Stuff You Should Know - Why do we believe in urban legends?

Episode Date: February 4, 2010

In this episode, amateur anthropologists Josh and Chuck discuss urban legends, from how they're defined to some classic examples you've probably heard yourself. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

It's time to reboot your credit card with Apple Card. Apple Card is designed to help you pay less interest. Unlike other cards, it estimates how much interest you'll owe and suggests moves to help you pay off your balance faster. Also, you can keep more of your money. Apply now in the wallet app on iPhone and start using it right away. Subject to credit approval.

Interest estimates on the payment wheel are illustrative only and may not fully reflect actual interest charges on your account. Estimates are based on your posted account balance at the time of the estimate and do not include pending transactions or any other purchases you make before the end of the billing period.

They're breaking in! From M. Night Shyamalan. Your family must sacrifice one of the three of you to prevent the apocalypse. We're not sacrificing anyone. This February. The last three times, for every note you give us, billions will perish.

This is so regional. Save your family. I'm on my family side. Or save humanity. No! Make a choice. Now, get the cabin. Only in theaters February 3rd. Read it R.

Under 17, at a minute without parent. Brought to you by the reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you? Welcome to Stuff You Should Know. From HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark.

There's Chuck Bryant. This is Stuff You Should Know. Let's get to the intro. Yeah, Jerry said we're wasting too much time at the beginning. Yeah, she said that she wished she had a third mic, so she could ask a question every once in a while so we could get to the intro.

Right, so what'd you have for lunch, Josh? I have not eaten lunch yet. Actually, I sent you. I had a Garadelli square chocolate with caramel inside, I'm sure. I had a baby baby roof. I ate a granola bar, courtesy of Discovery Channel. Thank you.

Yeah, raising D bar. I had a cherry Coke and... That's healthy, my friend. That's it. That's good. That's all I've had. I'm gonna live forever. I had a green apple and some almonds in green tea.

You were all about the almonds right now, aren't you? It's a superfood. That reminds me, I've gotta give you a recipe for roasted almonds. One of my friends told me last night it sounds really good. Don't you just roast them? Well, there's some other stuff mixed together.

It's an Alton Brown recipe. Oh, really? He's on the Alton Brown diet. I watched him eat a seaweed salad last night. Ooh, I love those. And I was just like, he's gonna weep at any moment. Jerry's so frustrated, right? She is, yeah.

Her calf muscles are about to burst out of her legs. Well, maybe we should send her to Vegas. No, no, no. I got something else. Oh, okay. Chuck. Yes. Did you know that National Gang Week has come and gone?

Is there such a thing? No. Oh, okay. That just ruined the whole thing. Well, Josh, tell me about National Gang Week. Okay. National Gang Week is when all of the gangs around the United States get together

and come up with a clever plan to murder unwitting and innocent people. So the Crips and the Bloods get together, one imagines with the Mongols and the Hells Angels and the Warriors. M14, M13. I'm gonna get shot in the head for this again. I know.

What is it? I can't remember. MS13? Sure. Man. Anyway, all the gangs get together and they come up with a plan that they're all going to perpetrate.

This year, this December, it was a baby, a fake baby, or possibly a real live baby, if they had any female gang members who were willing to give up their infant child for a little while. Right. In a baby seat on the side of the road, covered in blood, although uninjured,

just kind of doctored to look like they're bleeding, in an effort to trap female motorists who would inevitably stop. Female what? Motorist? Yeah, that. That's her spy. Curse my thick tongue.

The driver's by. Not to be confused with the drive-by, which is a gang activity. Sure. To trap female motorists who would stop and try to, see if the baby's okay, help it, and then out of the bushes come some gang members who beat and rape and murder her.

That sounds to me like an urban legend, Josh. Two. Two urban legends. Two police departments issued warnings about this. Really? This past December. It's so ridiculous.

