The Failed Suicide
A desperate man tries to arrange multiple, simultaneous methods to bring about his own death, but they cancel out one another. For example, the man may stand on a high cliff above the sea with a noose around his neck tied to a tree, a loaded gun in one hand and a vial of poison in the other. He drinks the poison, fires the gun toward his head, and jumps; but the shot severs the rope, he survives the fall, and the seawater that he swallows causes him to vomit up the poison. He swims to shore.
A less complicated version of the story describes a man leaping from a high window after having an argument with his wife in their apartment or being fired by his boss. The would-be suicide lands on top of his wife (or his boss, who has gone out for lunch after the unpleasant job of firing the man). The wife (or boss) dies, but the man lives. In his tell-all book about the insurance industry Andrew Tobias relates yet another variation on the theme of failed suicides, attributing the case to “an Alabama man,” who:
swallowed a fistful of sleeping pills, drove to the middle of a bridge, got out, and, just as the pills were beginning to rob him of his consciousness, jumped. It was fifty feet to the water. The fall did not kill him, the cold water, after a time, revived him, and, after floating for quite a long time, he finally managed to pull himself out of the current and drag himself out of the water. He suffered a heart attack from the exertion; and, while lying there, some wild dogs came along and chewed on him awhile. He died.
“Was it suicide?” Tobias asked, then quoting the state toxicologist, “ ‘not suicide but the strain and stress of the situation’ that killed him.” No source is cited for this remarkably legend-like account.
Variations of failed-suicide stories have circulated orally, in typescript, and on the Internet but are also published from time to time, sometimes to illustrate human behavior, the random nature of events, legal and moral aspects of suicide, and the like. One such printing by a British expert on forensic medicine described the multiple-means-of-death version as “a classic of its kind . . . not susceptible to confirmation.”
The Fallen Angel Cake
This story was published in 1980 in a Sydney, Australia, newspaper and, in 1982, in a slightly different version in a small-town Canadian newspaper. Both reports described it as an actual incident well known to the local population, so probably it is a widespread apocryphal account, that is, a modern legend. Less likely—indeed barely possible—is that the same mishap occurred twice in far distant places. A woman bakes an angel food cake for her church’s bake sale, but when it comes out of the oven the center of the cake collapses. Lacking time to make a second cake, the woman uses a roll of toilet paper to build up the center of her cake, and she frosts over the whole thing. She rushes her cake to the church sale, then gives her daughter some money and instructs her to hurry to the sale, buy it back, and bring it directly home. But the daughter arrives too late; the cake has already been sold. The next day the cakebaker goes to her bridge club, and she finds that the hostess has bought
her cake and is serving it for dessert. Before the woman can warn her, the hostess acknowledges a compliment on the beautiful cake, saying, “Thank you. I baked it myself.”
David Holt and Bill Mooney tell a slightly more elaborate version involving “Marge” and her daughter, presumably set in the United States, in their anthology The Exploding Toilet (see bibliography). Appropriately, each story in their book is followed by a small drawing of a roll of toilet paper hanging from its holder.
Fan Death
A belief rampant in South Korea—supported only by anecdotal evidence, rumors, and word-of-mouth stories (some circulated by e-mail)—holds that sleeping in a room with windows closed and an electric fan running will cause death. The notion of Fan Death continues among immigrant
South Koreans, as a 2008 article in the Toronto Star demonstrated. An instructor in an English as a Second Language class (ESL) encountered it in this way, while conducting her class during the winter in a sweltering classroom in an older building at the University of New Brunswick: “We couldn’t open the windows because it was freezing rain,” she said. So I told the class, “Tomorrow we’ll have to remember to bring a fan.” Her comment upset a Korean student, immediately distressed at the
prospect of an electric fan running in a room with closed windows. “The student told us that if you are in a sealed room with an electric fan, it will lower your body temperature and you will die,” [the instructor] said. “It was so weird to see someone so convinced of something that everyone else in the room thought was so ludicrous. Another person said she slept with the fan on all the time and (the upset student) said, ‘Well, you are very lucky to be alive.’ ”
Other explanations of the supposed danger of Fan Death are that the moving air causes a body to lose water and leads to hypothermia, that a fan causes a vortex that sucks oxygen from the room; that the fan chops up oxygen molecules, rendering the air unbreathable; and that the fan uses up oxygen, leaving a fatal level of carbon dioxide. Fan Death hysteria is further encouraged in South Korea by reports in the media and even by government statistics showing supposed fatalities caused by sleeping with a fan running. Electric fans sold in South Korea are equipped with timer switches.
The Fart in the Dark
This is a story of the general “Surpriser Surprised” type (and “The Nude Surprise Party” subtype) in which a person is embarrassed by his or her shocking behavior in the presence of others who have been brought together to surprise the victim. The surprisers are themselves surprised, in this instance by the victim’s indiscreet breaking of wind (expelling gas from the intestine). The story is told in the United States and England (and perhaps elsewhere) as both a legend and a joke, as well as being distributed in the form of a piece of Xeroxlore titled “The Gastronomical Bean Story.” A person has a great fondness for baked beans but has to give them up because of their effect—causing severe attacks of intestinal gas. Unluckily, the bean-lover indulges himself/herself in a large serving of beans on his or her birthday. The gas has built up alarmingly when the person’s spouse (or girlfriend, boyfriend, roommate, etc.) announces a surprise.
