadipsa keenelis are a particularly dangerous species with the second largest leech teeth in the world. Biologists say that it is possible that they have invaded Tallahassee’s sewage system. Tell your friends and family to keep an eye out for any signs of leeches in restrooms.

“Urban legends really are the modern myth,” says Jim Evans, a self-proclaimed urban legend connoisseur. “They are stories with a fantastical element to it, passed by word of mouth without any verifiable sources. What’s funny is that if you circulate it long enough, people will believe it’s true.”

Jim Evans writes for online publications. He comes up with story ideas on his own but finds urban legends helpful to writing. An army brat from Germany, he knows a vast number of urban legends that not only originate from America and Europe, but around the world as well. Whenever he would like to write a funny or frightening story he can use an urban legend from his memory or he searches snopes.com for new ones.

“What’s interesting is that they’re indicative of the times.” Urban legends do share common themes, from babysitter murders in the 50s and 60s, to Bigfoot and UFOs in the 70s, even superstitions of the thirteenth floor in hotels; one that is so widely feared that most hotels do not include a thirteenth floor.

Urban legends tend to go through one ear and out the other nowadays. In fact, most people don’t know it. In an age where we have access to Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, and Email it’s hard to keep up with the information that friends, family, and spammers throw our way. Indeed, it’s equally hard to ignore the subject lines THAT SCREAM AT YOU IN CAPITAL LETTERS WITH EXTRA EXCLAMATION MARKS TELLING YOU TO READ THIS!!!!!! With a feeling of urgency generated by the title we open the mail or post and fall head first into a chain letter.

“The way it used to be was “a friend of a friend told me’,” Evans says. “But we don’t talk about a friend of a friend anymore.”

Many urban legends, especially chain letters, take the form of cautionary tales. They blend the familiar and the impossible together to make the reader wonder and are usually told to instill a moral or a lesson. They teach these lessons mainly through fear, the stories contain serial killers, ghostly hauntings, or animals that have a basis in reality but are given outrageous elements to enhance fear. Another form of chain letter is religious in nature, usually containing a doctored photograph. It seeks to inspire belief, however, as is the case of all chain letters, its main purpose is to spread and often the religious chain letters use fear. “Send this to twenty-five friends or you will have good or bad luck,” they often say. Needless to say, they’ve made their way into pop culture in indirect ways. The most obvious are in horror films like The Ring, a curse that involves duplicating and sending a videotape in order to save the viewer, and the more obvious upcoming movie Chain Letter, a movie that will involve a serial killer that murders victims if they don’t forward his chain letters.

It’s a wonder that people don’t pick up on the tell tale signs of urban legends: “I heard this from a friend of a friend”, the false details, even the plot is perfectly structured to fit the tale. In the example above, each piece of information is completely relevant to the story. There is often no input from those involved, in fact the details such as the name, time, and place are either omitted or too vague.

Perhaps it’s the age we live in. The Information Age is buzzing with facts and news in every medium, and people are blasted with an onslaught of information everyday from multiple news sources with different biases. Indeed many or, some would say, all news stories on some level are false due to these biases. It’s difficult to disbelieve that the Florida Biological Health Association is false. The average reader of the Internet skims through paragraphs of information, their eyes have trained themselves to pick out the most relevant and sensational details. If the reader would just do their research into these chain letters, they would find that sewers would be inhospitable for leeches and alligators, or that you would have to drink about a gallon of saliva to get AIDs from someone’s mouth. But those knowledgeable of urban legends like Jim Evans can sift through the muck to find the true stories. Storytelling has been around since humans could communicate and everyone enjoys a good tale, be it frightening, inspirational, sensational, or hilarious. Be honest, the toilet leeches got you hooked didn’t they. If the story was left at that, don’t deny it, you would have probably told your family and friends. Given time though you might see the story again in a novel. Perhaps written by Jim Evans.