Urban legends easy to spread on the Internet

MONTGOMERY -- The alligator with the deer in its jaws is in two Alabama lakes no less. The cell phone do-not-call e-mails. The bad guy buried under a Florence street.

There's also Abe Lincoln's illegitimate offspring and Procter & Gamble's "satanic'' logo.

They're all urban legends, and if nothing else, they're easy to spread with the Internet.

Take a recent email photograph of a giant alligator with a deer in its jaws. The gator has been in Weiss Lake in northeast Alabama and in Lake Martin, the e-mails state. The truth is the gator and deer were photographed in a Georgia swamp.

Charles Hill is academic director of language and fine arts at Gadsden State Community College. He has a background in mythology and classical studies but urban legends are his hobby.

"What I tend to use as a working definition (of urban legend) is a story that is just too good to be true, but we tell as true,'' Hill said.

Urban legends, folklore, mythology and even religious stories cross over and mix.

"There is a difference between a hoax and an urban legend, but I'm being pedantically different,'' Hill said.

He said a good urban legend Web site is snopes.com and a source on urban legends is Jan Brunvand, who has written seriously about urban legends. Brunvand declined to be interviewed, saying he's retired, and referred queries to his Web page.

Hill said the Internet has changed the landscape with its ability to disseminate hoaxes and spoofs.

"Real urban legends have a life of their own; they are born and grow for no reason,'' Hill said. "You just can't start one and it spreads. It has to have a little bit of truth.''

Since today is Super Bowl Sunday, a relevant urban legend is the game's winner predicts the year's stock market performance. If the AFC team wins, the legend goes, the stock market will do poorly. But if the NFC team wins, the market will do well.

Hill said he debunked the myth that more guacamole is sold on Super Bowl Sunday than any other. "More is actually sold on Cinco de Mayo,'' he said.

A modern urban legend even prompted a government response.

Recent emails warn cell phone users to contact the do-not-call registry to block telemarketing calls that supposedly will start within days of the email's receipt. The note also warns that the cell phone owner will have to pay for them.

There's an element of truth in the e-mail, but it was misleading enough to prompt a response by the Federal Trade Commission and Federal Communication Commission.

Automatic dialer telemarketing to cell phones already is illegal "in most cases and will continue to be so,'' so "registering'' your cell phone number is redundant, the government said.

"It started a couple of years ago when some wireless companies started getting data for a national database, but it was nothing that telemarketers could use,'' FCC spokeswoman Rosemary Kimball said. "Because the rumor was that there would be a list, and they would call everybody's cell phone, we put out that press release.''

Northwest Alabama historian Bill McDonald said there are a slew of local urban legends.

There's the one about Civil War-era outlaw Tom Clark who was hanged for his misdeeds and then buried under Tennessee Street instead of an adjacent cemetery.

"While they were burying him, someone in the crowd supposedly made the statement that Clark said 'no one will ever run over me,' '' McDonald said. "A group of people claiming to be family members contested that and said he's not buried under Tennessee Street.''

There's the legend of a member of the outlaw Jesse and Frank James' gang robbing a bank, changing his name and becoming a wealthy northwest Alabama-citizen.

And the local legend about Abraham Lincoln's descendants in the Shoals. Plausible?

In 1828, when he was 19, Lincoln did guide a flatboat down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers to New Orleans, where he formed his objection to slavery, biographer Carl Sandburg wrote.

Although Sandburg didn't specify how Lincoln returned to the Midwest, the accepted route from New Orleans to the Ohio River was the Natchez Trace, which crosses extreme northwest-Alabama.

Then there's the legend that the money and plans for the old post office in Florence built 100 years ago were meant for the town of the same name in South Carolina, McDonald said. "I wrote to the post office and they said it was intended for (Alabama),'' he said.

Another urban legend is a guy goes to a convention, meets the wrong kind of women, and wakes up iced down in a bathtub with stitches in his side. A note says to seek treatment because a kidney has been harvested.

Is the Dan Brown novel-turned-movie, "The DaVinci Code,'' about supposed clues to Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene's children an urban legend?

Hill said "The DaVinci Code'' is really not an urban legend because there is marginal academic theory about the novel's clues that are real objects and events.

"The thing about (the feminine-looking disciple) John being to the right of Jesus in the Last Supper (painting) has been around a long time,'' Hill added. "It's all kind of minority theory, but did it get started as urban legend? "

McDonald said urban legends are really about entertaining.

"The fascination is, I think, people enjoy the intrigue of things that startle your mind to think about them,'' McDonald said. "If the Tom Clark story being dead under Tennessee Street isn't true, it is a good twist to put on a story to make it interesting.

"A good story is a good story.''

Dana Beyerle can be reached at (334) 264-6605 or dtb12345@aol.com.