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Urban legend?

tomwaits said:
DAMMIT! I heard this exact story not too long ago and didn't question it. I'm usually pretty good at spotting urban legends.
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You mean my story? I almost believed it when I heard it, actually. It did occur to me it could be an urban legend but part of me believed it cause it did kinda sound convincing in a "truth-is-much-stranger-than-fiction story" way.

Of course, I now know that most stories like that are pure urban legend.
 
Cainkane1 said:
My Grandmother told me once that a friend of hers had starved herself in order to get rid of a tapeworm. She held her mouth open while the tapeworm crawled out and it wnet into a small box she had for the occassion. She was going to throw the box away at a dump near a park bench. She sat down on the bench for awhile and went strolling around the park for a few minutes. She went back to throw the box away and someone had stolen the box. True story? I doubt it but she said it as if it were true. She was 88 when she told this tale and shes been dead 22 years. This variation of the story has apparently been around for many decades.
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I see you noted this is a myth. It most definitely is. Tapeworms don't crawl out of anyone's mouths. If they went anywhere it would be the other end but I don't think they even do that. You pass them after you kill them with poison.
 
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EeneyMinnieMoe said:
Yeah, that rarely happens nowadays, doesn't it? I suppose its because people are much more comfortable emailing strangers than talking to them. ....

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You forumites might want to get out more. ;) Maybe talk in person to a few people now and then. It really isn't so bad. :)
 
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EeneyMinnieMoe said:
You mean my story? I almost believed it when I heard it, actually. It did occur to me it could be an urban legend but part of me believed it cause it did kinda sound convincing in a "truth-is-much-stranger-than-fiction story" way.

Of course, I now know that most stories like that are pure urban legend.
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Well someone had told it to a good friend of mine and apparently claimed that it had actually happened to her. He told me the story immediately after she told him. I don't know why I didn't put two and two together...I think I was just so amazed and how funny the story was I didn't really think about it.

But usually I'm the one who points out to all my friends that their stories are myths. (Then they get mad because I "ruined" their story by questioning its authenticity)
 
Heh heh. Sort of an urban legend: I just got through answering an email to my sister - she sends me all the weird stuff she gets because I can look things up for her (never learned to use google. Harumph.) Anyway the email starts with the title - "Megavirus - even snopes says it's true". There's a link to a snopes article, and then the e-mail, which is a 15 year old chestnut about a virus that erases "Sector Zero" on your drive. I rung up snopes and looked for "Sector Zero", and there it was, labeled a hoax. The link in the email was to a different virus warning writeup that is indeed true.

I was wondering, "Who'd go to this trouble?", then I looked at the link to the snopes writeup in the email. Sure enough, the actual link didn't match the displayed link. A phish, hidden in a false virus hoax. Clever. I wonder how many uplink fell for it.

Don't ever click on a link on an email that you don't know the origin of. Particularly a forwarded message. Sorry for the slight stray.
 
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skeptigirl said:
I see you noted this is a myth. It most definitely is. Tapeworms don't crawl out of anyone's mouths. If they went anywhere it would be the other end but I don't think they even do that. You pass them after you kill them with poison.
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No, they usually don't come out whole, but they do shed segments, which contain eggs. They look like grains of rice. Now that everyone's a ready for supper...
 
Well here's one I do believe (please ignore my sig :) ). My brother (it's my BROTHER for the IPU's sake) was having some medical tests done and was asked to take a stool sample with a little kit his doctor gave him and then mail it to the lab in a special pre-addressed envelope also provided.

He did all that was required and put the envelope in his jacket pocket and took it to work to mail at lunchtime. At his office he took off his jacket and hung it over the back of his chair. At lunchtime the envelope was gone.

We're still both laughing.

It's my BROTHER I tell you! :D
 
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tomwaits said:
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But usually I'm the one who points out to all my friends that their stories are myths. (Then they get mad because I "ruined" their story by questioning its authenticity)
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That's the tricky part once they add the 'personal knowledge' bit.
 
shadron said:
No, they usually don't come out whole, but they do shed segments, which contain eggs. They look like grains of rice. Now that everyone's a ready for supper...
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I was talking about the "whole". The one in the story supposedly went looking for a new home.

