|
How a Myth Comes Into Being
The transformation of an occurrence into a full-fledged urban myth is a story all unto itself. Like a huge, cultural game of telephone, the Urban Myth is usually the result of half-truths or complete exaggerations. But sometimes, the myth turns out to be true. Check out these classic examples of urban myths and learn how they came into being.
The Legend:
There are many variations of this story, most of them involving female roommates. In the story, one girl goes out for the evening, while the other decides to stay home and make an early night of it. For some reason, either to get a sweater, her wallet or something else she's forgotten, the party girl comes back to the apartment. Not wanting to wake her exhausted roommate, she goes about her business in the dark, and leaves as quietly as she can. When she returns the next morning--so goes one version--the place is crawling with cops. Pushing her way past the crowd, the girl finds that her roommate has been brutally murdered; her throat slashed in her bed, and blood everywhere. Scrawled on the wall in her roommate's blood are the words: "Aren't you glad you didn't turn on the lights?"
In some versions of the story, the party girl hears sounds coming from her friend's bed and thinks that she is having sex. In other versions, she comes home and goes to bed across the room, still in the dark, oblivious to the carnage, only to wake in the morning to discover the body and the message. Sometimes the message is on the bathroom mirror, and she doesn't see it until she goes in to vomit after seeing the body.
There are a few variations in which it is not a roommate, but the girl's dog that suffers the grim fate. The girl wakes up, and fears that there is someone in the room with her. She reaches down beside her bed, feels her hand being licked by her dog, and, reassured, goes back to sleep. In the morning, she wakes to find her dog, throat cut, hanging in the shower with a note on the mirror that says: "Humans can lick too."
This story and all of its variations are scary because it puts the unwitting heroine in harms way. We are horrified by the gruesomeness of the murder, but the real shivers come from how narrowly the heroine averts disaster. We shudder to think how much worse it would have been, had she turned on the light.
Proving that even modern legends can have much older roots, the "licked hand" motif shows up in an August 11 diary entry penned in England by one Dearman Birchall way back in 1871: "Croquet party… (One of the guests) told of a clergyman who was aroused in the middle of the night by his wife who said 'John, dear, I am sure there is a robber under the bed, I hear him moving. Do get up and see.' John replied, 'Oh is only the Newfoundland dog. I just put my hand out and he licked it.' Next morning all the jewelry and many other effects had disappeared."
|
