Lesson 4.

2: Urban Legends

Lesson Summary

Urban legends connect many generations together, uniting them in belief and shaping ideals. As
Filipinos, we love to add a little bit of lore in stories whether it is a ghost in abandoned schools or
crossing through a thick smoke after a funeral. We use urban legends and lore to ‘spice’ things
up. We use these urban legends as signs of precaution against harm and to somehow be at the
safer side of our superstitions.

Learning Outcomes
This lesson aims to awaken the student’s sense of community as we approach Urban Legends in
a critical lense. As we go on, we realise that Urban Legend somehow protects a shell of society
and also define traditions. Like passing an ancient knowledge to the young ones, students must
be reminded that they are the carrier of this stories and traditions. You will soon assume the
responsibility of retaining these colourful Filipino culture to another generation or let it be
forgotten.

Motivational Questions
Have you ever heard of any urban legends in our university like George? What is your favourite
episode of KMJS (Kapuso Mo, Jessica Soho) urban legend series? What are some of the revolving
urban legends within your province or communities?
Discussion

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When we talk about Urban Legends, we usually assign it as scary, macabre and events
that explore mysticism that could either be of superstition or tradition. Now, we will read an article
from CNN Philippines explaining the different angles of urban legend and its significant to our
sense of community.

Manila (CNN Philippines Life) — In October, Robinsons Galleria launched a new digital campaign
featuring actress Alice Dixson in an effort to advertise the mall’s recently renovated interiors. In the
ad, Dixson can be seen browsing through racks of clothing and walking into the fitting room to try
them on, but she feels as though she is being watched. A humanoid snake reveals itself — but it’s
actually just a child in a costume.

In a little over a month, the campaign has reached 2.3 million views and tens of thousands of likes,
comments, and shares on Facebook.

If parts of this story seem familiar to you, you’re not alone. The campaign makes a reference to a
decades-old urban legend which claims that the mall was a secret hideaway for “Robinson,”
supposed mutant son of John Gokongwei and twin brother of Robina Gokongwei-Pe. According to
the legend, Robinson hid out in the department store fitting rooms to prey on unsuspecting young
women, and certain versions state that he had attacked, or perhaps fallen in love with, Dixson
herself. Celebrities tend to be common elements of urban legends, after all — there’s Richard Gere’s
gerbil incident, and Lady Gaga’s secret life as a hermaphrodite.
“Urban legends are part of a broader concept that is folklore,” says Prof. Carlos P. Tatel, Jr.,
anthropologist and coordinator of the folklore studies program in the University of the Philippines.
Folklore has two root words: folk, which corresponds to people, and lore, which corresponds to
stories and narratives. “Put them together,” Tatel explains, “and it means ‘narratives [or] things
about a group of people.’”

Operationalized, he adds, the concept boils down to a knowledge of people: “What [they] do, their
daily lives, their ideas, their habits, behavior, rituals, even what’s on their minds. All of it make up
[the school of thought called] ‘kaalamang bayan.’”

Collective consciousness and creating culture

Specifically, urban legends are parts of “kaalamang bayan” that are rooted in urban areas and cities.
“The thing about urban legends is that they prove that folklore is not relegated to the rural area,”
Tatel says. “Folklore is common everywhere, whether it is rural or urban.” Regarding the dichotomy
of city and province, the legends counter or disprove the idea that there is a divide between rural
and urban sensibilities. Instead, Tatel explains, “there’s one continuous general consciousness of
the people.”

More often than not, by the time we hear an urban legend, because of the speed at which it spreads
and its wide reach, it will have become difficult to point out exactly where it came from and how it
started. It gets told over and over and repeated, as though an object in a game of telephone or pass
the message, and details are blurred and changed, resulting in different versions.

“Urban legends help you understand the nature of life, the nature of the people, of
collective consciousness, because [the urban setting] helps you understand city
norms and city life.” — Prof. Carlos P. Tatel, Jr.

“People will talk about it and some will remember what happened, and they will pass it on from one
generation to another, hanggang sa maging part of the collective consciousness,” Tatel explains.
“This is no different from other forms of culture na you don’t know when or where it started, pero
people just do it. In time, it becomes part of the culture.” This, he adds, makes urban legends a
factor of culture making.