And I am well aware of tapeworms. I'm in the infectious disease field. But now that you bring it up, that's another hole in the story. Tape worms don't get in your gut, their eggs do. The worm would never change hosts.
 
Gord_in_Toronto said:
Well here's one I do believe (please ignore my sig :) ). My brother (it's my BROTHER for the IPU's sake) was having some medical tests done and was asked to take a stool sample with a little kit his doctor gave him and then mail it to the lab in a special pre-addressed envelope also provided.

He did all that was required and put the envelope in his jacket pocket and took it to work to mail at lunchtime. At his office he took off his jacket and hung it over the back of his chair. At lunchtime the envelope was gone.

We're still both laughing.

It's my BROTHER I tell you! :D
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Actually, I believe the stool sample stories. I can tell you a few of my own about how patients understand the instructions (not) and what they actually end up bringing in to the clinic.

Our mailboxes have occasionally been rifled and I found my neighbor's stool samples (the smears on cardboard to test for blood) on the street in front of the boxes once. Someone wanted to see what was in the big envelope I guess and didn't like what they found.
 
skeptigirl said:
That's the tricky part once they add the 'personal knowledge' bit.
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No kidding. I was with a group of people and somebody mentioned the myth that "you eat 8 spiders in your sleep a year" or some variation of that. I pointed out it was an urban myth and showed them how snopes proved it wasn't true.

Their response? "How do you know snopes is telling the truth! You can't believe what you read on the net!"

I was like "oh? but you believe everything you hear from some random person?" (they didn't even remember who told them!)

sheesh.
 
tomwaits said:
No kidding. I was with a group of people and somebody mentioned the myth that "you eat 8 spiders in your sleep a year" or some variation of that. I pointed out it was an urban myth and showed them how snopes proved it wasn't true.

Their response? "How do you know snopes is telling the truth! You can't believe what you read on the net!"

I was like "oh? but you believe everything you hear from some random person?" (they didn't even remember who told them!)

sheesh.
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I heard that one a million trillion times. I think I even read it in a children's science encyclopedia.

Wherever there's a "Did You Know That...?", whether a book or a Snapple cap series, the eight spiders will be somewhere in there.
 
baron said:
However, before they go, just for completeness, they want to check out his car. The guy says sure, why not? They do, and that's when they find the dead cat wedged in the wheel arch of the car.
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Reminds me of my first encounter with a dead animal. I was three years old, playing in our front yard and the neighbor kids (not much older) ran over and told me to hurry and come look at my cat.

I followed them to find "Blackie" lying motionless on their driveway. Their father was there and said the cat had been up in the wheel well of his truck and he'd backed out over it. It was dead, he said.

I moved in to take a closer look. One of the kids cried, "Careful! Sometimes they wake up and become a wild cat!"

I had no experience with dead cats or wild cats. For my own safety, I had to trust that this kid -- several months older than me, so most likely a veteran of hundreds of these cat deaths -- knew what he was talking about. I backed way off. Subsequently, Blackie did not wake up and become a wild cat. I surmised my quick retreat had appeased the beast within the corpse (apparently somewhat fearful of crowds).

In later years, after my own father had taken to serially buying and running over cats (in between, we kids were allowed to name them and feed them as if they were actual pets and not just objects for his sick fetish), it finally dawned on me that the "wild cat" warning was malarkey. Took a lot of dead cats to debunk that, though.
 
skeptigirl said:
I don't believe this one. How many people would go out and smash the cat? What cat wouldn't notice you coming close to it and at least look up at you? And how many of you has ever had the dead animal you hit with your car stick in the car somewhere? When the tires run over the animal, just where in the wheel well is the cat going to wedge?
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If pressed I'd say it wasn't true, either, although not for these reasons. I'd reject it because it's too glib. Personally I would certainly put a cat out of its misery if the situation called for it, although I'd make totally sure it was in a terminal condition first! Also, I ran over a pheasant a couple of years ago and some part of its body (not sure what part) busted through the inner plastic cover of my wheel arch and I had to don gardening gloves and extract large gobs of feathers and flesh, so that's perfectly possible too.
 
