ANestof Vipers Perspectiveson Contemporary Legend V

A Nest of Vipers
PERSPECTIVES ON CONTEMPORARY LEGEND
Volume V
A NEST OF VIPERS
PERSPECTIVES ON
CONTEMPORARY LEGEND V
edited by
GILLIAN BENNETI
and
PAUL SMITH
(@) __s_h_e_ff_ie_I_d_A_c_a_d_e_rn_i_c_P_re_s_s
In memory of our colleague and friend
Charlotte Norman
Copyright© 1990 Sheffield Academic Press
Published by Sheffield Academic Press Ltd

The University of Sheffield
343 Fulwood Road
Sheffield S10 3BP
England
for
The International Society for Contemporary Legend Research
in association with
The Centre for English Cultural Tradition and Language
Cover illustration and production of camera-ready

copy by Gillian Bennett. Cover illustration based on
a design by M.C. Escher.
Printed in Great Britain

by BPCC Wheatons Ltd
Exeter
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A nest of vipers: perspectives on contemporary legend,

volume 5.-(Perspectives on contemporary legend,
ISSN 0955-8691; 5)
1. Tales
I. Bennett, Gillian II. Smith, Paul S. (Paul Stefan)
1947- III. International Society for Contemporary
Legend Research IV. University of Sheffield, Centre for
English Cultural Tradition and Language V. Series
ISBN 1-85075-256-7
CONTENTS
Preface 7
Acknowledgements 9
Veronique Campion- Vincent

Viper-Release Stories: A Contemporary French Legend 11
Frances Cattermole-Tally
Male Fantasy or Female Revenge?:
A Look at Modern Rape Legends 41
Christie Davies
'Nasty' Legends, 'Sick' Humour and
Ethnic Jokes about Stupidity 49
William S. Fox
The Roommate's Suicide and the 4.0 69
Mark Glazer
The Contexts of the Contemporary Legend:
'The Vanishing Hitchhiker' and 'Gravity Hill' 77
Michael Goss
The Halifax Slasher and Other 'Urban Maniac' Tales 89
Paul Smith
'Aids: Don't Die of Ignorance':
Exploring the Cultural Complex 113
Eleanor Wachs
The Mutilated Shopper at the Mall:
A Legend of Urban Violence 143
About the Contributors 161

PREFACE
A Nest of Vipers is the fifth volume in the Perspectives on
Contemporary Legend series and features a selection of the
papers presented at the fifth and sixth International Seminars
on Contemporary Legend held in Sheffield, 1987 and 1988.
Initiated in 1982 and now hosted jointly by the Centre for
English Cultural Tradition and Language (CECTAL) at the
University of Sheffield and the International Society for
Contemporary Legend Research (ISCLR), these informal
gatherings provide a forum where participants can present
research findings and test out new ideas. At these conferences
participants expect to pool their knowledge about this almost
virgin research area. While these exchanges are convivial,
participation in the individual seminars can be, and frequently
is, hard work, debate and constructive criticism being the order
of the day.
Participants are also always aware that contemporary
legends are difficult to define, not only in terms of the accepted
canon of narratives, but also from the point of view of form and
structure, function and context. Consequently, to open up a
discussion about the nature of the genre can be likened to
putting one's hand into a nest of vipers. Hence the title of this
volume .
The choice of title also reflects the grim nature of the
subject matter covered in this volume. Unusually for the
Perspectives series, the volume contains no purely theoretical
essays but concentrates on the presentation of case-studies of
particular legends. And all the legends it features are about the
darker side of life in the 1980s. Here we have stories of physical
assault (Cattermole-Tally, Goss and Wachs), verbal attacks
(Davies and Smith), suicide and death (Fox and Glazer), and
conspiracy (Campion-Vincent). In general, though the contents
of the papers make for depressing reading, the analysis and
8
interpretations offered by the contributors should help advance

our knowledge and understanding of the world around us.
As organizers of these meetings and editors of the series of
publications, we realize that it is not the extent of the consensus
which ensures success, but rather the depth of the debate. In
this selection of papers, we hope to give some idea of the spirit of
both the debate and the scholarship. If you would like to join us
for future seminars, or if you would like further information
abut the work of ISCLR, please write to Professor Keith
Cunningham, Corresponding Secretary ISCLR, Box 5705,
Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff, AZ 66011, USA.
Gillian Bennett and Paul Smith

Sheffield November 1989.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The success of any event lies with all those who helped to
organize it and all those who participated. Consequently, there
are very many people to whom thanks are due for their
contribution towards this book-perhaps too many to
acknowledge adequately. As always, however, particular
thanks must go to the tolerant staff of Halifax Hall, especially
the Hall Manager, Alan Walker, who looked after conference
participants so well, and to the long-suffering office-staff at
CECTAL-Beryl Moore, Syndonia Donelly and Jean
Alexander-without whom nothing is ever possible. Special
thanks are also due to Andrew Bennett and Cathy Rickey for
technical assistance, patience and innumerable cups of tea.
Last, but by no means least, we would like to thank the
members of ISCLR for their support and the contributors to this
volume, whose courtesy, tolerance and patience with their
editors knew no bounds.
Thank you all!

VIPER-RELEASE STORIES: A
CONTEMPORARY FRENCH LEGEND
V eronique Campion-Vincent
The Story
No, Fernand Roques did not see the parachute. He was

driving the harvester .. . . He understood very well that
Christian Mallaurie was watching something in the sky. It
was noon . Christian Mallaurie saw that Thierry Dumas
saw too .... Anyhow it doesn't matter because amongst
those who have seen, it is Thierry who saw best .... He even
told everything to Radio-South:
'The plane circled for twenty minutes and all of a
sudden I saw a thing floating in the air, a sort of dirigible
balloon the shape of a sock. It was over a metre long and
descended softly on the Causse [plateau]. There was a sort
of box suspended underneath. Ten metres over the soil
there was a burst. I can't tell you what kind of noise it was,
my moped was running and I heard nothing. It must be a
system to free the vipers from the box.'
Vipers, the word has been dropped incidentally, at
the corner of a sentence, like an evident assumption. Of
course, that day, Thierry did not see any vipers and he is
not the type of guy to say he has seen what he has not seen.
But in the villages that hear Radio-South nobody flinched,
everyone knows that ecologists rent planes to release vipers
upon the French open country.
'From where come those snakes that jump over our heads,'
Liberation (11 August, 1981).
When I started in October, 1987, to search systematically

for information about viper-release rumours, I knew only a few
points about this story. People declared that they had seen boxes
of vipers being dropped from planes or helicopters so that they
12 Campion-Vincent Viper-Release Stories
could be released in the wild. But who· were the pilots? Some
people said they were ecologists, who were doing it in order to
help an endangered species or to provide food for birds of prey;
others said it was the pharmaceutical laboratories that were
responsible, and that they were doing it in order to ensure an
ample supply of snake venom from which to prepare a
protective serum.
At that time, I viewed the rumour as current from 1980
till 1985. I had two sources of information: first, a few pages of
commentary in Rumeursl (which suggested that the plane or
helicopter symbolized how far away the ecologists were from
the real needs of the rural areas they wanted to help); secondly,
the zestful Liberation article already cited (whose title 'From
where come those snakes that jump over our heads?'
paraphrases Racine's famous alliterative verse in Andromaque,
'For whom are those snakes that hiss over our heads,') stresses
that the stories are eye-witness accounts (a regular
characteristic of the rumours), and also alludes to a decree
protecting vipers and to the reactions of the local authorities to
the complaints of the population. Like most of the general
public, I was quite ignorant about the legislation which protects
animal life, so I asked the Department of the Environment for
information. In the office of a branch of the Division for the
Protection of Nature, I obtained the text of the protection decree
and was also shown a small file, neatly labelled 'Release of
Vipers,' which contained letters accusing the Department of the
Environment of organizing the releases.
Of sixteen letters, eight were dated 1986 or 1987. The
rumour was far from dead, as I had supposed, and a new culprit
had appeared: Government Officials . From my further
researches in the Department of the Environment's files, I got a
better understanding both of the obstacles faced in attempts to
enforce the protection legislation of 1979 and of the social
groups active in the field of nature protection. I met many
ecologists who stressed the hostility in rural areas between local
ecologists and hunters, who are a powerful force in France with
1,800,000 licence holders.2 The idea that hunters were probably
the originators and transmitters of variants of viper-release
stories which blamed ecologists was very popular amongst the
people I interviewed.
Campion-Vincent Viper-Release Stories 13
I also met intellectuals, social anthropologists linked to

National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) who generally
sympathized with the ecological approach. Two of them-who
did not know each other-were convinced that viper-releases
were organized in the Cevennes National Park, where the
National Park authority has released vultures, beavers, stags
and deer in the wild, though not, of course, vipers. Among this
group of people, it was the National Parks and Reserves who
were branded as responsible for viper-releases.
Next, therefore, I contacted the Federation of French
Natural Parks and, with their help, sent out a small
questionnaire asking if they had been accused of releasing
vipers. Their answers showed that the story was already
current in 1977. It could not, as I thought at first, have been only
a reaction to the protective legislation of 1979.
I was not helped by the Herpetological Society, based at the
Museum of Natural History, which I also contacted. Its
President had himself sponsored a study of viper-release stories
by a young social anthropologist and therefore refused to
receive me or to answer any questions; this respectable scientist
had an exclusive conception of _information, and the young
social anthropologist was forbidden to meet me or exchange
information. A first-year psychology student from Lyons
University, however, had prepared a memoir on viper-release
stories from October to December, 1987. She kindly sent me a
copy of her research, which was a valuable help.3
It would seem that the story started around 1976, invaded
the national press on a big scale in 1981, and raged till 1985. It is
still current in 1988, but has since evolved . Its main motifs
remain quite stable:
(i) Vipers have been seen in unusually large numbers and
this is proof that they have been intentionally released.
(ii) Planes or helicopters have been sighted dropping the
animals.
(iii) Wrappings (boxes, bags, parachutes, and so on) have been
found and are considered proof that vipers are released.
(iv) New varieties of vipers have been found which are
different from the usual specimens of the region and
characterized by a different colour (red or brown), shape
(bigger or smaller), and behaviour (more ferocious). This

is a minor motif.
The reasons given for the releases vary according to the
category of person accused of releasing them:
(i) Pharmaceutical laboratories are said to reintroduce
vipers because they want an abundant supply of raw
material from which to prepare the serum that cures
snake-bites. Furthermore, if there are many vipers, they
will sell more serum.
(ii) Ecologists and Officials of the Department of the
Environment and Natural Parks are said to release vipers
in order to preserve a natural equilibrium. Vipers are thus
reintroduced to destroy some animals (rodents) or to be
destroyed by others (buzzards) and thus feed them.
Ecologists and officials also want to help an endangered
species, extending to vipers the protection they already
afford to birds ofprey.
Table I in the Appendix, an informal poll conducted amongst
psychology and history students of Lyons University in
November, 1987, confirms this presentation of the story.4
Since it first appeared, the story has evolved. At first it
always referred to planes or helicopters and the releases were
mainly blamed on ecologists, with pharmaceutical laboratories
a strong second. Since then, though planes or helicopters are still
important, they have become less common features, and
officials have replaced pharmaceutical laboratories as the
second biggest culprit. The narrative content has diminished
and there are fewer eye-witness accounts; yet, for a large
section of the public, it has now become a matter of 'fact' that
vipers are intentionally released on a large scale. Tables II to IV
in the Appendix indicate the places where my research shows
the rumour has been heard. This work is still in progress: the
figures should therefore be interpreted with caution.
Related Stories
(i) Viper-releases are presented as one instance of a much

wider practice. Thus, in interviews, people talking about viper-
release will often switch abruptly from vipers to other pests:
They put back plenty of broken boxes [of vipers]. They talked
about it on radio, ies disgusting.
Some try to protect themselves from others who
empty them from the sky. It is the same with foxes: hunters
destroy them then bring back whole carloads of them. It is
the same with buzzards, they are ringed. 5
(ii) Related to this anxiety about wildlife reintroductions are

the frequent 'sightings' of phantom big cats. This cycle of stories
deserves independent study, but is nevertheless worth a brief
mention here. The phenomenon is fairly common in France
(Creuse, 1982; Pas de Calais, 1986; Var, 1987) and also in
Britain ('The Surrey Puma,' 'The Exmoor Beast' and so on).
(iii) In 1981, in South-West France, another viper story shook
the region. It was a variant of the legend of the 'Department-
Store Snakes:' the victim is a young child who goes to play on a
merry-go-round set in a shopping mall while the aged relative
who accompanies him/her is shopping. The child dies from an
undetected viper's bite, the merry-go-round having concealed a
nest of seven vipers. In the summer of 1981, the story emptied
supermarkets throughout the region. It did not reach the press,
but it was publicized in a radio programme about rumours
which was broadcast in March, 1982.6 The later variants of
1982 and 1983 from East and Southern France specified that
both the murderous snake and the product in which it was
hidden (bananas, Teddy bears) were of exotic origin. It is
interesting to note that I found out about this latter viper story
because some of my ecologist interviewees compared this 'true
incident' with the 'untrue stories' of viper releases. In this form,
however, the rumour seems to be dead.
The Context
In this part of the essay, I will outline the con texts in which the
story has developed.
First, in sections (1) to (3), I shall describe the status of
vipers and snakes. For almost nine years now, snakes species
have been protected in France. However, that protection is
difficult to enforce, especially in the case of venomous snakes,
for they are not only frightening and fascinating, but they have
also been commercially exploited.
Secondly, in section (4), I shall describe the wildlife
preservation groups and their strategies; then, in sections (5) to
(8), indicate some practices which might have reinforced
(though they cannot have created) belief in the story; and, in
section (9), examine the new cultural attitudes to which the
viper-release stories might appeal.
Finally, section ( 10) will summarize the importance of ·
these contexts.
1. Status of Vipers and Snakes: Protected

Since 1979, buying, selling, showing or transporting reptiles and
amphibians has been forbidden by law. Destruction is permitted
only for a few frog species, and for the two commonest
poisonous snakes, Vipera Aspis and Vipera Berus. This
legislation was laid down at the same time as other decrees
protecting birds, mammals and molluscs .
Birds of prey have been protected since 1962, the
legislation concerning them being strengthened in 1972. For all
protected species, dispensations allowing transport or capture
can be given by the administration for scientific reasons. All
institutions which keep or exhibit protected animals , however,
must be registered and authorized.
These decrees were additional measures to the 1976 Act
for the Protection of Nature, initial article of which stated that:
The protection of natural spaces and landscapes, the

preservation of animal and vegetable species, the
maintenance of the ecological equilibrium in which they
participate and the protection of natural resources against
all causes of degradation that threaten them are of general
interest.
This Act is an important measure, because it explicitly sets out a

new relationship between man and nature, where man is no
longer considered to be the master, entitled to exploit and
transform at will, but is viewed as the guardian and preserver
of the environment. 7
However, the new protected status of vipers runs counter

to the popular perception of vipers as dangerous pests.
Previously, the destruction of vipers had been rewarded by the
administration: in 1979 many local assemblies conseils
generaux operating at the departement level still offered small
rewards to anybody bringing dead vipers to the mayors. After
the passing of the new legislation, the Prefets wrote to the
Department of the Environment asking whether the reward
was still legal: the answer was a firm 'no.' In an interesting
letter, the Prefet of Vendee, south of Britanny, explained that
the local assembly had just refused to suppress the reward-a
negligible 1 franc per animal, which nevertheless had resulted
in the capture and death of 6,000 snakes in the departement of
Vendee in 1979.8
2. Status of Vipers and Snakes: Frightening and Fascinating

Feared animals fascinate: all sorts of folk traditions exist about
vipers (as about many other snakes), and malevolent symbols
are made of their supposed fantastic habits. The following are a
selection of such popular beliefs:
First, there are a set of traditions that depict snakes as
close to mankind, and deeply interested in their whereabouts.
Snakes are said to like milk; to milk cows in the pastures, and
even women in their sleep. Snakes are supposed to enter the
human body and pollute it, perhaps by laying their eggs in
babies' stomachs. The only way to get them out is to offer them a
jar of hot milk to entice them from the human body.9
Secondly, vipers are thought to be aggressive and able to
jump to prodigious heights. When surprised, they bite their tail
with their teeth and wheel upon their prey. Their sexual habits
are aggressive too. The female is said to cut the male's head and
swallows it during mating: in turn, she is killed by her young
who bite their way out of their mother's womb.lO
Thirdly, literary metaphors of the human condition-
chained by sexuality and greed-have been drawn from the
vipers' knots which the animals can form in the springtime. I I
Fourthly, linked to the venomous powers of the snake are
its supposed curative ones. Vipers were important in folk
remedies: the celebrated theriaque in antiquity and the middle
ages was made from viper's flesh and, later, viper's fat (not
equivalent to the cure-all American rattle-snake oil, but very

popular in rural 19th-century southern France):
The viper has been considered in ancient times as an active

medication useful in many illnesses . . . Its flesh is
sometimes, by old doctors, prescribed as broth ... it is still
widely used in France, to such an extent that the supply of
French vipers is inadequate and that vipers are imported
from Italy at considerable expense . . . In the South of
France, each peasant has viper's fat in stock, considered as
a marvellous remedy against snake-bite.
Grand Larousse Encyclopedique (1876),

'Vi peres,' p. 1097.
Fifthly, a viper preserved in a bottle of alcohol is a common

trophy in many rural French homes, and is used to adorn the
windows of many pharmacists, herbalists or taxidermists. The
alcohol, called Viperine, is a local delicacy offered in many
French restaurants. It is also a good remedy against
rheumatism, as an article published in an animal-lovers'
magazine affirms:
A few miles from Lons-le Saulnier, in the small village of

Vincelles, Jura, Rene Dalloz has a unusual job: maker of
viper's brandy. His activity is especially dangerous: he goes
on plateaux of Upper Jura to get reptiles, which he catches
with a long stick terminated by a hook. The village gives
him 1 franc per caught viper. The animal is kept unfed for
a month, then soaked in water, rinsed, washed in brandy
and finally enclosed in a bottle full of that liquid. After a few
hours, the viper bites its tail to kill itself and spits its venom,
thus conferring to the drink a curative power (it is said)
against rheumatism.
'Viper-Taster,' Trente millions d'amis 29 (October

1989), p. 9.
This article, published a year and a half after the

protection decree, makes no allusion to illegality of the practice:
after that fact was disclosed to the Department of the
Environment, a stern letter of protest was sent to the magazine.
Another snake-catcher, Serge Perron, interviewed in

1981 and 1984, did not prepare the drink himself, but sold the
snakes to restaurateurs, at 22 francs per head in 1981 and 30
francs per head in 1984. He affirmed that he had captured
1,167 vipers in 1980 and 1,060 in 1983. In 1986, the same
snake-catcher, well known in the city of Dijon where he has
many restaurateurs amongst his clients, had trouble with the
local police, who confiscated his viper's bag which had been left
unattended in the street at night for the third time of the year
while he was staying at the hotel.l2
Some of the snake-catchers interviewed stress their quasi
supernatural powers over the animal (evocative of the practice
of dowsing for water), thus playing on the horrified fascination
most of us feel towards snakes. One of them says:
When I feel a viper close, my body starts to tremble ... I've

only got then to immobilize it by holding a hand in front of
its eyes for diversion while I pin it from behind with the
other hand. [Noting our surprise, he adds] Beware, I'm no
. sorcerer. It's a gift that my father transmitted to me. My
daughter possesses it too. We emit radiations that are
stronger than normal.
'Chasseur de viperes' (interview with Daniel Loiseau),

La Depeche du Midi (28 October, 1984).
3. Status of Vipers and Snakes: Exploited

Picturesque figures linked to the past, in 1979 the snake-
catchers were members of a trade which, though largely on the
wane, had not yet completely disappeared. Their catches were
considered useful to the community since they were the
handmaidens of science: from the beginning of the century, the
vipers they caught were sold to pharmaceutical laboratories for
the making of serum. (The animals were killed after removal of
their venom.)
A newspaper article in Liberation, dated 1 September,
1956, gave the figure of 20,000 vipers received and killed per
year for the Garches Centre of the Pasteur Institute. Of course,
the snake-catchers stressed their noble scientific motive and
played down the traditional reasons which probably accounted
for most of the catches. Those traditional reasons were, as we
have seen, the production of folk remedies and trophies. Some

vipers also found their way into small menageries which
organized travelling exhibitions for fairs and schools.
My (non-exhaustive) search in administrative files and
press clippings have revealed nine identified snake-catchers
and some 7,000 catches. I estimate that at the time of the 1979
decree there were some twenty active snake-catchers netting
about 15,000 vipers per year in France. This is not a negligible
figure: even so, the extent of viper-catching had probably been
underestimated by the administration. Snake-catching-and
the related trade of taxidermy-were the focus of great hostility
from legitimate scientists, who denounced their now-illegal
activities. Menageries and road shows had to register, and
registration could be refused.
Conflicts were probably numerous, but they rarely made
headlines. However, a large (half page) photograph was
published by France-Soir on 29 December, 1984 which showed
four people handling big snakes and was dramatically
headlined, 'Starved by Red Tape.' The commentary explained
that, not having obtained its registration, the exhibitors'
company-fifteen people and about one hundred snakes-was
almost bankrupt.
"faxidermists' and hunters' associations challenged the
protection decrees; and in 1983 won their case as far as birds
and mammals were concerned . However, their victory was a
hollow one, since the administration quickly prepared new
versions of the rescinded decrees and the protection measures
were upheld.
4. Wildlife Groups
The notion that some animals species are 'vermin,' intrinsically
in need of suppression since they hamper attempts to tame
nature, was strongly upheld by the legislative action of the
Third Republic in favour of its peasant electorate, and is still
very powerful in tradi tiona! rural society and among the
general public. 13
Two groups, ecologists and natural scientists, have fought
a long battle against the stupidities of traditional prejudice. They
have not only inspired, but helped to draw up, protective
legislation which Government Officials now have the
responsibility of enforcing. I shall not try to draw a complete

portrait of these three groups, but will briefly sketch in their
strategies in the field of wildlife protection.
The ecologists are militants; they protest against the
evolution of the modern world and especially against the
pollution brought by industry. In France, they are less
important than they were in the 70s when they drew big
crowds against military camps such as Larzac or nuclear
power stations: they have not become an organized political
force as the Greens have in neighbouring Germany. However,
they are an active minority whose influence on public opinion
far exceeds the 4% they obtained in the last two Presidential
elections. In rural areas, where many have been called 'neo-
rurals', they are strong opponents of the hunting activities of the
traditional rural population. In reaction to the crisis in
agriculture, some ecological associations present themselves as
able and ready to take charge of the depopulated countryside.
Their proposed methods are not the traditional rural ways,
which they have a poor opinion of, but new techniques of rural
management legitimized by the science of ecology. Therefore a
degree of rivalry exists between peasants and ecologists for the
control of rural France.
Scientists, especially the natural scientists specializing in
biology, bio-geography and ecology who act as consultants to the
Department of the Environment, actively push their ideas and
plead strongly for conservationist measures. These specialists
are often university Professors acting on the behalf of various
Societies for the Protection of Nature which they have often
themselves created. These preservation societies, being half
learned societies and half pressure groups, present a distinctly
different image from the militant and political associations
dominated by the ecologists. Nevertheless, the Department of
the Environment files show many letters written by such
specialists vividly denouncing snake-catchers and those who do
not abide by the protective legislation.
The officials respond to the pressure of both these groups,
but they also have to take into consideration the traditional
opinion of hunters, peasants and the general public, who are all
less dedicated to protection and still sensitive to the notion of
'vermin.' The opinion of these latter groups is not felt directly by
the Department of the Environment, but their influence is felt

via other branches of the administration such as the
Department of Agriculture, and at local level through the
Prefets who pass on questions from the general public to the
Department of the Environment.
The Department of the Environment is relatively small,
and the Minister heading it is only a junior member of the
Cabinet. Its brief is the fight against pollution and industrial
nuisances, as well as nature protection. It fulfills the latter role
through legislative action and the management of hunting,
protected spaces, parks and reserves.
Parks developeci during the sixties. There are six National
Parks, which are managed by the Department of the
Environment, and cover some 865,000 acres in their central
zones (2,223,000 acres if the peripheral zones are included)-
about 0. 7% of French metropolitan territory. There are also
twenty five Regional Parks , which are managed in
collaboration with the relevant regional authority and cover
some 8,645,000 acres-about 7% of the territory. In addition,
there are eighty five Nature Reserves, covering some 24 7,000
acres. The reserves, which are sometimes included in the
Regional Parks, shelter exceptional or fragile environments
and include areas such as the lagoons of the Camargue. To
enhance protective action for these threatened milieus, they are
supplemented by the Shores and Lagoons Conservatory, which
has been managed by the Department of the Environment since
1975.
In all these protected spaces, especially National Parks
and Reserves, attempts are made to mitigate the all-powerful
right of private ownership in order to maintain natural
resources and manage their development. The Parks have
pioneered the protection of fauna and flora, and have also been
active advocates of the reintroduction of threatened animal
species. Reintroductions are very well known, and are the object
of much controversy amongst the authorities and between the
different groups involved.
5. Ambiguous Practices: Dispensations

The new protective measures taken in 1979 implied that
dispensations were to be granted to allow the capture of
protected animals for scientific research. Was the Department

of the Environment inundated by requests?
Let us recall that many animal species were declared
protected that year. Sometimes-though it is difficult to affirm
anything with certainty since the files remain largely closed to
the public-it seems that dispensations were granted somewhat
indiscriminately. Thus, in January, 1981, a scandal broke out
when snake-catcher, Jean Mora, from rural South-West Gers
appeared on TV on a Sunday afternoon and explained that, with
the blessing of laboratories and administration, he killed
hundreds of snakes each year. Ecologists and scientists made
strident complaints to the Department of the Environment
about the granting of a dispensation to so doubtful a character.
However, the Department of the Environment did not
remonstrate with the TV company-though it never hesitates
to admonish less powerful media such as local newspapers or
small magazines! However, the dispensation was not renewed
in 1981.
Pharmaceutical laboratories also asked for dispensations
allowing the capture of vipers. These were granted on condition
that the animals would be released after their venom was
taken, not killed as was usual in the 50s 14The Department of
the Environment specified that the releases were to be made at
the place of capture, but there is no guarantee that the snake
catchers always respect this wish. Scientists I have interviewed
have indicated to me that they thought that careless releases
had probably fuelled the rumour.l5
Significant numbers of snakes were caught and released.
To my knowledge, no dispensation was granted to the Pasteur
Institute, the best known French pharmaceutical laboratory
whose name is identified by the public with the anti-venom
serum it created (and is therefore a potential victim of 'The
Goliath Effect' 16), since it had enough stocks of serum.
Dispensations were, however, granted to the Merieux
Laboratory. In 1980 it received dispensations for a catch of
5,000 Vipera Aspis and 200 Vipera Berus. The report required
by the Department of the Environment, and duly filed, showed
that 1,632 vipers were caught and released in 1980. The
dispensation was renewed in 1981 for 1,500 Vipera Aspis. In
1981, the Department of the Environment explicitly told the
Merieux laboratory that dispensations could only be granted

during the period of adaption to the legislation and that other
solutions were to be found in future.
Nowadays, there is less need for serum, since other
therapies are preferred for snake bites. In any case, the need for
venom is supplied either by snake farms-which allow for
better input control-or by imports (from USSR for Vipera
Berus). However, dispensations are still granted. Between
November 1986 and November 1987, the Department of the
Environment received 300 requests for dispensations for the
capture or exhibition of protected species, of which fifteen
concerned vipers (eight of these were granted).
6. Ambiguous Practices: Voluntary Releases by Ecologists

Between 1980 and 1982 in a peat bog near Devin lake near the
Alsace city of Colmar and the town of Ribeauville in a very
touristy district, herpetologists observed vipers which were new
to the site. They exchanged information, started an
investigation and published their findings in April, 1983 in a
local scientific ecology journal, stating that the increase was the
consequence of voluntary reintroductions in 1973 (100 Vipera
Aspis) and 1979 (100 Vipera Aspis~ and groups of 50 and 15
Vipera Berus, the second lot a dark variety). The local press
reprinted the article in October, 1983, and an official
investigation was opened to calm the local population, who were
somewhat alarmed. The 'releaser' was soon identified, but not
pursued.
This documented case is unique, but it corresponds
perfectly to the story stereotype (minus helicopter, of course):
that is, the culprit is a young amateur naturalist, the
introduction is done by an expert who knows about the ecology
of the peliadic viper, and he releases vipers so as to enlarge their
habitat.l7
7. Ambiguous Practices: Releases of Other Wild Animals

The release of other wild animals is a very common occurrence.
The accidental release of exotic pets (many of them
snakes) is fairly common in France. Many of these unwanted
pets end up in the zoo, which also receives some animals directly
from the owners. The Paris Menagerie du Jardin des Plantes,
for example, receives on average three crocodiles, twelve

pythons or boas, twelve monkeys, twenty-four lizards, two small
mammals and over a hundred turtles per year.l8
Many of these accidental releases make headlines which
combine amusement with fear. On the one hand, if the stray
python can be given a fun name its media success is certain; on
the other hand, a snake snuggling in the bath is always noted
and the headline gets even bigger if he pops up in the home of a
woman living alone. It is an even better story if fact imitates
fiction-when, for example, a real alligator was found in the
Paris sewers on the 6 March, 1984. The animal's size added to
the shudders: the sewer alligator was specially good, at over two
feet long (though it seems to me that the sizes mentioned by
newspapers are somewhat optimistic-six feet being the norm
for the stray python, for example).l9
Some extraordinary cases of accidents with poisonous
tropical snakes have indeed occurred. The most spectacular
case was that of a fakir snake keeper who was bitten by his
poisonous najas and died on the Bordeaux Vintimille train in
1956 but had time to close the snakes' box.20 These, however,
are exceptional: there have been no more than five cases in the
last 30 years or so, versus some ten pythons or boas gone astray
each year.
Some twenty stray wolves have been sighted, and
generally killed, in France since 1945. There were ten sitings
between 1945 and 1962, and ten between 1963 and 1987. These
figures correspond to those for domesticated or captive wolves
who have escaped or been abandoned, or even released.
Ecologists' actions could possibly account for one of these sitings,
since a couple of animals were released in 1968 in South-West
Landes, which points to a reintroduction project.21 However, in
both cases the animals were shot.
Hunters' associations release animals for game: hare,
partridge, pheasant, boar are raised and released just before the
hunting season. Fishermen's associations also release trout fry
in mountain lakes, often from helicopters.
The fish are carried in specialized packs called 'Vibert's

boxes' ... Should we conclude that the young trouts have
become snakes, the Vibert's boxes vipers' boxes, the fishing

societies ecologists' associations?
'The Nasty Crawling Rumour,' La Nouvelle

Republique (7 November, 1985).
Association of ornithologists, and especially friends of birds of

prey, often try to boost the low natural fecundity of these species
by removing eggs and artificially incubating them, feeding the
young, and so on. These groups have been involved in
reintroductions conducted in the Parks and Reserves, and their
participation in viper-releases is often affirmed. It is said that
they want to ensure a sufficient supply of prey for the birds they
protect, especially buzzards and short-toed eagles.
8 Ambiguous Practices: Reintroduction of Wild Species Parks

and Reserves
In the 60s, the protection of endangered species and the
reintroduction of lost species were amongst the first tasks
assigned to the Parks and Reserves, and they have set about
their task with much enthusiasm but perhaps little method. I
shall not describe the reintroductions that do not meet hostility
(deer, beavers and wild horses, for example): I shall confine
myself to talking about those that raise controversy.
One important action, which has been given a great deal
of publicity, was undertaken in the National Park of Cevennes,
and involves the reintroduction of vultures. After an
unsuccessful start, it is now a success. The Park maintains
special carrion areas and feeds some fifteen animals. Their
survival is therefore very artificial and man-dependent.
Ecologists' associations are now pleading for a change in the
legislation to allow the dead sheep to rot naturally in the area
where the vultures live.
The last wild bears of France live in the National Park of
Western Pyrenees which, despite much controversy, is heavily
engaged in their protection. The Park also includes a zone
where isards-a species of wild goat which is a very coveted
game animal-are protected. In their answer to my
questionnaire, the Park indicated that it had been accused of the
uncontrolled release of many species including vipers and bears,
which are supposed to be imported from circuses. Interestingly

enough, isards are thought to be herded in to the protected zone
on the eve of the hunting season by Park officials and ecologists'
associations-who operate from white helicopters.22
The reintroduction by the Department of the
Environment of lynxes into the territory of the Vosges Park
started in 1983, after it had been successfully completed in
Switzerland. It has raised passions: there has been a strong
movement of sympathy, but also considerable hostility at the
local level. In January 1984 one of the two lynxes released in
1983 was found shot; and in November 1987 a male and a
female were shot, which caused the death of two new-born
cubs. The controversy still rages about lynxes. In Switzerland,
hunters and sheep farmers complain about the damage to
game and sheep caused by the animals. In the departement of
Ain on the borders of Switzerland from where a few lynxes have
arrived, local assemblies complain about dead sheep and
demand indemnities from the Department of the
Environment.23
9. New Cultural Attitudes

In their desire to react against traditional concepts-especially
against the concept of 'vermin' species--ecologists have tried to
reconcile the people with the 'unloved of yesterdays.'24 On
behalf of these species, they have shown a missionary zeal.
Rehabilitation exhibitions, indictments of trapping and cruel
traditional practices (owls nailed on barn doors, and so on)-
their actions have been numerous and had great influence.
Species that were hated have now been given a favourable
image, and their maintenance or reintroduction is either actual
or planned. Such is the case for the bear, the lynx and even the
wolf, the extermination of which was accomplished in France,
with unanimous approval, during the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries. In 1969 the well-known Swiss naturalist,
Robert Hainard, pleaded strongly for the reintroduction of lost
. .
species, arguing:
We shall recover the richness of life solely within the beauty

of nature which is a system of necessities no longer
submitted to, but willingly accepted, loved.
This is why the rescue of a perfectly useless species,

the reconstitution of a fuller nature seem to me the most
radical contribution to men's salvation.
[Alluding to the positive attitude that had appeared
during the 1968 release of wolves in the Landes, he
concludes]
It would have been more efficient to protect them and
to pay for the damage they might have caused within their
chosen biotope but public opinion is probably not ready.
'The Reintroduction of Big Mammals in Europe,'

Courrier de la nature (1969).
It is this orientation towards rehabilitation and fondness for

'vermin,' more than isolated hypothetical practices, that has
formed the public image of ecologists and made viper-release
stories seem plausible.
10. The Importance of Context

This overview of the context in which the viper-release stories
have appeared and developed shows that official attitudes
towards wildlife now run counter to a traditional system of
exploitation that previously functioned in all good conscience.
The result is a controversy between, on the one hand, the
preservationist and conservationist movements that guide
official policy and have become the norm and, on the other
hand, ingrained hostile and exploitative attitudes. These factors
have created a climate conducive to the growth of the belief that
vipers are released into the wild. However, they do not fully
account for it.
Analysis
We must now temporarily forget the context and come back to

the story itself in order to grasp its message and decipher its
meaning.
The viper-release story unites two narrative components:
vipers and planes or helicopters. Vipers are the epitome of evil
animals. Stories about their voluntary reintroduction may thus
serve as an extreme-a perfect-example of good intentions
gone astray. By letting loose a creature that has always been
perceived as dangerous and ready to attack any unsuspecting

passer-by, ecologists (or whatever other group is held
responsible) show themselves to be 'Sorcerer's Apprentices' who
forget about people in their passion for wildlife.
Helicopters, which might at first seem a superfluous
addition, are, in fact, the core of the story. If we have a legend-
and not just a brief rumour accusing one group or another of
releasing vipers-it is because of the extravagant, unbelievable
element introduced by the presence of the plane or helicopter
and the soft landing of the sock or box. It is this extravagant
element which draws attention, which makes the viper-release
tale a story that is good enough to pass on and fun to tell about.
It is such a good story that hearers feel they must participate in
it; hence the gates of mythomania open wide to foster the
epidemic diffusion of the tale.
Epidemic sightings have occurred in 1981 in the South-
West and the East of France, in 1982 in the South-East, in 1985
in the Centre. It is easy to show that these pseudo-observations
cannot stand up to even the first level of research, the
journalist's interview:
'Is it you who have seen an helicopter throw a box full of

vipers?'
'Yes, it's me. Well, not exactly. It is the friend of my
cousin's brother-in-law. But, you know, he is his best
friend. He is trustworthy. If he says so, he did see it.'
Thus the daily share of answers made to those who
try to play detective. Not easy to corner a rumour. Yes it
seems that .... Well, one says that .... The sure thing is that
people have seen the famous helicopters throw boxes full of
vipers. Think of it: up to two tons in the Vouglans lake, on
the beaches, to scare the tourists away. The problem is that
no one can say: 'I have seen' ....
'Vipers are Real Quiet: Leave Them in Peace,' La

Croix Jurassienne, 10 September, 1981
'They come down with helicopters by night, the vipers doze

in cardboard boxes, with holes so that they may breathe.
They have thrown 3000 upon the Morians forest ... Hold on,
I'm going to give you the phone number of the guy who did
it' ....
The phone number was not quite that, but there was
information at the end of the line.
'In Moirans, they arrested a roadmender because he
shot at the helicopter. He had enough of those helicopters.
One must understand him, last year his daughter was
bitten, she almost died.'
In Moirans the story is confirmed, except that the
roadmender has no daughter, it must be that of Ravirolles.
In Ravirolles, there is no roadmender.
'From Where Come those Snakes that Jump over our

Heads,' Liberation, 11 August, 1981.
Nevertheless, the important fact seems to be the belief, the tale's

epidemic diffusion rather than its slim factual basis. So why do
people believe, participate in and pass on this tale?
In their often violent reaction to the accusations against
them, ecologists have spoken of racism, of witchhunts and of
hysteria. It is perhaps possible that this may be so, but to answer
one unfounded accusation with another is surely a little weak? I
am, of course, handicapped in the presentation of my
hypotheses by the fact that I did no direct fieldwork at the time
of the widest diffusion of viper-release tales, but it does not seem
possible to reduce the rumour either to a symptom of the
antagonism between ecologists and hunters or to cases of
mental illness, which is the core of the ecologists' analysis of the
phenomenon:
Dr Mathieu, President of the FRAPNA DROME,25 to fight

the mills of ignorance and stupidity .. . [said]:
'Misunderstanding of animal biology, pressure
groups aiming to discredit the action of associations, public
rumour and hatred of nature, the problem of the release of
so-called 'vermin,' animals and of vipers especially is only
relevant to . . . psychoanalysis. Those declarations are
transmitted by persons whose fragile psychological state is
especially receptive: hysterics, phobics, paranoids.'
'Vipers fly Rhone-Alpes,' Nature, July, 1983.

