Did You Hear The One About The ...

Hey, did you hear the sad story about that missing 5-year-old Minnesota girl?

Her name's Kelsey Brooke Jones. It's awful. She was reported missing and her poor mother is at her wit's end, circulating the story all over the Internet, trying to recover her daughter. She's asking for prayers and any help she can get. She wants people to forward the e-mail with the information about the little girl to everyone they know.

What is the world coming to? It's terrible. Horrible. A symptom of society's breakdown.

Except it's not true.

OK, it's true that Kelsey's mother reported her missing last Oct. 9. But she was found less than two hours later, safe and sound, watching television at a neighbor's house. By all accounts, all is well in the Jones household.

Chances are, though, you're still getting e-mails with her mother's desperate plea to help find her daughter. It's taken on a life of its own. News organizations are bombarded with indignant queries from people, asking why they haven't reported the story -- is it a cover-up? A conspiracy?

Such is the power -- and one of the biggest downfalls -- of the Internet: It's given urban legends a new lease on life.

An urban legend is defined by experts Peter van der Linden and Terry Chan as a story that contains the following elements:

• It appears mysteriously and spreads spontaneously in various forms.

• It contains elements of humor or horror, and the horror often punishes someone who flouts the conventions of society.

• It makes a really good story.

• It doesn't have to be false, although most urban legends are. An urban legend often has a basis in fact, but, as van der Linden and Chan say, "It's their life after the fact, particularly in reference to the second and third points, that gives them particular interest."

Another element that all urban legends have in common: Somebody, somewhere, swears that it's true. Frequently, the teller insists that it happened to someone whom he or she knows -- but it's always someone pretty far removed in relationship, like a friend of a cousin or a sister-in-law's hairdresser.

The acknowledged expert in the field, Jan Harold Brunvand, has written a series of fascinating books about urban legends: "The Vanishing Hitchhiker," "The Choking Doberman," "The Mexican Pet," "The Baby Train," "The Chicken-Fried Rat" and "Curses! Broiled Again!"

There's also an excellent Web site devoted to debunking urban legends: the AFU & Urban Legends Archive, which allows you to search by topic or keyword. But beware: Once you get enmeshed in the site, you may not emerge for hours. And if you click on the "food" category, you're guaranteed to lose your appetite reading about some of the nasty urban legends that have sprung up regarding comestibles.

You may not know an urban legend by that phrase, but I guarantee that you've heard plenty of them. They've been around for years, even before everyone and his grandmother had Internet access.

The "Paul is dead" rumor? An urban legend. The hook-on-the-car-door story? Not true. The exploding cactus tale (in which a saguaro cactus explodes in someone's house and hundreds of baby tarantulas fly everywhere)? Absolutely false. Spider eggs in Bubble Yum? Nope. LSD-tainted temporary tattoos being unwittingly distributed by police departments? No, no, no. And the story about the Parisian bellboy and the toothbrushes (for the sake of delicacy, I won't elaborate)? Never happened.

And then there's an entirely new category, born of the Internet, in which folks are warned in dire terms of what will happen if they open a particular e-mail: Your hard drive will be erased and life as we know it will come to an end. (The AFU & Urban Legends Archive has a name for this category: "technophobia.") You can check on computer virus warnings and hoaxes here.

There are also dozens of advisories out there promising that if you forward a particular e-mail, you'll eventually earn a new Honda, shares of Microsoft stock or a trip to Disney World.

Here's a tip: There's no way to track forwarded e-mail. Period. This is what used to be called a "chain letter" back in the dark ages.

Want more evidence? Here's a list of urban legends that have been circulated ad infinitum via e-mail:

• The Nieman-Marcus chocolate-chip cookie recipe. The gist of this is that a woman and her daughter were having lunch at Nieman-Marcus. The cookies they ate for dessert were so fabulous that the woman asked if she could have the recipe. No, the waitress said, but she could buy it for "two-fifty." The woman agreed, handed over her charge card, and then was stunned a few weeks later to get her bill: Apparently the cookie recipe cost her $250, not $2.50.

  The e-mail sender includes the recipe and implores all recipients to make the cookies. "I paid for it; now you can have it for free," the e-mail originator says. "This is not a joke -- this is a true story."

  Except it isn't. There has never been any documentation to support the story, whose variations have included a recipe for Mrs. Fields' chocolate-chip cookies and a recipe for "red velvet cake" at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel -- the latter of which has been around for decades.

• Victims in various locations are falling prey to thieves who steal their kidneys in order to sell them on the lucrative organ-donor market. The gist of the story is this: Someone is befriended by a stranger. They have a few drinks (or a meal). The victim then awakens the next morning, nude, in a bathtub, his or her body packed in ice. A note -- sometimes scrawled on the bathroom mirror in lipstick -- is left behind: "If you're still alive, call 911," or "Call 911 or you will die," or a similar panic-inducing message.

  The victim makes a frantic phone call and is told to stay there and await medical assistance -- his kidneys have just been stolen.

  Never happened. Ever. Anywhere. However, there's probably no harm in remembering what your mother always told you: Be careful of strangers.

• Lethal "toilet spiders" killed three women in Chicago. This also is a story that's been frantically circulated via e-mail. The sender swears that according to a recent story in the "Journal of the United Medical Association," the three victims showed up at Chicago hospitals complaining of fever, chills and vomiting. The symptoms were followed by muscular collapse, paralysis and death.

  The only thing that the three women had in common was that they apparently ate at the same restaurant -- and used the same toilet. The culprit, according to the bogus story, was a small spider hiding beneath the toilet seat. The spider was captured and tested, the article said, and was determined to be a "South American Blush Spider," which thrives in cold, dark, damp climates -- such as a toilet seat.

  "It is now believed that these spiders can be anywhere in the country," the e-mail breathlessly advises. "So please, before you use a public toilet, lift the seat to check for spiders. It can save your life!"

  While there's surely no harm in checking for spiders beneath public toilet seats -- everyone has to have a hobby -- it's entirely unnecessary. There's no such creature as a South American Blush Spider, and no such publication as the Journal of the United Medical Association. There's also no such restaurant as the one cited in the e-mail.

• The "chicken" served by Kentucky Fried Chicken is really genetically altered, artificially sustained organisms. This is a fairly recent urban legend, and those who spread it claim that the information came from a University of New Hampshire study.

  But rest easy: Not only does it taste just like chicken, it actually is chicken. KFC buys its chickens from bona fide poultry producers; it doesn't raise them. And the University of New Hampshire has never performed a study involving KFC. In fact, the university debunks the story on its Web site.

As for the larger question of why people circulate urban legends: Who knows? Maybe we're trying to add some spice to life. Maybe we're gullible. Maybe we're just born storytellers, and the odder the story, the better.

The moral? A good story is fine, but a little skepticism is healthy.

Oh, and one more thing: that old story involving Richard Gere and small furry rodents? Absolutely untrue. An urban legend. Honest.

Note: Betsy's new pop culture column, Culture Shocked, appears every Wednesday in our Entertainment section. She welcomes your questions and comments.

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