How dangerous Urban Legends can be

When Urban Legends Turn Ugly
by Charles Rammelkamp

We often think of urban legends as essentially harmless tales that have captured the popular imagination. However, some urban legends veer into superstition and prejudice when various attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors are attributed to a particular group of people. One group that has been subject to this sort of urban legend is the Jews, who have been vilified over the centuries for many imaginary crimes.

The Jewish Kosher Tax

Where do urban legends end and malicious lies begin? Take, for instance, the claim that there is a secret tax on food either labeled with a “K,” a lowercase “u” inside a circle, or by the word “pareve.” How this tax works is unclear since taxes are collected by the government, but such details seem irrelevant to those who believe that Jews are inherently greedy.
Rather, these symbols indicate that the contents of the package were prepared in accordance with Jewish dietary laws. The “K” means “kosher” while the lowercase “u” in a circle refers to the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations, under whose auspices the food has been inspected and certified.

Similarly, the Yiddish word pareve means that the food is free from any animal by-products and thus, can be eaten with meat or dairy (in Jewish law, meat and milk must not be mixed). The organizations which provide the certification do, indeed, charge a modest fee for their services, but the cost of kosher certification that is passed onto the consumer is negligible.

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, purportedly the text of discussions among Jewish leaders that describe how Jews plan to take over the world by enslaving non-Jews, constitutes another insidious urban legend about Jews. Yet according to historian Benjamin Segel, the Protocols were fabricated in Paris at the end of the 19th century under the supervision of the Russian Okhrana (the Czar’s secret police) as a propaganda tool to stir up anti-Semitic sentiment.
The first known publication of the Protocols was in the Russian newspaper Znamia in 1903. In 1917, they were published again, this time attributed to Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism, the Jewish nationalist movement. This was a time of political turmoil in Russia, and a Jewish scapegoat was welcomed under such circumstances, to direct popular hostility away from those in power.

Two years later, the Protocols were distributed to members of the US cabinet and in 1920, Henry Ford printed them in his newspaper The Dearborn Independent as “proof” that Jews and Communists were trying to take over the world.

However, in 1921, Philip Graves, a reporter for the London Times, discovered that the Protocols had been plagiarized from two sources—an 1864 satire of the French ruler Napoleon III by Parisian lawyer Maurice Joly (entitled Dialogue between Machiavelli and Montesquieu in Hell) and Biarritz, an 1868 novel by German anti-Semite Hermann Goedsche. Graves debunked the Protocols in a long series of point-by-point refutations, after which a South African court ruled them a forgery and a Swiss court declared them a fraud. Subsequently, in 1927, Henry Ford publicly retracted his statement about the Protocols, and apologized for his diatribes, claiming his assistants had fed him false information.

But by then the damage had been done. In 1933, excerpts from the Protocols were used by Fascists in the Romanian parliament as a reason to expel Jews from the country. Adolf Hitler cited the Protocols in Mein Kampf, the influential anti-Semitic autobiography he wrote in prison in the 1920s. General Francisco Franco, the Fascist dictator of Spain, also referred to the Protocols when denouncing the Jews in the 1930s and ‘40s.

The Protocols are also believed to be used today as proof that Israel’s designs on the Middle East go beyond the Palestinian territories. In fact, they have been published in Arabic, distributed to local populations by Islamic groups with government sponsorship, and even promoted as true on Egyptian television, as recently as the spring of 2003.

The Holocaust Was a Lie

Similarly, denial of the Holocaust is used to both demonize and trivialize Jews, essentially calling them liars who are only trying to gain sympathy for themselves as victims by spreading falsehoods about WWII’s Nazi death camps. Holocaust deniers claim that the systematic slaughter of six million European Jews did not really happen, or certainly not on the scale that was reported.

These denials began in 1947 when Maurice Bardéche, a French fascist, suggested that much of the evidence about the extermination camps were fabricated and that any deaths in the camps was attributable to disease and starvation. Later, scores of books, such as David Hoggan’s The Myth of the Six Million (1969), claimed that the Holocaust was invented by Zionists in order to discredit Germany’s attempts to maintain national identity and racial purity.