Believers in the tale are far more numerous than the people
actively opposed to the ecological approach. Its persuasive
power is due to the fact that, through the narrative
embellishments of vipers and helicopters, it allows the cryptic
voicing of semi-formulated thoughts about wildlife
reintroductions-thoughts which linger in the public mind
even though the practice has official approval, is generally
presented very favourably by the media and apparently is a
sympathetically received. In fact, the tale shows that these
practices, when applied to vermin species, generate a great deal
of worry and hostility.
As early as March, 1982, a radio programme about
rumours quoted a reader's letter to the regional daily Depeche
du Midi that exemplified the link between viper-release stories
and hostility to the protection measures concerning the animal:
If the politicians that have voted the Act of July lOth 197626
had had-like me during my professional experience as a
country doctor down in the Upper Pyrenees and the Upper
Vienne-the occasion to bring help to three kids bitten by
vipers who only narrowly escaped death, they would not
have considered those dirty beasts as creatures worthy of
protection and we would not see the Forest Restocking
Authorities parachute vipers imported from the East so as
to, supposedly, protect young pine sprouts from rats and
m1ce.
It seems that the protection and reintroduction of wildlife

engenders contradictory attitudes and feelings. On the one hand
there are positive feelings that reintroductions help to recover a
lost harmony and diversity in nature. On the other hand, there
are negative attitudes that reintroductions represent a
dangerous risk that the equilibrium painfully achieved through
the peasants' endless endeavour to domesticate nature may be
lost and that the flood-gates may open and return nature to an
uncontrolled wilderness devoid of humans. These opposing
feelings are expressed through a legend, a myth: as Claude
Levi-Strauss stressed, myths arise to account for a
contradiction-'The purpose of myth is to provide a logical
model capable of overcoming a contradiction.'27
The extravagant, extraordinary characteristics of the

story-in which the release of vipers is effected by means of
helicopters-shows that it belongs to the fantasy class of
rumours, sharply studied by Peter Lienhardt who has analyzed
their relationship with the contradictions of the collective soul:
What appears is a set of images expressive of public feeling

and public attitudes. It is, no doubt, in one sense 'public
opinion' ... but ... one must be careful to distinguish it from
the more logical, analytic or reasonable part of public
opinion. It cannot be regarded as an attempt to understand
or evaluate. The rumour has its associations much less in
the field of logical thought than in the field of metaphorical
thought. It is not found by rational speculation. It is
figurative. Hence the attitudes it expresses do not have to be
consistent with each other. A bizarre set of 'facts'-and it
has to be bizarre for the rumour to work-is invented to fit
with the attitudes of the public. The bizarre story provides
the logic, appearing as an exceptional conjunction of facts,
not a characteristic one. It keeps the public's attitudes co-
present even though they are not consistent ....
Rumours of the more fantastic sort . . . represent
complexities of public feeling that cannot readily be made
articulate at a more thoughtful level. In doing so, they join
people's sympathies in a consensus of an unthinking, or at
least uncritical, kind.28
The very real processes of rural desertification that

characterizes many parts of the French open country gives
weight to this fear of a return to wilderness. It is also expressed
through the sighting of phantom big cats alluded to earlier:
The Beast coming from the far ages and from the deepest
country is going to reach the city ....
There is always a close lesson, familiar to the milieu
in which those fables hatch. Even not material, they catch
up by a sure pertinence, a social function that the searcher
looking too high up in the sky shall sometimes miss.
For the Beast of Noh, the meaning of its message
seems extremely clear . . . 'The wolves shall come back.'
This sentence is more symbolic than realistic. It seems to
translate an uneasiness felt by the rural population: some
woods have become impenetrable; the abandoned villages
bring to the countryside a wild and dismal character. The
train lines are abandoned: the wolves will no longer be

afraid of the noise .... Those rails that end up amongst
overgrown grass, those railways that return to forest are
the signs of human emptiness, an invitation to non-human,
to wild beats that had been pushed back by the first
farmers.29
The presence of helicopters adds to the viper-release

rumour a narrative content that allows us to use the term
'legend' about it. The intrusion evokes the supernatural, or at
least the extraordinary, without opposing the laws of reason,
without switching to the fantastic. One is reminded of other
epidemic 'sightings' of celestial objects-UFOs or the Spanish
cloud-busters ofPulpi, in the province of Almeria:
PULPI, Spain.
The farmers swear that the cloudbusters exist:

It's always the same, they say: They are working in
the dusty fields or orchards, when a big black thunderhead
shoulders up over the mountains to the west . They can
almost smell the rain.
Then the buzz of airplanes breaks the silence . Into
the murk they flay, spewing out chemicals. Back and forth
they drone, slicing the billowing mass into wisps that drift
away. Their work done, they veer off for a secret runway.
'It never fails,' says Diego Jimenez, a 60 year old dirt
farmer . 'The planes go round and round. Then nothing.
Not a drop.'
The governor of Almeria state, which includes this
sleepy farming town, says mass hysteria, provoked by a
prolonged drought, has pushed the local residents into an
aeronautical age witchhunt.
But the farmers have a more sinister explanation.
They say that the tomato moguls-or their insurance
companies, or the multinationals; well, special interests
anyway-are paying pilots of small airplanes to blast
rainclouds into shreds, and the only way to fight back is
with guns ....
The controversy of the cloudbusters has been
simmering off and on since the drought began in 1973.
Almeria Gov. Tomas Azorin Munoz ... invited to
Pulpi seven leading lights of the Spanish scientific
community-five meteorologists, including the general-
director of the National Weather Bureau, an aeronautical

engineer and an agricultural expert-to speak to the
farmers a few weeks ago.
About 600 people jammed the town's biggest building,
a restaurant, to hear them demolish the notion of the
cloudbusters. It was, the experts said, an impossible myth.
But at the end of the summit, as the meeting had come to be
known, a show of hands indicated that opinion was split
down the middle.
'The Rain in Spain is Stopped Mainly By Phantom Planes,'

The Wall Street Journal, 5 June, 1985.
The viper-release tale also expresses a deep-seated

rejection of the new view of the relationship between man and
nature in which the ecological sphere is considered as a whole
and not predominantly in its relation to man. Through the tale,
it seems a question is being timidly asked by those who do not
possess the superior legitimacy of science, 'Will the new ideas
lead the mighty to prefer animals, even the worst of animals, to
men?'
Appendix
Table 1
Have heard the story ffi [18%]

(110 boys, 221 girls)
Have heard the story 68 [18%]

(18 boys 16%, 42 girls 19%)
Believe the story

Yes 34
(56% of those who have heard about the story, 10% of the students
questioned)
No 13 [22%]
Don't know 13 [22%]
How
Planes or Helicopters 38 [63%]
Lorry or Car 16
Other 6
Who
Ecologists 38
Officials 14
Other 8
(2 immigrants said National Front)
Why
Help endangered species ~
Restore ecological balance 7
Eliminate rodents 7
Don't know 6
Table II
Departements cited by students

Source: Poll in Sabatier's memoir, Lyons, October 1987
Citations Departements
14 Ardeche
9 Loire
6 Ain
4 Rhone
3 Drome, Isere, Jura
2 Haute-Loire, Paris
1 Beaujolais, Cevennes, Midi, Pyrenees 30
D epartements where viper-release are denounced

Source: Letters of protest sent. to Department of Environment
Date Departement
1980 Cantal, Gironde, Haute-Garonne
1982 Cantal, Charente, Correze, Pyrenees Orientales
1984 Loire
1985 Charente, Dordogne, Vendee
1986 Yonne
1987 Allier , Alpes-de-Haute-Provence, Loire, Haute Vienne
Table III
Parks accused of releases

Source: Answers of the Natural Parks
Date Name ofthe Park Departements
1968 Pyrenees Occidentales 64,65
1974 Pilat 42,69
1977 Luberon 04,84
1977 Haut-Languedoc 34,81
1980 Haut-Jura ;})
1980 Volcans 15,63
1981 Ecrins 04,38
1981 Mercantour 05,06
1983 Vosges du Sud 68,70,88,90
1984 Livradois-Forez 42,63
1987 Briere 44
1987 Brotonne 27,76
1987 Marais Poi tevin 17,79,85
(unknown) Landes de Gascogne 33,40
Table IV
Articles concerning viper-release stories

Source: Press clippings, personal file
Date Articles Departements
1976 2 ffi
1977 1 ffi
1978 2 11
1979 2 2A
1981 8 24, 25, 34 (2 articles), 39 (6 articles), 46 (4 articles)
1982 8 02, 05,11 (2 articles), 12, 22, 26, 31, 34 (articles), 8,
39, 43, 46 (2 articles),48, 81, Auvergne, Lorraine,
Moirans, (2 articles)
1983 10 17, 26, 68 (8 articles), 71, Midi-Pyrenees,
Languedoc-Rousill on
1984 3 09,66,81
1985 11 07, 19, 26, 41 (3 articles), 42, 43 (2 articles), 44 , 63,
68 (3 articles)
1986 3 39,41,71
1987 1 ::!)
1988 3 Midi, Rhone-Alpes, Suisse
NOTES
1. Jean-Noel Kapferer, Rumeurs, Le plus vieux media du monde (Paris:

Seuil, 1987), pp. 85-86. Kapferer also recalls the popular French
expression of 'parachuted' decisions for administrative measures (p.
100).
2. That is, 34% of the general population, the largest percentage in
Europe, equal to that of the Irish Republic. Compare 1.4% for Great
Britain and 0.4% for the Federal Republic of Germany.
3. Lydie Saba tier, Etude psychologique des rumeurs et analyse d'une
rumeur contemporaine: les lachers de viperes en France (Dossier de
T.D. 'Perception et representation du Monde' Psychologie), Universite
de Lyon 2, 1988.
4 . Sabatier (1988), Appendix 10.
5. Statement of L.Q. to anthropologist, S. Pinton, in November, 1986 and
personal communication from S. Pinton. L.Q., a woman aged sixty, is
a retired agriculturist living alone on a small isolated farm in Creuse
(Limousin region) which she no longer cultivates. She still raises
poultry and grows vegetables.
6. The radio programme also contained statements about aerial viper-

releases in the same region.
7. France admitted these principles rather later in the day than other
European countries, especially Northern countries.
8. Prefet's letter dated 11 March, 1980; Department of the Environment's
answer dated 30 April, 1980.
9. See: Eugene Rolland, Faune populaire de la France, Noms vulgaires,
dictons, proverbes, legendes, contes et superstitions, 3 (Paris: G.P.
Maisonneuve et Larose, 1967), p. 29. First published 1877 -1911; Paul
Sebillot, Le Folklore de France, 10 vols. (Paris: G.P. Maisonneuve et
Larose, 1968), pp. 274-26. First published 1905.
10. See: Rolland (1967), III, p. 41, and X1, p. 51.
11 . See: Francois Mauriac, Le Noeud de Viperes.
12. Interviews: France-Soir, 18 August, 1981; Figaro, 26 August,1981;
La Croix, 30-31 (August, 1981); Nouvelle Republique du Centre, 30
October, 1984; Dijon incident: France-Soir June, 1986.
13. See: Anne Vourc'h and Valentin Pelosse, Chasseurs et protecteurs:
Les paradoxes d 'une contradiction, in: Anne Cadoret, ed., Protection
de la nature: Histoire et ideologie. De la nature a l'environnement
(Paris: L'Harmattan [Alternatives paysannes], 1988), pp. 1 10-17.
14. See: Liberation (September, 1956) cited earlier.
15. Personal communication from M. St. Girons, member of t he Herpet-
ological Society. ·
16. That is, the tendency to accuse the brand leader of involvement in
any ongoing rumour. See: Gary Alan Fine, 'The Goliath Effect:
Corporate Dominance and Mercantile Legends,' Journal of
American Folklore 98 (1985), pp. 68-84.
17. See: Gerard Baumgart, G.H. Parent and R. Thorn Observations
recentes de la vipere peliade dans le Massif Vosgien (Ciconia: Revue
regionale d'ecologie animale, 1983, 1, p.14. Born 1956, the 'releaser'
was seventeen in 1973, date of the first releases (personal
communication from G. Baumgart, July, 1988).
18. Personal communication from Guy Ramboise, Director of the
Vincennes Zoo, March, 1988.
19 . See: Michael Goss, 'Escaped Boas and Other Urban Terrors,' Fate
Magazine (August, 1986), pp. 30-37 and (September, 1986), pp. 78-87.
20. Le Parisien Libere, 11 April, 1956.
21. Francois de Beaufort, Le loup en France: elements d'ecologie histor-
iq ue (Paris: Societe fran~ais pour l'etude et la protection des
mammiferes (Encyclopedie des carnivores de France, 1, 1987), p. 27;
indications about the Landes release, personal communication from
F. de Beaufort, January, 1988.
22. Letter from the Park, dated 8 March, 1988: 'A young hunter very
hostile to ecologists ... told me as spoken and proven truth another
extravagant fable: on the eve of isard's hunt opening day ecologists
pull back into the park, by helicopter, the isards which have left that
protected zone' (personal communication from H. Larque, director of

a local newsletter, May, 1988).
23. For Switzerland, see: 'Lynx in Valais,' Nouvelliste et Feuille d,avis
du Valais, 8 July 1988; For Ain, see: 'The lynxes of conflict,' Figaro
(11 September, 1986); 'Lynxes are watched closely,' Figaro 27
(September, 1988).
24. Title of an exhibition organized in 1975 by the Cevennes National
Park at Roquedol's Castle.
25. An ecological association.
26. That is, the law for the protection of nature cited earlier.
2 7. Claude Levi-Strauss, 'The Structural Study of Myth,' Journal of
American Folklore 78 (1955), p. 443.
28. Peter. A. Lienhardt, 'The Interpretation of Rurnour,' in J. M.
Beattie and R. G. Lienhardt, eds., Studies in Social Anthropology:
Essays in Memory of E.E. Evans-Pritchard (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975),
pp. 128 and 130.
29. Jean-Louis Brodu and Michel Meurger, Les felins-mystere: Sur les
traces d,un mythe moderne (Paris: Pogonip, 1984), pp. 32-33.
30. Corresponding departernents: Beaujolais (Loire, Rhone), Cevennes
(Lozere, Gard), Midi (Alpes-Maritimes, Bouches-du-Rhone, Var,
Vaucluse), Pyrenees (Ariege, Pyrenees-Atlantiques, Hautes-
Pyrenees, Pyrenees-Orientales).
MALE FANTASY OR FEMALE REVENGE?:
A LOOK AT SOME MODERN RAPE
LEGENDS
Frances Catter:mole-Tally
Men apparently confuse the words 'seduction' and 'rape.' At
least, so it would seem from the reactions of the men I asked,
'How would you like to be raped?' Their answers ranged from
'Great,' 'Sure, when?' to a blissful smile accompanied by a
snicker or a glazed look and a soulful 'Yeah!' They must have
been thinking of the romantic fantasies conjured up by
magazines such as Playboy and Hustler, or television dramas
such as 'Fantasy Island' that depict a man surrounded by
beautiful women, each one doing her best to arouse him. Surely
they were not thinking of rape?-for rape, according to
Webster, is 'The act of seizing by force, a seizing and carrying
away by force or violence,' and' ... carnal knowledge of a woman
forcibly and against her will.' But, although Webster does not
specifically say so, rape can also be carnal knowledge of a man
against his will: I doubt that anyone, man or woman, really
wants to be raped.
The notion that a man can be raped by a woman appears
as far back as Ovid's Metamorphosis (IV, 285), in the legend of
Hermaphroditus and Salmakis. Hermaphroditus was the son of
Hermes and Aphrodite. He met Salmakis when he was walking
through a forest glade. Salmakis was a nymph, one of the
followers of Artemis. But she was atypical because she was not
athletic. She sat next to a pool of water in the forest, combed her
hair and gazed at her reflection. Salmakis fell in love with
Hermaphroditus on sight and tried to seduce him. He resisted.
Salmakis, acting as though she had lost interest, pretended to
leave the grove, but hid in some nearby bushes.
Hermaphroditus, thinking the nymph was gone, disrobed
and went swimming in the very pond which Salmakis had used
42 Cattermole-Tally Male Fantasy or Female Revenge?
as a mirror. The nymph, seeing Hermaphroditus's manly

beauty athletically displayed, could not resist him. She leapt into
the water after him and twined herself about him. She begged
the gods to remain this way forever. Her wish was granted.
Hermaphroditus, in turn, called upon the gods in a weak and
feminine voice to curse the water in which he swam. From that
day forth, the man who swims in the pond of Salmakis emerges
generally enfeebled.! Oskar Paul Dost, in Der Psychologie der
Notzucht (The Psychology of Rape), correctly lists this myth as
a female rape of a male, but it also appears to be more of a male
fantasy of seduction, since it does not include violence. Even
today many men, especially athletes, fear they will lose their
strength by copulating with women.2
In fairy tales, too, men are often overcome by women (see,
for example, 'The Peasant's Clever Daughter' [GR 94]). In this
story, the heroine drugs her husband and takes him out of his
castle to her home. Today, in comic strips such as
'Tumbleweeds,' Hildegard Hammocker is still trying to seduce
her cowboy. Newspapers periodically report that a man was
tied to a tree by three or five women, who seduced him in
succession. In at least one case a man said he was attacked by a
single woman with a knife and raped.3 These stories sound very
much like urban legends, as well as wishful thinking.
Let us return to Greek myths, which tell more about male,
than female, rapists. The would-be rapist is often severely
punished, especially if his target is a goddess. For example,
Aratos, a Greek poet (315-245 B.C.) described how Orion
attempted to rape Artemis. She killed Orion for his pains. Two
hundred years later another Greek poet, Parthemios (ca. 73
B.C.), wrote thirty six tales about the sufferings of love. In one he
told how Orion raped the daughter of Oinopion, ruler of Chios,
and Oinopion punished Orion by blinding him. 4
Rapists were also severely punished in Judea-Christian
biblical law. In Deuteronomy 22: 22-29, the punishment for the
rape of a betrothed virgin was death. If the virgin was not
betrothed, the man had to marry her and give her father five
shekels of silver. In those days, as today, if a girl was attacked
and did not scream and fight to defend her honour, she was
considered a willing accomplice and therefore an adulteress.
Both she and the guilty man were stoned to death.
Cattermole-Tally Male Fantasy or Female Revenge? 43
Some of the ancient Germanic tribal laws also demanded

signs from the woman, such as torn clothing and the like, to
prove that she had been violated. Even today, in the United
States, the woman is often considered to be at fault unless she
has screamed, struggled and is able to show marks of violence
on her body. Paradoxically, some experts say that if a woman is
quiet and submits to the rapist, she may lose her virginity or be
forced to engage in sexual practices against her will, but she will
not lose her life. These, of course, are male experts who do not
realize that it is not just the matter of an unpleasant sexual
encounter for the woman: it is a situation in which she loses her
status as an equal human being.
Two reasons are usually given for demanding physical
evidence of rape; both have a certain amount of validity. The
first is that a woman can accuse a man falsely, and some have
indeed done so. The second, and more sexist reason, is that a
woman really likes to be raped. In spite of modern research
which shows that rape is not a crime caused by unbridled lust
on the part of the man and is not sexual in nature5the notion
that women somehow like to be raped still persists in popular
opinion. Though rape is more properly thought to be caused by a
desire to denigrate women or perhaps all society, nevertheless
the notion of rape as a sexual crime prevails and is expressed in
popular jokes, doggerel, poetry, casual remarks, newspaper
articles-not to mention, by juries presiding over rape trials.
We hear, for example, the joking admonition to a woman
that when rape is inevitable, she should 'Lie back and enjoy it.' A
poem, popular in the last thirty years called 'Three Prominent
Bastards' contains the following stanzas:
My late lamented pappy made his permanent abode.

Now some was there for stealing but my pappy's only fault
Was an overwhelming weakness for criminal assault.
His philosophy was simple and quite free from moral taint:
'Seduction is for sissies but a he-man likes his rape'
So pappy's list of victims was embarrassingly rich;
Though one of them was mother he could never tell which. 6
In the same vein, a literary poet, Don Blanding, ends one of his
poems with the notion that it is better for a woman to be raped
than die a virgin-'She died with a smile on her face.'7 The

meaning is clear. The woman is nothing at all, not even a
person. Solely, the desire of the male is to be satisfied. These
attitudes are so bereft of understanding and compassion that
they are obscene.
The 1980s show little improvement in this type of
thinking. A flier advertizing 'Rape Classes' was posted on a
bulletin board in Royce Hall at the University of California, Los
Angeles. One example of its contents, 'Class Cirriculum' [sic]
includes: 'Once your [sic] attacked, three simple steps to mutual
climax .... ' I assume it was supposed to be amusing. Very similar
ideas are expressed by juries in modern rape trials. Both men
and women may say of the victim, 'Well she really wanted it, or
she would have resisted more,' or 'She was asking for it, look at
the way she dressed,' or 'She was hitchhiking, she knew what
would happen.' I have even spoken to young women who have
suggested that women have rape fantasies and that this proves
that they want to be raped. But as Medea and Thompson point
out in their book Against Rape, in a rape fantasy the woman
chooses the man, she directs the circumstances, she is in control:
it is sex without sin. The authors admit that there are women
who want to be victims, but they are atypical. Women's
fantasies, like men's, are fantasies of seduction, not violence.
With this history and analysis of rape in mind, it is time to
turn our attention to a growing body of modern legends in
which a woman, or a group of women, rapes a man forcibly,
violently. She, or they, penetrate his body anally with a large
wooden dildo, no doubt a substitute for a membrum virile. Some
versions report that the women mutilate the man as well. These
legends describe a true role-reversal. No longer are we
speaking of a male fantasy: we are now discussing female
revenge.
The following legends were reported from widely
separated states-Illinois, New Jersey and California.8 Three
variants of the story date from 1972. Supposedly they happened
in Chicago. A newspaper reporter, male, had the bad taste to
write an article, 'Why a Woman Can't Really Be Raped.' A few
days later, on his way home, he was accosted by five militant
feminists. They surrounded him and said they were going to
rape him. He was delighted (they were not unattractive),
'Great, when do we begin?' He continued to smile until he saw

the large wooden dildo one of them was holding. He tried to
escape. The women surrounded him and began to rip off his
clothes. In one version of the story, the poor fellow cried
hysterically, begging for mercy and grovelling on his knees
before the women: they relented and let him go. In the other
versions, the women were unmoved by his pleas and each one
used the dildo. He crept home, ashamed, to report the attack to
the police.
The majority of the other legends feature the victim as an
accused rapist who either was not prosecuted or was released
without being punished. One story is reported as true in New
Jersey, Chicago, Illinois, and San Diego. A known rapist was
raped by a group of women, who then cut off one of his testicles
as a warning to reform. The variants from Chicago are the
most violent and follow an interesting, if gory, pattern. The
rapist is hung out of the window of a skyscraper by one foot or
by one testicle. He is pulled in, the testicle is removed, and the
rapist moves to Detroit and stays out oftrouble.9
Another example of Chicago violence is evidenced in the
story of a girl called Amazalia, aged nineteen. During periods of
the full moon, she would go to Hyde Park at midnight and stroll
around. If she was approached by a man, she would go into the
bushes with him as if acceding to his demands. Then she would
down him with a karate chop, strip him, tie him up and use a
large wooden dildo on him, thus effectively showing him what
rape was. During the course of one year, the police found
several men tied up this way, but the men only said that
someone had tried to rob them. One man supposedly broke
down and told the whole story-he was crying that his
haemorrhoids would never be the same. Amazalia, they say, is
still at large because her male victims are too embarrassed to
press charges.
Feminine rape stories have even entered college sorority
lore. In Pennsylvania in the early 1970s some sorority girls
reportedly decided to rape a seventy-six-year old man as an
initiation prank. A similar story was told in Los Angeles in 1978.
In this case, the girls were punishing the man, who was one of
the backers of a fraternity. The girls had complained that a
member of his fraternity had got some sorority pledge dates
drunk at one of their parties, and, in addition, had used force to

rape the girls. The man laughed at them. The sorority girls, in
revenge, cornered the man in a parking lot, raped him with a
wooden dildo and then went to the fraternity house and threw
the dildo into the house.
There are, of course, less violent tales about women taking
revenge on suspected rapists. On the West Coast, it is said that
local feminists picketed the wedding of a man who had raped a
topless dancer at his stag dinner. The women paraded in front
of the church with signs reading 'John Doe is a rapist.'
Whether all these events actually happened or are merely
women's fantasies of revenge is not clear. Certainly, women
have become angry enough to make them come true. In 1971
an Anti-Rape squad was formed by women in Los Angeles.
Their leader said that ten of the women had planned to ambush
an acquitted rapist and take vengeance by shaving his head,
pouring dye over him and then photographing him. The
pictures were to be made into posters and put up all over Venice.
The leader added, 'We never did find him, but we were well
organized.'
Hopefully these stories are not evidence that women are
changing and learning from men how to de-humanize another
human being. Hopefully these legends are told to serve as a
lesson, a fable, to teach men that they are not invulnerable-
that they, too, can be penetrated, violated and mutilated: and
that rape is neither a desirable nor a sexual experience The
legends may serve to show men that women are not 'asking for
it,' and do not want to be raped. Rape, as many criminal studies
have shown, has little to do with sexual motivation and even less
to do with love or male/female relationships. Rape is the
violation of another human being, whether it is performed by a
man or by a woman.
NOTES
1. Oskar Paul Dost, Die Psychologie der Notzucht (Hamburg: Verlag fiir
kriminalistische Fachlitteratur, 1964), p. 31, case :;t:96; H.J.Rose, A
Handbook for Greek Mythology (New York: Dutton, 1959), p. 148.
2 . Archives of the University of California, Los Angeles.
3. For example, US (23 November, 1982), p. 68, an article, 'Reverse

Rape' by Alan W. Petrucelli
4. Dost (1964), p. 31, case #37; Rose (1959), p . 115; New Larousse
Encyclopedia of Mythology (New York/London: Hamlyn, 1968), p. 144
5. Jean MacKellar and Dr Menachem Amir, Rape: The Bait and the
Trap (New York: Crown, 1975), p. 7 ff.
6. Courtesy of Professor D.K. Wilgus, UCLA.
7. 'The Virgin of Waikiki.'
8. Many of these stories were brought to a class on 'Folklore of Women'
UCLA 1980 by a student, Catilyn Davis.
9. In the fifteenth century in the British isles, it was reported that three
women waylaid a man, bound him and cut off his testicles and stole
his horse. It is not mentioned if he was a rapist. Elizabeth G.
Kimball, ed., 'The Shropshire Peace Roll' (1400-1414), printed for
Salop County Council, 1959.
'NASTY' LEGENDS, 'SICK' HUMOUR AND
ETHNIC JOKES ABOUT STUPIDITY
Christie Davies
Nasty modern legends, sick humour and ethnic jokes have
many themes in common but two in particular stand out,
namely the consumption of objectionable foods and disasters
involving modern technology.
Objectionable Food
Western societies with a Christian tradition lack a

comprehensive set of food taboos (cf: Acts 10: 9-16; 11: 1-11; 1st
Corinthians 10: 25-6). No system may be discerned in, and little
significance attached to, the odd assortment of foods which
Westerners view as disgusting and inedible, or at least
uneatable and undrinkable, such as fried wood-lice, rat
sandwiches, genuine hedgehog-flavoured crisps, bovine urine,
bear's paw, snake soup, curried spiders and a variety of
harmless synthetic food additives used as flavouring, colouring
or preservatives and known only as a mysterious magical
cipher of letters and numbers.
The only coherent pattern that can be found is that
relating to the taboo against cannibalism and its curious
extension to cover pet animals . The most common humorous
references to cannibalism occur in cartoons, where one familiar
theme is the missionary or explorer in a cooking pot surrounded
by fat dark strangers in grass skirts and with bones through
their noses. However, there are also many corresponding ethnic
jokes in circulation, which are usually pinned on distant exotic
peoples from Africa or the islands of the Pacific.l
President Nyerere of Tanzania was flying to the United

Nations on a mumbo-jumbo jet. He scanned the lunch
50 Davies cNasty Legends,
menu and said, 'I don't like any of this. Bring me the
passenger list.'
[British 1980s2]
Q: What is the African counterpart of a vegetarian?

