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Death Trip
Claim: Young girls are tripped by a stranger and sent plummeting to their deaths from theater balconies.
Beware!! This has happened on three accounts so far! A two girls go to a movie theater. They decide it would help them to see better if they went up to the balcony. Once there, they decide to sit on the front row of the balcony. A man is already sitting on the front row, two seats from the aisle appearing to be sleeping. The girls don't want to step over the man so they occupy the two end seats. When the movie starts with the sudden sound check the man "awakens" startledly and spills soda on one of the girls. When she, with authority, gets up to wipe herself off, the man trips her and she falls over the balcony to her death. On the other two times that this has happened, the victim was paralized from the neck down. PLEASE BE AWARE OF YOUR SURROUNDINGS WHEN VENTURING OFF TO THE MOVIE THEATER!!!
Origins: Such are the times that it's actually refreshing to see a new horror legend that doesn't involve needles, AIDS, drugs, gangs or abducted women -- just an old-fashioned random serial killer who doesn't need a murder weapon other than his own two feet. What this legend does share with most others of its ilk is the setting. Describing the random, senseless deaths of victims who are killed while at the site of a pleasurable activity (fishing hole, amusement park, movie theater, dance club, golf club) is a staple of horror legends. In this case the death is neither an unintentional one caused by an accident or a non-human agent (such as the recent legend about snakes in ball pits <../../critters/snakes/ballpit.htm>) or one with a deliberate purpose beyond mere senseless killing (such as a the gang initation ritual found in the resurgent legend about headlight <lightout.htm> flashing). Here we have a stranger who kills or maims young women in movie theaters for no apparent reason other than the thrill of it all. We know this urban legend-like message must be serious, because it has the hallmarks of the usual Important Internet Warning of a Dire and Imminent Threat to You and Your Loved Ones: a initial statement assuring us that the information presented is true, a description of some horrible crime being perpetrated against innocent victims, and a cautionary closing paragraph typed IN CAPITAL LETTERS and ending with MULTIPLE EXCLAMATION POINTS!!! What's not included, of course, are the usual verifiable details: dates, names of cities, names of victims, names of police contacts, etc. Since the message claims three different occurrences of girls' being attacked in movie theaters by someone with the same modus operandi (but no mention of this being a gang initiation rite), we can probably assume the crimes are the work of a single man. If so, why he is still on the loose? At the very least, why don't we have a description of him? In all three cases only one of a pair of girls was killed or injured; the other surely saw the monster pull off his crime and described it to someone, or else we wouldn't know the details: that the murderer pretended to be asleep, sat two seats from the aisle, "woke up" when the sound check played, "accidentally" spilled his drink, and finally deliberately tripped one of the girls to send her hurtling off the balcony. The criminal couldn't have escaped too quickly for anyone to see him, as he would have had to climb over or around at least some theater seats (and possibly other patrons) to effect his escape. The theater lights may have been turned down for the beginning of the program, but movie theaters aren't so dark that you couldn't at least observe the height, clothing, and general features of another person standing right in front of you (and it apparently wasn't too dark to notice that the man deliberately tripped his victims). So why do we not have the smallest bit of descriptive information about this heinous madman? Scarelore warnings like this one, even if they do describe apocryphal events, usually at least offer some valid warnings: keep your eyes on your children at all times, be careful of giving rides to strangers, don't make safety judgements based solely on a person's appearance, etc. But "be careful in movie theater balconies lest someone push you over the edge"? If this is a lesson we need reinforced, we're in bigger trouble than I thought.
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Dressed to Kill
Legend: A gown used to dress a corpse for a funeral is removed from the body and returned to the store where it was purchased. An unsuspecting customer buys the gown and wears it to a dance, where embalming fluid from the dress seeps into her pores and kills her.
