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From: Paul Tomblin <ab401@freenet.carleton.ca>
Subject: Just found this...
Date: Tue, 5 Jul 1994 16:52:33 -0400 (EDT)

I just found this while cleaning up my directory, and thought it might be worth while archiving it on cathouse.

Newsgroups: alt.folklore.urban
From: ag955@Freenet.carleton.ca (Francine Dube)
Subject: Ottawa Urban Legends
Organization: The National Capital Freenet

This story ran on Sun., Oct. 17, 1993, in the Ottawa Citizen: Thanks to all who helped me with it.

Beacon Hill is in Gloucester, an Ottawa suburb

>From The Ottawa Citizen

By Francine Dube
Ottawa Citizen social trends writer

The Inuit don't have 30 words for snow. Hair and nails do not continue to grow after death. It is not illegal to drive barefoot. And the story about the child abducted at the Price Club _ that isn't true either.
They're stories rooted in folklore and urban legend, and they're busily being debunked in Cyberspace. Armed with books, news stories and scientific studies, people like Ottawa civil engineer Paul Tomblin are using the latest in computer technology to expose tall tales.
They're logging into FreeNet, Ottawa's electronic community billboard. From there they gain access international billboards. A few keystrokes later, they're in the newsgroup alt.folklore.urban, or AFU.
There they fire off proof that what sounds too weird to be true often is too weird to be true.
Tomblin, 32, became hooked as a student when he was assigned the task of discussing and debunking some famous structural legends. Like the one about the school library sinking into the ground because the architect forgot to factor in the weight of the books when he designed the building.
He's been monitoring AFU for more than two years and claims personal responsibility for debunking, at least on Usenet, the legend that you can't pick trilliums in Ontario. "It's a fun group. There's a lot of playfulness in the group," says Tomblin. "It's a chance to feel superior, maybe that's the appeal."
Topics on the newsgroup include the The Misappliance of Science, Stupid Academia Tricks, Stupid People Tricks, Kill Your Television, and unprintable legends about sex and the relevant body parts. About 70,000 people worldwide read AFU. Even urban legend expert Jan Harold Brunvand, a professor of English and folklore at the University of Utah, and author of several books on the subject, doesn't know where particular urban legends spring up. What is known is that they migrate with remarkable _ and in the computer and fax age _ increasing speed. Some urban myths are decades old, changing only enough to suit the times. Typically they are funny or horrifying. Often they teach a lesson.

They may come from across the continent, but they are usually localized. It always happened to a friend of a friend, who when called will admit that, well, actually it happened to the friend of another friend. But it's definitely true.

Like the one about the kid at the Price Club. A mother shopping with her child suddenly realizes her baby has been taken. The store is immediately sealed. Security guards search for the child while shoppers stand by. Soon child and abductor are tracked down in the men's room, where the child's blond hair has been dyed brown and cut short. The child's clothes have been replaced with a completely different outfit.

Then, of course, comes the final, blood-chilling sentence: Only five minutes had gone by since the mother noticed her child was missing.

Local police have never heard of such an attempted abduction.

"They're a means of transmitting warnings, they are a way of communicating wise modes of behavior," says Terry Chan, a California economist who has been maintaining the list for two or three years.

In the time that he's been monitoring AFU, Chan has seen two trends in the types of stories being circulated. The first was an abundance of legends relating to AIDS. The best-known is probably the woman who has sex with a stranger to find the words "Welcome to the world of AIDS" scrawled on the hotel room mirror in the morning.

Lately, says Chan, legends about initiations for gang members have been popular. The most recent one to hit Ottawa concerns gang members who drive around at night with their car lights turned off. To earn entry into the gang, novices have to shoot the driver of the first car who flashes his headlights at them. Sends chills down your spine, except no one has turned up a documented case.