When pressed about their sources, they both said, you know, actually, we can't verify any of this, so don't pass it along. It was just an idea somebody had. Yeah, you know, the other big gang, when I remember hearing this one myself, was if someone flashes their headlights at you, and you flash them back, then it's a gang,

and they'll turn around and follow you and kill you. The one I heard was if you see somebody driving without headlights on, and you flash, and they'll turn around and kill you. Yeah, that's what it is. As part of a gang initiation. So not true. No, it's not.

And what we're talking about, obviously, are urban legends, but more specifically, the article is called How Urban Legends Work. We decided to call this podcast, Why Do We Believe Urban Legends? Yeah. You know? Yeah, we'll get to that for sure.

Sure. I mentioned Vegas early on, though, because of the very popular old story that the man goes to Vegas, and he chats it up with a nice lady at the bar, and goes back to the room with her, and then he wakes up, dazed and confused, and a tub of ice the next day with a side hurting,

and with a note saying, call 911, and clearly his kidneys have been removed. Yeah, upon examination, his kidneys are removed. This actually gave me a moment of terror, Chuck, because if you remember in the Organ Donation podcast, we talked about a guy named Mohamed Saleem Khan, who had his kidney removed, and I thought, did we get taken

and pass long bad information? No, that's true, though. Thanks to Tom Sheave, right? Turns out Tommy was right. I went and double-checked his sources, and I saw a picture of the guy with like the huge sewn-up incision where his kidney was removed.

It was an ABC news story. Yeah, yeah, that was real. That is pretty much verifiable, right? But that story was around long before that happened to him. Yeah, and I think we even postulated that that urban legend gave rise to actual fact, right? Yes, yeah. And that does happen.

Sometimes life imitates art in the other way around. Sometimes it's something from a plot of a horror movie, or sometimes an urban legend is inserted into the plot of a horror movie, right? Like the Hook Killer. You want to tell that one? Well, yeah, that one's been around since the 1950s when teenagers first started going parking,

which is when they would drive out to Inspiration Point and make out and neck. And the story goes that they hear the story. It's always someone who's escaped from an insane asylum. Right. Who has a hooked hand. A hooked hand and then they hear someone scratching on the car and they don't do anything and they just leave

and they get home later and find that a hook is sticking into like the door handle. Right. Not true. No, and that and the Vegas one, the Vegas kidney one are considered cautionary tales, right? You have a very common hallmark of many urban legends that they are cautionary tales.

Right, and most cautionary tales also involves some sort of morality twist to them, right? Like in the most extreme cases, the guy who was in Vegas who was chatting with the girl was actually married and he went back to her hotel room. So the moral of the story is don't cheat on your wife, right? Or else something really horrible is going to happen to you. In the case of the teenagers in the 50s,

it was teenagers necking, as you put it, old man. And the moral of the story is don't have premarital sex, right? Yeah, shouldn't go park your car and do things like this. You shouldn't, no, nothing. Yeah. Right, so what's interesting about this is that urban legends reflect our own morality, our own values.

Our own fears many times. Think about that from the 50s to the 1990 when the first folklorist, I guess, chronicled that Vegas kidney story. In 40 years, it went from necking to cheating on your wife, right? And one could argue that our values had expanded like that or devolved to that same degree in that same period of time.

That's a good point, yeah. Did you hear a bunch of them when you were first going to college? When I look back on some of the stories I've passed along as fact, I couldn't be more ashamed. I heard these, I never passed them along. You didn't? Yeah, even if I didn't pass them along,

I believe some of them. Yeah, there's a couple of common ones. One is the be careful if you're in a dorm room and someone you don't know because you'll wake up every day and feel all groggy and like you've been taken advantage of for a very good reason because your roommate was knocking you out and performing indecent acts on you while you slept.

Sodomy? Not true. Very much an urban legend, as is if your roommate kills themselves, you get straight A's that quarter. Which, I have to say, forms the premise of one of the greatest Zach Morris movies of all time. What's that? Dead Man on Campus.