A: A humanitarian.
[American 1980s]
There's a great export trade from Golder's Green

[Crematorium]. They send ashes out to the Congo as
instant people. You just add water.
[Newall 19853]
Foreign news, Uganda. At the state luncheon to welcome

the German delegation today, General Amin ate a
hamburger, two frankfurters and a young man from
Heidel burg.
[Vincent 19774]
In nasty urban legends, by contrast, the cannibalism is

accidental and unwitting and involves, not distant and exotic
people, but local individuals similar to the teller and his or her
audience, often the familiar but anonymous 'friend of a friend.'
The persons taking part in the contemporary legendary tale are
deceived, because the food of human origin that they consume is
formless and thus unrecognizable-the usual versions being
cremation ashes and person-sausage.5 'A mix up in the mail' is
a characteristic example:
Grandmother had gone out to spend Christmas with her

cousins who lived in the Far East. She had not seen them
for several years and was very excited about the trip. They
had always been very kind to her and each Christmas used
to send a present of a jar of special spices to go in the
Christmas cake her daughter made.
About two weeks before Christmas, a small airmail
parcel arrived from the Far East. It had been posted on 1
December and contained what appeared to be the special
spices for the Christmas cake. There was no note with it
nor, surprisingly, any Christmas card. Not wanting to
delay any longer, the daughter got on with the baking and
produced a magnificent cake for the Christmas festivities.
It was the day after Boxing Day that a letter arrived
from the cousins in the Far East. Also dated 1 December, it
Davies (Nasty Legends' 51
expressed how sorry they were to have to break the news of

grandmother's death-the excitement had been too much
for her. They also wrote that, because of all arrangements
that had had to be made for the cremation, they would not
have time to send over the special spices for the cake this
year. However, they had airmailed grandmother's ashes
home and they should arrive shortly.6
Tales such as this are often told as if true (indeed the

narrator and/or audience may believe them to be true and it is
just possible that they are rooted in an actual incident, though
this cannot usually be demonstrated). They are very similar to
sick jokes that everyone regards as amusing fiction. A skilled
joke-teller who wanted to use the legend, 'A mix up in the mail,'
as a sick joke would alter it very little, as it already has the basic
structure and ingredients(!) of a joke. He would begin telling the
story poker-faced, as if describing a real event that had
happened to a 'friend of a friend,' and would maintain the
listeners' attention by skillfully adding plausible, though this
time deliberately mendacious, details. Once the audience was in
a suitable state of belief, or at least suspended disbelief, then it
would be time for him suddenly to unleash the punch-line that
revealed the comic shock-horror information that 'people just
like us' unwittingly ate their own grandma! At this point, the
joke-teller could relax his serious visage in delight at the
mixture of consternation and hilarity produced in the listeners.
It is easy to see why this 'charming story of family life has
circulated, both in the form of a joke and a legend for many
years.'7 The fact that it has circulated in both forms indicates
that jokes and legends are overlapping sets. The area of overlap
contains a large number of items that are recounted mainly in
order to amuse. Whether we class a particular telling of a tale
as a joke or as a legend presumably depends on the rather
arbitrary and subjective question of what is in the mind of the
raconteur at the time and how his audience perceive and
classify his account. If he is knowingly purveying an amusing
piece of fiction, albeit one that is initially plausible and which
connects with the listeners' own experience and values, then it
is a joke. Presumably legends begin at the point where there is
some small degree of real belief in the truth of the entire
narrative including the final shocking and comic denouement.
52 Davies cNasty Legends~
Even so, it is difficult to draw a clear line between jokes and

amusing legends, and often quite impossible to do so on the basis
simply of a particular written or recorded text.
A related group of ethnic jokes and nasty legends/jokes
involves the eating of animals such as dogs, cats or horses that
are kept as household pets or as working partners. 8 Such
animals are in some respects treated almost like human beings.
They are given individual, although on the whole appropriately
canine, feline or equine, names such as Rover, Tiddles, Felix,
Hervey, Rosinante, Cymro, which often reflect their owner's
view that they are valued individuals and not mere replaceable
surrogates. Cat owners have been known to pay a £200 vet's bill
or a hefty feline medical insurance premium for a used cat
whose historic cost, replacement cost, resale and scrap value
were all well under £5 and may even have been negative.
Because of their peculiar position in the homes and affections of
human beings, to eat pets would be, in the eyes of 'petishists' at
least, almost a minor form of cannibalism. Perhaps in
consequence, there are many ethnic jokes about distant peoples
(usually from the Orient-Koreans, Chinese, Vietnamese-but
also Australian aborigines, who are said to relish a meal of
'putjikata') alleged to be pet-eaters.9
Q.: What do you call a Vietnamese with a dog?

A.: A vegetarian.
Q.: What do you call a Vietnamese with two dogs?
A.: A rancher.
[American 1980s]
Provincial tourist (to kellner who offers him sausages): 'I

say old feller, any 'osses died about 'ere lately! Chevals
morts, you know! !'
[British 190s10J
Yakob Smirnoff: 'Mter I left Russia for the United States I

went shopping for food in a Los Angeles super-market.
There were lots of tins of dog food. There were none in
Russia. There dogs are food. In America there is such
variety of dogs-poodles, chihuahuas, pekinese-but they
all taste the same.'
[British 1984]
Davies 'Nasty Legends~ 53
These ethnic jokes about distant foreigners eating pets

occur alongside jokes and nasty legends about pet-loving peoples
eating cats or dogs (often their very own), either unknowingly
in a restaurant run by members of an ethnic group with a
different pattern of squeamishness, or from sheer hunger in
wartime:
One evening several friends went out to a local Chinese

restaurant for a celebratory meal. Half way through the
meal one of the party suddenly started to cough and choke.
Thoroughly alarmed they rushed her to hospital and she
had to undergo minor surgery to remove a small bone stuck
in her throat.
The surgeon who removed the bone was somewhat
perplexed as he did not recognize the type of bone found. He
therefore sent it off for analysis. The report came back
saying that it was a rat bone.
The public health department immediately visited the
restaurant to inspect the kitchens and in the fridge they
found numerous tins of cat food, half an Alsatian dog and
several rats all waiting to be served up.ll
During the siege of Paris in the Franco-German war when

everybody was starving, one aristocratic family had their
pet dog served for dinner. The master of the house, when
the meal was ended, surveyed the platter through tear-
dimmed eyes and spoke sadly: 'How Fido would have
enjoyed those bones.'12
Both of these tales can be treated as either joke or legend,

depending on the view taken of them by the tellers. Either way,
they lack practical importance, for only very peculiar and
eccentric individuals are going to act on the information they
contain-for example, by refusing to eat in all restaurants run
by members of ethnic minorities who feature in such stories.
The point at issue is, not whether the members of the
community in which the tale circulates are or are not
prejudiced against any of the minorities who run restaurants,
but that legends of this type are not going to trigger off a pogrom
against the alien restaurateurs: the themes that they embody do
not occupy a central or important position in the tellers'
dominant patterns of thought and action. These tales are for
54 Davies cNasty Legends~
amusement only, and the listeners can afford to laugh at them

because they play with, rather than seriously embody, the
breaking of food conventions.
The contrast to this occurs in communities where the holy
or defiling qualities of an animal-with all the implications this
has for what may or may not be eaten-are central to the
definition of a religious or ethnic identity. When the author lived
in Bombay, a cafe where he occasionally took his meals
displayed a large and prominent notice in the front window
saying 'No beef served here.' One of the reasons for the owners
placing it there was to avoid having his cafe wrecked by irate
and pious Hindus in the course of a communal disturbance. In
Gujarat, the rumour (which may or may not have been true)
that the Muslims had chosen to kill a cow (rather than, say, a
goat or a sheep) as part of the celebration of their 'Id festival has
been known to trigger a violent conflict between the Hindu and
Muslim religious communities, in which a large number of
people have lost their lives. The combination of the proximity of
the two groups, and the intense moral outrage caused if the
members of one group should flout the food taboos or related
sensibilities of the other, means that the telling of a 'nasty
legend' on this theme is likely to be inflammatory rather than
amusing. The nearest parallel in Europe would be the
murderous anti-semitic pogroms set off by mendacious and
often malicious accounts of Jews carrying out the ritual murder
of a Christian child or stealing, profaning and mutilating the
Host.
I stress these extreme cases in order to indicate the
relatively trivial practical implications of the individual legends
and jokes that I have quoted. In consequence, it is difficult to see
why anyone should find it necessary to deny the existence of
cannibalism or the possibility that those in charge of 'ethnic'
restaurants should have served meals containing animals
regarded as unsuitable for food by the indigenous population.
Cannibalism, though rare, is well documented13 and ethnic
minority restaurateurs have indeed sometimes been convicted
of serving various items of food which are deemed 'unfit for
consumption.'14 Neither of these phenomena constitutes, or is
seen as constituting, any real threat to those who enjoy jokes
and legends about them, and there is no reason to suppose that
Davies ~Nasty Legends' 55
such tales cause, or in any significant sense express, hostility

towards the various ethnic groups who figure in them. The real
significance of these stories lies in what they reveal of the joke-
tellers' view of themselves and what they see as essentially alien
patterns of eating (which have an especially strong potential to
shock when foisted on people like themselves).
Disasters Involving Modern Technology
Legends and jokes that deal with modern technology going

wrong need to be approached with a similar degree of caution.
The prevalence and popularity of disaster jokes, particularly
among young people, is neither evidence of their extreme
callousness nor of the use of jokes as cartharsis, as a means of
coming to terms with the pain of tragedy . There is no
independent supporting evidence for either of these views.
Neither is there any justification for reducing these forms of
humorous communication to serious ones, or for assuming that
they can be assimilated to patterns of serious behaviour-such
as grief, mourning and recovery-that are also associated ~vith
sudden loss or tragedy. Such jokes are best seen as related to the
reporting of these events in the mass media rather than directly
to the events themselves.15
Television in particular, but also radio and the press, have
created a possibility that did not exist in the past. Millions of
people are able to see or hear a disaster (often as it occurs) from
a safe distance and in the tranquillity of their own homes. They
are exhorted by reporters and commentators to respond to a
tragedy in the same way as the eye-witnesses, victims and their
families themselves do. Also, as Elliott Oring has shrewdly
pointed out, the insistent demands for shared sympathy and
sorrow, and the harrowing pictures or accounts of the disaster,
are incongruously sandwiched between trivial, banal and light-
hearted items such as advertisements, quiz-shows, mundane
soap operas, page three trips down mammary lane, sport and
gossip.16
Incongruity of this type is the very stuff of which humour
is made, as shown by the old joke about the Scotsman sending a
telegram to his brother that read: 'Wife killed in motor accident.
Come at once.' The clerk looked at the form and said, 'You can
56 Davies ~Nasty Legends'
have another four words for the same money.' The Scotsman
thought for a moment and added, 'Rangers two, Celtic one.' It is
· not surprising, then, that media disasters produce sick jokes,
usually of a question and answer kind: 17
Q.: Where do Piper Alpha oil-rig workers take their holidays?

A. Burnham on sea.
[British 1980s]
Q.: What is the weather forecast for Chernobyl?

A.: 8000 degrees and cloudy.
[American 1980s]
Q.: What's black and goes to school?

A.: A coal-tip.
[British 1960s]
Q.: Have you heard that they are going to rename King's
Cross underground station?
A.: They're going to call it Black Friars.
[British 1980s]
Q.: What's worse than glass in baby food?

A.: Astronauts in tuna.
[Oring 1987]
The case of sick jokes that grow out of the paradox of real
disasters viewed from a safe and uninvolved distance is
paralleled by that of nasty legends (imaginary, though plausible,
disasters that are alleged to have overtaken the 'friend of a
friend'). Such legends are almost part of that chain of events
experienced by individuals known personally to us which make
up the ordinary everyday world. A reliance on such people as
regular and trustworthy sources of information, combined with
an ignorance of how and why sophisticated modern machines
and artifacts work, gives the legends their plausibility. Many of
the tales collected by Paul Smith come in this category and he
notes that: 'Our dependence on technology and its consequent
dangers are encapsulated in tales such as "The Auto-pilot" and
"Dangers of the microwave oven."'I8
I once heard of an elderly lady who used to breed pedigree

cats and exhibit them at shows. She specialised in Persian
Davies 'Nasty Legends, 57
cats and their long hair always made it a difficult task to

clean and groom them for showing. In order to cut down
the effort involved the old lady had evolved the practice of
first washing the cat, towelling it dry and then, finally,
giving it a very brief warming in her electric oven.
One Christmas her cooker developed a fault and so
her son, by way of a Christmas present, bought her a brand
new microwave oven. On the day of the next cat show, not
understanding the basic difference in the technology
between an ordinary electric cooker and a microwave oven,
the old lady industriously washed her prize-winning
Persian cat and popped it into the oven for a few seconds.
There really was no miaow, nor any noise at all from the
cat, for the poor creature exploded the instant the oven was
switched on.19
The flight ran several times a week taking holiday-makers

to various resorts in the Mediterranean. On each flight, to
reassure the passengers all was well, the captain would put
the jet on to auto-pilot and he and all the crew would come
aft into the cabin to greet the passengers.
Unfortunately, on this particular flight the security
door between the cabin and the flight deck jammed and left
the captain and crew stuck in the cabin. From that
moment, in spite of their efforts to open the door, the fate of
the passengers and crew was sealed. 20
When hearing or reading the latter tale, it always puzzles

me how anyone would ever know what had happened, given
that the radio microphone is in the cockpit, that any written
account is unlikely to survive the crash and that the flight
recorder will offer no explanations of the cause of the
mysterious accident. It is not that I wish to attack a good tale
with pedantic objections, but simply that I cannot understand
why it is ever seen as an even faintly plausible legend rather
than an amusingly shocking acknowledged fiction. Paul Smith
comments on it that:
This well-known tale echoes the joke regarding the fully

automatic computer-controlled pilotless plane which, when
in flight, welcomes the passengers on board and assures
them nothing can possibly go wrong ... go wrong ... go
wrong .... 21
58 Davies 'Nasty Legends,
Once again, there is shown to be an overlap between, on the one

hand 'nasty legends,' which are half-believed, are told about
people like the tellers themselves, have a narrative structure
and are shocking and, on the other hand 'jokes,' which are
known to be inventions, often ascribed to members of other
classes, ethnic groups and nations and have a narrative or a
riddle-like structure: both are built around a sudden switch
between two opposed scripts and are comic, at least in intention.
This should not surprise us, for some modern legends are highly
polished inventions intended to amuse as well as shock, and
some jokes are true anecdotes that have been merely reshaped
and restyled in order to maximize their comic effect, an effect
that may well rely on a sudden revelation that is funny because
it shocks, as well as surprises, the audience.
Ethnic jokes often depict the members of another (but
usually familiar and neighbouring) group as causing a disaster
through their stupid ignorance of the nature of technical
devices.22 They are often set in submarines,23 planes, or space-
rockets; that is, artificial capsules in which human beings can
only survive if they obey a new set of technically determined
rules that are not part of the traditional taken-for-granted
world of walking, jumping and swimming. The foolish ethnic
ignoramus of the joke naturally gets it wrong:
Q: Why are people from Arhus not allowed to become

sailors in submarines?
A: Because they like to sleep with the windows open.
[Year house 197924]
Q: How can you tell a Belgian in a submarine?

A: He's the one with a parachute on his back.
[Isnard 197925]
A Sabena [Belgian airlines] plane was trying to land at

Brussels airport. The Belgian pilot signalled to the control
tower that the landing strip was too short for him to land
on. 'Your landing strip,' he said in despair, 'is only a
hundred metres long and several kilometres wide.'
[French 1980s]
Davies 'Nasty Legends, 59
A qualified Belgian pilot was explaining to a new trainee

how to fly the plane at night: 'You see that red light on the
left wing?'
'Yes.'
'You see that green light on the right wing?'
'Well night flying is very easy. You just fly between
the two lights.'
[Vander Boute and Hen Train 197826]
A Sop astronaut went to Russia for training. He came back

with very red hands. When asked why he said 'The Russian
pilot kept slapping my hand and saying, "Don't touch that!
Don't touch that!"'
[Bulgarian 1980s]
Q: How do you tell an Aer Lingus Pilot?

A: By the three gold rings on his wellies.
[British 1970s]
Pokorski got a job as a test pilot. He took a helicopter up to

5,000 feet .... 10,000 feet ... 15,000 feet . All of a sudden it
crashed. Pokorski woke up in hospital and his boss was
there asking him, 'What happened?'
'It got too cold,' said the Polish pilot, 'so I turned off
the fan!'
[Wilde 197727]
These ethnic jokes which export stupidity to another

group, like the nasty legends and the sick jokes cited earlier are
often seen as expressing, as Holbek states:
our own feeling of inadequacy in coping with modern life:

technology, social organization, etc .... [such jokes] express
a widespread but not admissible anxiety caused by the rapid
development of our society. The anxiety is temporarily
relieved by making jokes about dupes too stupid to adapt to
progress .28
It is doubtful whether such anxiety is either widespread

(except in a rather more superficial sense than Holbek implies)
or inadmissible. Most people have other more immediate
60 Davies cNasty Legends'
worries than technical change, though a minority find such

anxieties sufficiently admissible to demonstrate in public
against nuclear power stations, airports, computers, synthetic
food additives and other chemicals believed to be carcinogens.29
These anxieties are not merely admissible but fashionable.
At another level, it is easy to show that many individuals
can feel uneasy at the extent to which they are dependent on
machines that they do not understand and on the competence of
specialists the nature of whose expertise is beyond their
comprehension. The disasters of the past-of famine, plague
and pestilence-though far greater, were in the main allied to
what the insurance companies in their wisdom call 'Acts of
God.' Today's well publicized disasters that end up as jokes are
often the result of human error in the construction or
management of a complex machine or system.
Bob Ward's collection of jokes about, and on-the-spot
observations of, those involved in the pioneering, and thus
hazardous, journeys into space shows that those directly
involved and at risk were very conscious of their dependence on
the technical skills and knowledge of others-and that they
joked about it.30 When Gus Grissom was asked what he
thought would be the most critical part of the Apollo space
mission, he replied jokingly yet not altogether jokingly, 'the part
between lift off and splash down.'31 In a similar vein, John
Glenn commented, 'I looked around me and suddenly realized
everything had been built by the lowest bidder.'32 Much of the
joking by the astronauts and the engineers alike took on an
ethnic form, as in the jokes about a fictitious pusillanimous
Puerto Rican astronaut called Jose Jimenez,33 which were said
by the real astronauts to relieve pre-launch jitters.34 Other
ethnic jokes were told about the German, and sometimes World
War II origins, of many of the leading rocketry experts,
including the man they termed the 'pad fuehrer.'35 The
director of the National Space Administration's Marshall
Centre, who was from West Tennesee, would say of dubious or
inadequate scientific data:
That's like the East Tennesee [hill-billy country] method of

weighing hogs. You place a log across a fence, put the pig
on one end of the log, then pile rocks on the other end until
Davies cNasty Legends~ 61
the two loads balance. At that point you guess how much
the rocks weigh.36
It is these observations of jokes told in a specific context

that give substance to the otherwise speculative view that joking
about technical disasters is linked to the unease which we are all
at some time likely to feel about our dependence on new
artifacts designed and constructed by teams of specialists most
of whose expertise is unfamiliar to us.
Joking about potential disasters, however, is not quite such
a new phenomenon as Holbek implies, for both the jokes and the
apprehensions began with the steam-powered technology of the
nineteenth century (though, admittedly, this may have arrived
a little later in Denmark than elsewhere ). In the early
nineteenth century those who feared the physical, as well as
economic, railway juggernaut declared that the human frame
could not survive these new and 'unnatural' speeds. Later,
when trains were first introduced into Spain, peasants would
trespass casually on to the track and be run down by the engine,
to the anger of their families who would blame the driver
because they could not understand that the momentum of a
heavy, fast-moving train was such that it could not stop quickly
enough to avoid a pedestrian.37 Today the steam engine and the
railways are regarded as slow and comic ('British Snail,' 'Steam
Radio') and small and nostalgic ('Ivor the Engine,' 'Little
Snoring,' 'The Fat Controller'), but when first introduced they
represented a more decisive technical and economic change
than anything that has happened since.38 In the 1840s the Rev.
Sydney Smith became concerned with the risk of passengers
being burned to death in a railway accident while locked in their
carriages, and wrote a series of letters criticizing the directors of
the Great Western Railway which expressed a general concern
rather than merely personal fear and anxiety.39 As a noted
humorist, Sydney Smith could not resist illustrating serious
arguments with comic images, and considered a scene in
which:
the directors gazed with satisfaction on a burnt train-load of

captive passengers including a stewed Duke ... two Bishops
done in their own Gravy .... Two Scotchmen dead, but raw,
sulphuric acid perceptible. 40
62 Davies 'Nasty Legends'
Elsewhere he declared that 'A burnt bishop' might console

himself that 'his death will produce unspeakable benefit to the
public. Even Sodor and Man will be better than nothing.'41 The
mass-media, represented at that time by the press, thrived on
the sale of accounts of accidents which mingled sympathy and
ghoulishness.42 It is not surprising then that there are many
jokes about anxious travellers unduly nervous about the
prospect of an accident:
(Railway) Bookstall Keeper: 'Book, ma'am? Yes ma'am.

Here's a popular work by an eminent surgeon, just
published, "Broken legs and how to mend them": or, would
you like the last number of The Railway Operator?'43
Shrewd Clerk (with an eye to his percentage), 'Take an

accident insurance ticket, sir?' Passenger (nervously),
'Wha' for?! ' Clerk, 'Well, sir nothing has gone wrong 'twixt
this and London for the last fourteen months; and by the
haverages, the next smash is hoverdue exactly six weeks
and three days!!' Old gent forks out with alacrity.44
Nervous Party: 'The train seems to be travelling at a fearful

pace, ma'am.' Elderly Female: 'Yus ain't it? My Bill's a-
drivin of the ingin, an' 'e can make 'er go when 'e's got a
drop o drink in 'im!'45
These jokes (like legends about ghostly trains that rush

towards a real express) once again play with fear and danger,
with anxiety and aggression. The jokes do not express any of
these qualities but simply use them as counters in a verbal game
that is an end in itself, a form ofparatelic amusement. Babies do
not like being frightened or attacked, but they chuckle with
delight at games of peek-a-boo or tickling, which they know are
merely mock aggression and pretend frights. In this case at
least, wisdom does come 'from the mouths of babes and
sucklings.' The same point is true in relation to ethnic jokes
about railway accidents , in which disaster strikes allegedly
slow-witted 'dumb Svenskas' in Minnesota or 'Paddies' in
Scotland:
... the Swede farm-hand in Minnesota .. . on the witness

stand was called upon by the attorney for the railroad to
Davies ~Nasty Legends' 63
furnish details touching on the tragic death of a

companion.
'Aye tell you,' he answered. 'Me and Ole bane
walkin' on railroad track. Train come by and Aye yump off
track. By and by, when train is gone, Aye don't see Ole any
more, so Aye walk on and pretty soon Aye see one of Ole's
arms on one side of track and one of Ole's legs on other side
of track and then pretty soon Aye see Ole's head but Ole's
body is not there, so Aye stop and Aye say to myself, 'By
Yupiter, something must a' happened to Ole!'46
Up in Minnesota a railroad train killed a cow belonging to a

Scandinavian homesteader. The tragedy, having been
reported at headquarters, a claim-agent was sent to the spot
to make a settlement of damages ... 'Mr. Swanson,' he said
with a winning smile, 'the company wants to be fair with
you in this matter. We deeply regret that your cow has met
her death on our tracks. But, on the other side Mr.
Swanson , from our side there are certain things to be
considered. In the first place, that cow had no business
straying on our right of way and you, as her owner, should
not have permitted her to do so. Moreover, it is possible that
her presence there might have caused a derailment of the
locomotive which struck her and a serious wreck perhaps
involving loss of human life. Now, such being the case, and
it being conceded that the cow was, in effect, a trespasser on
our property, what do you think, as man to man, would be a
fair basis of settlement as between you and the railroad
company?' For a space Mr. Swanson pondered on the
argument. Then, speaking slowly and weighing his words,
he delivered himself of an ultimatum: 'I bane poor Swede
farmer,' he said. 'I shall give you two dollars.'47
The nursery rhyme 'Paddy on the Railway' IS essentially

similar:
Paddy on the railway picking up stones

Along came a railway train and broke Paddy's bones.
'Hey,' said Paddy, 'that's not fair.'
'Well,' said the driver, 'you shouldn't've been there.'
[British traditional48]
64 Davies (Nasty Legends,
The idea that those who find such tales and rhymes
amusing would be overjoyed at the sight of a real Ole or Paddy
being mown down by the train is absurd. The jokes simply draw
on, and combine, two well-established genres of humour
namely: playing with images of accident, death and disaster;
and the stupidity (and corresponding lack of technical and
commercial acumen) of a familiar neighbour or ethnic
minority.
It is difficult to establish detailed comparisons between the
jokes and legends of the railway era and those of today because
we lack a representative recorded sample of the material in oral
circulation in the past. However, the general similarities
between them show that the derivation of amusement from
mock horror-tales about technical disasters and from the
anxieties the latest forms of technical innovation produce is only
modern in the sense that it could only occur after the industrial
revolution.
Conclusions
In the legends, sick jokes and ethnic jokes, both about food and
about disasters, certain patterns seem to be discernible-
namely:
(1) They all play with things that shock~annibalism, 'peticide'
(especially 'canicide' and 'felicide'), aggression, the threat or the
reality of death and destruction. However, they are not usually
tendentious: that is, they do not have a purposed tendency. On
the contrary, they are a pleasing switch to a paratelic mode of
behaviour that is an end in itself and which constitutes a
welcome relief from the telic tedium of much of our everyday
existence in which all our activities are but a means to some
other serious end.
(2) Legends are tales whose capacity to shock depends on the
casual way they drop a horrid surprise into the everyday world
of the audience. They are told about people who resemble those
who tell and listen to the story, and their plausibility depends on
yet another such person-the 'friend of a friend.'
(3) Outsiders are brought in to provide a plausible explanation
for a bizarre episode in a legend, or alternatively as the key to a
joke whose punch-line is going to switch a plausible narrative
Davies cNasty Legends, 65
into palpable farce. The mechanism that does this is a

conventional comic script in which qualities that the joke-teller
and audience would reject as foolish (for example, stupidity) or
repellent (for example, cannibalism) are pinned in a humorous
way either upon neighbours (who are made to look like a foolish
version of the joke-tellers themselves) or upon a distant people
(who can be safely portrayed as behaving in a peculiar and
shocking manner).
NOTES
1. For further examples of cannibal jokes from many countries, see:

William Davenport Adams, The Treasury of Modern Anecdotes
(London: Hamilton Adams, 1886), p. 15; Julius Alvin, Gross Jokes
(New York: Zebra Kensington, 1983), pp. 57-62; Alan Bell, Sydney
Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), p. 198; Jacquie
Climent-Galant, Les Meilleures de Lui (Paris: Filipacchi, 1979), p. 69;
Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose (New York: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, 1983), p. 95; Geoffrey Gorer, Africa Dances
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1945), p. 209; Walter Jerrold, A Book of
Famous Wits (London: Methuen, 1913), p. 260; Arthur Marshall,
Neuer Rub Bottoms with a Porcupine (London: Allen and Unwin,
1979), p. 177; E. and N. and R. and C. and C. Mossessons, The Perfect
Put Down (New York: Scholastic, 1974); Franco Scopelliti, 600
Barzellette Irresistibili (Milan: De Vecchi, 1981), pp. 47 and 97; and
Peter Vincent, The Two Ronnies, but first-The News (London:
W.H.Allen, 1977), p. 25.
2. See also Roger Abrahams, 'Ghastly Commands: The Cruel Joke
Revisited,' Midwest Folklore 2 (1961), p. 246.
3. Venetia J. Newall, 'Folklore and Cremation,' Folklore 96 (1985), p.
143.
4. Vincent (1977), p. 28.
5. For further examples, see: Jan Harold Brunvand, The Vanishing
Hitchhiker: American Urban Legends and Their Meanings (New
York/London: Norton, 1981), p. 94; Christian Janssen (pseud. of
Christie Davies), letter to The Listener (26 November, 1970), p. 738;
Paul Smith, The Book of Nasty Legends (London: Routledge and
Kegan Paul, 1984), pp. 26, 104, 106.
6. Smith (1983), p. 106.
7. Smith (1983 ), p. 106.
B. See: Jack Goody, Cooking, Cuisine and Class (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1982), pp. 84 and 106.
9. John Greenway, The Last Frontier (London: Davis-Poynter, 1975), p.
276. For further examples of such jokes, see: America the Golden Age
of Comedy (New York: AFE,1973), p.127; David Barlow et.al., The
Instant Sunshine Book (London: Robson, 1980). p. 81; Bud Delaney

and Lolo Delaney, The Beastly Gazette (New York: Scholastic, 1979),
p. 83; George W, Jacobs German Wit and Humour (Philadelphia:
George W. Jacobs, 1903), p. 273; Charles William Kimmins, The
Springs of Laughter (London: Methuen, 1928), p. 159 .
10. Mr Punch on the Continong (London: Educational, Punch Library,
1908), p. 111.
11. Smith (1983), p. 54.
12. Jokes for All Occasions (London: Brentano's, 1922), p. 50 (see alsop.
194); Paul Smith, The Book of Nastier Legends (London: Routledge
and Kegan Paul, 1986), p. 95. (cf: AT 1409). For instances about cats
and dogs eaten by the beseiged, see: Rev. James Oliver Bevan, Wits
and their Humours (London: George Allen, 1911), pp. 97-80; Miglietto
Moglia, Le 1500 piu belle Barzellette (Milan: De Vecchi, 1981), p. 338;
Suzette Taylor, ed., The Humour of Spain (London: Walter Scott,
1906), p. 238.
13. See: Paul Fieldhouse, Food and Nutrition: Customs and Culture
(London: Croom Helm, 1986), pp. 182-91; Goody (1982), pp. 77, 106;
Reay Tannahill, Flesh and Blood: A History of the Cannibal Complex
(London: Hamish Hamilton, 1975).
14. For example, see: The Daily Mail (3 September, 1988), p. 3.
15. I am greatly indebted to the analysis of this point by Elliott Oring.
See: Elliott Oring, 'Jokes and the Discourse of Disaster,' Journal of
American Folklore 100 (1987), pp. 276-86, especially pp. 277, 282-86.
16. Oring (1987).
17. I wish to thank the many informants who have provided me with
examples and background data, notably Christopher Chevis and
Professor W.M.S. Russell.
18. Smith (1983), p. 10.
19. Smith (1983), p. 65; Brunvand (1981), p. 62.
20. Smith (1983), p. 63.
21. Smith (1983), p. 63.
22. See: Christie Davies, 'Ethnic Jokes, Moral Values and Social
Boundaries,' British Journal of Sociology 33 (1982), pp. 383-403,
'Language, Identity and Ethnic Jokes about Stupidity,' International
Journal of the Sociology of Language 65 (1987), pp. 39-52, 'Folklor,
anekdoti i ikonomicheski progres,' Smekhut vuv folklora, Problemi
na Bulgarskiya Folklor 7 (Sofia: Izatelsvo na Bulgariskata and
academiya na naukite,1987), pp. 66-77, 'Stupidity and Rationality:
Jokes from the Iron Cage,' in: Chris Powell and George Paton, eds.,
Humour in Society: Resistance and Control (London: Macmillan,
1988), pp. 1-32, 'The Irish Joke as Social Phenomenon,' in: John
Durant and Jonathan Miller, eds., Laughing Matters, A Serious Look
at Humour (Harlow, Essex: Longman's, 1988), pp. 44-65, and Ethnic
Humour around the World (Bloomington, Indiana; Indiana
University Press, 1990).
Davies 'Nasty Legends~ 67
23. Stephane Steeman, Raconte ... une fois les vraies histoires Belges
(Paris: Menges , 1977), p. 95.
24 . H.A. Yearhouse, De bedste Arhus Historier (Copenhagen: Chr.
Ericksen, 1979), n. p.
25 . Armand Isnard, 2000 Histoires Belges (Boulogne: Detente, 1979), p .
109.
26. Van de Boute and Hen Train, Anthologie de l 'humeur Belge (Paris :
Garnier Freres, 1978), p . 19.
27. Larry Wilde, The Last Official Polish Jokebook (Los Angeles:
Pinnacle, 1977), p. 135.
28. Bengt Holbek, 'The Ethnic Joke in Denmark,' in: W. Van Nespen,
ed., Miscellanea Prof Em. Dr. K.C. Peeters, Door Vrienden en Collega
hem aangebooden ten gelegenheid van zym emeritaat (Antwerp:
Govaerts, 1975), p. 33.
29. See Edith Efron, The Apocalyptics, Cancer and the Big Lie (New
York: Simon and Schuster, 1984).
30. Bob Ward, The Light Stuff, Space Humor from Sputnik to Shuttle
(Huntsville, Alabama: Jester, 1982).
31. Ward (1982), p. 141.
32. Melvin Helitzer, Comedy Writing Secrets (Cincinatti: Writers' Digest
Books, 1987), p. 31.
33. cf: Laurence J. Peter and Bill Dana, The Laughter Prescription (New
York: Ballantine, 1982), p. 63.
34. Ward (1982), pp. 39-44.
35.ward(1982),pp.22,72,91, 188.
36. Ward (1982), p. 82.
37. Herbert Spencer (ed. Donald G. Macrae), The Man Versus the State
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), p. 88.
38. I am glad to find that my colleague, Professor W.M.S. Russell, has
independently come to a similar conclusion on the basis of different
evidence. See: W.M.S. Russell, 'Time in Folklore and Science Fiction,'
Foundation 43 (1988), pp. 15 and 24. See also: Science and Technology
in l9th Century Germany (London: Goethe Institute/Munich:
Deutsches Museum, 1982), and especially Ernest H. Berninger,
'Science and Technology at the Time of Goethe.'
39. Bell (1980), pp. 204-05.
40. Bell (1980), p. 205.
41. Bell (1980), p. 671.
42. Leonard Russell and Nicholas Bentley, eds., The English Comic
Album (London: Michael Joseph, 1984), p. 21; Paul Spice and Sue
Spice, Jubilee 1887 (Buckingham: Barracuda, 1987).
43. Mr. Punch's Railway Book (London: Educational, 1908 ), p.95. Real
book-sellers, on the contrary (in the twentieth century at least), seem
concerned to avoid such themes. When J .K. Galbraith asked at La
Guardia airport if they had a copy of his own book, The Great Crash
1929 (which is in fact about the collapse of the stock market), the lady
in charge of the airport book store replied, 'That's certainly not a title
you could sell in an airport.' See: John Kenneth Galbraith, The Great
Crash 1929 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961), p. 19.
44. Mr. Punch's Railway Book (1908), p. 45. Also in James Ferguson,
The Table in a Roar (London: Methuen, 1933), p. 251.
45. Mr. Punch's Railway Book, p.29. Also in Ferguson (1933 ), p. 233.
46. Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb, A Laugh a Day Keeps the Doctor Away (New
York: Garden City, 1923), p. 227. Also in Gordon Lang, Great
Laughter in Court (London: Foulsham, n.d.), pp.48-9. The English
editor, Lang, managed to misquote the original American version in
such a way as to lose half the point of the joke.
47. Cobb (1923), pp. 104-5. Also in Lewis Copeland and Faye Copeland,
10,000 Jokes, Toasts and Stories (New York: Garden City, 1939), p.
757.
48. See also: Norah Montgomerie and William Montgomerie, Sandy
Candy and other Scottish Nursery Rhymes (London: Hogarth, 1948),
p. 12.
THE ROOMMATE'S SUICIDE
AND THE 4.0*
William S. Fox
A current p1ece of American college folklore succinctly
integrates three long-standing student concerns: grades,
roommates, and death. Its most common expression is: 'If your
roommate commits suicide, you get a 4.0 that semester.'l
There are many variants of 'The Roommate's Suicide and
the 4.0.' Some are quite permissive. Although most versions
require roommates to die by their own hands, many allow a
roommate's murder or accidental death or any violent death to
qualify a student for automatic A's. One version includes 'any
slow drawn-out death, for example, cancer.' Any sort of
roommate's death often suffices. Some very permissive variants
grant straight A's if a parent or other close relative dies or even
'any person who is important in their lives.'2
Still other variants include restrictive provisions. One
grants a 4.0 average only 'if death occurs in the room or with
the roommate .' Another reports: 'If you see them do it, you get a
4 point. If you don't see them, you just get a 3.4.' Still another
variant allows for natural or accidental deaths, but sensibly
withholds a 4.0 from a student who murders a roommate.
Although a 4.0 average is almost always mentioned, some
variants extend other rewards to the surviving roommate.
Some versions allow the bereaved student to return home for
the remainder of the semester, assured of a 4.0. One version
allows the surviving roommate to have 'first draw' or choice in
the next dormitory 'room draw.' A few less generous variants
automatically grant lower averages, often said to be a 3.0.
A few variants elaborate on the administrative aspects of
the grading policy. One student informant claims that a
roommate's suicide returns a 4.0, but only if the suicide occurs
70 Fox The Roommate,s Suicide
during the last six weeks of the academic term. This variant no
doubt parallels analogous administrative prohibitions against
'dropping a course during the last six weeks of a term. Another
variant maintains that if a roommate in a double (i.e., twin)
room dies, the survivor receives a 4.0, but 'if that roommate
lives in a suite with three students, all the suitemates get a
3.5'-a policy intended, perhaps, to stem grade inflation.
To explore variations in, and correlates of, 'The
Roommate's Suicide and the 4.0,' 1 carried out two small
surveys of convenience samples at two quite different colleges in
Spring 1985.3 One survey involved eighty two introductory
sociology students at Skidmore College, a residential liberal arts
college with about 2,100 students in upstate New York; the
other tapped 150 students in introductory and advanced
sociology classes at the State University of New York at New
Paltz, a state college with about 7,300 students. Although not
based on probability sampling procedures, these data document
both the popularity of 'The Roommate's Suicide and the 4.0' and
its widespread acceptance as true.
Table 1 in the Appendix describes distributions of
knowledge of the belief. Almost three-quarters of the private
college and fully two-thirds of the state college students reported
that they had heard or read of a college grading policy that
affects a student's grades if his or her roommate dies.
Students familiar with the belief were asked how they first
heard of the policy about a roommate's death and grades. The
distribution of sources at each school are presented in Table II in
the Appendix. In each survey, about three-quarters of students
who had heard of the policy reported that they first learned of it
from other students at the same school, another one in ten at
each college who knew the policy reported having first learned
of it from a student at another school. Only two students
surveyed, both at the public college, claimed to have first learned
of the policy by reading about it. Even allowing for faulty
memories and mistaken recollections, these data strongly
suggest the diffusion of the belief through student oral culture.
The oral transmission of this belief within student culture
is also suggested by a comparison of public college students who
live on and off campus. (Too few private college students live off-
campus to allow comparison.) Four-fifths of on-campus
Fox The Roommate~s Suicide 71
students had heard of the policy, as compared with a little over