Sometimes urban legends even make it into the newspaper. Several years ago, the Citizen ran a story about a woman in Tel Aviv who killed a cockroach in the bathroom by spraying it much too enthusiastically with insecticide. Her husband came home, went to the bathroom and, while there, lit a cigarette. The toilet exploded, and the paramedics who arrived to take the man to hospital laughed so hard when told what happened that they dropped him on the stairs, causing him further injury.

Reuters, the news service that carried the story, says it's too late now to be able to check whether the story was true. It ran in 1988.

But it's described as legend in two of Brunvand's books. Newfoundland folklorist Philip Hiscock says the exploding toilet legend has been around for at least 20 years.

He says the same story also ran in the Globe and Mail, on the CBC national news and on the front page of the St. John's Evening Telegram.

At 20 years old, the exploding toilet isn't even close to being the oldest legend around. A variation of "Welcome to the World of AIDS," can be found in Daniel Defoe's book, A Journal of the Plague Year, published in 1722, says Hiscock.

In that incarnation a man with the plague embraces an unsuspecting woman, infecting her with black death.

Sometimes, local folklore springs up, like the Ottawa belief that there are seven women for every man in this city. Actually there are about seven extra women for every 100 men in Ottawa, and in some age groups there are more men than women.

Not surprisingly, there are a lot of Ottawa tall tales concerning political figures and embassy officials, like the one about the wife of an ambassador living in Rockcliffe who gets dumped. Her husband, vacationing with his mistress, sends his wife a telegram asking her to sell the Mercedes and send him the proceeds. She puts an ad in the paper and sells the car to the first person who comes to look at it _ for $50.

And of course, everyone has a friend who has an older brother or sister who went to school with rocker Bryan Adams or actor Tom Cruise.

For the record, we know that Cruise attended Robert Hopkins primary school and Henry Munro Middle School, both in Beacon Hill, for Grades 4 through part of Grade 7, during the early 70s. Friends knew him then as Thomas Cruiser Mapother IV. Adams, who was Bruce Adams at the time, attended Henry Munro in 1973-74, when he was in Grade 8.

Chan says debunking an urban legend is often as simple as making two or three phone calls. Several people active on the billboard have a lot of technical or scientific knowledge and expertise. Many more myths can be debunked by simply scanning one of Brunvand's several collections of urban legends.

Debunking the myth that it's illegal to drive barefoot required two calls _ one to the OPP and another to Ottawa police.

Sometimes the legends contain a kernel of truth. The Inuit language doesn't have 30 words for snow. But it is a language in which the meaning of whole phrases can be expressed in a single compound word. So you can have an endless variety of compound words describing snow. That doesn't mean you have an endless number of words for snow.

Other folklore can't be conclusively proven or disproven. For example, it is believed to be false that if everyone in China screamed at the same time, people in North America could hear it, but try organizing the experiment to prove it. Others are false with a proviso. Hair and nails do not grow after death, but they appear to as the corpse shrinks.

Debunking urban legends won't kill them off, says Hiscock, because even for the debunkers, the fun is in the telling, and new ones are constantly springing up. Hiscock himself has used AFU to track the movement of legends.

Urban legends can be easy to spot, says Chan. For one thing, they often contain gaps in logic or suspicious coincidences.

Take the story of "The Hook." A girl and a boy go necking in lover's lane. On the radio, they hear that a homocidal maniac with a hook for a hand has escaped from custody.

Scared, the girl asks the boy to drive her home. He is angry, but he speeds away to her house. When he comes around the side of the car to open the door to let her out, he notices a hook hanging from the door handle on the passenger side.

Too much coincidence, too unbelievable. How many men will get out of a car to open a door for a woman passenger, especially if they're really peeved?

Some of the myths are so bizarre it's a wonder anyone believed them, and others so weird you wonder how they can be true.

A guinea pig's eyes will not fall out if you hold him by his tail. But some airplane-engine manufacturers do test planes by firing chickens from special cannons. Fin-de-siecle Frenchman, Petomane, did get rich farting as a music hall act.

Then there are the myths you wish were true. Like the male athlete who cheats on a drug test by submitting a urine sample from his wife. The test shows he's pregnant.