DEAR PROFESSOR: Here are the essential details of a weird story I heard recently. If it's an urban legend, I assume that there are some other embellishments going around.
A group of men on a trip together go to a tavern on their last night out, and one of them meets a woman there and tells the others he's spending the night with her.The next day they wait until the last minute for him to show up at the hotel for the trip home, but he never does.
Eventually, the missing man calls the hotel for help. It seems he was drugged and operated on for one of his kidneys to be used in the flourishing black market for human organs.
The perpetrators of the crime had left the man his hotel telephone number, since he had no idea where he was. - L. RODNEY PETERSON, AURORA, ILL.
DEAR MR. PETERSON: Yes that story is definitely an urban legend. I call it "The Kidney Heist," and I discuss it in detail in my next book, "The Baby Train," which will be published next year.
You want some embellishments? How about these typical details, which were included in the version sent to me recently by Renee Maciejeski of Kennesaw, Ga.:
The way she heard it, a group of local business people went to New York City for a weekend seminar attended by people from all over the United States.
On Friday night while several of the attendees were having a drink in the hotel bar, one man noticed "an attractive, professionally dressed woman who seemed to be giving him the eye."
He responded in like manner, and eventually the two left the bar together. The man failed to show up for either the Saturday or Sunday sessions, but his colleagues were not worried. They figured that he was a grown man and could do what he wanted and take care of himself.
But on Monday morning as the group prepared to return home, the man still hadn't shown up. Three days later, someone got a call from a New York hospital explaining the mystery.
The man had been found in a homeless shelter, still carrying his ID, but weak and sick after having been drugged and operated on.
Noticing a fresh scar on his back, the police had a doctor examine him, and it was discovered that a kidney was removed in an expertly done operation.
"Spooky," concluded Maciejeski's letter, "but I'm pretty sure that it's an urban legend."
Right you are, Renee, but "The Kidney Heist" also became the basis for an episode of the television series "Law & Order" in early April.
Although some of the promotional ads for the episode implied that the story was true, a disclaimer at the end stated, "This story is fictional. No actual person or event is depicted."
But by the end of April, with the story still circulating actively, one newspaper speculated about whether the TV program had given rise to the legend.
Not a chance, since "The Kidney Heist" was being told around the United States at least a month earlier than the show, and it's based on a prototype legend, known since 1987, about thefts of corneas and internal organs from children in Third World countries for sale to rich Americans needing transplants.There are dozens of other embellishments to the basic story, my own personal favorite being one in which the victim is operated on in a dentist's chair and has his wound sewn shut with dental floss.
Spooky!- "Curses! Broiled Again," Jan Harold Brunvand's fourth collection of urban legends, is now available in paperback from Norton. Send your questions and urban legends to him in care of the Deseret News.