The concept of a city is fairly recent, having existed within the past 200 years or so. Urban legends,
then, are fairly modern examples of folklore. Tatel says that common factors include “popular
culture, media, capitalists, buildings and transportation, crimes, [and other] elements that occur in
or are associated with a city.” A friend of a friend of a friend may have been injected with a syringe
along Recto, only to find a note that said, “Welcome to the HIV world.” Your mother may have told
you about Agapito Flores, the Filipino man who supposedly invented fluorescent lights. You may
have found yourself on Balete Drive, just waiting to catch a glimpse of a white lady in the rearview.

The making of a myth

The Robinsons Galleria story became mythical hearsay precisely because it’s set in a mall, which
has become a familiar part of life, if not a way of life, in Filipino municipalities.
Tatel and Dax Carnay, creative director of advertising agency Echochannels which produced the
Dixson campaign, are both familiar with the urban legend, and each had his own recollection of
having heard of it.

Tatel, who was in high school at the time, attributes its beginnings to good, old-fashioned
commercial rivalry. “You can say that it’s just a way to undermine the success of Robinsons [by
other malls], kasi may competition, and it caught on.” In a way, this tactic seemed to have worked
for Carnay, who was in elementary school when he heard it, as he remembers that “people wouldn’t
even go to Galleria because we were scared it was actually true.”

Another urban legend that appears to have been brought about by attempts to ruin a business is
the rumor that Chinese food, specifically siopao, contains cat meat. The success of Ma Mon Luk,
one of the country’s pioneering modern Chinese restaurants, became a catalyst for others to open
restaurant of their own. Ivan Man Dy, who leads walking tours of Binondo, Manila’s food culture
called the Big Binondo Food Wok, told Pepper.ph that the “siomeow” myth may have come from
their efforts to bring Ma Mon Luk down. Kowloon House, which also rose in popularity in the ‘90s,
suffered from similar hearsay. In the same article, the Philippine Food and Drug Administration
confirmed that inspections were conducted at Chinese restaurants, and no traces of cat meat were
ever found.

Part of the reasoning behind the persistence of this rumor is the stereotype that Chinese
immigrants are “cheap” and would prefer to slaughter stray cats than spend on real meat. Fact-
checking website Snopes states that the cat meat urban legend has been found to have been
around since “the earliest years of the British Empire in England and to the 1850s in the United
States,” and even then, it was arguably rooted in racist and xenophobic notions, perpetuated by the
difference in cultures between China and other countries.

As a historical figure, Jose Rizal is also the subject of a few strange myths. One such story
supposes that he may have been the biological father of Adolf Hitler, following a one-night tryst in
Germany or Austria. However, accounts of Rizal’s travels across Europe prove this false, as he was
in London and then France at the time of Hitler’s conception and birth between 1888 and 1889.

Rizal’s time in London is tied to an even more interesting possibility — that he was notorious serial
killer Jack the Ripper, who struck fear and panic in the city when he was staying there. In historian
Ambeth Ocampo’s book “Looking Back 5: Rizal’s Teeth, Bonifacio’s Bones,” he writes about this
legend, noting that Rizal made a passing reference to Jack the Ripper in an essay on the Guardia
Civil for La Solidaridad.

Theorists reasoned that Rizal was roughly the same height (“Jack” stood no more than 5’7”), had a
mustache, was around the same age, and even had the same initials. Jack the Ripper killed victims
with surgical precision, giving investigators the impression that the menace may have been a
doctor, and Rizal was a doctor, as well. Most interesting is the fact that the killings are believed to
have ceased at the same time that Rizal left London.

Lore in the time of social media

Perhaps one of the most well-known local urban legends in the Philippines is that of the above
mentioned white lady on Balete Drive, which dates back to at least the 1950s. A story published in
a newspaper in the mid-2000s purports that the myth was fabricated by a reporter in the ‘50s to
make for an interesting story, combining multiple accounts.

This reporter may have been Neal H. Cruz, who wrote in the Philippine Inquirer about his experiences
investigating Balete Drive. A “friend” of the white lady shared that she was actually a victim of a hit-
and-run; a lost soul looking for revenge. He also interviewed a police captain who said he picked up
a hitchhiking woman wearing all-white, only to find that she had disappeared into thin air at the end
of the street.