two-fifths of off-campus students who live with other students
and only about one out of eight off-campus students who live
with their families. Students in dormitories are likely to be more
centrally located in undergraduate sociometric networks and
thus are more likely to encounter the belief. In addition, since
most variants refer to roommates rather than family members,
the belief has far greater relevance to students in dormitories, or
at least living with other students, than to students living with
their families. (See Table III in the Appendix.)
Neither school surveyed has ever had any such grading
policy, of course. Although academic and administrative policies
never cease to amaze, it would be quite remarkable indeed if
any college or university grants an automatic 4.0 average for
any reason whatsoever. The surveys indicate, however, that
significant proportions of students believe the policy to be in
effect, even at their own college. Of Skidmore College students
who have heard that a roommate's death affects grades, almost
half believe the policy is operating at their school. Over four-
fifths of students familiar with the belief report the policy is in
effect at other schools. Belief in the policy is even more
widespread among students surveyed at the state college.
Almost five-sixths of those familiar with the story hold that it
operates at their school. Nine out of ten students believe the
policy is found at other schools. Table IV presents more detailed
data concerning belief that the policy is in effect.
Asked about why such a policy exists, most students point
to the stress and trauma experienced by the surviving
roommate. Among the rationales for what one student calls the
'suicide policy' are: 'due to the stress upon the student;' 'due to
shock;' 'it tends to have psychological effects on a person;' 'you
are emotionally disrupted;' 'she or he is placed under
tremendous emotional stress;' 'you are unable to function
scholastically, so a grade is assigned;' 'apparently the trauma is
so severe that the school will do this;' 'the school will compensate
by taking the academic pressure off. '4
I do not know where or when this belief began--does one
ever? Evidence suggests that it is fairly new, at least as a
popular, widely disseminated belief. I have not found the belief
in published collections of college folklore. 5 Despite the currency
of the belief among students today, almost none of my

administrative or faculty colleagues, not even the youngest,
know the belief; and those few who do know it recall that they
learned it only recently from students, none before a few years
ago. The registrars at the colleges surveyed had not heard of the
purported policy until I asked each of them about it. Indeed,
adults in general seem not to know of any such grading policy
and cannot recall one from their own student days. Thus 'The
Roommate's Suicide and the 4.0' appears to be of recent origin.
The belief may well stem from, or at least reflect, increased
concern with suicide in recent years, especially with increased
media and general public attention to the suicides of young
people.
The connection of 4.0 averages to roommate's suicides
reminds us, of course, of other college folklore. Perhaps the best
known of this lore is 'The Roommate's Death' (or 'The
Scratching at the Door'). 6 This legend, too, involves the
untimely demise of an unfortunate roommate. Reduced to its
essentials, 'The Roommate's Death' tells of two roommates,
almost always women, alone in an otherwise empty dormitory.
One girl leaves (for example, to get food or drink). A short time
later, the roommate remaining behind hears scratching at the
locked door. Afraid to open it, she spends a terror-filled night
before being rescued in the morning. Escorted from the room,
she sees her roommate outside the door lying dead in a pool of
blood.
However, differences between the belief of 'The
Roommate's Suicide and the 4.0' and the legend of 'The
Roommate's Death' are more telling than their similarity. In
'The Roommate's Death,' the surviving student is herself
heavily responsible for her roommate's fate since, in her fear,
she fails to respond to the desperate scratching at the door. She
is also punished for her failure to help her roommate-
sometimes by her hair turning white or grey, sometimes by
suffering a mental breakdown from which she never recovers.
Certainly the egocentrism, narcissism, and emphasis on
external rewards said to characterize students in the 1980s is
often grossly exaggerated. Still, such qualities do pervade 'The
Roommate's Suicide and the 4.0.' The belief centres solely on the
surviving roommate. Furthermore, the surviving student is not
Fox The Roommate,s Suicide 73
held responsible in any way for the roommate's death and

actually benefits as his or her trauma and stress are assuaged
with straight A's. Not even a trace of 'survivor's guilt' is found.
Belief that a roommate's suicide brings a 4.0 average is
also more egalitarian with respect to sex roles than is 'The
Roommate's Death.' The latter invariably features female
roommates. It is a tale with a moral and a victim-those
women, after all, should not have been staying alone in their
dormitory-and such tales are well-served by female
characters. In contrast, 'The Roommate's Suicide and the 4.0'
lacks both moral and victim, and thus has no special need for
women. The same grading policy in cases of a roommate's
suicide applies to males and females alike, and the belief is
sometimes even stated in gender-neutral language , often with
the phrase 'he or she gets a 4.0.' This is very much a belief for
our times.
'The Roommate's Suicide and the 4.0' is a recent addition
to an already voluminous body of college grading lore. It is,
however, most unusual grading lore. Such items usually
describe the idiosyncrasies of professors, the capriciousness of
their grading practices, or students' superstitions about exams
and grading.7 'The Roommate's Suicide and the 4.0' instead
concerns an entire institution's academic policies-an unusual
focus for folklore about grading. There is, of course, other college
folklore concerning administrative or academic policies . For
example, college rules are said to require students to wait
specified lengths of time for late professors, the specific waiting
period depending on the rank of the professor. Such beliefs and
legends, however, do not deal with grading.
Furthermore, 'The Roommate's Suicide and the 4.0'
presents college policies in a most favourable light. When asked,
most students explain that the college-granted 4.0 average is
intended to ease a student through the terrible trauma and
unbearable stress experienced after such a horrible tragedy.
The policy compassionately recognizes that such circumstances
adversely affect a student's academic performance. Thus,
college authorities are implicitly portrayed as caring,
concerned, benevolent. Such folkloric description of college
policies and authorities would have been unlikely indeed during
74 Fox The Roommate's Suicide
times of student unrest and dissent. Again, here is a belief for

our times.
But folklore invariably weaves the old with the new, and
'The Roommate's Suicide and the 4.0' shares with traditional
grading lore a certain treatment of grades and the grading
process as capricious. The belief re-inforces traditional
treatment of grades as arbitrary, as based on luck rather than
merit, as due to factors far beyond the student's control. 'The
Roommate's Suicide and the 4.0' is thus a macabre expression
of students' continuing folklore of the paper chase.
APPENDIX
Table I
Knowledge of 'The Roommate,s Suicide and t he 4.0 , (i n % )
Know s Belief? Private College State College

Yes 73 01
No CZ1 33
Total 100 100
(N ) (82) (150)
Table II
Source of belief (in %)
Lea rned From? Private College State College

S ame College 73 77
Anothe r Colleg e 12 10
Reading 0 2
Other/Don't Know 15 11
Total 100 100
(N) (60) (100)
Fox The Roommate,s Suicide 75
Table III
Knowledge of Belief by Residence (State College) in %
Knows Belief? On-Campus Off-Campus 1* Off-campus 2*

Yes 00 43 12
No 21 57 88
Total 100 100 100
(N) (112) (21) (17)
*'Off-Campus (1)' = students living off-campus with other

students;
'Off-Campus (2)' = students living at home.
Table IV
Belief That Policy Is In Effect (Students Who Know belief Only) in %
Policy Is In Effect Private College State College

A. At Own College
Yes 48 84
No 52 16
Total 100 100
(N) (48) (73)
B. At Other Schools
Yes 82 00
No 18 10
Total 100 100
(N) (38) (60)
NOTES
* An earlier version of this paper was read at the annual meeting of the
American Folklore Society held in Cincinnati, Ohio, in October 1985.
1. A brief explanation of '4.0' is needed for readers unfamiliar with this
term. Most American colleges and universities evaluate a student's
academic performance by assigning a letter grade for each course at
the end of each semester or term. Usually an 'A' indicates
distinguished performance, 'B' above average, 'C' average, 'D' below
average, and 'F' fail. These evaluations, called 'grades,' are assigned
numbers--4 for A, 3 forB, and so on-and these numerical grades
are then averaged over a student's courses into a 'grade point
average' for the term. Thus, a 4.0 average, usually called simply a '4
point' or a '4 point oh,' is synonymous with receiving all A's, or
'perfect' grades.
2. Variants reported in this paper were collected in Spring, 1985 from
interviews with student informants and from responses in surveys
described later in the paper.
3. Copies of the short questionnaires used in these surveys are available
from the author. Write to William Fox, Department of Sociology,
Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, New York 12866, USA. Spencer
Cahill of Skidmore College and William W. Philliber of SUNY at New
Paltz helped collect data for these surveys.
4. In personal correspondence, Jay Mechling of the University of
California at Davis reports that native interpretations of texts he has
collected on his campus almost never mention official university
policies. Rather, Professor Mechling notes, the surviving roommate's
receipt of a 4.0 is attributed simply to extra-personal forces and luck,
not to college policies. I have not encountered this rationale in my
collecting. Rather, students at the New York schools from whom I
have collected the belief invariably point to administrative policy.
Further study across more colleges, however, may well uncover the
pattern suggested by Professor Mechling.
5. For example: Richard M. Dorson, 'The Folklore of Colleges,'
American Mercury 68 (June, 1949), pp. 671-77; Ronald L. Baker, 'The
Folklore of Students,' in: Richard M. Dorson, ed., The Handbook of
American Folklore (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983),
pp. 106-14; and Barre Toelken, 'The Folklore of Academe,' in: Jan
Harold Brunvand, The Study of American Folklore, 3rd edn. (New
York/London: Norton, 1986), pp. 502-28.
6. On 'The Roommate's Death,' see: Jan Harold Brunvand, The
Vanishing Hitchhiker: American Urban Legends and Their
Meanings (New York/London: Norton, 1981), pp. 57-62. See also
Brunvand's bibliographic references, pp. 71-72.
7. See, for example: Toelken (1986); and Baker (1983).
THE CONTEXTS OF THE
CONTEMPORARY LEGEND:
'THE VANISHING HITCHHIKER' AND
'GRAVITY HILL'
Mark Glazer
The urban belief legend may well be the type of folktale which
best expresses contemporary folk culture and is most typical of
modern narrative. These stories, which seem to be generated by
the petty anxieties of the modern world, apparently have a
morbid preoccupation with stalled cars, contaminated food and
other negative aspects of contemporary technology. They seem
to reveal a fascination with those facets of modem life we love to
hatel and have thus created a folklore (or, more accurately, a
narrative tradition) of the commonplace. It is this prosaic
character which leads them to be told in ad hoc and highly
informal circumstances.
Though many attempts have been made to study the
urban belief tale in context, unfortunately very little of this
research has been done in a context which is inherent to this
kind of narrative. The problem essentially is as simple as it is
hard to surmount. As there is no structured context for the
narration of contemporary legends, it is impossible for a
folklorist to witness a natural performance. Unlike the
performance of a Turkish 'hikaye' in a coffee house, for
example, there is no possible way a folklorist can know where
and when the performance of a contemporary legend will take
place.2
So what are the natural contexts of urban belief tale
telling? In what kind of settings are these tales usually told? We
can at least begin by stating obvious facts such as that the
contexts of these stories are as ordinary as the narratives
78 Glazer The Contexts of the Contemporary Legend
themselves: the narrators are not necessarily people famed for

their skill as storytellers; the audiences for these tales tend to be
acquaintances of the tellers, perhaps friends or work-mates:
and they are told in informal conditions which favour the
telling of stories which are told-for-true or told-as-rumour
rather than formal fictional narratives.
In this paper, I contend that understanding these casual
and spontaneous contexts is extremely important to the study of
contemporary legends, not only because the unstructured
storytelling framework is the means by which the narratives
are communicated, but also because it is often the settings
themselves which determine many of the social characteristics
of the tellers and their audiences.
I discuss these issues by studying the contexts of 'The
Vanishing Hitchhiker'3 and 'Gravity Hill'4 legends as told in a
strictly delineated geographical area and by a single ethnic
group. The area in question is the Lower Rio Grande Valley of
Texas and the group the Mexican American community of that
region.5 The Mexican Americans of the Lower Rio Grande
Valley have adapted the contemporary legend to their culture
and have made it a part of their tradition.6
I will start with a review of the folk cui ture of the Lower
Rio Grande Valley of Texas and continue with a discussion of
the method used to collect the legends. Then the contexts of
contemporary legends will be reviewed by discussing, first the
contexts of'The Vanishing Hitchhiker,' and then the contexts of
'Gravity Hill.' I shall conclude with a comparison of contexts of
these two legends.
The Folk Culture of the Lower Rio Grande Valley of Texas.
The Lower Rio Grande Valley of Texas, 'The Valley' as it is

known by its inhabitants, is the name given to the four counties
in the extreme south-eastern part of the state of Texas. Three of
these counties are on the border with Mexico and therefore on
the Rio Grande River itself; these are, from west to east, Starr,
Hidalgo and Cameron. The fourth, Willacy, is to the north of
Hidalgo and Cameron counties. 'The Valley' is one of the poorest
Glazer The Contexts of the Contemporary Legend 79
areas in the United States, and usually has an unemployment

rate of over 15%. Of the approximately half a million people
living in the area, 80% are Mexican Americans.
Traditional Mexican American folklore has been a part of
the culture of the region since at least the seventeenth century.
This lore is closely associated with the folklore of north-eastern
Mexico. Nevertheless, contemporary urban folklore is also
strongly represented in this area. In 'The Valley' traditional lore
and urban lore coexist and affect each other. It is important to
note that, on the one hand many traditional tales are updated
and made to fit modern culture and technology, while on the
other hand many items of contemporary folklore such as urban
belief tales are coloured by traditional beliefs and made to
conform to a more traditional context. This results in a mixture
of traditional, updated and modern folklore, with urban belief
tales strongly represented.
The materials in the Rio Grande Folklore Archive at Pan
American University, Edinburg, Texas suggest that the
Mexican American traditional folklore is, generally speaking, of
Hispanic derivation. By this, I mean to say that this folklore has
in the main descended from Southern European folklore and
has a Spanish framework. Very little of this lore seems to have
been influenced by the culture of Mesoamerican Indians. This is
especially true of the traditional folk narratives of the area. 7
The major influences on modern narrative in this urban
setting are North American urban belief tales. These widely told
stories from American culture have been adopted and adapted
by Mexican Americans. Well-known tales such as 'The
Vanishing Hitchhiker,' 'The Hook' and 'The Boyfriend's Death'
are popular; and the collection at Pan American University also
contains narratives such as the story of 'Gravity Hill,' updated
traditional legends such as 'The Devil at the Disco,'8 and newer
narratives such as 'The Superglue Revenge' which, although
noted in the literature, have hardly ever been studied. The
contextual information gathered alongside this large body
contemporary legends provides a base for the analysis of the
narrative contexts of the urban belief tale. 9
Method of Collection
The data reviewed here were collected on the basis of genre-

specific collection forms . This has resulted in a random
sampling of the folklore of the area. (All collected materials are
deposited in the Rio Grande Folklore Archive at Pan American
University, Edinburg, Texas10). A special form was designed
and has been used to collect demographic and contextual
information as well as texts. This process provides a more
scientific view of the overall characteristics of the genre than
the usual subjective and personal approach affords. The Rio
Grande Folklore Archive is a depository for 1,867 legends,
including eighty five versions of 'Gravity Hill' and 248 versions
of 'The Vanishing Hitchhiker.' 'Mter the Devil and La Llorona,
The Ghostly Hitchhiker is the third most common character in
the area's legendry. It is the materials in this collection, as
represented by 'The Vanishing Hitchhiker' and 'Gravity Hill,'
which form the basis for the following discussion.
The Contexts of the Contemporary Legend
Basing my analysis on the folktale survey of the Lower Rio

Grande Valley of Texas, in this section I will try to identify some
of the contexts of contemporary legend narration and some of
the social attributes of its tellers. This examination will show
that contemporary legends are told in ad hoc and highly
informal situations.
1. The Contexts for 'The Vanishing Hitchhiker,

'The Vanishing Hitchhiker' is probably the best known of
contemporary legends. To summarize, this story usually
involves the disappearance of a hitchhiker from a motor
vehicle. The driver eventually finds out that the hitchhiker is
dead and that he has given a ride to a ghost. Of the 248 versions
of 'The Vanishing Hitchhiker' in the Rio Grande Folklore
Archive, 182 (73.38%) were told in 'Informal Situations,' 31
(12 .50%) were told in 'Storytelling Situations,' and 14 (5.64%)
were collected as 'Personal Experiences.' We do not have this

information for 21 narratives ( 8.46%) (See Table 1).
Of all the contexts listed, those brought together under the
heading of 'Casual Settings' are the most common for the
'Vanishing Hitchhiker.' 111 legends (44. 75% of the total
sample) were told in this context. Within this category,
'Talking' (8.46%) is the most common setting, followed by
'Conversation' (5.64%) and 'Gatherings' (5.23%). The second
most common set of 'Informal Situations' is 'School or Work'
(10.88%) followed by 'Domestic Situations' (10.08%).
I would like to note that the informants are almost equally
divided between men and women; 104 (41.93%) are male and
105 are female (42.33%). We do not have this information for
the rest of our sample. Of tales told in 'Casual Settings,' 36.93%
are from male and 41.44% are from female informants. We do
not have this data for 21.62% of our informants. There are
other important differences in the proportion of men and
women and the context of telling a contemporary legend which
are as follows: 'Work or School,' male 51.85%, female 44.44%;
'Domestic Situations,' male 48%, female 40%; 'Travelling,' male
66.66%, female 25%; 'Personal Experiences,' male 50%, female
42.85%. It seems that 'Casual Settings' are the most common
storytelling settings for women, and that the other settings are
more popular with men.
2 . The Contexts for 'Gravity Hill:~

'Gravity Hill,' as told in the Lower Rio Grande Valley of Texas, is
a story which relates how a car stalls on some railway tracks
and is mysteriously moved to safety. It is believed that the stalled
car is pushed away from the tracks by the ghosts of children
who died there tracks in a school bus or train collision; they do
not want anyone else to die at that location.ll Of the 85 versions
of 'Gravity Hill' in the Rio Grande Folklore Archive, 67
(78.82%) were told in 'Informal Situations,' 8 (9.41 %) were told
in 'Storytelling Situations,' and 8 (9.41 %) were collected as
'Personal Experiences.' We do not have this information for two
narratives (2.35%) (See Table II).
Of all the contexts listed, those brought together under the
heading of 'Casual Settings' are the most common (57.64% of
the total sample). Within this category, 'Talking' (16.47%) is
again the most common setting, followed by 'Conversation'

(5.88%), 'Visits' (5.88%) and 'Parties' (4. 70%). The next most
common set of 'Informal Situations' is 'School or Work' (10.58%
of the total sample), which ties for second place with
'Travelling' (10.58%). We do not have a single example of this
story being told in a 'Domestic Situation.'
I would like to note that the informants for this tale are
mostly women (54.11 %): male tellers represent only 32.94%.
We do not have this information for the remainder of our
sample. Of stories told in 'Casual Settings,' 35% are from male
and 57.10% are from female informants. We do not have this
data for 8.10% of our informants.
There are other important differences in the proportion of
male and female tellers in one context of narration for this
contemporary legend. These are: 'Work or School,' male
44.40%, female 44.40%; 'Travelling,' male none, female 78%;
'Personal Experience,' male 62.5%, female 37 .5%.
Conclusions: A Comparison of the Contexts of Two

Contemporary Legends
The initial question which I set out to answer in this essay was:
'What is the natural context of the urban belief tale?' Namely,
'In what kind of settings are these tales usually told?' As far as
the tales I have examined are concerned, the answer seems to
be that both tales are told predominantly in 'Informal
Situations.' If these two legends are typical, and there is no
reason to think they are not, then for the first time in the study
of contemporary legend, we have sound statistical evidence to
bear out our long-held implicit assumption that contemporary
legend telling tends to occur in unstructured contexts quite
distinct from the traditional tale-telling gatherings conducive to
the narration of folktales.
One interesting observation which also comes out of this
analysis is that women in particular favour tale-telling in
informal contexts. The difference in the data for 'Gravity Hill'
and 'The Vanishing Hitchhiker,' for example, shows that the
former is more often told in these sorts of settings than the
latter. It appears that this is a function of the greater proportion
of women storytellers in the data for 'Gravity Hill.' As this

survey indicates that more women than men tell modern
legends in 'Casual Settings,' it follows that a story told more
often by women will be told in informal situations more
frequently than in other contexts. These leads are worth
pursuing in future studies.
Some other observations are also of interest. First, 'The
Vanishing Hitchhiker' is more often told in a formal
'Storytelling Situations' than 'Gravity Hill' is. Secondly,
'Gravity Hill' legends are collected as 'Personal Experiences'
more often than 'The Vanishing Hitchhiker' legends are,
perhaps because so many individuals are supposed to have
acted out the legend and experimented by stalling their cars at
these railroad track. Thirdly, whereas we have a few
'Vanishing Hitchhiker' legends narrated in 'Domestic
Situations,' we do not have a single example of 'Gravity Hill'
being told in these circumstances. The reasons for this situation
are unclear.
There are some other interesting conclusions to draw
from the data. In the first place, it seems to indicate that males
exchange stories in 'Work or School' situation more often than
in other contexts, and that telling a legend as a 'Personal
experience' seems to be common among male storytellers. The
exchange of stories during travel provides us with another
interesting contrast: though many men tell 'The Vanishing
Hitchhiker' while travelling, few women or girls do so. It seems,
then, that we might be able to make certain predictions about
who tells which story by identifying the contexts of the
storytelling.
To conclude, the analysis of data based on background
materials for 'The Vanishing Hitchhiker' and 'Gravity Hill'
collected in the Lower Rio Grande Valley of Texas shows, as
expected but never previously proven, that the most common
contexts for telling contemporary legends are informal
situations and that there is enough variation in these contexts
from one legend to another to be able to predict with some
accuracy who the tellers of the story are likely to be in a given
context. It will, however, take research on many other
contemporary legends and in other cultural areas before the
findings of this preliminary examination of the contexts of the

contemporary legends can be either confirmed or denied.
Table I
Contexts of ~The Vanishing Hitchhiker'
No. % M % F % N/A %
A. Informal Situations
Casual Settings 11 44.75 41 36.93 46 41.44 24 21.62
Requesting a Tale 7 2.82 1 14.28 6 85.71 0 0.0
Domestic Situations 25 10.08 12 48.00 10 40.00 3 12.0
School or Work CZ7 10.88 14 51.85 12 44.44 1 3.70
Travelling 12 4.83 8 66.66 3 25.00 1 8.33
B. Personal Experiences
14 5.64 7 0.50 6 42.85 1 7.14
C. Storytelling
31 12.50 14 45.16 15 48.38 2 6.45
D. Not Available
21 8.46 7 33.3 7 33.3 7 33.3
Total 248 99.96 104 41.93 105 42.33 :E 15.72
Table II
The Contexts of 'Gravity Hill'
No. % M % F % N/A %
A. Informal Situations
Casual Settings 49 57.64 17 35 28 57.10 4 8.10
School or Work 9 10.58 4 44.40 4 44.40 1 11.10
Travelling 9 10.58 0 0.0 7 78.00 2 22.00
B. Personal Experiences
8 9.41 5 62.50 3 37.50 0 0.0
C. Storytelling Situations
8 9.41 5 62.50 3 37.50 0 0.00
D.Not Available
2 2.35 0 0.0 0 0.0 2 100.00
Total 85 99.97 28 32.94 46 54.11 11 12.94
NOTES
1. There have been numerous articles which discuss the nature of the
contemporary legend. These include: David Buchan, 'The Modern
Legend,' in: A.E. Green and J.D.A. Widdowson, eds., Language,
Culture and Tradition (Leeds/Sheffield: The Institute of Dialect and
Folklife Studies/ Centre for English Cultural Tradition and
Language,1981), pp. 1-15; W.F.H. Nicolaisen, 'Perspectives on
Contemporary Legend,' Fabula 26 (1985), pp. 213-18; and Gillian
Bennett, 'What's "Modern" About the Modern Legend?,' Fabula 26
(1985), pp. 219-29.
2. For example, a version of 'The Hook' published by Bill Ellis was
acquired accidentally while his students were trying to collect
supernatural events, and a version of 'The Vanishing Hitchhiker'
published by Jose Limon was also collected accidentally while he was
working on something unrelated to contemporary legends. See: Bill
Ellis, 'Why Are Verbatim Transcripts of Legends Necessary?,' in:
Gillian Bennett, Paul Smith and J.D.A. Widdowson, eds.,
Perspectives on Contemporary Legend II (Sheffield:
CECTAL/Sheffield Academic Press, 1987), pp. 31-60; and Jose Limon,
'Legendry, Metafolklore, and Performance: A Mexican-American
Example,' Western Folklore 42 (1983), pp. 191-208.
3. For 'The Vanishing Hitchhiker' in the Lower Rio Grande Valley of
Texas, see: Mark Glazer, 'The Vanishing Hitchhiker in the McAllen
Standard Metropolitan Area: Mexican American Culture and Urban
Legend,' Urban Resources 4:3 (1987), pp. 31-36. For Mexican
American variants of the tale in Texas, see: Ruth Dodson, 'The Ghost
Nun,' in Mody C. Boatright and Donald Day, eds., Backwoods to
Border (Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1943), pp. 138-
39; and Limon (1983), pp. 191-208. The earliest article on 'The
Vanishing Hitchhiker' is Richard K. Beardsley and Rosalie Hankey,
'The Vanishing Hitchhiker,' California Folklore Quarterly 1 (1942),
pp. 303-35. Rosalie Hankey had, however, published some stories
about the ghostly hitchhiker earlier that year-see: Rosalie Hankey,
'Califomia Ghosts,' California Folklore Quarterly 1 (1942), pp. 157-77.
Among the many publications in which 'The Vanishing Hitchhiker'
is discussed are: Louis C. Jones, 'Hitchhiking Ghosts in New York,'
California Folklore Quarterly 3 (1944), pp. 284-92, and Chapter Six:
'The Ghostly Hitchhiker,' of Things That Go Bump in the Night (New
York: Hill and Wang, 1959), pp. 161-97; Ruth Ann Musick, Coffin
Hollow (Lexington, Kentucky: University of Kentucky, 1977), pp. 147-
58; Douglas J. McMillan, 'The Vanishing Hitchhiker in North
Carolina,' North Carolina Folklore 20 (1972), pp. 123-28; William A.
Wilson, 'The Vanishing Hitchhiker Among the Mormons,' Indiana
Folklore 9 (1976), pp. 5-13; Keith Cunningham, 'The Vanishing
Hitchhiker in Arizona-Almost,' Southwest Folklore 3 (1979), pp. 46-
50. For one of the best recent pieces, see: Gillian Bennett, 'The
Phantom Hitchhiker: Neither Modem, Urban nor Legend?,' in: Paul
Smith, ed., Perspectives on Contemporary Legend: Proceedings of the
Conference on Contemporary Legend, Sheffield, July 1982 (Sheffield:
CECTAL, 1984), pp. 45-63.
4. For 'Gravity Hill,' see: Ronald L. Baker, Hoosier Folk Legends
(Bloomington, Indiana : Indiana University Press, 1982), pp. 200-1,
259-60, and 'The Influence of Mass Culture on Modern Legends,'
Southern Folklore Quarterly 40 (1976), pp. 368-79. For this legend in
the Rio Grande Valley of Texas, see: Mark Glazer, 'Gravity Hill:
Belief and Belief Legend,' in: Gillian Bennett and Paul Smith, eds.,
The Questing Beast: Perspectives on Contemporary Legend IV
(Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1989), pp. 165-78.
5. For ethnographies of the area, see: Arthur J. Rubel, Across the
Tracks: Mexican Americans in a Texas City (Austin, Texas:
University of Texas Press, 1966); and William Madsen, The Mexican
Americans of South Texas, 2nd edn., (New York: Holt, Rinehart and
Winston, 1973).
6. For a general paper on the legend in the area, see: Mark Glazer, 'The
Mexican American Legend in the Rio Grande Valley: An Overview,'
The Borderlands Journal 10 (1986), pp. 143-60.
7. For an overview of the contemporary legend in the Mexican American
community, see: Mark Glazer, 'The Traditionalization of the
Contemporary Legend: The Mexican American Example,' Fabula 26
(1985), pp. 288-97. For some specific legends in the Mexican American
community, see: Mark Glazer, 'The Cultural Adaptation of a
Rumour Legend: The Boyfriend's Death in South Texas,' in: Bennett,
Smith and Widdowson, eds. (1987), pp. 93-108, and 'The Superglue
Revenge: A Psychocultural Analysis,' in Gillian Bennett and Paul
Smith, eds., Monsters with Iron Teeth: Perspectives in Contemporary
Legend III (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1989), pp. 139-46.
8. For the role of the devil in the folklore of the area, see: Mark Glazer,
'Continuity and Change in Legendry: Two Mexican American
Examples,' in: Smith, ed. (1984), pp. 108-27. For an anthology of the
folklore of the Rio Grande Valley of Texas, see : Mark Glazer, ed.,
Flour From Another Sack (Edinburg, Texas: Pan American
University Press, 1981).
9. For an overview of the Rio Grande Folklore Archive and its methods of
collection, see: Glazer (1981), pp. 205-10, and 'The Rio Grande Folklore
Archive: A Summary of Methods of Collection, of Classification and of
Holdings,' Southwest Folklore 5 (1981) , pp. 16-23.
10. The materials in the corpus discussed above were collected as part of
a survey of the folklore of the area.
11. The railroad tracks in question are in San Antonio, Texas, and their
location seems to be known to a large number of individuals. Many
young people seem to go to find out if their cars will really move over
the railroad tracks at this location.
young people seem to go to find out if their cars will really move over
the railroad tracks at this location.
THE HALIFAX SLASHER AND OTHER
'URBAN MANIAC' TALES
Michael Goss
Urban Maniacs: A Genuine Case?
In December 1987 an Old Bailey Court heard Anthony Bowl, a

51-year-old man with a history of mental illness, plead guilty to
the charge of having pushed a 40-year-old woman beneath an
approaching Waterloo-to-Portsmouth train at Wimbledon
Station on the previous 14 March.
Prosecuting Counsel claimed that the accused had staged
this apparently motiveless attack with 'a smile on his face;' one
eyewitness decribed him as calm, composed and emotionless,
while another stressed that Bowl had taken a run-up before
making contact with his victim. As clarified by the Prosecution:
'What he did was quite deliberately push [the woman] with
outstretched arms into the path of the oncoming train.' The
judge praised the prompt action of two 'outraged' bystanders in
seizing Bowl, who was detained instantly despite his denials that
he had committed any offence. Bowl-variously described in
one newspaper report as 'a cruel genius' and 'an amazing
mixture of genius and madness' or more simply as a paranoid
schizophrenic-was a voluntary patient at an Epsom mental
hospital. He was said to be obsessed with blondes-his victim
happened to be a blonde-and to have had a previous record for
assaults on his wife and upon a secretary outside Liverpool
Police Station, the latter with scissors . Found guilty of
manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility, he
was placed in a psychiatric hospital under Section 37 of the
Mental Health Act. One report stated that Bowl was to face
further questioning over an incident at Wimbledon Station
90 Goss The Halifax Slasher
three years prior, the nature of which seems to have been

similar to the one leading to his Old Bailey appearance.!
My initial response to reading the several accounts of this
case in national newspapers was to speculate upon a possible
connection between them and a story I had overheard on the
London Underground in February 1985. At time of hearing it, I
had no means of recording the tale (as told by a woman in her
mid-thirties to a female friend, virtually at my elbow) but I
committed the gist of it to paper immediately after leaving the
train. A paraphrase of that narrative follows; the remarks in
parentheses are intended to convey responses from the
otherwise passive audience:
There is a Maniac on the London Underground. His
identity is of course unknown-likewise, his physical
appearance is vague; however, he is a true homicidal or
psychopathic maniac.
The Maniac lurks on crowded station platforms,
positioning himself behind a chosen victim who is close to
the platform edge. As the train rushes out of the tunnel and
into the station, the Maniac, with fiendish timing, imparts
a short, sharp shove to the victim's back, causing that
unfortunate to fall onto the rails and beneath the oncoming
train. In the ensuing confusion and terror, the Maniac
melts away in the crowds and is never detected nor
captured.
[Why does he do it?]
Purely and simply because he is a Maniac.
Here, as in other contemporary legends, it is assumed that

being a 'Maniac' carries its own self-explanatory motivation;
we should seek no further for a rationale, since psychopaths are
'known' to be secretive, irrational, merciless and, above all,
consistently homicidal. The story continued:
[I've never heard anything about this!]

