It happened to a friend of a friend of mine

It happened to a friend of a friend of mine

Courtney Kaminski
Issue date: 10/23/07

A university student who really likes to party and have a good time meets a girl one night when he is out with some friends. When she asks him to head to a party she knows about he gladly goes with her, and does not shy away from the drinks and drugs she encourages him to take.
The next thing he knows, he wakes up in a bathtub filled with ice; "Call 911 or you will die" is written on his chest in lipstick.
The 911 operator encourages him to get out of the tub and examine himself in a mirror. He seems fine until he discovers two nine inch slits on his lower back. The student's kidneys have been removed for sale on the black market, and he is currently on life support awaiting a suitable kidney donor.
Does this story sound familiar? Think you've heard that one before? It is a fairly widespread urban legend, so it is likely that you have.
In recent years, urban legends have become very pervasive, creeping into areas of popular entertainment, such as Thomas Craughwell's book The Cat In The Dryer: and 222 Other Urban Legends; the 1998 films Dead Man On Campus and Dead Man's Curve about the urban legend that university students with roommates who commit suicide will receive perfect grades for the semester; and especially the films Urban Legend and its sequel Urban Legend: Final Cut, which both feature murderers that make urban legends a reality for their victims. This popularity has created a fascination with the legends among many people.
"I'm inclined to think human beings are hard-wired to love a good story," said David Emery, About.com's Urban Legend and Folklore expert. "Maybe it's because life doesn't unfold like a satisfying narrative - the bad guys don't always get their comeuppance, the good guys don't always come out on top, and there's hardly ever what you'd call a good ending."
"But when we talk about our lives we invariably put it in story form, and it's hard to resist fudging the details a little to improve it. No matter how far out they go, urban legends are always just plausible enough to be believed, and that's one of the big secrets to their longevity. Besides being good stories, urban legends tend to deal with things that are important to us. They're about the things we fear, the things we dread, or the things we wish for. They're irresistible because they hit us on an emotional level."
Emery explained that an urban legend is generally accepted as being a story that people pass around, claiming and perhaps even believing that the story is true - although it usually is not - in which some hilarious, outlandish, embarrassing or horrifying thing happened to someone other than the person who's telling the story.
"The biggest giveaway," he said, "is that the protagonist of the story is always 'a friend of a friend,' or 'my best friend's sister's hairdresser,' or some variation of that. The Internet is rife not only with urban legends, but with hoaxes as well. The two may often seem indistinguishable, but the difference is that a hoax is a story or bit of misinformation that someone has made up on purpose to deceive other people."
Urban legends, which have recently begun being referred to as contemporary legends, are nearly impossible to trace back to an initial source. Emery said that for the most part, the stories usually have a "grain of truth".
"They grow out of a fact that someone misunderstood or a story they misheard but passed along anyway, then it gets embellished as other people tell it until the original basis for it is completely lost. It's like the kids' game of Telephone," said Emery.
But urban legends are not just a larger version of a children's game, nor do they exist purely for entertainment. The legends serve a larger social function.
"Urban legends give people a chance to talk about and share subjects that deeply concern them without having to reveal too much about themselves," Emery said. "It's a form of emotional release. We're all a little suspicious of strangers, and afraid of what might happen to us when we're alone in some isolated, unfamiliar place. So when we pass along a story about someone who had a close call with a murdering madman in a shopping mall parking lot, or about someone who had a drink with a stranger in a bar and woke up the next morning in a bathtub full of ice to find his kidney had been surgically removed, we're able to express this free-floating unease without coming right out and saying 'the world is a scary place'."
"On the basic level of a cautionary tale, urban legends serve as a reminder that bad things do happen to people sometimes, and we need to be aware of our surroundings and cautious in our dealings with strangers. The negative side to that is that urban legends always exaggerate the danger."
It seems that the advent of the Internet changed everything, and so not surprisingly, urban legends are not exempt.
"The Internet - e-mail in particular - has dramatically increased both the scope and speed of circulation," said Emery. "Before the Internet there were faxes, before faxes there were office copiers, and before copiers there was word of mouth. None of those could compete with the Internet.
"One reason there's so much hoaxing on the Internet is that it affords easy anonymity. It's almost impossible to track down someone who makes up a hoax and circulates it via email. The Internet has turned us all into gossips and rumormongers. People who would never even think of spreading rumors over the back fence or in a phone call to a friend will do so without hesitation when an urban legend or chain letter lands in their inbox. All they have to do is click the 'forward button'. It isn't convenience alone that makes us give in to temptation. It's the fact that we don't feel responsible for what we forward, because we didn't write it."
While there are several different kinds of urban legends, ranging from horrific to embarrassing or ironic, and Snopes.com - The Urban Legend Reference Pages has over 45 categories for legends, most attention is given to the legends that have an element of thrill.
"My favorite urban legends have to do with a close call with death," said Emery. "There are many of these, and most people are familiar with at least a few. I especially love the urban legend about the college girl who returns to her dorm room late at night and, not wanting to wake up her roommate, gets ready for bed in the dark and goes to sleep. When she wakes up the next morning she finds her roommate dead, horribly murdered, and sees the words, scrawled in blood on the wall, 'Aren't you glad you didn't turn on the light?'."
When it comes to urban legends, it's important not to believe everything you hear, see and read, regardless of who it's coming from. Luckily, along with helping the quick circulation of urban legends, the Internet also provides an easy reference for sourcing the origins of suspicious stories. Entering a few key words into Google will tell you pretty quickly that your friend who knows this guy who woke up in a bathtub of ice was probably just the victim of an urban legend.
For more urban legends, visit David Emery's list of The Ten Scariest Urban Legends at http://urbanlegends.about.com/od/horrors/tp/top10scariest.htm or visit Snopes.com.

http://media.www.brockpress.com/media/storage/paper384/news/2007/10/23/Focus/It.Happened.To.A.Friend.Of.A.Friend.Of.Mine-3051022.shtml