I looked at the Snopes link for the stolen-dead-cat story. I was particularly intrigued by the "dead cat swapped for a ham" variation. I wonder if this was started by someone who thought "a pig in a poke" was just too good of an idea to let die.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pig_in_a_poke
"Pig-in-a-poke is an idiom that refers to a confidence trick originating in the Late Middle Ages, when meat was scarce, but apparently rats and cats were not.

The scheme entailed the sale of a "suckling pig", in a "poke" (bag). The wriggling bag actually contained a cat, not particularly prized as a source of meat, which was then sold unopened to the victim."


If that were the source, then maybe "dead cat stolen" was a later variation invented to make the story more morally satisfying.
 
skeptigirl said:
:rolleyes:

Now this one I don't believe. I hope you were kidding, I don't mean to insult you.
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Not a joke. Of course it might have been a joke by my friends but their granny was gone. Also they told other members of my family the same joke. They invited me to go on a Mexico trip with them but I declined cause I don't care what they say I don't thnik there is anywhere that I would think is safe to camp in Mexico.
 
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Orthoptera said:
Dogdoctor: the Granny on the Roof story is positively ancient, and has made it into several movies as well.

http://www.snopes.com/horrors/gruesome/deadgranny.asp


ETA: Sorry, I see the story is already linked in the original post
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What if this really happened? Do you suppose there would be evidence that someone could find of it? If you knew their names perhaps you could look up death certificates but there would not likely be any public record of this if it did happen.
 
Neal Boortz, the Atlanta radio talk show host used to tell this one on himself and swear it was true. Once during the Xmas shopping season, he carefully wrapped a dead gerbil in holiday wrapping paper. Where he got the gerbil or how it came to be a late gerbil, I do not remember. He said he tied the bow on it in such a way that when loosed, the bottom of the package would fall out. He then drove to Lenox Mall, a busy shopping area, parked his car near a restaurant which he used as his observation post, and left the package on the back seat of his car, with the window slightly rolled down and the doors unlocked. He said he wanted to see the type of person who would steal his "Xmas gift". You know how radio show hosts are about discussing current events. The Atlanta media had been warning shoppers about such things and giving tips on how to avoid being victimized. Neal said that eventually a middle aged lady parked her car near his and walked past his open window. He said she paused and turned around and walked past it in the opposite direction. She then turned and came back to his car and took the package and walked back to her own car. Neal said he hurriedly left the restaurant and saw her driving away. He got in his car and followed her. What she did was drive to another section of the lot where she parked again. He said as he drove by her car, he saw her with both arms raised and a look of horror on her face. He did not confront her, but merely drove away. I have often wondered if he really did that caper or was it just more radio talk show crap.

But I will tell this one on myself as it is ongoing. Recently while online, I leaned back in my office chair and it broke right where the seat post meets the mechanism plate. I called my garbage service to see if they would pick it up with the weekly trash and they said no, but they would send a special truck to get it for $20. At the time my wife had been doing her Xmas shopping online and the delivery guys were making a regular run to my house, so I got this bright idea. I got out a screwdriver and a wrench and dismantled that chair down as far as I could. The seat plate mechanism became the largest and heaviest remaining part. The seat and back went out separately in the regular garbage run mixed in with ordinary trash in a Hefty bag. Smaller parts went out also in trashbags, but the various heavy steel parts were carefully fitted into UPS boxes that I re-wrapped to look like they had not been opened. I placed one on my lawn next to the street, on my property, but out of view from my house. It was not there the next day. I put one beside the trashcan on garbage pickup day - it was gone before the trash truck arrived. I placed one in the back of my pickup truck and parked at the grocery store. Vanished. I still have one left that I have been driving around with for a couple of weeks. Can't always find a crook when you need one. I figure as we get closer to Xmas that it has a good chance of disappearing as well. Saved me 20 bucks.
 
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