You will not have heard about this from the
newspapers. Although police and London Transport
authorities are all too aware of the Maniac, they dare not
admit nor publicize the fact, especially not to the media.
This is partly due to fear of inspiring other unbalanced
people to commit copy-cat murders, but also because it
would be an acknowledgement of their own inability to
protect us from this unpredictable murderer.
Goss The Halifax Slasher 91
What this brief paraphrase cannot hope to do is to convey

the 'theatre' or 'performance' of the narrative: the narrator's
deadly seriousness while engaged in the act of telling it, her
adoption of the psychopath's flinty stare, the acting out of his
straight-armed lethal push. Interestingly, when the listener
demurred, saying that people fall or are nudged from Tube
station platforms by accident, the narrator issued a firm denial:
'No! This is deliberate! He does it deliberately!'
In many respects, this narrative sounds similar enough to
the story of Anthony Bowl, at least as his activities were
summarized in the press accounts of his trial, to suggest that the
Bowl story may be the origin of the legend of 'The Maniac on
the Platform.' The press reports tended to portray Bowl as just
the sort of passionless agent of motiveless murder as the
'Maniac on the Platform' in the tale which I overheard. Bowl's
outstretched arms and subtle timing seem fairly close to the
modus operandi attributed to the unknown, unnamed subway
assassin. On the other hand, there is an obvious departure from
the plot, inasmuch as Bowl did not melt away from the scene
but was promptly caught, held and eventually tried. More
problematical is the fact that the Wimbledon incident of March,
1987 could hardly have given rise to a story heard in February,
1985.
i
We might perhaps try to resolve this last difficulty by
postulating that the 1987 attack was not the first of the kind
that Bowl had perpetrated. There is some warrant for thinking,
as the police appear to have done, that he may have committed
another and similar crime three years previously at the same
station (?1984). If so, it could be argued that some popular
awareness of this unsolved attack gave rise to rumours of a
'Maniac' on the London Underground, one of which I chanced
to hear and record in 1985. However, this would fail to explain
why the story of 'The Maniac on the Platform' seems to be
known and told about other public transport systems around
the world, as will be detailed below.
The point I am trying to make here is not that incidents of
the (?)1984 kind encourage people to believe in similar
rumours, nor that the Bowl trial adds authenticity to the story I
heard in 1985, nor that Bowl was implicated in the (?)1984
incident. Folklorists will be aware both of the inherent danger of
reading too much into any once-heard, unusual story-

especially one taken down under such casual conditions-and
of the difficulty in deciding whether the story represents a
garbled version of a real occurrence or a fictive legend at some
stage of its evolution. In my own reaction to the story, I was
influenced not so much by the improbability of the tale as by its
anecdotal quality, the confidence with which it was told and the
'thought-out,' balanced feel to the narrative. In addition, it
featured components common to many other modern legends,
several of them carrying a kind of narrative consistency or
reinforcement.
For example, the hint of a London Transport or
Metropolitan Police conspiracy to hush up the affair has the
logical result that no official recognition or corroboration of the
rumour can be traced.2 Taken with the 'fact' that the Maniac
is never caught, this means that the story can also not be
refuted. This leaves us, the audience, totally dependent upon an
'Informed Narrator' whose access to this secret information
derives from his or her own private sources.
As might be expected, this doubly-privileged source turns
out to be a 'friend of a friend.' When challenged to explain how
she 'knew all this' in the face of London Transport's silence and
the media's ignorance, my narrator replied: 'I knew a man
\
whose daughter ... ' instantly amending it to, 'I knew a man who
knew a doctor whose daughter was killed by him' (that is, by the
Maniac).
Besides introducing a reliable authority figure in the form
of a doctor, the subplot moved the Maniac story onto a new
narrative plane. The daughter had been killed by the Maniac on
the eve of her wedding. The narrator was at pains to stress that
the girl had gone out on a whim rather than from necessity and
used the Tube as a matter of course ('I forget what it was, but
she had no reason to go out'). The allusion to this girl murdered
on the eve of her wedding helps to personalize the horror of the
story. The Maniac appears far more malignant and dangerous
for his whimsical lack of sentiment in choosing his quarry; we
underground users seem all the more imperilled. The same
element features in a few of the more artfully-constructed
versions of 'The Phantom Hitchhiker,' where the girl is also
said to have been killed on the eve of her wedding. The Blue Bell
Hill (Kent, England) and Uniondale (South Africa) story-cycles

are outstanding illustrations of this pattern, where the
explanation of why the unhappy spirit of the hitchhiker 'walks'
is given in terms of a popular folkloric motif-the eve-of-
wedding disaster which leads to the frustration of earthly love
so close to its consummation.3
Variants on the 'Maniac, Theme
One working method for evaluating whether or not a

particular story constitutes an 'authentic' legend is to check
whether other stories exist which are identical to it or closely
resemble it in theme or treatment. Never having heard of 'The
Maniac on the Platform' before but suspecting that others
might have done so, I wrote an account of the tale for the May
1985 issue of Magonia.4 This brought an encouraging response
as several readers drew my attention to similar (though not
identical) stories from other transport systems besides London
Transport. The common denominator of these accounts was a
basic plot in which one or more persons were allegedly pushed
to their deaths (from the vehicle or as it approached) by an
unknown psychopath.
In an account given by Roger Sandell, a woman was said
to have narrowly escaped death at Leicester Square Station
after tripping over the prone body of a tramp near the platform
edge. A man pulled her to safety and then began to kick the
vagrant, excusing himself with: 'He's always doing this.' A
tramp, as Roger pointed out to me, would be a most cunning
disguise for the Maniac to adopt, and he wondered if the
rescuer's extreme behaviour may have been influenced by prior
awareness of the Maniac rumour.5 In another account, Jean
Louis Brodu wrote of what he styled a 'psychosis' based on
reports of mysterious Asiatics hurling people onto the rails of the
Paris Metro. At least one case appears to have been confirmed
as reality rather than rumour: the culprit, who was both real
and insane, was identified as a Laotian who believed himself to
be the reincarnation of the martial arts superstar, Bruce Lee.
Later, outside the pages of Magonia, I was referred to a
published anecdote about a scientist thrown onto the Moscow
underground by a woman who claimed to have acted under

orders from voices in Space;6 and Sven Rosen sent me two
analogues from Sweden. 7 Finally, two participants at the fifth
Perspectives on Contemporary Legend Conference at Sheffield
in 1987 affirmed that they, too, had heard of 'The Maniac on
the Platform;' one had heard of the tale with a London
Underground setting, and the other knew the story as
indigenous to New York.
The kinship between these stories from London, New
York, Paris, Moscow and Sweden need not be generic in the
strict sense of the word. Given that platform and in-transit
accidents are scarcely confined to any one transport system,
each story might develop as part of an imaginative effort to
comprehend or rationalize a spate of unusual, macabre travel
fatalities. In this respect, Sven Rosen's comment that a 'mad
guard' was said to be responsible for a series of accidents in
which people had fallen from the Acland Ferry and from
carriages on the Malmo-Stockholm Express in the1950s seems
to invite a wider application. (One can imagine a dialogue based
on the desire to 'explain' these accidents: Q.: 'How and why did
these people fall?' A.: 'They didn't fall, they were pushed by an
unknown assailant.' Q.: 'Why did the unknown assailant push
them off?' A.: 'Because he was insane, a Maniac.' Q.E.D.).
It would follow that any 'meaning' in the Maniac story is
not unique to the London example. However, if for sake of
convenience, one were to treating it as though it were unique,
what kind of meaning might the story possess? On a banal level,
it might dramatize a warning against standing too close to the
edge of the platform; alternatively, and not necessarily
contradictorily, it might express a fear of the hazardous nature
of this form of transport-a modern revamping of the old fear
that the subway is a breeding ground for disease and contagion,
perhaps, or a reinforcement of vague warnings about the
strangers one is forced to come into contact with there.8
'The Maniac on the Pia tform' could be classified in any
number of ways. Quite patently, he is a part of the folklore of
subterranean places: the timeless lure of tunnels and what they
contain; Subterranea as a magic kingdom of dangers and
adventures. More specifically, he is part of urban subterranean
lore (alligators in the sewers, man-eating rats, monstrous
humanity). Again, he could be seen as a facet of the folklore of

the London Underground, which includes stories of closed-
down stations accidentally visited and that classic study in
claustrophobia, 'The Walled-Up Train.'9 Yet it seems more
pertinent to look at the Maniac from a broader perspective. He
is a kind of anxiety-amalgam, a character through whom is
expressed a pervasive fear of strangers, of insanity, of personal
violence, of the dangers of travel and darkness; these he brings
to life as a scare-story, which relies on our accepting that
violence on the underground is real and that homicidal killers
are real too. This balance of real/unreal is a vital aspect of
Urban Maniac lore, and 'The Maniac on the Platform' fits into
it perfectly.
Urban Maniac legends use transient, unpredictable and
totally irrational psychopaths as their theme, and make all the
gore, carnage and cruelty credible by engaging our
preconceptions about 'psychopaths' and other dangers. Our
fearful perceptions make 'The Hook,' 'The Killer in the
Backseat,' 'The Man Upstairs' and 'The Doggy-Lick Killer' all
too credible. While never inviting us to question whether such
maniacs actually exist outside fiction (and by implying that they
certainly do!), much of the appeal of these stories lies in their
gross entertainment value-the word 'gross' being_ employed
here in both its modern senses. But nevertheless, they still
encapsulate certain values and act as cautionary tales.lO
I would like to hazard the suggestion that occasionally
these Maniac or Mystery Assailant rumours and legends have
even wider, deeper and infinitely more serious messages: that
they may also act as vehicles for conveying urban tensions,
unrest and dissatisfaction, and as characterizations of
contemporary fears. Maniac legends present people-
ourselves-up against irrationality at its worst.
The Halifax Slasher
Such processes can be traced in the weird career of the bogey-

man who came to be known as 'The Halifax Slasher'
Over a period of about a fortnight in November, 1938, the
West Yorkshire town of Halifax (population: ca. 98,000) was
afflicted by reports of a mysterious nocturnal assailant who
attacked victims-men as well as women-with a razor-

blade.11 The evidence supporting this belief was a series of
bloodied arms and wrists, slashed garments (most of the
damage to which was sustained on the sleeves) and,
occasionally, discarded razor-blades; more important, needless
to say, were the victims' personal accounts. As more and more
reports appeared in the Yorkshire papers, Halifax found itself
nationally famous. As far as most of its inhabitants were
concerned, it was a town under siege.
The scare began, not in the town proper, but in the nearby
village of Barkisland, where on 16 November two girls were
attacked by a mystery-man on their way to evening classes. In
this instance, the assailant did not use a razor or sharp
implement, but (according to police thinking) a bludgeon or
hatchet. There was an immediate and significant impact upon
Barkisland: a reign of terror began, few persons ventured out
after dark, evening class attendances fell and a general
suspicion of strangers manifested itself. This was a pattem to be
repeated on a larger scale in Halifax itself over the next few
days.
On 21 November, a 21-year-old girl was attacked by a
man armed with some form of sharp weapon in a well-lit part
of Halifax as she came from her shift at the toffee-factory
around 10.10 p.m. There is some evidence that the attack really
did take place (the precise meaning of this observation will
emerge presently), and, especially after a male caretaker at the
School of Art was attacked with a razor three days later, nobody
was disposed to cast doubt upon the incident. This second attack
was important for a variety of reasons. For one thing, press
coverage revealed that a few people had been anticipating
something of the sort. More crucially, the same coverage gave
the mystery-assailant a distinct label and identity, 'The Halifax
Slasher,' and published a description of him which was highly-
influential in the succeeding days, especially because it
emphasized that the man wore a pale raincoat. The Halifax
Courier's announcement that there was a £10 reward for
information leading to the Slasher's arrest inevitably added
substance to an otherwise shadowy figure.
The scare soon escalated far beyond Halifax, affecting
towns on both sides of the Pennines (Doncaster, Barnsley,
Bradford, Sheffield and Settle in Yorkshire to the east:

Blackburn and Wigan in Lancashire to the west). At its height
there were reports from as far north as Glasgow and as far
south as London and Bournemouth.12 By this stage, over a
dozen slashing attacks had been officially reported to the police
in Halifax, with the press in hot attendance on each fresh
development.
A kind of siege-mentality evolved in the town. Women and
children were escorted after dark, many did not go out at all,
and shops (especially those keeping late hours), cinemas and
other businesses experienced a drastic loss of trade. The only
shopkeepers to do well from the scare were those purveying
walking sticks, clubs and other items of self-defence (home-
made coshes and lengths of lead piping were carried by men
and women alike as a matter of course). Even local elections
were jeopardized: the political parties were too afraid of adverse
responses to risk canvassing votes, and there was talk of a freak
result being returned on the actual day of voting.
From the earliest phases of the panic, vigilante bands had
taken to the streets, sometimes armed. Ostensibly they were to
provide safe escort for females or to mount a general
surveillance under the guidance of the police, but often they
took a more active role. Suspicious persons were interrogated
and pursued, with the inevitable result that a few folk mistaken
for the Slasher (if only because they were wearing white
raincoats) were mobbed and assaulted. At times it seems that
the vigilantes set about likely, or unlikely, victims just for the
sake of it. At the scene of one slashing incident, for instance, a
reporter found himself confronted by an ugly crowd in which
men were 'falling over each other in their anxiety to be the first
to lay hands on the Slasher.'13
Even with reinforcements from other northern
constabularies, the Halifax police were hopelessly overtaxed by
·the sheer number of incidents to be looked into. The press was
now comparing the Slasher with Jack the Ripper-a dubious
compliment!-and searching out psychologists for quotable
items with which to flesh out their reports. Halifax people found
themselves (and their football team) dubbed 'The Slashers.'
On 29 November, two detectives from Scotland Yard
arrived in Halifax to take over the inquiry. The coming of these
elite, and reputedly infallible, Londoners was expected to have

an immediate effect on the hunt for the Slasher. So it did,
though not in the way that most people had foreseen. Following
an immediate clamp-down on the press (mainly by releasing as
little new information as possible), the Yard men re-interviewed
the victims of the attacks. Within forty eight hours it was
announced that, contrary to all the previous 'evidence,' 'The
Halifax Slasher' did not exist. As the Courier put it:
There never was, nor is there likely to be in this connection,

any real danger to the general public ... no real cause for
alarm, in short, no properly authenticated wholesale attack
by a bogey-man known as the 'Slasher.'
The case was now viewed as a remarkable example of mass

hysteria. The victims were known to have slashed themselves
and their own clothes (and had confessed to it). Why they did so
is largely the province of psychiatrists rather than folklorists to
explain, except insofar as it shows how rum our, abetted by the
media and other mechanisms, can affect the behaviour of
ordinary individuals and upon a surprisingly wide scale. In
record time, the scare became a local joke, the 'mass hysteria'
explanation being recited as if proven-and applied
pejoratively. On the legal front, a number of prosecutions were
brought against selected Slasher 'victims' for causing a 'public
nuisance' by wasting police time and public money, and in a
few cases the outcome resolved into prison sentences of one
month.
That, in brief, was 'The Halifax Slasher,' a nocturnal
monster forged from popular belief and too credible to ignore.
But it is vital not to see these as isolated events or singular,
aberrant occurrences. The fact is that mystery assailants
repeatedly figure as urban terrors. We could, for example, cite
the cases of 'The Monster' (London, 1788-90), the 'Connecticut
Jabber' (1925-1927), the 'Mad Gassers' of Botetourt (Virginia,
December 1933-February 1934) and Mattoon (Illinois, 1943)
and the unpleasantly high number of 'Phantom Snipers.'14
Each of these features a near-identical theme: random attacks
(generally unsolved) by presumed-insane perpetrators in an
urban environment, leading to widespread alarm, limited police
success, vigilante action and finally explanations-cum-solutions
which, though accepted as convincing at the time, may today

make curiously uncogent reading. In their turn, these
characters can be compared with mystery assailants who,
whatever their real history or factual basis, eventually became
incorporated into national folklore: Springheeled Jack15 and
Jack the Ripper come to mind with little effort.
These instances should be taken in the context of a much
wider psycho-social phenomenon. They fall into a category of
phenomena which may loosely be termed 'flaps.'
The Flap Phenomenon
A flap is an unusual, dramatic burst of excitement centred upon

some anomalous and possibly threatening report which
generates others of the same variety. It is characterized by
intense public and media excitement during which a number of
separate incidents become collated into a series or cycle, the
whole being more impressive (convincing, credible) than any of
its parts. The theme of a flap may well be some aspect of the
paranormal-UFOs, ghosts, witchcraft or lycanthropy.
Conversely, it may focus upon a more quasi-tangible threat like
an escaped wild animal (puma, boa-constrictor) or, as we have
just seen, upon a mysterious psychopathic attacker.
A flap is dominated, and in some senses fuelled, by an
escalation characteristic. The original report inspires more of
the same kind, with witnesses coming forward to claim
personal experience of the reported phenomenon. Gradually,
there is a tendency for later reports to become more bizarre,
more violent and more disturbing than the ones that preceded
them. They are also more geographically diverse: they are no
longer confined to the original location determined by the first
report(s), but are received from places miles, or even scores of
miles, away. The result is mounting excitement and media
coverage (the one keeping pace with the other). Objectively
viewed-as it seldom is at the time-the scene is one of
increasing irrationality.
The emergence of vigilante groups is a key phase in any
flap. Self-appointed and/or legally condoned, they step in to
perform what they regard as public duties neglected by the
proper authorities. Though the vigilantes mount watches,
patrols and the like, they may not stay on the side of the law:
they may start out as unauthorized detectives and policemen,
but they may become a lynch-mob.
Then, just as the flap seems to have reached a point where
anarchy and irreversible lawlessness appear inescapable, the
whole thing subsides. This unexpected development may
coincide with the appearance of some quasi-official
'explanation' which authoritatively shows the reports to have
been products of mass hysteria or mal-observation. At this stage
the phenomenon, however believable it may have previously
been, is no longer credible. Nevertheless, one might suspect that
the deflation of the flap owes as much to the fact that the
participants have become bored with it as to any rational
process. In this case, the official explanation may be seen as no
more than a good excuse for dropping the proceedings. As
Patrick Mullen says, 'once the ambiguity of the original
situation is resolved ... the rumor dies.'16 The only amendment I
would offer to this evaluation is that, in the present context and
in at least some cases, it is the ambiguity itself that breeds
boredom. In other words, the ambiguity may not actually be
removed, but the official explanation suggesting that it has been
removed provides timely and valid grounds for the participants
not to bother themselves with resolving what they have helped
to create.
In the Halifax case, the end of the panic was attributed by
some observers to the intervention of Scotland Yard. While true
in part, this ignores clear signs that Slasher-mania was on the
decline even before the two Yard detectives arrived. Some
pseudo-victims outside Halifax had already confessed to false
reporting, and in Halifax itself the arrival of Scotland Yard may
have conveyed the seriousness of the situation and imparted the
tacit advice that now was a good time to stop a game that had
already become somewhat dull.
So to the finale. In remarkably short time the threat is
forgotten and well on the way to being little more than a joke.
The scare becomes merely a source of recrimination.
The Rationale of the 'Maniac~
So what caused the Halifax Slasher 'flap' It is hard to be sure.

Could it be that Halifax was particularly prone to crime and
therefore to fears of crime? Or maybe the press caused-or
even fabricated-the scare? Or maybe it was the victims
themselves who were to blame?
Although one local resident assured me that the town, for
its size and population, has an unusually high murder rate, I
found no other evidence that Halifax has a history of homicidal
violence. The fact that one notorious mass-murderer
(Christie17) lived there in his early days and that another
(Peter Sutcliffe, the 'Yorkshire Ripper'18) committed two of his
infamous crimes there is surely coincidental? Nor could I find
evidence that in November, 1938 the town was reacting to any
identifiable form of stress or disadvantage which left it uniquely
prone to mass hysteria of the type just outlined. What is,
however, apparent is that at this time, across a wide area of
Northern England, there existed a certain anxiety arising from
reports of violent crimes against women.
It would seem that the Barkisland bludgeoning incident,
perhaps linked with a particularly harrowing child-murder not
long before in Bradford, gave shape to these fears. In this
climate of opinion, press reports of the attack of 21 November
took local people into a further stage of fear, creating a potent
image of a raincoated 'Slasher,' which was only too credible an
image of urban violence.
It would be easy to blame the press. The source of
inspiration for many of the false reports, as subsequent evidence
showed to the point of tedium, was word of mouth; but
newspapers were an even more comon source. One girl, for
example, said: 'I read a lot in the papers about people being
slashed. This seemed to get on top of me,' and another confessed:
'I don't know what made me do it. I have been reading the
papers and it has got on my brain.' The most that can be justly
alleged, however, is that the press reported events (and
hearsay) about the Slasher with a good deal of enthusiasm, and
thereby endowed him with substance. But the press did not
invent him, and would have been unable to foist him on the
public without their prior willingness to believe.
It is just as unavailing to lay sole blame for the Slasher

upon the victims, the vendors of those false reports. While they
made the mystery attacker seem indubitably real-and for
some considerable time it was impossible to consider him
otherwise than real-and though the false reporters share
overall culpability for that, fundamentally they were as much
victims of the rumour-process as anyone else. In a flap of this
kind somebody must come forward to give the rumour
substance: what good is a mystery attacker if no-one is prepared
to say that he or she has been attacked? Closer scrutiny of the
confessions reveals (as might be expected) personal, private
motives for the false reports: one girl was unemployed, a few
spoke of not having been well lately due to 'nerves' or depression
and two had quarrelled with their boyfriends hours, or even
minutes, before staging their 'attack.' For them, the Slasher
was a ready-made way of getting attention and calling down
revenge upon whatever, or whoever, they held responsible for
their wrongs. One way or another, they were peculiarly
susceptible to the Slasher image, but they did not invent him
either.
Ultimately, the Slasher cannot be blamed on any one set
of people, journalists or pseudo-victims, nor was his usefulness
restricted to a few select individuals. To quote Mullen again:
'Legends ... point to modern concerns about anxiety-producing
situations.'19 (Readers of his paper will recall that one his
examples touches neatly on the subject of Urban Maniacs,
dealing as it does with a psychopath rumoured, on the strength
of a popular clairvoyant's prediction, to be about to commit
wholesale murder in a New York State dormitory.) So what
pressures, what anxieties led the people of Halifax into believing
in the Slasher?
Although there is little evidence to show that Halifax had
any discernible reason to fear nocturnal assailants (at least, no
more than any other northern town), it might be permissible to
suggest that the Slasher functioned as a release for social
pressures which did not lend themselves to concrete definition,
just as witchcraft accusations did in earlier centuries.20 He
was, in many ways, a very useful sort of Maniac. First of all, his
presence provided the excuse to shrug off normal anonymity
and-as escort, vigilante or 'play-detective'-become involved
in the frontline life of the town. Secondly, communal and

unchallenged belief in the Slasher made normally-outlawed
pursuits like carrying a weapon condonable. Thirdly, he
provided a threat which demanded (and largely received) a
united response: everyone had to show a community spirit, the
kind of 'pulling together' in the face of a common enemy which
was needed during the darkest days of World War II. Above all,
the Slasher provided a holiday from drab reality. However
scary they are, mass-murderers and psychopathic killers are
also exciting: they inject a rare, much-needed sense of drama
and uncertainty into ordinarily predictable lives. And they do so
more credibly, more relevantly, than alternative sources of
disquiet such as ghosts or motorist-abducting Ufonauts. We
know there are psychopaths loose in our society; we cannot be
quite so sure about ghosts and extra-terrestrials.
Finally, it must be confessed that there is an element of
admiration as well as fear in the common response to great
criminals. They may be seen as deriding the police and defying
social or legal restraint, as 'Men of Power' who do exceptional,
as well as exceptionable, things; even as symbols of protest, since
they act out criticisms of the 'authorities' who govern our cities
and lives. They are seen to thrive because civic organizers, town
planners and others are derelict in their duties and allow urban
decay to reach a point where it not only breeds crime but abets
its commission. Thus the residents of Halifax argued that the
Slasher went uncaught only because of urban degradation, lack
of adequate street lighting and the absence of effective policing.
Take in evidence a remark from a man at Pelion (scene of the
eleventh Slasher attack), who told a reporter that locals had
been expecting the Slasher to visit them for some time because it
was 'such as ideal ground for the man's purpose;' or the words
of another man, who said:
I will guarantee that I could go down into the Crib Lane

district where one woman was attacked, and break a
window and vanish without a soul seeing me come or go . I
could bury myself in a moment.21
Uncatchable 'super-criminals' always pose questions

about how the 'System' is performing and the ways in which it
has left us anxious and vulnerable. George Bernard Shaw was
admittedly overstating the case when he hailed Jack the Ripper

as a reformer, but the point remains valid:
Whilst we conventional Social Democrats were wasting
time on education, agitation , and organization, some
independent genius has taken the matter in hand.22
Overstated or not, this same point was not lost on other

contemporary observers. There were serious, if not vehement,
accusations that Jack's gory career would not have been
allowed to develop had his victims come from the West End of
the city rather than the East End; others conceded that, at the
least, the Whitechapel Murders drew long-overdue attention to
the sordid squalor of the wastelands from which those victims
came and the tragic vulnerability of its occupants.
In the same general manner, legendary maniacs spotlight
perceived defects in our society and our social standards: the
tolerance of unchaperoned couples in lovers' lanes, the
unsupervised state of (female) students in college dormitories
and, more broadly speaking, the perils of allowing women out
on their own anywhere. Needless to say, this is obsolete
thinking, but as legends begin to take into account changing
public attitudes to these issues, it is likely that the helpless
heroine will find means of salvation without recourse to the
usual handily-placed male.23
'The Maniac on the Platform,' as I have already
suggested, may therefore be taken as a distorted symbol of
crime on the underground and, by inference, the failure of
London Transport to protect its customers. Writing of the Paris
Metro scare, Jean Louis Brodu presents an even stronger
argument; he believes that:
The security in the subway has been a major political issue

and the 'pousseur' affair must also be seen as the
orchestration by a certain section of the press of a collective
fear to attack the government on the subject of citizens'
safety.2 4
The transition from 'The Maniac on the Platform' to Jack

the Ripper over the past few paragraphs of this essay may
appear to have carried us from straightforward legend or
rumour to disturbing historical fact. But, literally real or not,
actual or legendary, homicidal maniacs all partake of folklore

at one level or another. Put another way, any real mass-
murderer can appear to have fabulous attributes and any
fabulous, imaginary or legendary mass-murderer owes some
debt to reality. We may see, for example, the legend of 'The
Hairy-Handed Hitchhiker' retold with the implication that the
disguised axe- or knife-man was none other than the Yorkshire
Ripper.25 Conversely, when the police imposed an embargo on
information on the Ripper case in order to eliminate the chance
of copy-cat crimes and to facilitate later identification, rumours
and exaggeration were inescapable.
Limitations of space preclude a thorough discussion of the
equally important process by which essentially minor criminals
can be made to appear major ones; the rather pathetic
individual who snips women's dresses on the escalator becomes
the journalists' 'Jack the Snipper' and later may emerge as a
kind of proto-Jack the Ripper. Nor is there space to examine
how, upon apprehension, the typically ordinary-looking
murderer can undergo media-transformation into something
satisfactorily closer to the demonic image propagated earlier in
print and rumour.26 Some attention, however, must be paid to
labelling, the process by which a mysterious, and as-yet
uncaptured, murderer is endowed with a recognizable image,
which is usually, though not always, an artifact of press
reporting. Though at best nothing more than a term of
journalistic convenience, a distinct label makes the vague,
faceless, anonymous peril seem less ambiguous. The simplest
form is the local name-tag. We suddenly find ourselves reading
of 'The Boston Strangler,' 'The Cambridge Rapist,' 'The Green
River Killer' and so on. These labels are obviously useful to the
media in presenting and codifying their news reports, but
inasmuch as they bring a measure of compactness and form to
the mystery assailant, they are equally useful to us, the
audience. Yet, while fundamentally harmless, labels can
occasionally prove confusing, since they tend to promote over-
specific images which affect the way the mystery attacker is
perceived and described in subsequent reports. At worst, they
may even obscure the identity of the actual criminal by bringing
attention to bear upon a spuriously specific, yet non-existent,
identity. What happens if the real Slasher is not a man in a pale

raincoat?
An outstanding demonstration of labelling appears as a
subplot in the story of the 1888 Whitechapel murders. Even
· today, it is quite common to find waxworks proprietors
depicting Jack the Ripper as a tall, saturnine figure in evening
dress, flowing cape and top hat, with a black Gladstone bag at
his side. That image may be as accurate as any other, since the
non-capture of Jack makes it impossible to deny that he may
have looked like that. But this image was a comparatively late
development, as indeed was the name 'Jack the Ripper' itself.
The tag came into being after the Central News Agency
received a letter bearing this signature (on 27 or 28 September,
1888). Prior to this, the papers had talked only of 'The
Whitechapel Murderer,' and then, in what appears to have
been a deliberate effort to get a sharp focus upon the faceless,
undescribed killer, they switched to 'Leather Apron.'
'Leather Apron' was a common enough nickname among
slaughterhouse-men who wore such items as a matter of
course, as did cobblers and members of certain other trades.
This piece of popular iconography became affixed to the
Whitechapel murders by a species of lateral thinking. The first
victim, Ann 'Polly' Nicholls, was found on 31 August close to an
abattoir; the wounds upon the second victim ('Dark Annie'
Chapman) nine days later were compared with those left by a
short-bladed knife of the kind used by cobblers. Reasoning that a
leather apron would also hide obvious traces of blood and permit
the killer to pass through the district without comment, people
began to assume that the Whitechapel murderer wore a leather
apron. Hence anyone answering to that common trade
nickname fell under popular suspicion, often with drastic
results. In a short time 'Leather Apron' became a name applied
to a whole series of murder suspects and, as Tom Cullen puts
the matter:
a monster conjured up by the collective will . .. more a

recurrent symbol than a person; or rather ... the nickname
applied to a whole series of persons who automatically
became suspect through mere possession of this talisman 27
Regardless of whatever comfort or reassurance lay in the

creation of 'Leather Apron,' the image also obstructed the hunt
for the true killer by endowing him with a spurious and non-
evidential kind of identity.
Jack the Ripper, as we all know, graduated into urban
folklore, a shadowy figure in cloak and tall hat who flits with
psychopathic grace across the more lurid parts of our
imaginations. This gothic image is arguably more 'real' to most
people today than the actual Whitechapel murderer, whoever
he may have been. The obverse may apply just as easily:
imaginary or legendary psychopaths can come to gain credence
by virtue or rumour, popular belief and anxiety, friend-of-a-
friend testimony and media reinforcement. Some, and perhaps
most, of these appear to be 'travellers,' homicidal characters
from tales told all over the country, who, contrary to the
narrators' firm insistence, are not unique to any one place, town
or area and have been simply borrowed as appropriate to the
narrative situation. In this category we find 'The Hook,' 'The
Doggy-Lick Killer' and 'The Maniac on the Platform.' Others,
like 'The Halifax Slasher,' take on local identities which hide
the fact that both character and motif can be freely encountered
elsewhere.
It is worth repeating that the gulf between these
legendary Maniacs and the Yorkshire Rippers, Boston
Stranglers and other deranged killers is not a wide one-at least
from a folklorist's viewpoint. To varying degrees and regardless
of their literal reality, they express anxiety, preconceived
attitudes to crime and criminals, dissatisfaction, anti-social
urges, acknowledgement of our doubt and vulnerability.
One Victorian journalist suggested, with what modern
readers might feel was a surprising tolerance for the period,
that when Jack the Ripper was caught there ought to be some
effort made to understand him. Perhaps our Urban Maniac
legends encourage us to look still deeper and understand
ourselves?
NOTES
1. The Bowl case was reported in most national newspapers of 2

