Did You Hear the One...?

     I wish there were more urban legends. I'm sad because I'm starting to think that there aren't ever going to be any more true urban legends. Sure, I check Snopes pretty regularly, but what they consider "new legends" anymore really aren't the kinds of things I'm interested in.

     When I first started getting interested in urban legends, I was reading through Jan Harold Brunvand's wonderful books. He not only discussed the legends and their various permutations, but also gave some very interesting and entertaining analysis of why these stories were so popular, so long-lasting, and so easy to believe. These books were so fascinating that I just had to get more, and it was always exciting to flip through and find new legends that I had never heard before (and even a few that I myself had once believed). Being a nerd, I found urban legends to be a great mixture of folklore and forteana, part sociology and part a study of unexplained phenomena.

     Then I discovered Snopes, and I spent months gorging on legends. I systematically went through and read every article on the sight. I remember it being especially satisfying because, at the time, I was doing a job that put me on the road for months at a time. So poring over this all-inclusive site served as a great distraction, and I found the writers of the articles were just as entertaining and analytical as Brunvand.

     But, alas, all good things must end, and I eventually read every scrap of content on the site. Now I'm afraid that I may never get another new, true urban legend.

     See, a true urban legend takes time to develop. You need a tale that is passed down over the years by word of mouth, retold like some multi-generational game of Telephone. You need a story that weaves itself into the cultural fabric, so that it is indistinguishable from the truth. An urban legend needs to be impossible to trace because it just seems to be part of the collective consciousness (or zeitgeist, to borrow an intellectual elitist's term). What we get now—according to Snopes—are virus and Facebook hoaxes, missing child alerts, and misattributed quotes and political propaganda. These aren’t legends; they are forgotten almost as soon as they are born.

     I don't think we'll ever get a true urban legend again because of the speed of information. Stories don't have a chance to gain the momentum needed to reach the appropriate mythical status. People like me are part of the problem, really. We hear something that we think might not be true, and we immediately jump on the internet to check it out. We've hunted myth and legend to extinction.

     In college, my roommate and I talked about trying to start our own urban legend on the campus. It never really materialized because, as most things involving teenage boys, the idea quickly flew out of our heads when something even remotely more interesting came along. I think it might have worked, because we were working with a somewhat insular environment (the college campus).

     But now I think I might start up the experiment again, once I can find the right venue…