Dude, did you ever see that? No. That was a great movie. That was the plot, though? Yeah, that was the whole plot. He smokes a bong in that movie. It's kind of startling for having grown up on. Who's Zach Morris?

Saved by the Bell. Oh, is he? Is that his character name? Is that his real name? Yeah, I don't remember his real name. Oh, Zach was his character in Saved by the Bell. Yeah, Zach. He's the blond guy.

Zach, if you're listening, send us an email telling us your real name. No, we'll look it up in a second, so don't bother emailing. I prefer an email from him. OK. OK. So Chuck, like we said, that these things kind of tend to reflect our own morality, our own values.

And you said they reflect our fears. And that's absolutely true. There's a lot of urban legends. I would even say the vast majority of them have to do with some sort of fear, right? And that's one reason we pass them along, is because they resonate with us. We have loved ones in our lives.

There are people we care about, or at the very least, we're having a good day, and we don't want some stranger to fall into some horrible misfortune. So we pass these along. And if they're passed along to a person who maintains the same kind of fears, and maybe the same level of fears, and the same dopey believability,

they'll absorb them, fear them, and pass them along themselves. Sure. Many times it's also regionalized. So what may be, if you're in Seattle, it could be a neighborhood in Seattle where this happened. If you're in Atlanta, it could be Eastlake. So they get regionalized, and all of a sudden you think, well, it may not be true.

But I should tell my friends this on the internet, such as send an email out, just in case, because it's happening right here. Right. And because it's in a place that you can visualize, it has that much greater of an impact on you. Fear, once again. Sure.

I mean, if you can visualize your fear, you can fear even more. Yeah, good point. Thanks. That's going to be on my tombstone. Should we talk about some dead giveaways that you're, in fact, hearing an urban legend, and not the real thing?

Totes. It happened to a friend of a friend. That's the classic. Definitely. FOF is what they call it. And actually, if it happens to a friend of a friend, usually when you pass it along, you're not going to say a friend of a friend,

because you just immediately lost credibility right there. Yeah, yeah. So you're going to say it happened to my friend Chuck's friend, or it happened to Chuck's friend. You know Chuck. It happened to one of his friends, who neither one of us have ever met. Yeah, yeah.

Right? That personalizes it a little more, brings it home a little further. Or if I were a real liar, right, or really desperate for attention, I would say it happened to Chuck, even though Chuck told me it happened to a friend of his. But I'm just going to gloss over that part, because I really want you to believe what I'm saying.

Because if you believe what I'm saying, then I can more easily believe what I'm saying. Right. Right? And people innately want to believe their friends when they hear things. And people innately want to tell a good yarn. So couple those together, spin a good yarn,

and then is that what they're? It's called spinning yarn. They have kids call it. Put those two together, and you get urban legends. Yeah. I actually remember the first urban legend I heard. And my buddy Rad in Montana, my best friend in high school, actually lived with this Radford.

Radford, that's right. He told me, I remember this so distinctly, about the Eddie Murphy and the elevator. It used to be Reggie Jackson before that. The story is the lady gets on the elevator, and it's some African-American with his large entourage. Or a dog. It's a dog.

Oh, it's a dog. He has a dog. Yeah, it's the crux of it. Oh, OK. Well, let's see it changes. That's the hallmark of an urban legend, too. It changes per story. OK, sorry, go ahead.

Well, the lady will clutch her purse in fear. And then later on, she finds out it's at a hotel that her hotel stay was paid for. It's like courtesy of Eddie Murphy. We got the best laugh I've had in weeks, because we scared you. Oh, yeah. That's not how a mom told it.

How does your mom say it? She said that, and I think if I remember correctly, she told me that it had happened to a friend of hers, or someone she works with, friend. Well, that's what Rad said. I remember it was his mom, someone his mom worked with. Right. Well, in this case, it was Lionel Richie.