The bean-lover is left alone blindfolded in an empty room to await the surprise. Unable to hold it any longer, he or she breaks wind loudly and repeatedly. Then the party planner returns and removes the blindfold, revealing a roomful of friends gathered to celebrate the birthday. A literary treatment of the story appeared in Carson McCullers’s 1940 book The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, and a short film titled The Date dramatized the story in 1997. Another version of “The Fart in the Dark” describes a young woman’s flatulence overheard by a double-dating couple seated in the rear of a car but unobserved by the victim when she is let into the front seat.
Fast Food
Fast-food franchise restaurants selling mainly hamburgers, pizza, Mexican food, and related side dishes are often the targets of negative rumors and legends, particularly those that claim serious contamination of the foods. Likely there is some element of guilt involved in circulating such lore, as people realize that fast foods offer speed, low cost, and efficiency at the expense of a balanced diet and wholesome food prepared at home from fresh ingredients.
Some typical contaminants described as having invaded fast foods are worms, pet food, meats considered inedible for most humans (e.g., cats, dogs, horses, kangaroos), and body substances (semen, pus, blood, urine). Such stories are told about named companies, indeed, even about specific
local franchises, and the stories tend to gravitate toward the largest companies (the so-called Goliath effect) and to switch from company to company. Actually, most fast-food restaurants are probably operated in a more consistent and hygienic manner than are many small individual Mom-and-Pop eateries. Besides contamination, fast-food stories may claim that companies are owned by unsavory conspirators or that a portion of their enormous profits are diverted to support evil ends.
The Fatal Boot
A legacy of the American frontier, this tall tale continues to have some currency as a modern legend. A man is struck by a rattlesnake whose fangs penetrate his boot and kill him. Unnoticed by anyone, one fang breaks off in the boot, and two successive generations of men in the family wear the same boot and are killed by dried venom remaining on the fang. Finally, someone inspects the boot closely and discovers what has happened. The boot in the story may be that of a cowboy, rancher, logger, hiker, hunter, and so on. In an updated version, a rattlesnake’s fang is broken off in a rancher’s truck tire, killing a mechanic who changes the tire. Although thoroughly discredited by herpetologists, this rattler story (among others) has persisted since the late eighteenth century. In the 1960s, a roadside tourist attraction in Florida displayed a shoe with the fatal-boot story attributed to it, and probably other such places have exploited the same tale.
A report from a legend-debunking article in a 1910 magazine seems to refer to a close relative of “The Fatal Boot” in another American story. Samuel Hopkins Adams, thoroughly skeptical of such yarns, wrote: Under the heading “Fatal Spider Bite” there is a considerable and interesting newspaper bibliography. The details do not analyze well. . . . The instance of a young woman in an Eastern state is significant. Thrusting her foot into an old slipper, she felt a sharp jab upon the point of her index digit. Upon hasty removal of the footgear, she saw, or supposed she saw, a large and ferocious spider dart forth. This, to her mind, was evidence both conclusive and damning. Seizing upon the carving knife, she promptly cut off her perfectly good toe, bound up the wound, and sent for the doctor, thereby blossoming out in next day’s print as a “Heroine who had Saved her own life by her Marvelous Presence of Mind.” The thoughtful will wonder, however, whether the lady wouldn’t have got at the real root of the matter by cutting off her head.
Ernest W. Baughman indexed two strains of the frontier tale. Motif B765.19(a) The fang in the boot kills wearers in succession showed up as a believed legend throughout the East and Midwest, while Motif X1321.4.10*, Detached snake fang kills person long after the snake is killed, had similar distribution more as a humorous tall tale than a belief legend. (Each of these motifs has several variant forms also indexed by Baughman.) However, “The Fatal Boot” has an even wider range of connections, beyond American folklore. Thompson’s Motif N335.4, Accidental death from flying splinter of bone, a motif recorded at the time only from Africa, seems to echo the snake-fang story with a sharp piece of bone substituting for the fang. The possible connection between the two stories is further suggested by this Japanese legend, “The Hunting Dog’s Revenge,” translated from a 1928 source:
A hunter who lived near here had a hunting dog for years, but gradually the dog got so old, lame, and tired that he couldn’t do what his master wanted. So the hunter got angry at the dog. But the dog growled so that the man knew he would get bitten if he tried to push it too hard. So he decided to kill his dog. He took him way back into the mountains and shot him with his hunting rifle and left him there. About three years later, though, he got curious about what had happened to his dog’s carcass, so he went back up to the place where he had shot it. To his amazement, he found the dog sitting up there, but as just a skeleton, as if he were looking at his master. This annoyed that hunter so much that he kicked the skeleton aside, and it fell over in a heap. But with this kick, a small sharp bone was driven into the hunter’s leg, where it pained him and caused such a bad infection that finally he died from it.