December, 1987. My summary is based upon those in The
Independent, The Daily Telegraph and The Daily Express (the latter
entitled, 'Smiling killer pushed woman under a train,' by Joe Wood
and William Mach, Daily Express, 2 December, 1987, p. 5 ).
2. London Transport subsequently assured me that there was absolutely
no truth in the story, but their denial would have to be rejected on
those terms: the authorities might be expected to issue a blanket
denial of this type.
3. For remarks on the eve-of-wedding disaster motif and associated
elements, see: Michael Goss, The Evidence for Phantom Hitch-Hikers
(Wellingborough: Aquarian Press, 1984), especially pp. 100-128.
4. Magonia began life as a Merseyside UFO magazine in 1968. Although
still primarily concerned with ufology, it has expanded its sphere of
interest to include other material which can be classed as anomalous,
'Fortean' or folkloric. My article, 'The Maniac on the Platform'
appeared in issue 19 for May, 1985, pp. 3-6, 22. Responses to it
(Sandell, Brodu and others) were printed in the following number
(August, 1985), p. 22.
5. It is tempting to file this story in context of other 'Abused Tramp' or
'Tramp Hostility' legends which I have noticed over the past few
years. Alongside it would go the Sunday Mirror's purportedly true
report of a tramp massacred by a machete-wielding 'City Gent' on the
Paris Metro (1987), supposedly by way of reprisal for the man's
drunken, abusive manner; the killer was said to have walked away
calmly afterwards. See: 'Machete fate of a tramp,' Sunday Mirror (1
March, 1987), p. 5.
6. Cited by John Keel in his UFO classic, Operation Trojan Horse
(London: Abacus, 1973), p. 245. Keel attributes the story to Jacques
Vallee's Passport to Magonia (Sudbury: Neville Spearman, 1970).
7. Personal Communication.
8. Nowadays, many people would agree that the Tube can be bad for your
health-not so much because of disease, but because of its reputation
as a venue for violence. Despite recent events which raise doubts
about the safety of London Transport users (the King's Cross fire,
reports of unauthorized persons opening the doors of trains in transit,
and a few unsolved murders), the actual record of the London
Underground is quite reassuring. It is only within the last decade
that the media has portrayed it as a haven for muggers, pickpockets,
sex pests, drunks, vagrants and rowdies. For 1985, the year in which
I first heard of 'The Maniac on the Platform,' official figures stated
that a total of 1,515 passengers and 372 staff had been assaulted,
which represented annual rises of 18% and 25% respectively. If the
rise in-· violent assaults corresponds with a rising anxiety among
customers, the Maniac might stand as the sum of the faceless perils
awaiting Tube travellers-or rather, a symbol of what the violent

trend might finally lead to.These figures come from Paul Wilenius's
report, 'Ticket to Terror,' Daily Express ( 10 March, 1986), p. 5.
9. 'The Walled-Up Train' (containing a cargo of skeletons, nominally
Victorian) is dealt with in my Magonia article. See note 3 above. This
type/motif, plus 'The Closed Station,' is revisited in Nigel Pennick's
'Urban Folklore of the London Underground,' Folklore Frontiers 6
(1987), pp. 8-12.
10. See: Eleanor Wachs, 'The Mutilated Shopper at the Mall: A Legend of
Urban Violence,' this volume.
11. The full story, or something like it, appears in: Michael Goss, The
Halifax Slasher: An Urban Terror in the North of England (London:
Fortean Times Occasional Paper 3, 1987). This reproduces material
from northern and national newspapers of the time, but particularly
information from the Halifax Evening Courier. All quotations which
follow in the present paper have been taken from that source except
where otherwise specified.
12. This refers solely to published evidence and cannot take into account
oral testimony which failed to get into print.
13. Yorkshire Evening Post (28 November, 1938), p. 12.
14. A select bibliography on 'The Monster' can be found in Goss (1987).
The doings of the 'Connecticut Jabber' were summarized by Charles
Fort in Wild Talents. See: the Complete Books of Charles Fort (New
York: Dover, 1974), pp. 896-97. Fort cites his references as the Herald
Tribune [sic.]. A further news report on this mystery attacker is
reproduced in Paul Sieveking, Man Bites Man. The Scrapbook of an
Edwardian Eccentric George lues (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981),
p. 23. On 'The Mad Gasser of Botetourt,' see: Michael T. Shoemaker's
article of that title in Fate 38:6 (June, 1985), pp. 62-68. The standard
account of the closely comparable 'Mad Gasser of Mattoon' is: Donald
M. Johnson, 'The "Phantom Anesthetist" of Mattoon: A Field Study of
Mass Hysteria,' The Journal of Abnormal & Social Psychology 40
(1945), pp.175-86. See also: Loren Coleman's lively reassessment (with
new data) in Mysterious America (London/Boston: Faber, 1983), pp.
191-210, where the Gasser is presented alongside Springheeled Jack
and the Blue Phantom of Route 66 (a mysterious sniper).
15. The most accessible account of this famous character is Peter
Raining, The Legend and Bizarre Crimes of Spring-Heeled Jack
(London: Frederick Muller, 1977). A more scholarly review of source-
material on Jack is being prepared as an Occasional Paper for
Fortean Times by Mike Dash.
16. Patrick Mullen, 'Modern Legend and Rumor Theory,' Journal of the
Folklore Institute 9 (1972), pp. 95-109.
17. Readers unfamiliar with British criminal history should consult:
Rupert Furneaux, The Two Stranglers of Rillington Place (London:
Panther, 1961).
18. Readers unfamiliar with British criminal history may find the
following information useful-Peter William Sutcliffe ('The
Yorkshire Ripper') was the subject of two paperback accounts even
before his capture and trial: Peter Kinsley and Frank Smyth's, I'm
Jack. The Police Hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper (London: Pan, 1980);
and Michael Nicholson, The Yorkshire Ripper (London: W.H.Allen,
Star Book, 1979). Subsequent to his arrest there have been: Roger
Cross, The Yorkshire Ripper .(London/Toronto: Granada, 1981); John
Beattie, The Yorkshire Ripper Story (London: Quartet/Daily Star
Publications, 1981); and more significantly, Gordon Burns,
Somebody's Husband, Somebody's Son (London: Heinemann, 1984).
19. Mullen (1972), p. 105. The 'New York State Killer' rumours are
discussed pp. 102-3 and 105-7.
20. cf: Alan Macfarlane, Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England
(London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970).
21. Yorkshire Evening Post (29 November, 1938), page number
indecipherable.
22. This quotation from Shaw's ferocious letter, 'Blood Money to
Whitechapel' (which appeared in The Star, 24 September, 1888) is
taken from Donald Rum below, The Complete Jack the Ripper
(London: Star paperback, 1976). Other parts of Shaw's letter are given
at some length in Donald McCormick, The Identity of Jack the
Ripper, revised edn. (London: Arrow, 1970). In this edition, the quoted
passage appears on p. 64. The 'reforming' impact of the Whitechapel
murders is also summarized-forcefully-in Arthur Douglas's
useful sourcebook, Will the Real Jack the Ripper (Brinscall, Chorley:
Countryside Publications, 1979), p. 6.
23. Notice, for instance, how the Hairy-Handed Hitchhiker is nowadays
outwitted by his intended female victim. Look also at newspaper
reports of unnamed, and possibly imaginary, helpless females who
turn the tables on attackers by use of some adroit judo, karate, etc.; I
suspect that at least a few of these purportedly-real incidents were
media fabrications. This scepticism about 'judo expert' stories does
not deny the fact that genuine cases of assault defeated by individuals'
self-defence skills certainly occur and occasionally reach the papers.
However, many of the not infrequent reports appear oddly reticent as
to names and other corroborative data, hence my doubt. There is, of
course, a logistical problem about using this as an alternative ending
to 'The Hairy-Handed Hitchhiker.' If the heroine managed to
overpower the disguised thug, the obvious thing would be for her to
escort him in arm-locked helplessness to the police-or to bring them
to the spot where he lay immobile and hors de combat. This ought to
mean that the Hitchhiker's existence (reality) might be subject to
investigation, perhaps care of the police who handled the arrest: an
unthinkable prospect for the chief character in any urban legend!
Unless, that is, the thug recovered and fled prior to the arrival of the
police, as indeed they appear to do in a lot of narratives of the 'judo

expert defeats mugger' type.
24. Brodu, letter to Magonia. See note 4 above.
25. For example, David Yallop, Deliver Us From Evil (Great Britain:
Futura, 1981), p. 273. He correctly dismisses this Hairy-Handed
Hitchhiker as a legend retold in the spirit of a current spate of anxiety
about the Yorkshire Ripper.
26. For example, the Yorkshire Ripper's participation in black magic
rites was affirmed by one northem paper in the wake of his trial and
sentencing, when an amazing number of hitherto-silent former
acquaintances seemed eager to give journalists their personal
reminiscences of the mass-murderer. George Joseph Smith, 'The
Brides in the Bath' murderer, was credited with the power to
hypnotize his victims into taking their last fatal baths, as a desperate
attempt to explain the yet-mysterious question of the women's
strangely cooperative manner and Smith's swift, silent mode of
killing them. (Most criminologists today agree that he merely took
them by surprise, though their lack of suspicion about his buying a
new bath each time may seem odd.) His Defence, Sir Edward
Marshall Hall, appears to have believed that Smith had literally
hypnotic eyes. For information about Smith, see: Eric R. Watson,
Trial of George Joseph Smith (Edinburgh/London: William Hodge,
notable trials series, n.d.).
27. Torn Cullen, The Crimes and Times of Jack the Ripper (Arrow:
Fontana, 1973), p. 56. See also: Donald McCormick, The Identity of
Jack the Ripper, revised edn. (London: Arrow, 1970), p. 41-'Leather
Apron was more a phrase than a real person ... the title given to a
whole series of suspects.' Most books on this notorious case deal with
the Leather Apron scare.
'AIDS-DON'T DIE OF IGNORANCE' t:
EXPLORING THE CULTURAL COMPLEX
Paul Snrlth
When seeing for the first time the poster for the government
campaign 'AIDS-Don't Die of Ignorance,' one child asked
his teacher, 'Please, Miss, how do you catch ignorance?'2
The Legends
One Friday afternoon in February, 1987, John Tunney, a

journalist with The Star newspaper in Sheffield, phoned to ask if
I had heard a story he had just been told by a doctor at the Royal
Hallamshire Hospital in Sheffield. According to John, a young
man had visited Josephine's Night Club in the city and had met
a girl he had not seen before. They danced all evening,
eventually went back to his place and spent the night together.
When he woke up in the morning, the girl had gone.
Immediately thinking he'd been set up and robbed, he checked
his wallet and valuables-only to find they were all there. A
little confused, he walked into the bathroom and found written
on the mirror in lipstick the words: 'Welcome to the world of
AIDS!'
John Tunney said the story was being told all over the city.
He then asked if I had heard the tale and if it was a
contemporary legend. At that time I had not heard the story.
However, in the best tradition of the folklorist, I made a few
tentative observations. Firstly, the story certainly had features
in common with other contemporary legends, in that it was told
about a specific place but anonymous people. Secondly, the tale
appeared to contain familiar functional elements: for example,
it was a moral tale about revenge.3 Thirdly, the device of
writing on a bathroom mirror is found in other contemporary
114 Smith ~ids: Don,t Die of Ignorance,
legends such as 'The Doggy-Lick Killer'4-a modern version of

a tale which can be traced back to the sixteenth century.5
'What does all that mean?' asked John.
'It's probably a contemporary legend,' I responded, 'and I
have a feeling we're in for an AIDS-lore epidemic.' How right I
was!
The following week the newspaper The Daily Star carried
this item:
A British industrialist visiting Miami hired a lady of the

streets to keep him company for the night on his stop-over.
The following morning when he woke, his companion had
gone. On entering the bathroom-so the legend goes-he
found the following horrific message scrawled in lipstick on
his mirror: 'Welcome to the AIDS club.,6
Within a short space of time, the same tale cropped up in

Europe. According to Wiener , the Austrian magazine-with a
mission to make prurience chic-it happened to a young
Austrian man after a casual encounter in New York. Weiner
staged the scene in a large photo which introduced an article
about what it called 'AIDS terrorists.'7 Similarly, in April the
magazine, The Face, in a article indexed as 'AIDS: Face the
Virus. Too Serious for Snappy One-Liners. Eighties Biology
Starts Here,'8 announced to the world in large type:
AIDS terrorists, moral puritans and designer condoms are

all part of the new sexual folklore ... But our cosy Western
ideas about the disease itself must also change as we face
the virus.
The article then continued:
A city whizzkid meets a beautiful woman and spends the

night with her. A few days later, a bunch of flowers arrives
with this message: 'WELCOME TO THE AIDS-TEAM., Or:
A friend of a friend picks a woman up. In the morning
she,s gone, but a message in lipstick on the bathroom
mirror tells him, 'WELCOME TO THE WORLD OF AIDS.,
Has it happened to a friend of a friend of yours yet?9
Smith ~ids: Don't Die of Ignorance' 115
As is the very nature of folklore, multiple and variant

forms of the 'Welcome to the World of AIDS' narrative were
circulating simultaneously. One version heard in Germany
during the spring of 1987 had the male/female roles reversed-
with the girl bringing the boy back to her place and him writing
on the bathroom mirror.10 Another version, documented by
Jan Harold Brunvand, had the following conclusion:
Doctors have told the man that he has contracted the

disease. He now spends all his time looking for his killer,
but no one seems to know her, and she has not retumed to
the club.ll
In time, the prolific occurrence of this tale confirmed the

suspicion that the 'Welcome to the World of AIDS' story was,
indeed, a contemporary legend. This was later to be verified by
that astute North American 'folklorist' Ann Landers. In a reply
to a query regarding the outcome of the story, Landers
commented 'It is one of those often-repeated stories that has
been around for months and may not be true.'12
In reality, what we were hearing in Europe in the spring
of 1987 were versions of a story which, in its 'Welcome to the
World of AIDS' form, was circulating some six months earlier
in North America. For example, USA Today reported in
October, 1986 that:
Wednesday night, novelist Jackie Collins (Hollywood

Husbands), ever the chronicler of sexual adventure, shared
what she said was a true story on Joan Rivers' show.
A married Hollywood husband picked up a beautiful
woman at a bar. They enjoyed a night of passion at a good
hotel; in the morning he rolled over to find a sweet thank-
you note. Class, he thought, real class. Then he walked into
the bathroom and found, scrawled on the mirror in lipstick,
'Welcome to the wonderful world of AIDS.'
Not knowing if the woman had been kidding or not,
he didn't dare have sexual relations with his wife , and it
could be a long time before he'd know whether he had
become an AIDS victim.13
An immediate precursor of this story is reported by Randy

Shilts as circulating as early as 1982. It was around this time
that rumours began on Castro Street about a strange man at

the Eighth and Howard bathhouse, a blond with a French
accent. He would have sex with you, turn up the lights in the
cubicle and point out his Karposi's sarcoma lesions. 'I've got gay
cancer,' he'd say. 'I'm going to die and so are you.'14
Towards the end of March, John Tunney called me
again-this time with tales about ' ... male homosexual
prostitutes who had deliberately given AIDS to their procurers
and clients.' Although the same vagueness, in terms of who had
done what with whom and where, was exhibited in these stories,
it appeared that, in part, there was a kernel of truth underlying
these tales:
there have been at least two male prostitutes in Texas and

Georgia who may have known that they have the disease
but continued to ply their trade. On February 21, The New
York Times reported that the police in Nuremberg, West
Germany, had arrested a bisexual former U.S. Army
sergeant on the suspicion that he had knowingly spread the
disease to his sexual partners. And on March 4, the paper
reported on the upcoming trial of a man who allegedly
killed his male sexual partner when the man informed
him-after sex-that he had AIDS. 15
Further reinforcement for the 'truth' underlying these

narratives was to come from an unexpected quarter-namely
Michael Meacher, at that time the British Labour Party
Shadow Health Secretary:
Young people with AIDS are being detained in secure units

to take them out of circulation [Michael Meacher] claimed
today. He referred to 350 'secure unit places' in 44 local
authority homes 'where a number of young people with the
virus are being detained. There are a number who are
being held for no other reason, as far as we know, than that
they have the virus.'
Ostensibly, they were being held because they were in
need of care. But the real reason was that they could infect
others: 'There has been talk in the press of revenge sex, and
for all I know, these are some of these persons.'
This was a reference to allegations that teenage male
prostitutes have been touting for clients to infect them
deliberately.16 [my emphasis]
Smith ~ids: Don,t Die of Ignorance, 117
Government health agencies denied that they knew of any such

case of the kind outlined by Meacher-in spite of his claim that
his information came from a 'wholly reliable source .'1 7
Meacher's source turned out to be former Health Department
Head of Child Care, Professor Norman Tutt of the University of
Lancaster, who commented:
There were about 10 young people being detained with AIDS

in different parts of the country ... 'They were in local
authority care and absconded and either got involved in
drug use, or promiscuous lifestyles becoming rent boys or
prostitutes.,18
While reinforcing the AIDS revenge stories, these

statements by Meacher and Tutt also pick up on another
theme, namely the confinement of AIDS carriers-an issue
which was certainly receiving serious attention in some
quarters.19 For example, Lothian Region Conservative
Councillor and member of the Police Committee, Tony Lester,
was reported as saying:
rve heard of rent boys who can infect a hundred or more

people in a year. res a lethal weapon they,re carrying in
their bodies and ies being allowed to run free. res
ridiculous .... So I believe in compulsory screening .... Then
people who have been identified as positive should be
isolated with maximum freedom. There are a number of
islands around the coast we could prepare specially. They
would have to stay there either until there was a cure or
until their death. It»s as bad as that.20 [my emphasis]
Lester has not been the only person to suggest this 'solution:'
'AMERICA'S 1.5 million AIDS victims should be banished to a
remote Hawaiian island, a top doctor urged yesterday'21 and a
Swiss doctor suggested that 'AIDS virus carriers be sterilised
and marked with a tattoo.'22
Horrified? Well, in the USA The Sun newspaper recently
reported that the singer Johnny Rotten, a one-time hero of the
punk world who encouraged his fans by spitting at them, will
now no longer play concerts in London as he is afraid he may
118 Smith ~ids: Don't Die of Ignorance'
catch AIDS from fans who spit back at him.23 Similarly, the
singer Tom Jones is said to be cleaning up his act:
The sexy singer is so terrified of AIDS that he's doing

everything he can to keep his ardent female fans at bay.
For more than 25 years, hip-gyrating Tom, 47, has
been whipping his drooling supporters into a frenzy and
encouraging them-as many as 40 in just one
performance-to mob the stage and share a passionate
kiss. But that's all changed. Now, he's keeping his lips to
himself.
'You can't be too careful,' he says. 'You just don't
know how the disease is spread. It scares me because the
scientists aren't in agreement about the risk.'24
However, while some public figures appear to be scared of

catching AIDS, others, or so the press tells us, appear to have
little concern that they may catch it--<>r even spread it:
Cold-hearted Rock Hudson deliberately French-kissed

Dynasty beauty Linda Evans when he knew he was dying of
AIDS.
The evil star even had open sores on his mouth when
the steamy scene was being filmed. And he bragged
afterwards: 'Great! I gave her a big wet one.'
Hudson's callous trick has been revealed by his
former lover, Marc Christian, 29, in an interview with an
American magazine. 25
Such news reports may or may not be true. However, we

need to set them alongside accounts which tell us that jailed sex
attackers in American prisons are no longer being beaten up by
fellow prisoners: if they are harassed, all they do is to threaten to
spit on their attackers.26 Allan Breed of the National Council on
Crime and Delinquency in the USA has publicly stated that:
Guards are worrying about dealing with unruly prisoners

who claim to have AIDS. Now prisoners, when they are
about to be restrained say 'I've got AIDS,' and they spit in
your face.27
Certainly in the UK, we have already had instances of this

vengeful threat being carried out:
MUSICIAN WITH AIDS VIRUS SPAT BLOOD AT

POLICE
A former pop musician who once squandered $50,000 a year

on his heroin addiction was jailed for two years yesterday
for spitting blood at two police officers and threatening to
kill them by infecting them with AIDS. Daniel McGlynn,
30, was said to have discovered recently that he had become
infected with the AIDS virus.
When detained by police in connection with an
offence, he was injured during a struggle. He then began to
spit mouthfuls of blood and shouted at the police: 'I have
AIDS, I am going to kill you bastards, I am going to give
you AIDS.'
At the High Court in Edinburgh McGlynn, of
Magdalene Gardens, Edinburgh, pleaded guilty to
assaulting two police officers at Leigh police station by
threatening to infect them with AIDS and spitting blood at
them and on to one of the police officers.28
A similar attack was given a rather more homophobic

treatment in the Daily Star:
PUTTING THE BITE OF FEAR ON YOU
A young man of our acquaintance has suffered the most

nightmarish of attacks outside a seamy Edinburgh
nightclub known to be frequented by all manner of persons
of a homosexual inclination. Our chum's superficial
wounds, one fears, could yet turn out to be of a quite fatal
nature.
As our friend walked past the establishment, a
bearded and extremely agitated drunk came tottering out of
the premises and grabbed him by the hand. 'Have you got
AIDS, dearie?' he asked. 'No, no, I haven't,' replied our
startled acquaintance. His attacker seized his arm and
sank his teeth into it. 'Well-you have now!' he said. And
ran off. The awful thing about this disturbing story-our
correspondent has seen the teeth marks-is that this
wretched young man, whose name we know but prefer not
to publish, may not learn for years whether the incident
was just some dreadful joke-or otherwise.29
The tales I have related so far are by no means the only

AIDS contemporary legends in circulation. However, it is
perhaps significant that they appear to be the most prevalent.
Of the other narratives currently circulating, from the Detroit
area Janet Langlois reports another revenge legend which she
calls 'Hold the Mayo.' The story tells of a young man who works
at a Burger King restaurant who, upon finding that he has
AIDS, ejaculates into the mayonnaise and so passes the disease
on to the unsuspecting public.30 In a similar vein, she also
reports that:
A Palestinian student told me that her younger sister had

heard the rumour ['Hold the Mayo'] this way: A man found
that he had AIDS and was working at McDonald's, so he
cut his finger and dripped blood into all the hamburgers.31
Of the other tales to surface to date, several portray

incidents of mindless violence. One, heard in February, 1987,
tells of an incident where:
... a group of friends in a disco in Germany were attached

by a gang of youths who stabbed them with hypodermic
needles containing contaminated blood.32
Not surprisingly, the tale does not explain where the

contaminated blood came from. In attempting to unravel this
particular contemporary legend, perhaps it is safe to assume
that this scenario is based on a confused interpretation of the
many warnings given to drug users by health officials on the
dangers of sharing needles and so spreading AIDS. 33
Other legends tell of how individuals who have come into
contact with infected blood can be 'protected:'
This guy tried to kill himself by slashing his wrists because

he had AIDS and winds up in the hospital-still bleeding.
Anyway, he tried to kill himself again by jumping through
a window, but still doesn't die and is bleeding even worse
now. He runs out to a police car and throws himself into the
back seat-bleeding everywhere. The cop is shocked and
rushes to help him, not thinking what he might have ....
Anyway, they all rush back to the hospital and the truth
comes out-[He has AIDS]-and in order to decontaminate
the cop they put him in a body bag of a water and salt, i.e.,
sterilizing solution.34
The 'killer' nature of the disease has also been picked up

and incorporated into existing contemporary legends:
In the summer of 1988 an advertisement in a newspaper

read '1987 Firebird for sale---$1000.00.' My brother, who was
looking for a car at the time, told me about it. Apparently
the owner of this car had AIDS and he had died. The
owner's wife was having a great deal of trouble trying to sell
the car and thought reducing the price of the car would
make it easier to seU.35
However, not all the AIDS legends are quite so serious. Francis
Wheen in The Independent writes:
For many years there has been a neon-illuminated

hoarding by the Chiswick flyover in west London bearing
the slogan 'Lucozade-Aids Recovery.' According to one
popular current story, an Australian who was picked up [by
a taxi driver] at Heathrow saw the sign and said: 'You
pommie bastards-you've found the cure and not told the
rest of us.' Apocryphal, of course. But myths have a power
of their own. A reader points out that the words 'Aids
recovery' have just been mysteriously removed from the
sign. Only a shadowy impression of the original letters
remains.36
Nor do all the AIDS legends documented to date function

at an international, or even national level. Michael Goss relates
the following localized narrative:
With the imminent return of thousands of matelots in the

Global '86 Fleet-men whom, it was feared, might not
appreciate the extent and severity of Britain's AIDS
problem-an official warning was posted in warships and
naval bases to the effect that a Plymouth prostitute had been
diagnosed as having the disease--much to the annoyance of
the Plymouth health officers, who criticized it as
'codswallop.' And in short order the naval authorities
admitted they were wrong. No such diagnosis had been
made: they had been thrown into panic by rumours picked
up by the seamen at pubs and clubs in Union Street,
'Plymouth's notorious red light district,' one version of

which specified only that two prostitutes were living with a
male AIDS carrier. The rumour was just-an
unsubstantiated statement-but like most rumours it was
horribly believable. 37
This then is the core of the AIDS complex of contemporary

legends documented to date-though I am sure that there are
many more narratives of this type currently in circulation-
and many more to come.
The Cultural Complex
Stories such as these do not appear out of the blue, dissociated

from other manifestations of modern culture. Contemporary
legends about AIDS are, in part, the product of static and
evolving belief systems and static and evolving health systems,
both of which directly influence the content of the tales. Not
surprisingly then, concern about AIDS has already become
manifest in many other contemporary cultural traditions such
as jokes, graffiti and photocopy-lore.
There are, for instance, many AIDS jokes currently in
circulation38 and, as is usual with evolving joke cycles, a large
proportion take the form of one-line riddles. These often reflect
the erroneous and homophobic view that the disease is passed
on only by homosexuals:
Q.: Why is AIDS referred to as the miracle disease?

A.: Because it changes fruits into vegetables.
Others target 'known' homosexuals:
Q.: How did AIDS get into America?

A.: Up the Hudson
or combine AIDS humour with other topical themes:
Did you know that the Archbishop of Canterbury's got

AIDS?-He's lost weight [ie., (Terry) Waite].
Not all jokes take the form of riddles, however. Some

employ a more extended narrative text:
The first man to die of AIDS goes up to heaven.

Saint Peter at the gates: 'Well, what did you die of?'
Man: 'Aids.'
StPeter: 'We've never had one of those before. You11
have to wear a sign in Heaven to show what you died of. I
know, you can wear this red cross. God will see you in a
moment.'
God to St Peter: 'Who's this?'
StPeter: 'Oh, he's the First AIDS man.'39
Apart from jokes, graffiti was one of the first areas of

contemporary tradition to highlight concern about AIDS. Some
graffiti were simple graphic representations of the various
answers to the question 'What does AIDS stand for?'40 Others
were grossly homophobic:
Aids is not a disease--it's a cure41

Help stamp out AIDS-run over a poofter42
Fortunately, others were less vicious and more witty. The

following, for instance, simultaneously builds an interactive
dialogue and parodies existing conventional texts:
A tisket
A tasket
A condom
Or a casket.
The ability of graffiti to communicate cultural values, attitudes

and fears is perhaps best exemplified by an incident mentioned
by Moody Adams:
The only empty seat in a crowded New York subway car,

one busy day, was the one bearing the spray paint words,
'Did an AIDS patient sit here last?'43
To date, no AIDS contemporary legends have appeared in

photocopy form although several AIDS texts and cartoons are in
circulation. These include stereotypical ethnic slurs, such as 'An
Irishman's letter to the DHSS in response to receiving the AIDS

leaflet.'44 Other photocopied AIDS-lore items found so far
include parodies of prohibition signs, novelty Tee-shirts, office
notices, memos, slogans, Rorsach blot tests and cartoons. AIDS-
lore is now also being circulated by means of computers. For
instance, one parody entitled 'Robin Hood and his Merry Men'
was put together by three teenage boys using their school's
computer.45 This parody adopts a several-centuries-old
traditional image, but is very specific about the sexual
relationships between Maid Marion and the 'merry' men.
Perhaps not surprisingly, AIDS-lore is not solely the
preserve of the adult world. Children in the playground are
already taunting one another with such abuse as 'You condom,'
and a correspondent to The Guardian newspaper reports that
he heard seven-year-olds singing a version of 'Soldier, Soldier,
will you marry me?' which had the soldier replying: 'No sweet
maid, I cannot marry you, for I have no condom to put on.•46
Elsewhere it has been reported that:
Informed sources at a primary school in Billingham tell us

that children playing tag in the playground no longer
describe the person who is 'it' as having the lurgy. The
unlucky child is instead said to have AIDS. 4 7
Is this perhaps an updating of the older British traditional tag

the 'Noxious Touch' or 'Dreaded Lurgy' as described by the
Opies, 48 or the American 'Cootie Complex' discussed by Sue
Samuelson?49
Underpinning the various AIDS-lore manifestations in
our contemporary cultural traditions, there exists a whole belief
system about how AIDS developed and how it is passed on. In
terms of how AIDS developed, the following explanations have
all been seriously suggested:
(i) it has originated in green monkeys in Africa 50
(ii) it has spread from specific ethnic groups-such as
Haitians51
(iii) it is an out-of-control germ warfare virus that escaped52
(iv) it has been put in the fluoride in our drinking water53
(v) in the U.S.A.) it has been put inK-Y Jell by the Centre for
Disease Control to 'get at' all the homosexuals54
Smith 'Aids: Don't Die of Ignorance' 125
(vi) it has been developed by the CIA55

(vii) it has been developed by the Russians 56
(viii) it was created in Hitler's laboratories57
and so on and so on... 58
This is folk belief run riot-and perhaps not surprisingly-for,
can the scientists explain the origin of AIDS any better?
Likewise, it has been suggested that AIDS is passed on in a
whole variety of ways-many of which bear little, if any,
relationship to medical opinion:
(i) scientists in Johannesburg have suggested bed bugs could
pass on AIDS to malnourished children59
(ii) Tory MP Nicholas Soames is reported as 'believing you
can catch it from sitting on public lavatory seats'60
(iii) a writer to Dr. David Delvin's column in Titbits magazine
asked, 'Could licking stamps bought from a gay sub-
postmaster give me AIDS?'61
As one commentator observed:
People believe you can catch AIDS from giving blood. That's
like saying you can catch athlete's foot from watching
'Come Dancing.' 62
In reality, we do know you can catch AIDS through sexual

contact with an infected person. But just how does the lay
person define sexual contact? Well, sexual intercourse is
obvious. But what about kissing?63 Certainly the press have
reported that debate. 64 Other confusions are less
understandable:
A Thames Television camera crew recently refused to set

foot inside the Terrence Higgins Trust (the major support
group for AIDS patients), terrified of picking up the disease
from the air or off the furniture.65
The morass of misinformation about the nature of AIDS has

also opened up the possibility of manipulating of the truth when
it comes to explaining how the disease has been contracted :
Business travellers who risk contracting the AIDS virus

from prostitutes in Africa return home with stories about
having been bitten by an insect or a vampire bat ....
126 Smith 'Aids: Don,t Die of Ignorance,
Professor Arie Zuckerman, professor of microbiology

at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine,
said he told travellers to tropical countries not to bother
about insect bites: AIDS could be avoided by lack of sexual
contact. When they asked, 'What about vampire bites?' he
replied: 'Don't go into caves. '66
In the USA-but where else?-free enterprise has stepped

in to save the day:
America's anxiety that the AIDS epidemic is spreading

among heterosexuals has produced the inevitable
American solution: a rash of dating services open only to
people with an AIDS-free certificate and enough money to
keep the guarantee up to date.
For a mere $390, red-blooded heterosexuals in New
York, eager to continue dating and mating much as they
did in the now-innocent pre-AIDS era, can sign on for six
months with Ampersand, a new organization offering
single people the chance to meet others who have been
screened for the absence of the AIDS virus, HIV. By
removing the now-awkward question, the romance may be
put back into brief encounters. 67
Alongside this miscellaneous collection of folk beliefs, there

runs a somewhat more hostile homophobic view as to where the
blame for AIDS lies. Fundamentalist religious leaders in the
U.S.A. quite openly place the blame for AIDS squarely with
homosexuals, often in extreme language:
Homosexuals need help. Seven thousand had died from

AIDS by the spring of 1986. The most compassionate thing
that can be done is to educate them to the fact that
homosexual sex is a filthy, disease-ridden practice that is
killing them. The bar, bathhouse, 'gay' disco and porn
merchants are covering this up in order to keep the money
flowing in. Homosexual leaders help hide the truth because
their power and publicity comes from the practice.
These men, for obvious motives, want to hide the facts
about where AIDS started. The American strain of AIDS
came from men who pay in other men's rectums;
homosexual men who use their genitals and arms, their
tongues and toys to frolic in a cesspool of germs. From this
vagina of viruses AIDS proliferated. Within this womb of
filth it flourished. Americans have not been educated to the

fact that homosexual sex is just like heroin use. Both are
highly pleasurable to some, highly addictive, and highly
dangerous indulgences. 68
The same church fathers also see AIDS as divine retribution

sent by God to punish homosexuals.69 One cartoon recently
depicted Jerry Falwell at the side of the bed reciting his prayers:
'We thank thee for thy bountiful Herpes and thine blessed AIDS,
0 Lord .... Now send us something for the rest of the weirdos.'70
Contemporary legends do not exist in isolation-
consequently many aspects of current AIDS-lore will have
demonstrable historical antecedents. Tales of revenge executed
via sex have a lengthy history-although most have been
excluded from the conventional tale type and motif indexes. An
immediate antecedent of the 'Welcome to the World of AIDS'
narrative had widespread circulation in the USA around ten
years ago. In this instance the girl 'visitor' had contracted
herpes and was deliberately passing it back to the male
population.71 Reginald Wright Kauffman uses an interesting
version of the revenge sex theme in his Daughters of Ishmael. 72
Here, the prostitute, Mary, gives syphilis to the man who
tricked her into prostitution by claiming to be planning to
marry her. A similar sex revenge theme is discussed by
Gershon Legman. 73 This traditional motif even ended up as the
plot for a 1923 pornographic movie, 'The Pick Up':
The hero is introduced: 'Gus-the man who broke

Solomon's home into a thousand PIECES'... The film
recounts how the rakish Gus picks up Lizzie the flapper in
his car, drives her out of town, and makes his pitch:
'Anything doing, babyT
'How far are we from townT she asks.
'Ten miles.'
'NO.'
'GET OUTr
She gets out docilely, waves goodbye, and walks off towards
town.
The next day the events reoccur, and twenty miles
from town she still says, 'NO.' However, on the anecdotal
conventional third go-round, this time fifty miles from
town, she succumbs and they have sex. Afterwards, Gus

asks why she was reluctant earlier.
'I don't mind walking ten, fifteen, or twenty miles,'
she replies, 'but I11 be damned if I11 walk fifty, just to keep
you ... from getting a dose of CLAP!!' 74
A slightly more distant relative of the 'Welcome to the