The police captain’s story has become a common iteration of the urban legend; only today, it’s most
attributed to taxi drivers on night shifts. In a modern spin, a Grab passenger now claims that her
driver was dropping off a passenger at Robinsons Magnolia, only for her to vanish once they pass
Balete Drive. There were supposedly records of unpaid transactions with routes along Balete Drive.
Though one has to wonder, however, how a ghost can even create a Grab account.

“Sometimes, people spread stories because they're interesting, not necessarily

because they’ve been verified to be true. In social media where likes and shares are
a currency, urban legends and fabricated stories will inevitably arise.” — Mac
Arboleda

In the early days of the internet, urban legends would be diligently and routinely passed along as
“warnings” through forwarded emails. In the age of Twitter threads and Facebook posts, the viral
nature of hearsay has only intensified. Various classic urban legends have actually begun popping
up again and gaining thousands of interactions on Twitter, from the sperm cell in one student’s
tissue sample in class to the kiss with a necrophiliac that results in body horror.

It can be said that it’s now much easier for such stories to get out of hand. Case in point: You may
have heard that religious groups protested and demanded the cancellation of The Killers’ concert
in Manila in 2013 because of their band name. But the truth of it was that it was a satirical Facebook
post meant only for a small group of people to see and laugh at.

“It was mostly inspired by the absurdity of the actual protests that happened when Lady Gaga did
a concert here,” says Mac Arboleda, who wrote and posted the fake article. He had done it to poke
fun and to point out what a ridiculous idea it was, but when his friends began commenting, he
realized that they actually believed it. “The entire time I really thought they would understand that
it’s a joke, but apparently not.”

The post reached nearly 3,000 shares overnight, and it was even picked up by news sites and other
websites.

Arboleda eventually used the event as a basis for his undergraduate thesis, which revolved around
online audiences and satirical news. “With social media, it’s so much easier now to spread
misinformation,” he says. “But many people still lack the literacy needed to be able to distinguish
[what’s] satire from what’s not, the motivation to read entire articles, etc. Being familiar with current
news also helps, and the problem with people who aren’t aware of what’s happening around them
could easily be fooled by stories that are even just a tiny bit believable.”
And as with most urban legends, details are constantly being blurred the more it’s passed on —
especially online, where knee-jerk reactions have become a normal part of the conversation.

“Sometimes, people spread stories because they're interesting, not necessarily because they’ve
been verified to be true,” Arboleda adds. “In social media where likes and shares are a currency,
urban legends and fabricated stories will inevitably arise.”

Making sense of the world

Tatel posits that if urban legends reveal anything about us and our customs, it’s that “we are indeed
a very folkloric people.” It’s ingrained in our beliefs, our culture, and how we interact with the world
around us. “[Folk tales] did not leave us when we supposedly became more modernized or
urbanized. They’re a part of our lives.” He adds that folklore, by nature, is passed down orally —
keeping the story alive and sustaining it by continuing to tell it.

“Urban legends aren’t just stuff that we hear; they create a world that we [don’t necessarily] see,”
Carnay says. “They stick with us because we learn about them when we’re kids, trying to figure out
the world.” Eventually, we outgrow these beliefs, but he says that the wonder never really goes away.
“You choose to believe [or hold on to it] because it’s more interesting. It makes our lives interesting
as people.”

According to Tatel, however, urban legends also have social relevance beyond giving us tales to tell
around a campfire: “Urban legends help you understand the nature of life, the nature of the people,
of collective consciousness, because [the urban setting] helps you understand city norms and city
life,” he says. “They help you understand society better.”

Urban legend is story that has humor and caution elements mixed in it. It is spread to its
readers/consumers as a true event, but evidence is not available to prove the story’s claim. Its
elements of humor and caution are important part of it. The combination of these elements show
that urban legend sets a standard of morals.

The article is informative. It shares the definition of urban legend, its characteristics, and
its origins. It also emphasizes that urban legend is new and city-invented. Another thing
mentioned in the article is the fact that urban legend has paved its way to Filipinos because of
economic reasons and social reasons. First, the Robinson monster integrated itself in the lives of
Filipinos because of the big part of malls in the Philippines. Second, urban legends are used for
marketing purposes. Third, some urban legends came about because of racism and other
negative factors.

In the article, media has had a great influence in spreading urban legends in the
Philippines. One example in the article is the creation of the story “Balete drive”. Cautionary tales
have spread even more because of Facebook and other over the top warnings. Many shared them
out of humor.

As a conclusion, urban legends are not only stories. They represent a culture of a society.