QUESTIONS - Horror - http://maxpages.com/folklore/what_are_urban

Q: What exactly are urban legends?
A: Urban legends are popular narratives alleged to be true, transmitted from person to person by oral or written communication (including fax and email). Said stories always involve some combination of outlandish, humiliating, humorous, terrifying, or supernatural events – events which always happened to someone else. For credibility, the teller of an urban legend relies on good storytelling and the citing of an "authoritative" word-of-mouth source (typically "a friend of a friend") rather than verifiable facts. And sometimes, but not always, there's a moral to the story, e.g.: "behave yourself, or bad things will happen."

Urban legends are a type of folklore – the traditions, stories, and beliefs of "the folk" – ordinary people. So, one way to differentiate between urban legends and other types of narratives is by examining where they come from and how they are spread. Legends are rarely traceable to a single source, e.g. a book or a television show – in fact, most often they seem to spring from nowhere. And again, urban legends are primarily spread person to person, not through the media or other institutional forms of communication. That's why no two versions of an urban legend are ever exactly alike – there are as many variants of a story as there are tellers.

Q: Okay. But what does any of that have to do with urban?
A: Don't take the phrase so literally! While it's true that the phenomena known as "urban legends" are more accurately referred to as "contemporary legends," the more popular term picturesquely differentiates between latter-day folktales and their traditional, mainly rural antecedents. It makes a better catchphrase, too.

Q: How long does it take for a story or a rumor to become a legend?
A: Ever since the advent of the Internet as a popular means of communication... a matter of mere days. The Kurt Vonnegut hoax of 1997 is a standout example of how rapidly in the modern age a false belief can spread, be found out and debunked, and end up canonical. It's amazing, really.

Q: Do urban legends ever turn out to be true?
A: Every now and then.

Q: Does that disqualify them as urban legends?
A: Not necessarily. Keep in mind that by definition, urban legends are well-known, propular stories. As such, they develop fairly set narrative structures and obligatory details that survive, even while subtly changing over time, through repeated tellings. As long as these factors apply, an urban legend doesn't lose its folkloric status simply by being proven true.

Q:Why do people beleive urban legends?
A: Okay, okay. Surely there are a lot of factors, but, to name one, I find myself wondering sometimes if we as human beings aren't simply storytellers – and story believers – by nature. Maybe we're "hard-wired" in some way to wax credulous in the face of a well-told narrative, even when it contains doubtful elements.

It does seem to be the case that we're naturally inclined to interpret the world in narrative terms, in spite of how few events in real life really unfold in a manner resembling a coherent storyline. Maybe this is a psychological survival tactic. After all, there are a lot of horrifying, absurd, incomprehensible things we have to reckon with during this short sojourn on earth. Perhaps one of the ways we cope and stay "sane" is by interpeting life as a story, or a collection of stories, with ourselves as the protagonists.

Clearly, at any rate, we wish life would unfold that way, and folklore offers some fulfillment of that desire – which is probably also why we like to tell stories we only half-believe in. It's wish-fulfillment, in a way

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Page Updated Thu Jul 4, 2002 1:06pm EDT