Consider this story:
"Police in Charleston, S.C., arrested a man who handed a note demanding money to the automatic teller machine at a bank. A police officer who witnessed the incident said that when the machine didn't respond to the demand, the man pumped two shots into it and drove off."This version of "The ATM Holdup" was reported in "News of the Weird," or NOTW, a syndicated newspaper column that recently yielded a book containing hundreds of weird news items.
The book's cover blurb promises that "News of the Weird," by Chuck Shepherd, John J. Kohut and Roland Sweet, is composed entirely of "bizarre-but-true stories." I gave it a close reading and can report that it's about 95 percent legend-free.
For example, "The ATM Holdup" may have happened in Charleston, but it's also told in many other cities. Multiple versions of such stories are considered legends, even if they began as retellings of actual news stories.
"The ATM Holdup" is only one legend told about mistakes with "money machines." Other technological legends are about smoke alarms, fax machines, pocket calculators, talking dashboards, etc.
Here's another NOTW story concerning a modern gadget:
"Police in Radnor, Pa., interrogated a suspect by placing a metal colander on his head and connecting it with metal wires to a photocopy machine. The message `he's lying' was placed in the copier and police pressed the copy button each time they believed the suspect wasn't telling the truth. Believing that the `lie detector' was working, the suspect confessed."
Other NOTW items echo legends about unfortunate pets:
"A couple from Berlin Heights, Ohio, filed a $125,000 lawsuit against a pizza company, claiming a `spoiled, rotten, rancid and moldy' pizza caused the death of their dog Fluffy. Their lawyer said the couple `became violently ill after eating a small quantity of the pizza. Then they became severely distressed in their search for medical assistance and ran over Fluffy in the driveway."
The lawsuit probably existed, but that kind of accidental death of a pet or a child is a common legend theme.
The NOTW compilers use the same collecting technique as I do: They rely on readers to send them material. I seek oral repetition and variation to identify the stories I collect as folklore, while they only require that "Every item has been reported in a mainstream news source."
They omit stories that were later retracted, but they do not attempt to verify their clippings. They try to eliminate any mere "legends" that reporters may unwittingly have reported as fact.
There's enough leeway in these principles to allow inclusion of a news item like the following, which clearly reports behavior imitating a legend:
"In Los Angeles, a 26-year-old man was sentenced to one month in jail in 1988 for killing his wife's 6-week-old kitten by cooking it in a microwave oven because the wife had gone to a movie with a friend."
Other NOTW items echo the legends I call "Superglue Revenge," "The Stolen Specimen" and "Backward Masking." Either news reporters fell for apocryphal anecdotes, or life imitated legend.
One of the funniest suspicious-sounding weird-news entries is this:
"Two brothers drove a Honda station wagon away from Randy's German Car Repair in Boca Raton, Fla. The brothers, aged 6 and 8, had painted mustaches on to look older. When a police officer blocked their path with his patrol car, the boys put the car into reverse and drove backward across an intersection and crashed into a wall. Police Sgt. Robert Muth noted that they hadn't intended to go in reverse and that they thought they had `put it in "R" for race."'
I've heard variations of this story since the earliest days of automatic transmission, and from many other places. Both "`R' for Race," and "`P' for Pass" are mentioned in variations.
But I never heard of a Japanese car stolen from a German car repair shop. There's something fishy about that detail!
- "Curses! Broiled Again," Jan Harold Brunvand's fourth collection of urban legends, is now available from Norton. Send your questions and urban legends to Prof. Brunvand in care of this newspaper.