Or Reggie Jackson. I think the other variation I heard was Reggie Jackson or Lionel Richie. I never heard Eddie Murphy. Depends on what decade. But he's in there. They're in a very nice hotel that allows huge dogs. And the guy has a dog with him.

Sure, yeah. So he's even more intimidating. And the woman is trying to avoid eye contact, is scared clutching her purse, that kind of thing. And then all of a sudden, the guy goes, sit, lady. And then the woman sits down in the elevator. And the guy's like, I was talking to my dog. And then her hotel stay is paid for by Reggie Jackson,

or Lionel Richie, or Eddie Murphy, or one imagines P Diddy. Yeah, sure. Or Jay-Z. But if Rad, if you're listening, you lied to me, buddy. Way back when, when we were eating turkey sandwiches after school, you lied to me. I remember distinctly. And I'll never forget it.

So Josh, that was a lot of time to give up the one dead giveaway for another friend. It really was. So we'll go through some of these other ones quickly. Actually, we already did. There are many variations. That's a dead giveaway. The topic is one that is often on the news,

or one that people gossip about. Yeah, that's a big one. The Stuff podcast got a forwarded email about census workers. The census is about to happen. So now don't open your door unless they have a confidentiality agreement, and certain other things. Or else they'll murder you. Yeah, we got it this morning.

Oh, OK, was that what it was? Isn't that ironic? But that actually happened when the census worker, we thought, was killed, but it turns out it's a suicide. So oftentimes, it'll spin off of a real news story and get morphed. Yeah, which is kind of scary, because a lot of urban legends have been portrayed as fact in the news, the newspapers.

Well, that's another reason people believe them, is because they trust the news when they ought not. Which is sad, because really, frankly, you should take all news stories with a grain of salt. It's just some dude or chick reporting something. Trying to file a story. Just like we do, we get things wrong all the time. Clearly.

Why are you shaking your head? Just gave us away, dude. People know. We call ourselves out. But it's true. I think it's funny that we do that, and we need to do that, because in this day and age, pretty much our entire job, or at least a significant portion

of it, Chuck, is avoiding giving out false information. We have to go through and verify it, which is getting increasingly harder. Yeah, we try. We definitely do. We were talking about pop culture, and sometimes movies will work it in or the other way around in the movie Goodwill Hunting, remember?

They tell the story about the guy who gets pulled over by the cop because he's drunk, and then an accident happens, and the cop has to run to the accident, and the guy jumps in his car, goes home, the cop comes in next morning, and the guy denies that he was ever out drinking until he looks and notices that in his driveway he had jumped in the squad car by accident.

Right. Not true. Right. But it's an urban legend. It was in Goodwill Hunting. Right. The Simpsons. Which one?

You know how you always hear the story about a mouse in a Coke bottle? Remember the Simpsons when Barney and Homer visit the Duff Brewery, and the guy's on the line, Phil is on the line checking the bottles as they go by? He's like, good, good, nose, good, needle, and then he turns his head, and Hitler's head, it goes by in a bottle.

Yeah. That's a good one. Did you see the YouTube clip of Hitler finding out that Scott Brown won the Massachusetts Senate seat? I did. You sent it to me. God, that's good. Is that an urban legend?

Or did Scott Brown really win the Senate seat? He really did. I thought it was made up. There's a pretty, it's pretty much impossible to trace the origin of any urban legend, really. Yeah. No one ever knows where they come from. One of the reasons why is because it

follows oral tradition, or it used to, generally, right? Right, folklore. It is folklore. And it's actually studied by cultural anthropologists and folklorists, which I think is probably a subset of cultural anthropology. And the, hey, Dave, have you seen the Encyclopedia of Urban Legends?

No, I used to have a cartoon book, though, of Urban Legends. It was pretty cool. Nice. Well, the Encyclopedia of Urban Legends is fairly anthropological in nature. Yeah. It's a pretty thick tome. It's on Google Books.

