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Encyclopedia of Fantasy (1997)
Urban Legends

Tagged: Theme.

Modern oral Folklore – also spread via newspapers, photocopier graffiti and, increasingly, the Internet. The Urban Legend is typically a Tall Tale with a frisson of comeuppance or Horror, related as having actually happened to a "friend of a friend" – usefully abbreviated to "foaf" by Rodney Dale in his The Tumour in the Whale: A Collection of Modern Myths (1978), whose title commemorates the World War II Urban Legend of whale meat (offered as a substitute for beef) which proves to contain a live, pulsing tumour. Urban Legends can feed into fantasy, and vice versa. Randall Garrett builds on the belief that the image of a murderer can be photographed from the dead man's retina in "The Eyes Have It" (1964), a notion already used by Rudyard Kipling; Harlan Ellison makes creative use of the Urban Legend alligators infesting New York sewers, in his "Croatoan" (1975), as does Thomas Pynchon in his Fabulation V (1963); Terry Pratchett's Feet of Clay (1996) spoofs Urban Legends told against ethnic restaurants, when outraged Dwarf customers discover the speciality dish, rat, to be disguised chicken.

Conversely, the title Urban Legend of The Vanishing Hitchhiker: American Urban Legends and Their Meanings (1981) by Jan Harold Brunvand (1933-    ), whose eponymous female Ghost disappears from a moving car, is so wearily reminiscent of innumerable Ghost Stories that it cannot be told as fiction – only the spice of "foaf" pseudo-factuality gives it life. There are Urban Legends of ghostly truckers driving immaterial vehicles along US Interstates, updating the Flying Dutchman; Steven Spielberg's Duel (1971 tvm) owes something to this Urban Legend. The Greek Myth of the poisoned shirt of Nessus resurfaced as a 1930s-40s Urban Legend involving a fatal dress, allegedly tainted with embalming fluid from a corpse and unscrupulously resold to a woman who died from wearing it. A classic case of a story published as fiction but retold as Urban Legend (often with indignant insistence on its truth) is Arthur Machen's "The Bowmen" (1914), which gave rise to the Angels of Mons myth. [DRL]

further reading: The Natural History of Nonsense (1947) by Bergen Evans; The Book of Nasty Legends (1983) by Paul Smith; The Choking Doberman and Other "New" Urban Legends (1984) and several further compilations by Jan Harold Brunvand.

see also: Spring-Heeled Jack.

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