Recently there was a certain story spreading over the entire Midwest which took everyone by storm. It seems there was a banquet at a prominent hotel in a certain city. One particular girl who was going decided it was important enough to have a new dress. She bought one at a local department store, a simple but exquisite gown. At the dance after the dinner, her escort noticed a peculiar odor while they were dancing. She had been feeling faint, and she believed it was the odor. She thought the dye in the dress had faded, so she went to the washroom and took off the dress. There was nothing wrong, so she went back to the dance again. However, she felt more faint, and the odor still remained. She thought she had better sit down, and on the way back to their table, she fainted. Her escort took her home and called a doctor. She died before he got there. The boy explained about the odor, and the doctor investigated the dress and found that the dress had a familiar odor. He ordered an autopsy, and they discovered that the girl had formaldehyde in her veins. The drug had coagulated her blood and had stopped the flow. They investigated the department store where she had bought the dress and learned that the dress had been sold for a corpse and had been returned and sold to the girl. When she perspired and her pores opened, she took in the formaldehyde which killed her. A favorite story of New York literary circles a few years ago concerned a beautiful young girl in a white satin dress. It was one of those anecdotes which everybody swore had actually happened to his first cousin or next-door neighbor, and several narrators became very testy when they were informed that several other people's cousins had evidently undergone the same experience just a few weeks before. At any rate, the legend maintained that a very lovely but poverty-stricken damsel was invited to a formal dance. It was her chance to enter a brand-new world. Who knew but that some rich young man would fall in love with her and lift her out of her life in a box factory? The catch in the matter was that she had no suitable dress to wear for such a great occasion. "Why don't you rent a costume for the evening?" suggested a friend. Not having thought of this before, the girl became hopeful, and that very night went to a pawnshop near her little flat, where for a surprisingly reasonable sum she rented a beautiful white satin evening gown with all the accessories to match. Miraculously, it fit her like a glove and gave her such radiance that upon her arrival at the party she created a minor sensation. She was cut in on again and again, and as she whirled happily around the floor she felt that her luck indeed had changed for the better. Soon, however, she began to feel faint and nauseated. She fought against a growing discomfort as long as possible, but finally stole out of the house with barely sufficient strength to stagger into a cab and creep up the stairs to her room. She threw herself onto her bed, broken-hearted, and it was then -- possibly in her delirium -- that she heard a woman's voice whispering in her ear. It was harsh and bitter. "Give me back my dress," it said. "Give me back my dress! It belongs to... the dead..." The next morning the lifeless body of the young girl was found stretched out on her bed. The unusual circumstances led the coroner to order an autopsy. It was found the girl had been poisoned by embalming fluid which had entered her pores when she became overheated from dancing. The pawnbroker was reluctant to admit that he knew where the dress had come from, but spoke out when he heard that the district attorney's office was involved. It had been sold to him by an undertaker's assistant who had taken it from the body of a dead girl just before the casket was nailed down for the last time.
Variations:
· Specific hotels (where the dance was supposedly held) and department stores (where the dress was allegedly purchased) are often mentioned in early versions of this legend (c. 1935), with Marshall Field and Company being the most frequent example of the latter. · The gown is often described as being white, and in some versions as an actual wedding dress. (The purchaser had intended to wear it for her wedding but died before the marriage took place; the family decided to bury her in it instead, but changed their minds after deciding that the dress was too expensive.) · Earlier versions of this story describe the original wearer of the dress as being a "Negro" girl, and the victim as a white girl. · The girl dies because the embalming fluid (usually said to be formaldehyde) asphyxiates her by closing her pores, by entering her pores and embalming her alive, by causing her blood to coagulate, or by simply poisoning her. · The odor coming from the dress is often (but not always) the clue to discovering the means of the girl's death. · The poison dress was taken away from its original wearer and resold because it was returned to the store (for unspecified reasons); because the wrong dress was used on the corpse by mistake; or because a greedy mortician was surreptitiously removing expensive dresses from his "clients," replacing them with cheaper versions, and returning the originals to stores or selling them to pawnbrokers. · Some versions claim that the some or all of the principals involved in the story (e.g., the mortician, the store/pawnbroker, the hotel) paid off the victim's family to keep the matter quiet. Origins: As Raymond Himelick of Indiana University noted, the "poison dress" legend has a couple of analogs in classical mythology: Hercules was poisoned by a robe his wife had dipped in the blood of a former suitor; and Medea the sorceress sent a poisoned robe to Creusa, the woman her husband had taken up with after divorcing her. In a general sense, this legend is a fine example (see the version collected by Cerf above) of the genre of ghost story about spirits who return to avenge the theft of their property. (Remember the "Where's my golden arm . . .?" tale from your childhood slumber parties?) The racist aspects of earlier versions of this legend cannot be ignored, however. The point is frequently made in older versions that the original purchaser of the dress was a "Negress", even though Marshall Field and Company was an unlikely place for a Black girl to have been shopping in the 1940s. The implication is that the "Negress" sought a place above her natural station in life, bringing disaster upon both herself and an innocent white person.