The issue naturally arouses strong emotions on all sides, and several famous court cases have been ajudicated on this very matter. The most famous occurred in the 1990s, when British historian David Irving, author of various books on Hitler, sued Penguin Books and Deborah Lipstadt, professor of Modern Jewish and Holocaust Studies at Georgia’s Emory University for libel, when she “outed” him as a Holocaust denier. Lipstadt won the trial when Irving was found to have used pseudoscientific evidence to misrepresent historical evidence in his books.

Jesus Killed by Jews

The New Testament Gospels have been a source of much misunderstanding, with the medieval Church portraying Jesus a a Christian who was killed by Jews. Rather, Jesus was a Jew whom the Romans killed in response to the political intrigues of the Sanhedrin. In fact, miracle plays of the Middle Ages incited pogroms against Jews by showing, onstage, the drama of Christ’s final days and his gleeful murder by Jews, who were usually portrayed with devil horns and tails. After the performance of such plays, European peasants would go on violent rampages against Jews, destroying property, raping, and killing, all in an act of “revenge.”

Though they can be benign and amusing, some urban legends have been used to reinforce stereotypes, which has often led to violence. We should always try to separate verifiable truth from unsubstantiated rumor when it comes to leveling serious accusations at groups or individuals.

source: mysteries magazine

The Crow

One of the most gothic movies ever is "The Crow". A man comes back to life to take revenge for the death of his beloved girl. And so the epic begins. The movie was based on the bestselling graphic novel "The Crow". The director managed to sustain the gothic mood of the novel and to transfer it to the large cinema screen.

The movie is "haunted" by the tragical accident that led Brandon Lee, the star of the movie, to his fatal end. During one of the last shots, the guns were not checked. As a result one of them burst out and killed the poor guy. Moreover, some scenes were shot after Brandon's death and they used for that purpose CGI images. Since then a lot of things have been heard. A lot of people believe that behind his death there is a conspiracy, the well-known Bruce Lee conspiracy. Probably is just another urban legend. Was truly a tragic accident or a successful murder attempt? So far, noone has reported evidence of Brandon's comeback to take revenge...

Another cookie urban legend

THE FABULOUS COOKIE RECIPE

The story: A woman and her daughter finished their salad at a Neiman-Marcus cafe in Dallas, Texas, and because they were both such cookie lovers, they decided to try the "Neiman-Marcus" cookie. The cookie was so excellent that the woman asked if she might have the recipe. The waitress rather haughtily informed her that the recipe could not be given away freely, but it might be bought for two-fifty.

The woman was thrilled, considering "two-fifty" to be $2.50 and a great deal. However, when she received her credit card statement, she was shocked to see that the Neiman-Marcus charge was $285.00 with "Cookie Recipe: $250.00" clearly marked on the bill.

The woman called the Neiman-Marcus accounting department to complain, and she was soundly rebuffed. She was told that the waitress had duly informed her that the recipe could be bought for "two-fifty" and she was naive to think that such a treasured list of ingredients could be purchased for $2.50. She was warned not to call the Better Business Bureau or the Texas Attorney General's office, and not even to think of trying to get even or to get her money back.

"All right," the woman told them, hatching a scheme to get revenge for such an exorbitant bill, "you've got my $250.00, now I'm going to have $250.00 worth of fun. I'm going to send your famous cookie recipe to every cookie lover in the United States who has an e-mail account."

An alleged recipe for Neiman-Marcus cookies is then provided to the e-mail recipient with the instructions that it should be sent on to every person he or she knows who has an e-mail address.

While many recipients of such an e-mail undoubtedly follow the recipe included and produce a good-tasting cookie, the recipe does not come from Neiman-Marcus. There is no "Neiman-Marcus cafe" at any of the famous department store's three Dallas-area outlets. In its restaurants, named the Zodiac, Zodiac at North Park, and The Woods, the staffs do not sell recipes, but give them away free to any customer who may inquire about a particular item on the menu.

There wasn't even a "Neiman-Marcus cookie" until quite recently when, in a good-natured response to the widespread urban legend, the company developed a chocolate chip cookie and freely gives away its recipe.