World of AIDS' narrative, in terms of plot, is given by Vance
Randolf in Pissing in the Snow. Randolf comments that he
heard a version of the tale in the 1920s:
One time there was a country boy come a-walking into

town, and he made a bee-line for the whore house. The
woman begun to tell what pretty girls she had upstairs, but
the boy didn't pay her no mind. 'I don't care nothing about
that,' says he, 'all I want is a good dose of clap.' The woman
figured the fellow must have went crazy. 'What on earth do
you want to get the clap for?' she asked him. 'So I can give it
to Sis,' says the boy. The woman that run the whore house
was pretty tough, but she wasn't used to such talk as that.
'My God,' she says, 'what did your sister do to you?' The
country boy looked surprised. 'Sis? Why she never did
nothing. Me and her gets along fine. But she'll give it to
Paw, before the week's out.' The woman just stood there
with her mouth open, and she thought the whole thing is
terrible. 'Good Lord,' she says, 'your Paw must be awful
mean to you!' The country boy stared at her. 'No,' says he,
'Paw's all right. I just want him to give Maw a good dose.'
The woman that run the place was plumb shocked when
she heard that. 'It's a awful thing for a boy to hate his own
mother,' she says.
'Why, I ain't got nothing against Maw,' says the boy.
'You ain't?' hollered the woman that run the whore
house. 'Then what for do you want her go get the clap?' The
country boy scowled. 'Why,' says he, 'she'll give it to that
goddam preacher, that put me out of the Sunday School.
He's the son-of-a-bitch I'm after!'75
Another relative of the 'Welcome to the World of AIDS'

legend was given by J. Mortimer Hall in his Anecdota
Americana, first published in 1927:
A man entered a bawdy house in a great hurry. 'Give me a

girl that has a clap,' he demanded. The madam looked her
Smith 'Aids: Don~t Die of Ignorance~ 129
indignation. Angrily she informed him that such girls

were not retained in her establishment. 'I'll have to go
some place else, then,' said the man. One of the girls,
overhearing the conversation, called the madam aside,
'Tell him I've got a clap,' she said. 'Why shouldn't I make
the money.' So the madam called the man back, pointed out
the girl to him, and they went upstairs. When he had
finished screwing her, the girl looked up at him and
simpered, 'I fooled you, mister. I ain't got any clap.' 'Oh,
yes you have,' said the man. 76
Perhaps not surprisingly, antecedents of stories about the

confinement of persons with AIDS are also documented-
though these are few and far between:
Variants of a 'black syphilis' legend. According to students

at the Indianapolis campus of Indiana University, soldiers
stricken with this incurable disease are sent from Viet
N am to an island (location unknown). Victims may request
that they be listed as 'missing in action,' or may wait until
they succumb (as all do) to the fatal disease, at which time
they are listed as killed in action. 77
Currently, AIDS is presented to the public by the popular

press as the greatest 'killer plague' this century. Consequently,
it is appropriate to explore the question of whether parallels of
our contemporary legends are to be found in the plague-lore of
earlier centuries.
Antecedents of this complex of narratives were, in fact,
chronicled as so-called 'true stories' during the Great Plague of
London in 1665 by Daniel Defoe in Journal of the Plague Year.
For example:
A poor, unhappy gentlewoman, a substantial citizen's wife,

was (if the story be true) murdered by one of these creatures
in Aldersgate Street, or that way. He was going along the
street, raving mad, to be sure, and singing; the people only
said he was drunk, but he himself said he had the plague
upon him, which, it seems, was true; and meeting this
gentlewoman, he would kiss her. She was terribly
frightened, as he was only a rude fellow, and she ran from
him, but the street being very thin of people, there was
nobody near enough to help her. When she saw he would
130 Smith 'Aids: Don't Die of Ignorance'
overtake her, she turned and gave him a thrust so forcibly,

he being but weak, and pushed him down backward. But
very unhappily, she being so near, he caught hold of her,
and pulled her down also, and getting up first, mastered
her, and kissed her; and which was worst of all, when he
had done, told her he had the plague, and why should not
she have it as well as he?78
To contextualize this story, it is important to remember

that Defoe was only a child of five or six during the Great
Plague of 1665 and his Journal of the Plague Year was not
published until 1722, so it could not have been the eye-witness
account it claims to be. However, Defoe's journalistic
background structured his approach to his account:
The Defoe we prize is not a working journalist but a novelist

whose method is that of the working journalist. To be
termed 'an imaginative writer' would have terrified him.
The purpose of the pen was to render, in seemingly
u n considered immediacy, true events, and if the events
were strange and surprising then so much the better. 79
Although the account should not be regarded as strictly factual

and much of it is hearsay, this is a matter which should
recommend it to the folklorist.
The Journal is full of little anecdotes-the journalist's

'human interest'-but the narrator is often over-careful to
insist that this is all hearsay, he cannot vouch for the truth
of it (there is increasing evidence for supposing that, where
he does vouch for the truth of his facts, he is describing
events that can be verified from the records).80
Defoe used gossip and hearsay as a creative tool; in fact, the

opening sentence of the novel contains a phrase that
researchers in the area of contemporary legend also often
employ:
It was about the beginning of September 1664, that I

amongst the rest of my neighbours heard in ordinary
discourse that the plague had returned in Holland again. 81
[my emphasis]
Likewise, throughout the novel Defoe litters the text with

such telling apologetic phrases as: 'old wives' tales;' 'it was
reported by was of scandal;' 'innumerable dismal stories were
heard every day on this very account;' 'and some came to my
knowledge, that is to say, by hearsay;' 'I could give a great
many such stories as these, diverting enough, which in the long
curse of that dismal year I met with-that is, to say, true in the
general: for no man could at such a time learn all the
particulars.'82
Even more interestingly, Defoe shows a clear
understanding of the nature of legend and rumour:
They did tell me , indeed, of a nurse in one place that laid a

wet cloth upon the face of a dying patient whom she tended,
and so put an end to his life, who was just expiring before;
and another that smothered a young woman she was
looking to when she was in a fainting fit, and would have
come to herself; some that killed them by giving them one
thing, some another, and some starved them by giving
them nothing at all. But these stories had two marks of
suspicion that always attended them, which caused me
always to slight them and to look on them as mere stories
that people continually frighted one another with. First,
that where it was that we heard it, they always placed the
scene at the farther end of the town, opposite or most remote
from where you were to hear it. If you heard it in
Whitechapel, it had happened at St. Giles's , or at
Westminster, or Holborn, or that end of the town. If you
heard of it at that end of the town, then it was done in
Whitechapel, or the Minories, or about Cripplegate parish.
If you heard of it in the city, why, then it happened in
Southwark; and if you heard of it in Southwark, then it was
done in the city, and the like.
In the next place, of what part soever you heard the
story, the particulars were always the same, especially that
of laying a wet double clout on a dying gentleman's face,
and that of smothering young gentlewoman; so that it was
apparent, at least to my judgement, that there was more of
tale than of truth in those things. 83 [my emphasis ]
Besides providing us with an array of legends, Defoe (like

Pepys and other writers) left us much more, in that they
describe the health systems and belief systems which fostered
the spread of the disease and the spread of the rumours. The
parallels with the case of AIDS is instructive and can be traced
in particulars: 1) lack of adequate information about cause and
cure; 2) rumours of compulsory segregation; 3) 'explanations'
for the epidemic based on notions of Divine retribution; and
social tensions and prejudices.
1. Lack of Information
Though very justifiably frightened, the people of the
seventeenth century were frightened of the wrong things ;
plague is not, as they thought, carried by a miasma
through the air, nor is it quite as contagious as they
supposed. They can in no way be blamed for their
ignorance, for the full facts about plague were not
understood until early in this century. 84
Misinformation about cures also abounded. For instance,

it was not unknown for physicians and quack doctors alike to
recommend freshly killed dog, combined with a 'medicinal'
paste, as a cure against the plague. (Perhaps here we have an
echo of the belief 'it has to hurt before it can cure you:' after all,
the British have historically abhorred the notion of eating
dog, 85 so what better formula to use as a curative against such
a mighty disease as plague?). In the seventeenth century many
such quack medical cures against plague abounded-just as
fake cures for AIDS do today.86 However, plague victims also
turned to other sources for prevention and cures. For example,
witches were seen as having malevolent powers to cause disease
and plague and occult practices were also employed to ward off
contamination.
Such practices were reinforced by a complex belief system
which included the idea that 'the conjunctions of planets in a
malignant manner and with mischievous influence ... foretold of
draught, famine, and pestilence.'87 Such heavenly portents,
particularly in the form of the comet which had been seen in
England in 1664, were guaranteed to spread fear, rumour and
gossip when the Great Plague arrived in 1665.
While it may seem quaint and curious that in the
seventeenth century people should even consider trying such
practices or should hold such beliefs, are we today any better
prepared for the AIDS epidemic? In 1665 physicians offered to
Smith 'Aids: Don,t Die of Ignorance, 133
cure the plague-although they did not know what caused it. In
1989 we partially understand the causes of AIDS-but still
know no cure. Hence rumour, hearsay and gossip are as rife
now as they were in 1665.
2. Forcible Confinement
While at present, the forcible confinement of persons with AIDS
exists as rum our and not reality, if we are to believe Defoe in
1665 the forced segregation of plague victims was a reality. In
setting out his objection to forced confinement, Defoe identified a
crucial mechanism which underlies this corpus of plague/AIDS
stories:
... setting watchmen ... to keep the people in was , first of all,
not effectual, but that the people broke out, whether by force
or by stratagem, even almost as often as they pleased: and ,
second, that those that did thus break out were generally
people infected who, in their desperation, running about
from one place to another, valued not whom they injured;
and which perhaps, as I have said, might give birth to
report that it was natural to the infected people to desire to
infect others, which report was really false. 8 8 [my
emphasis]
3. Divine Retribution
The view that AIDS is a plague from God, perhaps not
surprisingly, is an echo of a belief which has been persistently
reported during periods of epidemics for several thousand
years. For example, Boccaccio in his introduction to The
Decameron (tales ostensibly told by a group of people who had
fled from Florence to escape the plague of 1348), observes:
Some say that [the plague] is descended upon the human

race through the influence of the heavenly bodies, others
that it was punishment signifying God's righteous anger at
our iniquitous way oflife.89
A similar causation was also offered by Defoe:
I would be far from lessening the awe of the judgments of

God and the reverence to his providence which ought
always to be on our minds on such occasions as these.

Doubtless the visitation itself is a stroke from Heaven upon
a city, or country, or nation where it falls; a messenger of
His vengeance, and a loud call to that nation or country or
city to humiliation and repentance, according to that of the
prophet Jeremiah (18: 7.8).90
The same explanations are, of course, offered today.
4. Tension and Prejudice

Over the years we can see a persistent pattern of social tensions
building at times of stress. Tensions which manifest themselves
as splits in the fabric of society, 'us' versus 'them,'91 the
'wealthy' versus the 'poor,' and the 'clean' versus the 'diseased.'
As Roy Porter has recently said:
We have no natural or acquired immunity against panic,

and epidemics of new, killer diseases sap that confidence in
the future upon which civilization depends. 92
Nowadays, the AIDS epidemic is blamed on 'bogeymen' such as

the Arab nations or the homosexual community:
AIDS TERRORISTS-THE NEWEST THREAT!
A band of AIDS-infected Arab terrorists are romancing

Americans, Europeans and Japanese in a bizarre plot to
infect millions with the deadly virus! And authorities says
the radical romeos are as devoted to the Ayatollah and
Allah as the suicide bombers who blew up the U.S. Marine
barracks in Beirut, Lebanon.
So serious is the threat from sex terrorists, customs
officials in England are now turning away anyone infected
with the virus. Says Cyril Lythrop, 52, a health department
official in London: 'We're not the only country which has
taken measures to control the AIDS epidemic.'
... The official estimates a thousand AIDS terrorists
have infiltrated America. 'Their methods are bold .... They
go for unsuspecting patrons of singles bars, gay, drug
addicts, and prostitutes.'
In Japan, health officials say an elusive Lebanese
gigolo, known only as Nayef, may be responsible for
infecting 14 women with AIDS since 1982. A Japanese
government spokesman said there is no direct evidence
linking Nayef to any Arab terrorist group. However, several

American women living in Tokyo, who have been exposed to
the virus, charge he is a terrorist. Says Janet Libby, 41, a
friend of one of the American women who got AIDS after
dating Nayef: 'He's a fiend, a dirty, rotten excuse for a
human being. He's killing Americans. The only difference
between him and a suicide bomber is the delay of the
explosion. '93
The prevalence of these AIDS-lore narratives and related beliefs

in our contemporary traditional culture thus reveals our
current fears and preoccupations-fears and preoccupations
upon which the sensational tabloid press constantly feed in
order to increase their circulation figures, and in so doing sow
the seeds for 'new' narratives and beliefs.94
Folklore presents, and at the same time reflects, reality.
We do not live in a nice, tidy, clean, non-violent society and our
contemporary traditions highlight, if not magnify, both the
'nice' and 'nasty' elements. AIDS has only just entered the
traditional and popular consciousness of our society and we can
already see the results directly expressed. At the same time,
folklore as a system of knowledge, belief and practice very often
provides us with 'information' to complete our 'knowledge'
about the way the world works. Not surprisingly, when
knowledge is scant or conflicting, folklore takes over.95
Interpretation
On an initial reading, the 'Welcome to the World of AIDS' story

appears to be a comparatively straightforward revenge tale in
which an infected individual 'gets back at' society. But is the
case so clear cut? Gary Alan Fine has suggested that the
underlying meaning of the story may not be about AIDS but
about rape. Fine concludes that for women, the legend portrays
a subtle revenge against men, and that for men, the story plays
on their collective paranoia about women.96 However, this
reading appears to have been based primarily on stories where
the man is the victim. If we include stories where women are
the victims, it is possible to interpret the narrative differently
and disinter a wider message which focuses on social
136 Smith ~ids: Don't Die of Ignorance'
responsibility. In this reading, the individual, whether male or

female, becomes a victim because s/he was irresponsible enough
to engage in casual sex. In this reading, the message is that the
'victim' is actually a 'transgressor' and therefore deserves the
punishment.
Be that as it may, an even stronger and more convincing
interpretation emerges once we consider the legends in their
historical context. Fear, violence, revenge, mistrust and
prejudice-these were the characteristics of plague-lore in the
seventeenth century and the same attitudes infuse the AIDS-
lore which has succeeded it. My tendency is therefore to view
this group of contemporary legends and related lore as a
popular manifestation of what I call the 'H.S.B. syndrome'-
that is, the 'Hill Street Blues syndrome'-it echoes the
sentiment expressed at the beginning of every episode of that
popular series, 'Let's do it to them before they do it to us.'
Acknowledgements
I must take this opportunity to thank the many people who, in one way
or another, contributed towards this paper. In particular, I must thank
Gordon Ashman, Dan Barnes, Gillian Bennett, Julia Bishop, Marion
Bowman, Sam Coleman, Ramona Dearing, Ian Duff, Mark Ferguson,
Gary Alan Fine, Derek Froome, Mark Glazer, Diane Goldstein, Michael
Goss, Ruth Ann Hendrickson, Philip Hiscock, Helen Hartnell, Pete
Jacques, Marilyn Jorgensen, Di King, Janet Langlois, Jimmy Lavita,
Gershon Legman, Jerry Oakes, Mike Preston, Roger Renwick, Cathy
Rickey, Danielle Roemer, Steve Roud, Riki Saltzman, Phil Smith, Heike
Starke, Liz Thompson, John Tunney, Eleanor Wachs, John Widdowson,
and Brian Woodall.
NOTES
1. This title is based on the slogan which heralded the British AIDS
education campaign in February, 1987. Please note that the beliefs
and attitudes expressed in, or implied by, the folklore discussed in
this paper are not necessarily those of the author, the editors or the
publishers: they merely reflect some of the opinions current at the
time of writing. Folkore is not necessarily either 'nice' or accurate:
Smith ~ids: Don:Jt Die of Ignorance:~ 137
though one may deplore its disreputable and unpleasant aspects, one
should not wilfully suppress them.
2. Related to me by a Doncaster school teacher (April, 1987). The joke
was current across the country at that time.
3. See: Bengt af Klintberg, 'Why Are There so Many Modern Legends
About Revenge?,' in: Paul Smith, ed., Perspectives on Contemporary
Legend: Proceedings of the Conference on Contemporary Legend,
Sheffield, July 1982 (Sheffield: CECTAL, 1984), pp. 141-46.
4. See for example: Edith Fowke, Folklore of Canada (Toronto:
McCelland & Stewart, 1976), p. 266.
5. For historical antecedents of 'The Doggy-Lick Killer,' see: J.M. Elgart,
ed., Still More Over Sexteen (New York: Grayson Publishing,1954), p.
93; P. M. Zall, ed., A Hundred Merry Tales and Other English Jest
Books of the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries (Lincoln, Nebraska:
University of Nebraska Press, 1963), pp.130-31.
6. 'A Very Rude Awakening,' The Daily Star (25 February, 1987).
7. 'Face the Virus,' The Face 84 (April ,1987), p. 67.
8. The Face (1987), p.3.
9. The Face (1987), p. 67
10. Communicated by Heike Starke of the Department of English,
Cologne University, West Germany (August, 1987).
11. Jan Harold Brunvand, 'Urban Legends: "AIDS Mary" Transmits
Scary Tale,' News-Journal Paper (16 March, 1987), p. D 3.
12. Ann Landers, 'Teen-agers Must Be Educated About AIDS,' The
Boston Globe (30 July, 1987), p. 25.
13. 'AIDS on the Talk Show Circuit,' U.S.A. Today (24 October, 1986), p. 2
D. Reported by Joseph Goodwin in: More Man than You'll Ever Be:
Gay Folklore and Acculturation in Middle America (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1989), p. 85.
14. Randy Shilts, And the Band Played On: Politics, People and the AIDS
Epidemic (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1987), p. 165.
15. Brunvand (1987), p. D 3.
16. 'Young AIDS Carriers "Held in Detention" says Meacher,' Daily
Mail (17 March, 1987), p. 2.
17. Daily Mail (17 March,1987), p. 2.
18. Clare Dover, 'Boys in AIDS Scare Shut Away,' Daily Express (17
March, 1987), p. 1.
19. See for example: James McKeever, 'Should Those with AIDS Be
Isolated?,' in: The AIDS Plague (Medford, Oregon: Omega
Publications), pp. 93-108.
20. Carol Sarler, 'The AIDS Crisis: Edinburgh's Nightmare-City at
Risk,' The Sunday Times Magazine (21 June, 1987), p. 27.
21. 'Cast Away on AIDS Island,' The Sun (8 August, 1987), p. 7.
22. Reuter, 'AIDS Tattoos,' The Guardian (14 September, 1987), p. 6.
23. [Paul Screeton] 'AIDS Deficiencies,' Folklore Frontiers 3
(1986), p. 16. (Quoted from the Daily Mirror, 6 June, 1986.)
24. 'Why Tom Jones is Scared of AIDS,' The Globe (12 April, 1988), p. 29.
25. 'Deadly Secret of Cruel Rock's Kiss,' News of the World (2 August,
1987), p. 11.
26. Michael J. Berens, 'Criminals Use Fear of AIDS as a Weapon
Against Police,' The Columbus Dispatch (2 December, 1987), p. E 5.
27. Moody Adams, AIDS: You Just Think You,re Safe (Baker:
Louisiana: Dalton Moody, 1986).
28. 'Musician with AIDS Virus Spat Blood at Police,' Glasgow Herald
(10 March, 1987), p. 7.
29. Sarler (1987), pp. 24-28.
30. 'Putting the Bite of Fear on You,' The Daily Star (3 September, 1986).
31. Janet Langlois, 'Hold the Mayo: Cultural Inversions in an AIDS
Legend,' paper presented at the 7th Perspectives on Contemporary
Legend International Seminar, Texas A & M University, College
Station, Texas, 1989.
32. Communicated by Janet Langlois, Department of English, Wayne
State University, Detroit (19 May, 1989).
33. Communicated by Brian Woodall, Tideswell, Sheffield (June, 1987).
34. Communicated by Ramona Dearing via Mark Ferguson, Department
of Folklore, Memorial University of Newfoundland (March, 1989).
35. Collected by Patricia Gaul ton, Memorial University of Newfoundland
(January, 1989).
36. Francis Wheen, 'Lights Out,' The Independent (18 April, 1987), p. 18.
37. Michael Goss, 'AIDS: Heaven-Sent Folklore,' Folklore Frontiers 5
(1987), p. 8.
38. For further discussion of AIDS jokes, see for example: Reinhold
Aman, 'Kakologia: A Chronicle of Nasty Riddles and Naughty
Wordplay,' Maledicta 7 (1983), 'Kakologia: A Chronicle of Nasty
Riddles and Naughty Wordplay,' Maledicta 8 (1984-5), pp. 215-16,
'Kakologia: A Chronicle of Nasty Riddles and Naughty Wordplay,'
Maledicta 9 (1986-7), pp. 269-317; David Black, The Plague Years: A
Chronicle of AIDS, The Epidemic of Our Times (New York: Simon
and Schuster, 1986), pp. 23-31; Alan Dundes, 'At Ease, Disease-
AIDS Jokes as Sick Humor,' American Behavioral Scientist 30 (1987),
pp. 72-81; Casper G. Schmidt, 'AIDS Jokes or, Schadenfreude Around
an Epidemic,' Maledicta 8 (1984-5), pp. 69-73; Holly Tannen and David
Norris, 'AIDS Jokes: Punishment, Retribution and Renegotiation,'
Southern Folklore 46 (1989), pp. 147-57.
39. Communicated by Lee Wilson, Stockport, February, 1987.
40. Communicated by Philip Hiscock. Written on the wall of the Educ-
ation building, Memorial University of Newfoundland, January, 1986.
41. Communicated by Liz Thompson, Leeds. Seen written in the dust on
the rear of a lorry.
42. Seen on a billboard in Russellville, Kentucky, September, 1987.
43. Adams (1986), p. 213.
44. Received from Pete Jacques, via Helen Hartnell, Doncaster, April,
1987 . Variant copies were circulating in Sheffield, London and
Reading at the same time.
45. Received from a Doncaster teacher, February, 1987.
46. Alyson and David Elliman, 'Letter to the Editor,' The Guardian ( 11
March, 1987), p. 2.
47. 'Feedback,' New Scientist (15 January, 1987), p. 63.
48. Iona and Peter Opie, Children's Games in Street and Playground
(Oxford: Clarendon, 1969), pp. 75-78.
49. Sue Samuelson, 'The Cooties Complex,' Western Folklore 39 (1980),
pp. 198-210.
50. 'AIDS: Once Dismissed as the "Gay Plague", the Disease has Become
the No. 1 Public-Health Menace,' Newsweek (12 August, 1985), p. 20.
51. Robert Auguste, 'Haitians are Used as AIDS Scapegoats,' The
Miami Herald (21 December, 1983).
52. David Fletcher, 'Kissing Can Pass on AIDS,' The Daily Telegraph (13
March, 1987), p. 2.
53. Adams (1986), p. 130. Quoted from The San Francisco Chronicle (5
September, 1984).
54. Larry Flynt, The Village Voice (29 November, 1983). For a discussion
of how this story may have developed, see: John Borneman, 'AIDS in
Two Berlins,' in: Douglas Crimp, ed., AIDS: Cultural Analysis,
Cultural Activism (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988), pp. 233-34.
55. Michael Goss, 'Legends for Our Time: The Great Plague,' The
Unknown (November, 1987), p. 74. In 1976 rumours were widespread
in the U.S.A. that 'swine flu shots were actually vaccinations against
a virulent disease that escaped through negligence from a military
research laboratory.' See: Hal Morgan and Kerry Tucker, Rumor!
(New York: Penguin, 1984), pp. 134-35.
56. Goss (1987), p. 74.
57. 'Hitler's Labs Created AIDS Virus,' The Sun (3 January, 1989), p. 7.
58. For further discussions of the possible origin of AIDS, see: Jacques
Leibowitch, A Strange Virus of Unknown Origin (New York:
Ballantine, 1985); Robin McKie, Panic: The Story of AIDS (New York:
Thorsons, 1986); and Paula A. Treichler, 'AIDS, Homophobia and
Biomedical Discourse: An Epidemic of Signification,' in: Crimp
(1988), pp. 32-33.
59. The Sun (7 July, 1986).
60. 'A Very Rude Awakening,' The Daily Star (25 February, 1987).
61. Dr David Delvin, 'Casebook,' Titbits (24 August, 1987), p. 46.
62. Victoria Wood, interviewed on 'The Late Clive James Show,'
Channel 4 TV (11 July, 1987).
63. 'Can I get AIDS from Kissing?' The World Weekly News (7 February,
1987), p. 7.
64. Fletcher (1987), p. 2.
65. Roy Porter, 'Plague and Panic,' New Society (12 December, 1986), p.
11
66. Michael Parkin, 'AIDS Fault of Insects,' The Guardian (25 April,
1987), p. 2.
67. Michael White, 'Romance Ticket for the AIDS-free,' The Guardian
(21 April, 1987), p. 1.
68. Adams (1986), p. 71.
69. Adams (1986), p. 152.
70. Reproduced in Maledicta 8 (1984-5), p. 75 Source not given.
71. Communicated to me during the discussion which followed the
presentation of a version of this paper at the Center for Intercultural
Studies in Folklore and Ethnomusicology at the University of Texas,
Austin, April, 1988) . 'Auberon Waugh's Diary,' Private Eye (19
November, 1982), p. 19 carries a report that 'American girl, Ms.
Susan Lintrop of Miami, Florida, is suing the man she claims she
caught it off after a "one night stand"-for 60,000!'.
72 . Reginald Wright Kauffman, Daughters of Ishmael (London: Stephen
Swift, 1912), pp. 332-39.
73. Gershon Legman, The Rationale of the Dirty Joke (New York: Grove
Press, 1968), pp. 256-57.
74. AI DiLauro and Gerald Rabkin, Dirty Movies: An Illustrated History
of the Stag Film (New York/London: Chelsea House, 1976), pp. 44-62;
see also: Frank A. Hoffman, 'Prolegomena to a Study of Traditional
Elements in the Erotic Film,' Journal of American Folklore 78 (1965),
pp. 146-47.
75. Vance Randolph, Pissing in the Snow and Other Ozark Folktales
(Urbana/Chicago: University of Illinois Press, Illini Books, 1976), pp.
61-62.
76. J. Mortimer Hall, Anecdota Americana (Boston: Humphrey Adams,
1927), tale 182.
77. Saunders K. Ivey, 'Query,' Folklore Forum 3 (1970), p. 69.
7 8. Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year: Being Observations or
Memorials of the Most remarkable Occurrences as Well as Private,
Which Happened in London During the Last Great Visitation in 1665:
Written by a Citizen who Continued all the While in London (London:
Nutt, 1772). This quotation is taken from the Penguin edn., ed.
Anthony Burgess (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986), p. 173.
79. Anthony Burgess, 'Introduction to Defoe,' in: Defoe (1986), pp. 13 and
15.
80. Burgess (1986), pp. 13 and 15.
81. Defoe (1986), p. 23
82. Defoe (1986), pp. 41, 81, 131, and 71.
83. Defoe (1986), pp. 101-102.
84. See: Robert Latham and William Matthews, The Diary of Samuel
Pepys, vol 6-1666 (London: Bell, 1972), p. 329.
85. See: Paul Smith, Welcome to the World of Aids': A View of Folklore
in the Twentieth Century (Harmondsworth: Penguin, forthcoming).
86. 'Preying on Patients,' Newsweek (1 June, 1987), pp. 52-54.
87. Defoe (1986), p 45.
88. Defoe (1986), p. 88.
89. Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron, trans, and introduced by G.H.
McWilliam (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), p. 50.
90. Defoe (1986), pp. 204-205.
91. Vass (1986), pp. 87-101.
92. Porter (1986), p. 11; See also: Margaret 0. Hyde and Elizabeth H.
Forsyth, 'An Epidemic of Fear,' in: AIDS: What Does it Mean to You?
(New York: Walker, 1987), pp. 55-63.
93. George Glidden, 'AIDS Terrorists-The Newest Threat!,' The
Examiner (24 March, 1987).
94. For an overview of how the media is presenting AIDS, see: Black
(1986), pp. 192-93; Richard Deacon, The Truth Twisters (London:
Macdonald, 1986), pp. 220-23; Anthony A. Vass, AIDS, A Plague in
Us: A Social Perspective (St Ives, Cambridgeshire: Venus
Academica, 1986), pp. 18-105; Simon Watney, Policing Desire.
Pornography, AIDS and the Media (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1987), and 'The Spectacle of AIDS,' in: Crimp
(1988), pp. 71-86. To compare with the media handling of herpes, see
Jerrold Mirtznik and Bernadette M. Mosellie, 'Genital Herpes and
the Mass Media,'Journal of Popular Culture 20:3 (1986), pp. 1-11.
95. Casper G. Schmidt, 'The Group-Fantasy Origin of AIDS,' The
Journal of Psychohistory 12 (1984), pp. 37-73.
96. Gary Alan Fine, 'Welcome to the World of AIDS: Fantasies of Female
Revenge,' Western Folklore 46 (1987), pp. 192-97.
THE MUTILATED SHOPPER AT THE
MALL: A LEGEND OF URBAN VIOLENCE*
Eleanor Wachs
Well, I work in Jordan's and I heard from another

salesgirl about a problem that [they] had at Sears on a
Friday or a Saturday night. A lady was there shopping. Her
husband had left her off. And she was trying on dresses or
sportswear. It was at the end of the day, possibly an hour
before closing time. The husband went outside to wait for
her to come out. And she didn't arrive when the store
closed. So, he called security.
And security went into the store looking for her. And
they found her in a fitting room. And evidently she had been
mugged and her finger had been cut off and her diamonds
cut off her finger. And she was unconscious. This is what I
heard.l
This legend is typical of many others which I have entitled 'The

Mutilated Shopper.'2 A woman goes into a dressing room at a
major department store to try on a dress which she has seen
earlier in the day. While in the dressing room, she is attacked by
a male intruder who steals the diamond engagement ring or
wedding band from her by severing her ring finger from her
hand with a knife.
To the best of my knowledge, 'The Mutilated Shopper' has
been popular in the Greater Boston area since 197 4, and
probably circulated earlier, although it has not been detailed in
the folklore literature. Of the nintey seven versions used for this
study, 75% indicate that the woman enters the store near
closing time, usually around 9.30 p.m. when the mall and the
store are nearly deserted. 3 The victim's husband, who brought
her to the mall, usually waits outside the department store in
the mall area or in his car in the mall parking lot for a
144 Wachs The Mutilated Shopper
'reasonable,' but not a specified, amount of time. When the

husband begins to worry about his wife's absence, he seeks out a
mall security guard and expresses his concern about his wife. It
is often the security guard and the husband together who make
the gruesome discovery. The fate of the shopper varies only
slightly from version to version. In almost half of the versions,
she is found unconscious. The following is a typical account:
A lady and a man were shopping in Sears. And she said to

her husband, 'I am going to go into the dressing room to try
this on' and he said that he would meet her in the car. So,
she was in there and it got to be like 9.30, closing time, and
she hadn't come out. So he got worried and he went back
into the store. He found two security guards and he told
them his wife was in there. They told him no one was in
there. They checked around the store and they found her in
the dressing room. And she was on the floor and someone
apparently cut off her finger, her wedding finger, and took
her diamonds and she was lying on this floor. And they took
her to the hospital.4
In other versions, the shopper is discovered bleeding on the

restroom or fitting room floor.
'The Mutilated Shopper' follows a pattern common in
American urban legendry: that is, physical or sexual violence to
women by local deviants.5 It is also related to common themes
and patterns in traditional tales. The female character, for
example, is depicted as incapable of defending herself; the male,
who is often the victim's boyfriend or husband, rescues her just
as the prince rescues the princess from danger. Moreover, 'The
Mutilated Shopper' shares motifs with other folklore forms,
particularly those narratives that feature severed hands or
fingers (S 161.1).6 Before we go on to look at the modern
elements of this urban legend, therefore, it is worth while
drawing attention to some of these older parallels.
Often the amputated finger or hand provides the element
of discovery in the traditional folktale as, for example in the
story of 'The Robber Bridegroom' (AT 955). 7 In this tale, a
betrothed maiden finds her way into the den of her future
husband who, unbeknownst to her, is a leader of a gang of
murderers and thieves. Witnessing the murder of a maiden,
Wachs The Mutilated Shopper 145
she sees her finger severed by one the men when he is unable to
remove her ring:
Then one of the robbers saw a gold ring on her finger, and
because he could not draw it off he took up a hatchet and
hewed at it, and the finger flew up, and fell behind the cask
into my lap. 8
On her wedding day, the bride exposes the groom's villany by

presenting the human appendage: '[Then she] threw it down
before him, and showed it to all present.'9 Unlike the Grimm
tale, however, the assailant of 'The Mutilated Shopper' is never
discovered, though the victim is identified.
The severed finger also links 'The Mutilated Shopper' to
'The Robber Who Was Hurt.' Jacqueline Simpson suggests that
a parallel exists between the urbanized form of the latter and
the witch tales of earlier times. Her point is clearly applicable to
'The Mutilated Shopper.' In our culture today, criminals are
just as indistinguishable from victims of crime, as witches were
indistinguishable from non-witches in the past.lO As sociologist
Lyn Lofland points out, in urban society it is difficult to
differentiate between the good Samaritans and the harm-
doers.ll
The motif of the mutilated finger also appears in the
traditional tale 'Lady Restored to Life' (AT 99), discussed by
Katharine Briggs who presents seven versions of the story in
her Dictionary of British-Folk-Tales.12 In this tale, a woman is
buried with her wedding band or diamond ring on her hand
because it proves too difficult to remove during the burial
preparations. The church sexton decides to steal the ring after
the burial, digs up the coffin, opens its lid, and procedes to
amputate the woman's ring finger. His actions bring the dead
woman back to life-she usually screams at him-and she
returns home, much to the surprise of her bereaved husband.
In most other respects, however, 'The Mutilated Shopper'
is a very modern tale. Its motifs are consistent with those of
other urban legends and always include: 1) a female victim; 2)
the mall, and the mall department store, as the specific setting
for the events; 3) the husband's search and disc.overy of the
victim; 4) the gruesome act of mutilation; 5) the mention of the
stolen jewellery; and 6) the ultimate fate of the victim. Also, as is

characteristic of legend transmission, some informants present
a detailed version of the legend while others know only the
barest of plot li:p.es and present the story as a statement of belief
or fact. In other words, they know the legend kemel, 13 as in this
example:
I heard that some lady went into the dressing room at Sears
at the Plaza and somebody tried to steal her rings but they
couldn't get them off so they cut off her finger to take her
rings.14
Whether told as a legend kernel or as a lengthier narrative

filled with detail, tellers mostly concern themselves with the
victim's mutilation and the grotesqueness of such inhumanity.
The veracity of the account is rarely questioned.
It is usually agreed that urban legends provide reveal
current societal tensions by embedding told-for-truth stories in
daily conversations.15 The one examined here, like many
others, can thus provide insights into the contemporary cultural
scene and reveal the culture's trigger points.16 In this essay I
shall suggest that 'The Mutilated Shopper,' as well as
commenting on violence to women, also explores two other
aspects of contemporary American culture-racial tension and
conspicuous consumption.
Racial Tension
Jan Harold Brunvand suggests that 'The Mutilated Shopper'

could be a possible offshoot of 'The Castrated Boy in The
Restroom.'17 In the latter legend, also commonly set in a mall,
a mother anxiously waits for her young son outside the men's
room exit. When the boy does not appear, he is discovered in the
restroom, often lying in a pool of blood, castrated.18 Brunvand
links the legends together by referring to their abduction theme.
In light of the fact that there is no abduction in versions of 'The
Mutilated Shopper,' this must be a mistake. Once the element of
race is introduced into the legend, however, folklorists
interested in how legends mutate and take on other
characteristics of similar legends might indeed recognize the

striking similarities between the two legends.
In the five versions of 'The Mutilated Shopper' which I
collected that are comparable to 'The Castrated Boy in the
Restroom,' the teller seems convinced that she is telling the
same story. When 'The Mutilated Shopper' is told in this form,
the underlying theme is not violence against women, but racial
prejudice. In these versions, the scene and characters shift
away from the 'safe and all white' surburban mall to Boston's
Downtown Crossing, a shopping area frequented by both blacks
and whites. It is not surprising that the legend would circulate
in this form, especially since Boston has had a long and
unflattering history of racial conflict. Folklore often masks
prejudice. Even Boston's famed landmark, Filene's Bargain
Basement, is not exempt from this legend. Two accounts follow:
My mother was telling me that another woman she knows

said that a woman was going to the ladies' room in Filene's
Basement. She entered the ladies' room, two women
approached her, and asked her to take her, uhm she had a
diamond ring on her finger, and they told her to take it off.
She explained to them that she could not take the ring off
because it was ... stuck and they then struggled with her
and at that point one of the girls pulled a knife, cut her
finger, took the ring, and locked her in the bathroom and
left her there. And then later someone went back, went to go
into the ladies' room and then forced the woman there
bleeding severely . . . also I knew, that is, was uhm, black,
females. After the incident, she [the teller's mother] was
fearful because she goes shopping in downtown Boston. She
went to the jewellers and she had her ring adjusted. So
that, you know, cause what if she was in the same
situation? She has arthritis, her fingers swell and she can't
even move them .. . so she went to the jewellers and he had
it adjusted so that it can be taken on and off.l9
There is this s t ory about the lady that had her fingers
chopped off at the shopping center. It was in Filene's
basement in town that I heard it. And it was a little old lady
and she was minding her own business. She was shopping
in the lingerie department and there weren't too many
people there. And these two black guys came up to her and
they were trying to get her wedding ring off but it wouldn't
come off so they pulled out knife and cut off her finger. And
she didn't die or anything like that. She screamed for help
and everything but they got away. You know she had to go to
the hospital and have her finger sewn. Well, she was
missing a finger, you know. 20
Blacks, however, are not the only focus for the tale. I
myself first heard the legend embedded in a conversation, a
typical setting for legend transmission, and told as a cautionary
tale. The teller, recently returned from Miami, had been
warned that Cuban revolutionaries were 'stalking' Collins
Avenue and stealing jewellery by hacking off women's fingers
with machetes. The informant recounted her version of the
legend and said to me:
You can't walk down the street if you are wearing jewellery
or gold rings since the Cubans will attack you and chop
your finger off with a machete.21
According to Bengt af Klintberg, in Sweden the story is of a