Sightings: In 1998's Elizabeth, a poisoned dress meant for Queen Elizabeth I kills one of her ladies in waiting instead. An episode of Fox's "Beyond Belief" TV program (30 June 2000) claimed this tale was true, based on "published reports."
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Death of Little Mikey
Claim: Little Mikey of LIFE cereal fame died from the explosive effects of mixing Pop Rocks candy with soda pop.
Status: False.
Example: [Collected on the Internet, 1994] A kid ate 6 bags of pop rocks at a party. He then proceeded to drink a 6-pack of Pepsi. The two substances combined in his stomach and exploded, killing him horribly. That's why pop rocks were taken off the market in the early eighties.
Origins: Invented in 1956 by General Foods research scientist William A. Mitchell and introduced to the general public in 1975, these fruit-flavored nuggets delighted kids with their "fizzle." Small amounts of carbonation were released when the candy was placed in the mouth, causing both a mild "exploding" sensation and resulting in a satisfying "sizzling" noise kids loved. Though the confection had been extensively tested and found safe, the combustive candy still alarmed residents in Seattle. The Food and Drug Administration set up a telephone hotline there to assure anxious parents that the fizzing candy would not cause children to choke. Nevertheless, among kids, wild stories about the perils of eating Pop Rocks abounded. (Kids love ghastly rumors about candy. Visit our Bubble Yuck page for the one about Bubble Yum and spiders.) Mixing the candy with carbonated drinks would cause the stomach to explode, was the popular whisper. Further, according to playground lore, an overly-cute kid who achieved fame in LIFE cereal commercials had died of this. Why Little Mikey, of all people? We can only guess. Urban legends require victims who are known yet anonymous -- the ubiquitous friends of a friend -- to lend them a touch of credible realism without allowing for the easy verification of their details. Little Mikey was a kid known to all other children by virtue of his famous television commercial, yet he was still relatively anonymous -- few people (adults included) knew his real name, and his non-appearance in any public role subsequent to his well known LIFE commercial could therefore plausibly be attributed to his untimely demise. (Contrary to the rumor, John Gilchrist, the lad who played Mikey, not only survived his childhood unexploded, but is now an advertising-account manager for a New York radio station. And no, that's not him in the new LIFE commercial; that's Jimmy Starace.) General Foods was battling "exploded kid" rumors as early as 1979, a scant four years after the product's introduction. They took out full-page ads in 45 major publications, wrote some 50,000 letters to school principals around the country, and sent the confection's inventor on the road to explain to all and sundry that Pop Rocks generate less gas than half a can of soda and ingesting them could induce nothing worse in the human body than a hearty, non-life-threatening belch. Despite all these measures, the rumors abound even to this day. The company stopped marketing Pop Rocks around 1983, and this is often pointed to as "proof" that the candy was so harmful it had to be pulled from the shelves. What's less known is that Kraft bought the rights to the product from General Foods in 1985 and then marketed it as "Action Candy" through a company named Carbonated Candy. Pop Rocks are now back out in the open, though, and are again marketed under their original name by Chupa Chups.
Sightings: In the 1998 slasher classic Urban Legend the folklore professor invites a co-ed to eat Pop Rocks and then down a soda. She refuses to do it because she knows it kills people, including "that kid in the cereal commericial."
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