You can check it out. But the author of it, Jan Harold Brunvan. Harold. Why are you doing this to me today? Are you talking to your mouth or to me? Both. OK. The author, Jan Harold Brunvan, kind of

laments that the internet has removed that aspect, the oral tradition, by digitizing it. Yeah, and now all you do is click forward. Right. And Brunvan suggests that the golden age of urban legends was the 60s or the 80s. Yeah. Although they've been around a lot longer than that, right?

Yeah, since the 30s and 40s, they said. I found even further back than that. Apparently, F. Scott Fitzgerald in the 20s referred to contemporary legends. Interesting. The critic took to mean the same thing as an urban legend. Sure. And then even before that, I think in the 1890s,

there was a French columnist who asked, do cities maintain folklore just as rural areas do? Interesting. The answer to that is a big fat yes, obviously. Urban legend. Yeah. So that's when they were actually called out as urban legends.

Like we said, it goes back centuries, tradition of folklore. Sure. Historians are big on verifying and writing things down, and folklorists tell stories with their mouths. Yeah, like we do. Right. That sounds like a t-shirt.

Folkloreists do it with their mouths. That should be. Yeah. And like you said, Chuck, these things go back centuries, if not further. And again, all legends reflect the feelings, the fears, that kind of thing in the culture at the time. So we're before in the pre-industrial age,

most fairy tales that had something bad happening to them were set in the woods, like Hansel and Gretel or Snow White or whatever. Yeah, yeah. These fairy tales were set in the woods because the woods were still very scary places filled with bandits and bears and scary monsters. Yeah, super freaks.

Yeah. One thing I thought was interesting is the famous website Snopes.com clearly can put it into a lot of these internet, if you're smart enough to go look at Snopes, these internet rumors that get started. But one thing I thought was interesting was, reading this article, is that Snopes evidently gets a lot of angry emails because people

want to believe their friends so much that their friends have not made this up, that they will email Snopes angrily and say, you're calling my friend a liar. This really happened. He said it happened to his best friend. And Snopes is like, I doubt if they even respond to those and that.

Send us your address so we can send a guy to come hit you with a tack hammer. Right, and I have some Swampland in Florida, I can tell you. Exactly. We were talking about the origins of these things, Chuck, right? Indeed.

Right. So folklorists, anthropologists, and pretty much any smart person can point to actual events that are maybe misinterpreted or expanded upon, become the source of urban legends, e.g. temporary tattoos laced with LSD. Right. That could have been birthed out of the real practice

of a chemist who make LSD would oftentimes put it on, or I guess still do, put it on like a stamp with a cartoon character. Yeah. And so that might have gotten confused with temporary tattoos. So the word spreads and all of a sudden, and what I love is that the story goes

is they give them these LSD tattoos to get the kids hooked on LSD, which is just silly. Yeah, it's not physically addicting at all, nor psychologically addicting. I doubt it. I imagine it's much more psychologically aversive than anything. Probably so.

I'm getting nostalgic. Halloween, lots of urban legends around Halloween. Yeah. With the tainted candy and the razor blades and the apple. You know what's crazy is we were talking about how the organ thief actually probably got the idea from the urban legend. There have been instances of people tainting Halloween

candy after the urban legend was around. Oh, really? Uh-huh. Interesting. Most of the ones that have razor blades, and I have to say this is from Snopes. Right. There's a pretty long article on Halloween candy

with razor blades and needles. But most of the ones that have actually been perpetrated were hoaxes, or they wanted to get attention, or something like that. But poison candy actually has come up many, many times around Halloween and non-Halloween days, the other 364 days, where kids have died. Apparently, yes, and this is not an urban legend.

Apparently, and I don't remember what state it was in, but a friend of a friend told me that a little kid died after getting into his uncle's stash of heroin. Awful. And so the family actually sprinkled his candy, Halloween candy, with heroin from the uncle's stash to protect the uncle to make it look like somebody had poisoned the kid with heroin.