Swedish woman tourist in North Africa who must be aware
that the 'natives ... will chop off her finger once they see her
ring.'22 Both the Miami and the Swedish examples recall the
xenophobic fears exhibited in popular contamination legends
about exotic cultures and alien foodstuffs.
Apart from fear of strangers and people of other races, the
legend is often used to focus other societal dilemmas and
tensions. The popularity of 'The Mutilated Shopper' also clearly
indicates a cultural ambivalence towards American
consumerism. It is this theme that I want to explore in the
remainder of this essay.
Conspicuous Consumption
Examining the shopping mall as the setting of the legend helps

to explain the popularity of 'The Mutilated Shopper.'
From the large shopping centre found almost anywhere
in suburbia to the enclosed metropolitan marketplace, the
'mailing of America' has been one of the most noticeable
changes in the American cultural and physical landscape since

the mid-part of this century. Replacing the downtown squares,
the American shopping mall has become the hub of social
activity for teenagers, senior citizens and suburban housewives,
as well as the place where billions of dollars are exchanged
between America's consumers and retailers. The mall is not
only a place to shop: it is the new 'street comer' where teenagers
hang out, where senior citizens linger over a cup of coffee at a
restaurant, where walking clubs exercise during inclement
weather. The mall is the new American surburban 'Main
Street.'
William Severin Kowinski, who has investigated the ways
shopping malls have affected Americans, reports that:
There are more shopping centers in the United States than

movie theaters . . . There are more enclosed malls than
cities, four-year colleges, or television stations, and nearly
as many as county courthouses. There are more shopping
centers than school districts, hotels or hospitals.23
How can we explain the love affair between American shoppers

and malls?
The American shopping mall is a model for American
consumerism. First of all, it attempts to replicate a city market
where all goods and services are easily accessible. Though the
old face-to-face interaction between shopkeeper and customer
has gone and there has been a shift away from shopping as an
experience in which one interacts with the individual
merchant, stores still advertise themselves by their comfortable
atmosphere. One well-known advertisement for Jordan Marsh,
the department store which figures prominently in the Boston
variants of 'The Mutilated Shopper,' for example, uses the
slogan that the store is 'the place to meet.' Malls are also
believed to be clean, dry and safe. Many malls have security
guards, analogous to the 'Cop on the Corner,' who walk around
the neighbourhood and whose presence provides a sense of
safety.
A mall is not 'Main Street' as it would be found in a New
England or a Midwestern town, however. It is performance-
oriented in a way that 'Main Street' never was. Shopping in a
m a ll is not only a fundam e ntal w a y t o d emon s trate t hat one can

participate in a community of strangers, but also fun. It is a type
of consumer's Disneyland. This effect is created by presenting
the mall as a scaled-down downtown area, a complete
environment similar to a theme park. As in a theme park, the
consumer may choose how to spend the time. In this created
environment, in addition to shopping, one can see featured
performances (often on a seasonal theme such as a Christmas
play). Or one can have one's blood pressure checked at a health-
stop table, have a gourmet dinner, buy a raffle ticket to support
a church, go to the cinema, play a video game, register to vote,
visit the dentist, view the work of a local artist or even attend a
college course for credit. All of these activities occur within a
limited physical space-almost as if under a circus 'big top .' In
addition to buying consumer goods, mall patrons 'perform' their
consumption for one another, and by doing so confirm the
American view that shopping is fun.
These consumer-performers are, on the whole, women. In
popular culture today, there are a myriad signs that confirm
the idea that the activity of shopping is the proper domain of
women. Bumper stickers, key chains, signs for car windows,
Tee shirts and greeting cards all scream out the same
message-'Born To Shop,' or 'A Woman's Place is in The Mall.'
These slogans send a message that shopping is a g ood tension-
release, a cure for whatever a ils y ou. As in a theme park, once in
the mall your care s can be left behind.
Safe Shopping
One of the most prevalent anxieties among Americans today is

the fear of urban crime and physical attack.24 Several
informants who knew 'The Mutilated Shopper' legend were
female employees of the store where the incident supposedly
took place. Like the woman victim of the legend, they too had to
stay in the store after closing time and they also had to walk
through the dark, deserted parking lot late at night. They, too,
were vulnerable to being victimized, since they also were in the
fitting rooms at closing time.
Employees such as these are faced with a dilemma. In
identifying with the victim, they acknowledge their own
vulnerability, but they might also risk appearing disloyal to

their employer. To avoid this, some informants dissociate the
crime from their own work environment. For example, several
employees of Jordan's mention that the incident took place at
Sears, a large department store on the opposite side of the mall.
In addition, some women mention that they believe that
the story was concocted as an advertising ploy to lure customers
away from Jordan Marsh and over to Sears, which had just
opened in the mall at Christmas time when the legend was
being widely circulated. Simply put, they need to re-establish the
safety of the environment in which they work and they do so by
rationalizing their own fear; by suggesting that competition
between two large corporations is at the root of the story, thus
removing the possibility of seeing themselves as potential
victims.
Female employees in the section of the store where the
incident supposedly occurred were in an even more
complicated situation. While they chalk up the incident to
competition between the two companies, they also feel a need to
defend their employers and present their own working
environment as safe and crime-free. One employee remarked
that customers would ask sales clerks if a checker would guard
the entrance to the fitting room to make sure that no unwanted
intruders could enter the dressing cubicles.25 The excerpt
below from an interview with one of the employees shows how
these differing opinions appear as elements of the legend
complex:
J.D.: I work in Jordan Marsh. I was in the clothing

department. Now I'm in costume jewellery. Well, we had
fitting rooms and we would have people, ladies, who would
come up to us and ask, 'Is there some guy going around
cutting off ladies, fingers and getting their diamonds off
their hands?' I heard it a few times, mostly from
customers. The first time I heard it I was just about to ring
up a sale for a customer. And a lady walked up to me and
asked me if it was okay to go into the fitting room. I said,
'Sure., She said, 'Do you have a checker today?' That's the
person who checks clothes. 'No, we don,t have a checker
today.' And so she said, 'Oh, do you have anyone to protect
us?' And I just looked at this lady. We get a lot of nuts. And
I said, 'Protect you? It's perfectly safe. This is Jordan

Marsh.' And she said, 'Did you hear about this guy?' And I
said, 'What guy?' And she said, 'The guy who is going
around and cutting off people's fingers and getting their
rings, mostly married ladies.' I said, 'No, ... never in this
fitting room.' She said, 'Didn't you hear it?' I said, 'No, I
never heard that before.'
This was about two years ago in the summertime.
Then I heard it again. It must have been a year ago in the
wintertime when we were having a big sale and there were
tons and tons of people. Another lady, a different lady, came
up to me and said, 'Have you had any problems here?' I
said, 'What do you mean, "problems"?' I figured this was
coming again. And she said, 'You know, the guy.' And I
said, 'What guy?' She said, 'The guy who ... the thief who is
stealing jewellery.' She said this guy was walking around
the Plaza pulling off chains of people and he gets them in
fitting rooms when they're ready to take off all their clothes,
things and jewellery. And I said, 'Oh, we don't have any
problems like that in this department.' And she said, 'Oh,
good,' and she just walked in.26
Summary
The legend of 'The Mutilated Shopper' actualizes American

women's cultural fears. First of all, the fear of violence towards,
and violation of, women; secondly, anxieties about what Barre
Toelken has termed 'the international minority conspiracy.'
Legends such as the story of the shopper mutilated in Filene's
Basement plug into our 'cultural paranoia, sending a warning
that "those people" are out to do us harm.'27
Thirdly, it provides a corrective counterbalance to the
shopping culture by presenting a different picture of the ways
women are allowed to behave. While many urban legends
depict women as victims of violence, this legend goes one step
further. The victim is not only a victim of violence, but a victim
of vanity as well. The women protagonists in this legend, unlike
the 'modern woman' who struggles to balance career and
family, is not one of those who have reaped the benefit of
America's feminist movement. She is quite the oppposite. She is
the suburban homemaker with sufficient purchasing power
and leisure to shop twice in one day. The legend warns that this
sort of self-indulgence cannot be tolerated in a world where

planning and budgeting is important: she is punished by
becoming a victim of crime. Though one dominant American
cultural assumption is that 'a woman's place is in the mall,'
'The Mutilated Shopper' presents a counter-example and
shows just how fragile this assumption is. Here, the idea that
shopping may be an avenue to meaningful existence is seen as
foolish and empty. As a result of playing out her narcissism, the
woman is robbed of her ring, which not only represents her
wealth but is also the symbol of her consumer potency.
The legend of 'The Mutilated Shopper' thus undermines
the idea that the act of consumption itself is empowering. The
woman's mutilated hand and the loss of her ring strikes at the
very heart of the American idea that one should parade one's
wealth. The legend tells us that it is dangerous to wear
expressions of consumer power, for the woman is a target for
violence simply because she wears either a gold band or a
diamond engagement ring. As some legend texts (and crime
victim personal experience narratives too),28 indicate, one
avoids danger by not being conspicuous.
In other words, this contemporary legend provides us with
a new interpretation of the maxim caveat emptor, or buyer
beware.
Appendix I
Traits of the Mutilated Shopper Legend*
I. Victim
a) Wife
b) Woman
c) Lady
d) Wife of elderly man
e) Middle aged woman
2. Department Store Setting

a) Jordan Marsh, Braintree
b) Filene's, Braintree
c) Sears, Boston
d) Filene's Basement, Boston
e) Jordan Marsh, Boston
D Sears, other branches
3. Scene of Incident
a) Ladies' fitting room
b) Ladies' rest room
c) Lingerie fitting room
4. Time of Incident
a) Closing time
b) Christmas season
5. Intruder
a) A guy/man
b) Two men
c) Two black guys
d) Black woman
e) Two girls
D Two black girls
h) Two women
i) Nondescript
6. Mutilation
a) Ring finger cut off
b) Hand or fingers
c) Yanked or pulled
cont
cont
7. Weapon
a) Knife
b) Other
B. Type of Jewellery
a) Diamond ring
b) Wedding ring
c) Wedding ring and diamond ring
d) Rings
9. Waiting Period by Husband

a) Reasonable amount of time
b) Less than an hour
c) More than an hour
10. Discovery
a) By security guard
b) By husband
c) By salesperson
11. Outcome
a) Found unconscious
b) Discovered bleeding
c) Taken to local hospital
d) Finger disappears
e) Finger left next to body
f) Victim left holding hand
g) Bleeds to death
*NOTE: The words and phrases listed are key words

in the responses given by informants and are ranked
in order of frequency
Appendix2
Sample texts of ~The Mutilated Shopper'
92 versions of 'The Mutilated Shopper' were used in this study. Below

are three representative sample texts, selected because they each
contain a majority of the legend traits discussed in Appendix 1, and also
two legends, 'The Mall Murderer' and 'The Rider With The Extra
Hand,' which are often confused with 'The Mutilated Shopper' but are
actually different legends.
Sample Text 1:
My roommate's mother has this diamond ring which is
huge, about thirty carats. So a friend of hers called her up
right about Christmas and told her, 'Don't go to Jordan
Marsh. If you go to Jordan Marsh, don't wear your ring.'
So she asked her why. This lady and her husband, she was
an older woman, around forty five or something like that.
They were Christmas shopping. She went into a dressing
room in Jordan's, to try on the dress. And the husband was
outside, waiting around. And she didn't come out. It was
over an hour and she still didn't come out. Her husband
ran in there and there was blood all over the dressing room
and all over the lady. He thought she had been shot or
something. But he looked at her and her finger was entirely
cut off, the ring finger. And the ring was gone. And she
had passed out. She was out cold. That was all the details
really. That was it.
[Collected by Eleanor Wachs from Lisa Correnti, aged 24,

Brighton, Massachusetts, 10 March, 1982].
Sample Text 2
I heard it about a year ago when I ... started at my job at the
card store in the mall. And some co-workers were talking
about Christmastime and they told me that they heard
about a woman who had gone shopping at Sears & Roebuck
in the Plaza. And her husband had dropped her off, uh,
maybe fifteen, twenty minutes before it was about to close.
And she wanted to go in to pick up something she had seen
earlier and she went in there and all the employees started
to come out and the husband got a bit worried so he went
and talked to a security guard and told them what was

going on and they searched the dressing rooms. They found
her on the floor and her ring was gone and her finger had
been removed and she was unconscious.
[Collected by Janine Doherty from Michelle Doherty, aged

19, Braintree, Massacusetts, 2 May, 1982].
Sample Text 3
I was in the wig department and I heard a lady was talking
about a friend of hers that had gone to the Sears & Roebuck
store. She went into the fitting room to try on a dress and
she was with her husband. Her husband waited for her
maybe around fifteen minutes and he casually asked one of
the sales ladies to go in and check on his wife because she
had been in there for quite some time. The sales lady went
in. And the lady was on the floor. She had been knocked out.
And her finger had been cut off. Her ring finger had been
cut off. And it had disappeared. They called the ambulance
and transported the lady, I believe to the South Shore
Hospital. And that's what I have heard.
[Collected by Janine Doherty from Ginny Moran, aged 57,

Weymouth, Massachusetts, 2 May, 1982].
Sample Text 4: cThe Mall Murderer,

This woman went shopping at a large mall with her
daughter. When she returned to the car with her bundles
and child, she noticed an old, bent figure in the back seat of
the car. She slowly approached the car, and asked the old
woman what she was doing there. The old woman replied
that she was very tired and that he had just missed her bus
that only left once an hour. She asked the woman if she
could drive her home to her house. The shopper looks down
at her watch nervously and says, 'Sure, I can drive you
home, but first I have one more errand to do.' She puts her
packages in the car, and takes her daughter back with her
into the mall. She gets a security guard. And he goes back
to the car with the woman. The guard makes the old
woman get out of the car. And they both realize that it is a
man dressed in the disguise of a woman, who is concealing
a hatchet under her [his] dress on the seat.
[Collected by Lisa Correnti from from Lisa Tallis, aged 25,

Brighton, Massachusetts, 29 April, 1982).
Sample Text 5: 'The Rider With The Extra Hand,

As I heard it, a lady was sitting on a train. And this guy
walked in and he had this trench coat on. He sat down and
he was kind of nervous and jittery. So she noticed there was
blood around one of his coat pockets. And it seemed like it
was coming from there and his hand was in his pocket. So
she went and got a cop. And I guess the police went over to
the guy and frisked him and went through him or
whatever. And come to find out there was a woman's finger
in his pocket and it had a diamond on it.
[Collected by Janine Doherty from Jeffrey Moore, aged 22,

Dorchester, Massaschusetts, 18 April, 1982).
NOTES
* An earlier version of this article was presented at the 1983 annual

meeting of the American Folklore Society. I would like to thank Linda
Morley, Janine Doherty, Lisa Correnti, and especially Jay Mechling
for their helpful comments.
1. Interview conducted by Janine Doherty with D.D. of Braintree MA, 19
April, 1982.
2 . To collect versions of this legend, several methods were used. When
teaching an Introductory Folklore class in 1981-82 at University of
Massachusetts, Boston, several weeks were devoted to collecting
urban legends. In addition to collecting several versions of 'The
Mutilated Shopper,' other popular local and urban legends of the
Greater Boston area were collected (including topics such as the
folklore of the Boston Marathon, and legends such as 'The Hook,'
'The Baby in the Oven,' and 'The Intended Killer'). I also wrote to
several archives in the United States and placed short items soliciting
texts in national newsletters such as Folklore Women's
Communication (see issue 26. Only one version surfaced, for which I
would like to thank Marilyn J. Phillips of Ann Arbor, Michigan) . I
acquired other versions by interviewing three employees who worked
in the suburban mall where the alleged incident took place and
searched for accounts of the event in a newspaper published and
widely read in the area. When I telephoned the newspaper, a
newsroom editor told me that the story was 'just a rumour'
(conversation with newsroom editor, Patriot Ledger (13 September,
1985).
3. See Appendix 2 for sample versions of the legend.

4. Interview conducted by Janine Doherty with D.L. of Braintree MA, 16
April, 1982.
5. The legend of 'The Hook' is the most obvious and popular example of
this theme. Violence such as in 'The Babysitter and The Man
Upstairs' can also be compared to 'The Mutilated Shopper.'
6. Other motifs that apply here include S 176 Mutilation: Sex organs cut
off; C 946 Limbs affected by breaking tabu; C 948 Mutilation as
punishment for breaking tabu; C 948.6 Hand cut off for broken tabu.
See Stith Thompson, The Motif-Index of Folk Literature, 6 vols.
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1966).
7. See Antti Aame and Stith Thompson, The Types of the Folktale (New
York: Lenox Hill, 1971), pp. 143-44.
B. Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Household Stories (London: Warne-
Routledge, 1861), p. 136.
9. Grimm (1861), p.136.
10. Jacqueline Simpson, 'Rationalized Motifs in Urban Legends,'
Folklore 92 (1981), pp. 205-6.
11. Lynn H. Lofland, A World of Strangers: Order and Action in Urban
Public Spaces (New York: Basic Books, 1973), p. 99.
12. Katharine M. Briggs, A Dictionary of British Folk-Tales in the
English Language, vol. 2 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971),
pp. 83-87. AT 990 is also known as 'The Seemingly Dead Revives.'
Lynwood Montell cites two versions of AT 990 as 'The Jewelry
Thieves' in Ghosts Along the Cumberland: Deathlore in the Kentucky
Foothills (Knoxville: University ofTennessee Press, 1975), pp. 207-8.
13. Susan Kalcik, "' ... like Ann's Gynecologist or the Time I was Almost
Raped": Personal Narratives in Women's Rap Groups,' in: Claire R.
Farrar, ed., Women and Folklore (Austin, Texas: University of Texas
Press, 1975), p. 3.
14. Interview conducted by Janine Doherty with C.B. of Braintree MA, 1
May, 1982.
15. Bill Ellis, 'De Legendis Urbis: Modern Legends in Ancient Rome,'
Journal of the American Folklore Society 96 (1983), p. 201
16. Gary Alan Fine, 'The Goliath Effect: Corporate Dominance and
Merchantile Legends,' Journal of the American Folklore Society 98
(1985), p. 63.
17. Brunvand notes 'a possible offshoot of these legends: "The Mutilated
Boy and The Attempted Abduction" is another, heard less frequently,
concerning a woman who encounters a robber in the dressing room of
a department store. In order to steal her diamond ring or gold
wedding band, the robber cuts off her finger. (Sometimes she bleeds to
death in the dressing room or on the way to the hospital.)' In
Brunvand's account, the reference to the legend is a plot summary,
without a source or title. Jan Harold Brunvand, The Choking
Doberman and Other cNew, Urban Legends (New York/London:

Norton, 1984), p. 92.
18. For 'The Castrated Boy,' see: Ellis (1983), pp. 200-7; Richard M.
Dorson, Land of the Mill Rats (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1981), pp, 228-30; Florence H. Ridley, 'A Tale Told Too Often,' Western
Folklore 26 (1976), pp. 153-56; Brunvand (1984), pp. 78-92.
19. Interview conducted by Lisa Correnti with L.P. of Jamaica Plain
MA, 29 April, 1982.
20. Interview conducted by Janine Doherty with E.M. of Brighton MA, 7
May, 1982.
21. Interview conducted by Eleanor Wachs with Meredythe Church of
Providence R.I., 15 April, 1981.
22. Personal communication 17 September, 1983.
23 . William Severin Kowinski, The Malling of America: An Inside Look
at the Great Consumer Paradise (New York: W. Morrow, 1985), pp.
20-21.
24. Other legends which use shopping malls as their settings involve
cars. For example, 'The Intended Killer,' a legend set in a mall
parking-lot, concems a woman who discovers in her car's back seat
an armed man dressed as a woman (see the Appendix). Both that
legend and 'The Mutilated Shopper' undermine the sanctity and
safety of one's car in the mall lot. See also, Jeff Copland et al., 'The
Plague ofViolent Crime,' Newsweek (23 March, 1981), pp. 46-54.
25. The customers, on the other hand, most likely, saw the department
store as a large corporation more concemed with profit and loss than
with protecting the clientelle from harm. Checkers are used to guard
against customer shoplifting and are not there to protect them from
physical assault while in the dressing room.
26. Interview conducted by Eleanor Wachs with Janine Doherty of
Braintree MA, 5 April, 1982.
27. Barre Toelken, The Dynamics of Folklore (Boston: Houghton-Miffiin,
1979), p. 272.
28. Eleanor Wachs, Crime- Victim Stories: New York City,s Urban
Folklore (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988).
About the Contributors
Gillian Bennett
is a research associate of the Centre for English Cultural
Tradition and Language (CECTAL) at the University of
Sheffield, where she received her Ph.D. in 1985 with a study of
the supernatural beliefs of elderly, urban women. She has
written extensively on the subjects of modern legend and
personal narrative, and is the author of Traditions of Belief·
Women and the Supernatural (Harmondsworth, 1987), co-
editor of other volumes in the Perspectives series and editor of
Jokelore: Studies in Culture and Humour (London/Sheffield,
forthcoming ). Her current research interests are in life history
and family legends.
Veronique Cmnpion-Vmcent
is Information Officer at the National Centre for Scientific
Research (CNRS), Paris. She holds a Licence de Psychologie,
CES d'ethnologie, and a doctorate in Sociology on the subject of
'Images du Dahomey. Un Royaume african vu par la presse
fran~aise lors de sa conquete, 1889-1894.' Her publications in
the field of folklore include: 'Les Histoires exemplaires,'
Contrepoint (December, 1976), pp. 217-32; 'Legendes urbaines
et representations de la ville,' in: Ethnologues dans la ville
(comite des travaux historiques et scientifiques, 1988); 'Les
legendes urbaines. Rumeurs du quotidien, objet d'etude
pluridisciplinaire,' Cahiers de litterature orale 24 (1988), pp. 75-
91; and 'Complots et avertissements: les legendes urbaines,'
Revue franr;aise de sociologie 30 (1989), pp. 91-105. She is
organiser of an exchange network about contemporary legends
and rumours.
Frances Cattermole-Tally
received her Ph.D. in Germanic Languages from University of
California, Los Angeles with a historical survey of the beliefs
162 About the Contributors
and customs of women during pregnancy. She was responsible

for the first course in 'The Folklore of Women' (UCLA 1971)
and taught classes in traditional medicine and the folklore of
women at both UCLA and at the University of California,
Irvine. She has put together a film series and written teachers'
manuals for a film series called 'Folktales around the World'
and has acted as consultant for several educational films based
on folktale themes and motifs. For many years she worked with
Professor Wayland D . Hand on the Encyclopedia of American
Popular Beliefs and Superstitions and is now Executive Editor of
the Encyclopedia.
Her publications include: 'La Interrelacion Entre la
Curacion Magica, Ia Curacion Religiosa, y Ia Medicina
Integral: Encantamientos Verbales y Visualization,' Cuadernos
del Instituto Nacional de Antropologia (Buenos Aires, 1979-
1982), 9, pp. 293-303; 'Folk Medicine,' Compton's Encyclopedia;
'Geburt-f Enzyklopadie des Miirchens (Berlin/ New York;
Walter de Gruyter, 1986), 5 , pp. 806-15; and 'The Dangerous
Bride: A Psychoanalytic Analysis of the Bridal Veil,'
In t ernational Folklore Review 5 ( 1987 ), pp. 48-51.
Christie Davies,
who was educated at Cambridge University, is Professor of
Sociology at the University of Reading, England. He is the
author of several articles about the sociology of humour and
folklore and of the book Ethnic Humour Around the World: A
Comparative Analysis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1990). He has been a visiting lecturer in India and the United
States and has also lectured about his work in Bulgaria,
Hungary, Ireland and Israel.
William S. Fox
is a sociologist at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New
York. He received his B.A. at the University of Michigan and
Ph.D. at Indiana University. Bill Fox's earlier sociological work
primarily concerned social inequality and stratification,
although he has also written on musical tastes and message
songs. His current folkloric interests centre on fakelore and the
relationships between popular culture and folklore. He has
written on potato chip legends and on the social and political
About the Contributors 163
implications of fakelore. He also does his best to maintain an old

Victorian house in which he lives with his wife Collette and dog
Sadie.
Mark Glazer
is professor of Anthropology and Head of the Rio Grande
Folklore Archive at the University of Texas-Pan American. He
is President of the International Society for Humor Research
and Vice-President of the International Society for
Contemporary Legend Research. He is currently doing
research on the contemporary legend and computer
applications in folklore studies. He has published four books, and
his articles have been published in: The New YorkTimes Book
Review, The Journal of American Folklore, Fabula, New York
Folklore, The Borderlands Journal and as numerous book
chapters. He has studied at Northwestern University, Istanbul
University, and Robert College.
Michael Goss
divides his time between freelance writing and teaching English
at further education colleges in Essex. He has written on
paranormal, folkloric and cryptozoological topics for magazines
that include Fate, The Unknown, Fortean Times, Magonia, and
Folklore Frontiers. In addition to the two books cited in the
paper in this volume (The Evidence for Phantom Hitch-Hikers
[1984] and The Halifax Slasher [1987]), he has published an
Annotated Poltergeist Bibliography (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow
Press, 1979).
Among other contemporary legend types, he is especially
interested in stories relating to animals, mystery assailants,
hypnosis, rocklore and the martial arts . Off-duty pursuits
include poetry, listening to American blues, Beatles and Doors
records and trying to improve his own limited guitar technique.
He also breeds indian stick insects (or rather, lets them get on
with breeding themselves ).
Paul Smith
is an Associate Professor in the Department of Folklore at
Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada, and also acts
as Assistant Director at CECTAL. He was instigator of the
164 About the Contributors
successful annual Perspectives on Contemporary Legend

seminars, and is currently is President of the International
Society for Contemporary Legend Research. He has presented
a number of conference papers, guest lectures and seminars in
the United Kingdom and North America on contemporary
legend, traditional drama and other topics. He is author of The
Complete Book of Office Mispractice and Reproduction is Fun:
A Book of Photocopy Joke Sheets as well as several volumes
dealing with contemporary legends.
Eleanor Wachs
received her Ph. D . in Folklore from Indiana University in
1979. Her main research interests include urban folklore and
urban legends. Her book, Crime- Victim Stories : New York
City's Urban Folklore, published in 1988 by Indiana University
Press is one of the first folklore works devoted entirely to this
topic. Eleanor Wachs has taught at several universities and, for
the past few years, has worked in the public sector arranging
folklore exhibits.
A NEST OF VIPERS
PERSPECTIVES ON CONTEMPORARY LEGEND V
EDITED BY
GILLIAN BENNETT AND PAUL SMITH
A Nest of Vipers is the fifth and final volume in the Perspectives

on Contemporary Legend series and features a selection of the
papers presented at the fifth and sixth Intemational Seminars
on Contemporary Legend held in Sheffield, 1987 and 1988.
The choice of title reflects the grim nature of the subject
matter covered in this volume. Unusually for the Perspectives
series, the volume contains no purely theoretical essays but
concentrates on the presentation of case-studies of particular
legends. All the legends it features are about the darker side of
life in the last quarter of the twentieth century. Hence, there are
studies of beliefs about ghosts, govemment conspiracy, assaults
on women, rape, mindless violence on the London underground,
student suicide, ethnicity and AIDS. In general, though the
contents of the papers make for depressing reading, the analysis
and interpretations offered by the contributors help improve
knowledge and understanding of the world around us.
The contributors, who come from the disciplines of
folklore, anthropology and sociology, are Veronique Campion-
Vincent, Frances Cattermole-Tally, Christie Davies, Bill Fox,
Mark Glazer, Michael Goss, Paul Smith and Eleanor Wachs.
ISBN 1 85075 256 7
®Sheffield Academic Press

ANestof Vipers Perspectiveson Contemporary Legend V

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A Nest of Vipers

PERSPECTIVES ON CONTEMPORARY LEGEND

Copyright© 1990 Sheffield Academic Press

Published by Sheffield Academic Press Ltd

Cover illustration and production of camera-ready

Printed in Great Britain

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A nest of vipers: perspectives on contemporary legend,

Veronique Campion- Vincent

About the Contributors 161

interpretations offered by the contributors should help advance

Gillian Bennett and Paul Smith

Thank you all!

No, Fernand Roques did not see the parachute. He was

When I started in October, 1987, to search systematically

I also met intellectuals, social anthropologists linked to

(bigger or smaller), and behaviour (more ferocious). This

(i) Viper-releases are presented as one instance of a much

(ii) Related to this anxiety about wildlife reintroductions are

1. Status of Vipers and Snakes: Protected

The protection of natural spaces and landscapes, the

This Act is an important measure, because it explicitly sets out a

However, the new protected status of vipers runs counter

2. Status of Vipers and Snakes: Frightening and Fascinating

equivalent to the cure-all American rattle-snake oil, but very

The viper has been considered in ancient times as an active

Grand Larousse Encyclopedique (1876),

Fifthly, a viper preserved in a bottle of alcohol is a common

A few miles from Lons-le Saulnier, in the small village of

'Viper-Taster,' Trente millions d'amis 29 (October

This article, published a year and a half after the

Another snake-catcher, Serge Perron, interviewed in

When I feel a viper close, my body starts to tremble ... I've

'Chasseur de viperes' (interview with Daniel Loiseau),

3. Status of Vipers and Snakes: Exploited

have seen, the production of folk remedies and trophies. Some

responsibility of enforcing. I shall not try to draw a complete

the Department of the Environment, but their influence is felt

5. Ambiguous Practices: Dispensations

protected animals for scientific research. Was the Department

Merieux laboratory that dispensations could only be granted

6. Ambiguous Practices: Voluntary Releases by Ecologists

7. Ambiguous Practices: Releases of Other Wild Animals

for example, receives on average three crocodiles, twelve

The fish are carried in specialized packs called 'Vibert's

become snakes, the Vibert's boxes vipers' boxes, the fishing

'The Nasty Crawling Rumour,' La Nouvelle

Association of ornithologists, and especially friends of birds of

8 Ambiguous Practices: Reintroduction of Wild Species Parks

which are supposed to be imported from circuses. Interestingly

9. New Cultural Attitudes

We shall recover the richness of life solely within the beauty

This is why the rescue of a perfectly useless species,

'The Reintroduction of Big Mammals in Europe,'

It is this orientation towards rehabilitation and fondness for

10. The Importance of Context

We must now temporarily forget the context and come back to

perceived as dangerous and ready to attack any unsuspecting

'Is it you who have seen an helicopter throw a box full of

'Vipers are Real Quiet: Leave Them in Peace,' La

'They come down with helicopters by night, the vipers doze

'From Where Come those Snakes that Jump over our

Nevertheless, the important fact seems to be the belief, the tale's