Urban Legends: Modern Morality Tales

We have all heard them. The alligator in the sewers of New York City and so on. They are meant to frighten. To make us wary. To make us laugh – nervously.

Put a little thought into the story and it becomes plain that some are social warnings, morality tales, designed to keep us from doing things which society says are dangerous or sinful and reminding us to conform to society’s norms.

The legend of the murderer with the hook for a hand.

A young couple drive out to a popular spot in the woods for a bit of private friskiness. As they drive, there is an emergency radio announcement and the couple stop driving to listen. The report is of an escaped inmate of a local top-security insane asylum. The prisoner is missing a hand and wears a hook in its place. The girl gets nervous and demands that her boyfriend to take her home. He thinks she is over-reacting, but he gives in and speeds to her house. Upon exiting the car, she screams – a bloody hook is hanging from the handle of the passenger side door.

The moral of the story: quite obvious really, premarital sex can potentially cause death. It is a warning to teenage girls not to let the boyfriend have his way, not to be weak. Apparently, the legend dates back to the 1950s and may be based on the unsolved 1946 Texarkana Moonlight Murders of several young couples in popular “lovers’ lanes”. In a sense, the 1950s were a conservative time, when the social restrictions for women, which had been lifted to a degree by WW2, were being reintroduced. The results of a romantic rendezvous ruined a girl’s life then, the stigma was never forgotten by society. Make your daughter too afraid to leave the confines of a proper, respectable date by fear of death and save her from “social death”.

The legend of the bite with hidden consequences.

A woman goes on vacation to a remote tropical rainforest. When she returns, she notices a bite on her cheek that begins to itch. Then it becomes painful and swollen. Her doctor, either accidentally or on purpose, cuts open the swelling and hundreds of tiny spiders swarm out.

The moral of this story: the victim is always female, so many think it is about vanity, but I say it is about a woman’s place in society. The legend first appears in 1842, a time when the majority of women were confined to a life within the home as they passed from the control of fathers to husbands and then to their children. It is similar to the legend above – a warning to behave properly to stay within a proper, respectable sphere of society. The woman in this story has defied convention by travelling, and not just that but also going to someplace “uncivilised”. Although there were some famous female travellers in the 18th and 19th centuries (their exploits make for wonderful reading), it was basically men who went on the “Grand Tour” of Europe and further afield. Adventure was a man’s job, not a woman’s role.  There is another version of this tale in which the spiders nest in a woman’s elaborate hairstyle- now that would be a warning about vanity!