The Fatal Cleaning Lady
The following story of a supposed series of bizarre and mysterious deaths in a South African hospital circulated worldwide on the Internet: Cleaner polishes off patient “For several months, our nurses have been baffled to find a dead patient in the same bed every Friday morning,” a spokeswoman for the Pelonomi Hospital (Free State, South Africa) told reporters. “There was no apparent cause for any of the deaths, and extensive checks on the air conditioning system, and a search for possible bacterial infection, failed to reveal any clues.” However, further inquiries have now revealed the cause of these deaths. It seems that every Friday morning a cleaner would enter the ward, remove the plug that powered the patient’s life support system, plug her floor polisher into the vacant socket, then go about her business. When she had finished her chores, she would plug the life support machine back in and leave, unaware that the patient was now dead. She could not, after all, hear the screams and eventual death rattle over the whirring of her polisher. “We are sorry, and have sent a strong letter to the cleaner in question. Further, the Free State Health and Welfare Department is arranging for
an electrician to fit an extra socket, so there should be no repetition of this incident. The enquiry is now closed.”
Arthur Goldstuck, Johannesburg journalist and
urban-legend researcher, looked into the story, comparing press accounts of the supposed incident and interviewing writers who had worked on them. He demonstrated how the highly suspicious and poorly documented story originally published in an Afrikaans-language newspaper had been magnified and standardized by other publications, then began circulating on the Internet, becoming, as Goldstuck termed it, “South Africa’s . . .
most famous urban legend of the 1990s, as far as the rest of the world was concerned.”
The Fatal Golf Tee
An avid golfer plays the game frequently and is in the habit of putting his tee into his mouth after his first shot and keeping it there during the whole game. Eventually he dies from pesticides that were transferred from the golf course’s grass via the tees to his body. Fairways and greens heavily treated with chemicals have, indeed, been the cause of illness and even occasionally death among golfers,
particularly professionals who play often and long. But there are no verifiable reports of this contamination coming specifically from a tee carried in someone’s mouth.
The Fatal Initiation
A legend of modern college life is based on the traditional narrative motif (N384) of someone’s death resulting from severe fright. As part of his initiation into a fraternity, a young man is blindfolded, then made to believe that he has been cut and is bleeding or has been branded with a red-hot iron. (Actually, although he is shown a knife or the branding iron in advance, after he has been blindfolded, he is touched only with a piece of ice.) The initiate dies from the shock. In a variation, the fraternity
pledge is led to a high cliff, blindfolded, then told he will be pushed over the edge. Although he is merely pushed over a drop of two feet, he dies from shock as he stumbles and falls. The appeal of this horror legend in colleges during the 1940s diminished as some fraternity initiations actually did lead to deaths in later years, usually as a result of binge drinking. A story reported by Elizabeth Tucker from Alfred University in Alfred, New York, was told in 2003 as an explanation for why Greek organizations were banned on that campus: Like many other fraternities at other schools there is one night where the pledges get blindfolded in a car and are dropped off in an unknown location without phones, money, credit cards, or other means of help and are expected to find their way home somehow. [Only 13 of the 14 pledges return. When the others go back to search for their missing companion, they find only] . . . a red bandana from the blindfolded car ride.
FBI Stories
There may be a larger genre of legends about the major U.S. government law enforcement agency, but so far only two FBI stories have been noted by folklorists. “The New Identity” claims that after the FBI furnished aMafia informer with a completely new identity—name, invented background, plastic surgery, a new profession, and so on—no sooner had they moved him into his new home than the man received a fund-raising letter from the alumni association of his alma mater. It was addressed to his original name. “Watch the Margins” claims that J. Edgar Hoover, the longtime director of the FBI, enforced strict guidelines for the length of memos and the widths of top and bottom margins. Once when an agent’s report had margins that were too narrow, the director wrote on it, “Watch the
borders!” Immediately a horde of extra agents was assigned to the American borders with Canada and Mexico.
Fear of Frying
Horror stories told of people trapped by their seat belts in burning cars after an accident, unable to get free, who suffer a terrible death. People use such stories as a rationale for not buckling up when they drive or ride—not a good idea, according to auto safety experts. One such pro commented “This myth of being trapped in a burning car remains, yet no scientific study has ever shown this to be true . . . A person wearing a seat belt and involved in a fiery crash is more likely to be conscious and
able to escape than someone not wearing a seat belt.” For those who still fear frying in a car wreck, there is a device sold under the name “Life
Fifi Spills the Paint
Professional painters know this ploy—and some may actually have practiced it—as a way to place the blame for a spillage on the customer’s pet: A painter working inside an expensive home happens to tip an open can of paint onto a valuable rug or a beautiful parquet floor. He grabs the customer’s yappy little toy poodle, sticks the dog’s feet into the mess, and exclaims, “Fifi! Bad Dog! Look what you’ve done!” The story has been told among trial lawyers to illustrate (as one lawyer put it) “how seductive yet weak circumstantial evidence can be.” A variation on this story illustrating the same point has young boys or girls put the blame for eating some forbidden food onto the family pet.
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