This popular urban legend of an ordinary woman getting revenge on a corporate giant has been around in one form or another since the late 1940s. It began shortly after the end of World War II (1945) with a woman being charged with an exorbitant bill after requesting the recipe for fudge cake from a railroad diner car. In the 1960s, the legend evolved to a woman customer receiving a bill for $350.00 from New York's Waldorf-Astoria Hotel for a dessert known as "Red Velvet Cake." In the 1970s, Mrs. Fields became the villain for having sold the recipe for chocolate chip cookies to a customer for $250.00. The story regarding Mrs. Fields became so widely circulated that in 1987 the company issued a public denial, insisting that all of their cookie recipes remained trade secrets. In each of the fictional instances, the urban legend had it that an ordinary person who had been taken advantage of by a haughty big business had gleefully taken her revenge by distributing the once-sacrosanct recipes to whomever wished to use them.

Sometime in the 1990s, the story shifted from Mrs. Fields as the malefactor to a cafe in a Dallas-area Neiman-Marcus store. The advent of the Internet caused the story of the vengeful woman and her defiant distribution of the cookie recipe to become one of the most popular of all the widely circulated urban legends.

Bloody Mary

BLOODY MARY

In folklore and children's street culture, "Bloody Mary" is the name of a children's game in which a ghost or witch of the same name (or sometimes other names, such as "Mary Worth") is said to appear in a mirror when summoned. One of the more common ways participants attempt to make her appear is to stand before a mirror in the dark (most commonly in a bathroom) and repeat her name three times, though there are many variations. Some include chanting a hundred times, chanting at midnight, spinning around, rubbing one's eyes, or chanting her name thirteen times with a lit candle. Most of these are meant to disorient people. In some versions of the legend, the summoner must say, "Bloody Mary, I killed your son!" or "I killed your baby." In these variants, Bloody Mary is often believed to be the spirit of a mother (often a widow) who murdered her children, or a woman who was murdered shortly before or after her wedding. In stories where Mary is supposed to have been wrongly accused of killing her children, the querent might say "I believe in Mary Worth." This is similar to another game involving the summoning of the Bell Witch in a mirror at midnight. Similar rituals are also used to summon spirits in the movies Beetlejuice (1988) and Candyman (1992). The game is often a test of courage, as it is said that if Bloody Mary is summoned, she would proceed to kill the summoner in an extremely violent way, such as ripping his or her face off. Other variations say that the querent must not look directly at her, but at her image in the mirror; she will then reveal the querent's future, particularly concerning marriage and children.

Bloody Mary Worth is typically described as a child-murderer who lived in the locality where the legend has taken root years ago. There is often a specific local graveyard or tombstone that becomes attached to the legend.

On the other hand, various people have surmised that the lore about taunting Bloody Mary about her baby may relate her tenuously to folklore about Queen Mary I. The queen's life was marked by a number of miscarriages or false pregnancies. Had Mary I successfully borne a child, this would have established a Roman Catholic succession and threatened the continuance of her religious persecutions after her death. Speculation exists that the miscarriages were deliberately induced. As a result, some retellings of the tale make Bloody Mary the queen driven to madness by the loss of her children. It is likely, however, that Queen Mary I provided only her nickname to the Bloody Mary of folklore. She is also confused in some tellings of the story with Mary Queen of Scots. Bloody Mary is sometimes said to have bathed in the blood of her child victims (or more commonly the blood of virgins) in order to retain a youthful complexion; this would appear to confound her with Elizabeth Báthory.

The mirror ritual by which Bloody Mary is summoned may also relate to a form of divination involving mirrors and darkness that was once performed on Halloween. While as with any sort of folklore the details may vary, this particular tale encouraged young women to walk up a flight of stairs backwards, holding a candle and a hand mirror, in a darkened house. As they gazed into the mirror, they were supposed to be able to catch a view of their future husband's face. There was, however, a chance that they would see the skull-face of the Grim Reaper instead; this meant, of course, that they were destined to die before they married.

The appearance of a ghostly figure in the mirror could be explained quite easily for the more complex rituals, for example spinning around whilst summoning Bloody Mary in front of a mirror lit by candles. The combination of dizziness, rapid movement and flickering lighting could easily fool the eye into seeing someone, especially when the idea has already been implanted. The participant may think that they have seen a spirit, it is, however, most likely a trick of the eye brought upon by the combination of darkness, fear and disorientation.