And that really happened. It happened. Wow. What if Snopes is wrong about all this stuff? I don't know. I've had that horrible feeling before, horrible thought set upright in bed. You've been like, tootsie roll pops.

Like Snopes is just this one dude. He's a big fat guy in his program. He doesn't even bother research. He's just like, eh, we'll say this is true. He's like the wizard behind the curtain. That'd be pretty cool. I guess we should point out a few of these email urban legends just so you don't forward them around

to your friends and family. Be wary of anything free. Obviously, that's a dead giveaway usually. Well, that's just like the pigeon drop. Yeah, sure. Yeah. If anybody starts talking to you about money and you've never met them, you don't want to respond.

Right. Another dead giveaway, Josh, is if you ever get an email that starts with a line, if you forward this email colon, or if it says, this is not an urban legend colon, then it's probably an urban legend. Yeah. And then, of course, there is the famous Neiman Marcus

Cookies email, which I've actually received. I have received this one as well. I've never made them, have you? No, well, they're just regular old cookies. Tom Harris says they're delicious. Really? I think he made them for this article. That is research, pal.

Yeah, we'll detail this one. This is a very famous one. So back in, I think, the 90s, late 90s, there was an email that was sent around where it talked about the Neiman Marcus chocolate chip cookie recipe, which made some delicious chocolate chips, they say, or chocolate chip cookies. And a woman, apparently, asked for Neiman Marcus, somebody

at the store, to give her the recipe for the cookies. And they gave it to her, but they charged her for it. They said $250. And when she gets her bill later that month, she sees that they charged $250 instead of $2.50 for this recipe. The woman finds it outrageous. They contact Neiman Marcus, and they're like, well,

our cookies are really good. We're not going to refund your money. So she decided that to get them back, she would forward the recipe in an email to everybody. And spread it around to get back at Neiman Marcus. You were my crutch, Chuck. Not true, Josh. They didn't even make the chocolate chip cookie at the time.

In the 80s, it was Mrs. Fields, not Neiman Marcus. And before that, it was the Waldorf Astoria Hotels Red Velvet Cake. Take that, stupid people who believe forwarded emails. I'm sad to say, not only did my mom pass along bunk information with the Lionel Richie slash Reggie Jackson story, but my dad, I found out, is a birther.

Really? Are you kidding me? Yeah, he's not in any kind of structured or organized capacity. As a matter of fact, he wasn't even aware of the term birther. But he believed a forwarded email that was birther in nature. Which, again, that was a real occurrence.

There were people out there who wanted to see Barack Obama's birth certificate. You're claiming he was not born in this country is what that origin is. They said that his birth certificate was doctor that he was really born in Kenya, yada, yada, yada. And therefore, he shouldn't be president, right? But that has taken on a life of its own.

So out of this original idea, it's become an urban legend and a forwarded email urban legend, which are really the dregs of urban legend society. Yeah, because you're not even taking the time to spin a good yarn at that point. No, and that's why Brunevan was saying, like, it was best from the 60s to the 80s. You know, there's spider eggs and bubble

yum and cookhands hanging from car doors. And the calls coming from upstairs. And the great part about it was that everybody was personalizing it because it happened in Eastlake, or it happened in Peoria, Illinois, depending on where you are. And so it took effort. And there was personalization done to it.

And so people were engaging in oral folklore tradition without even realizing it. And it kept it alive and vital. Now it's just forwarding. That's it. Well, you and I remember clearly. I remember Rad lying to me in the 9th or, I'm sorry, 10th or 11th grade.

You remember your mom telling me stories? Like, I remember this specifically in his kitchen. I remember that day specifically. But I don't remember whatever Jack asked forwarded me. The gang headlight thing. Should we talk about a couple of real ones real quick before we wrap it up? Yeah, these are great, Chuck.

Chuck found some on cracked.com. And the more fantastic ones, we actually did go and double check with Snopes, the big fat guy who doesn't check anything, all right? Yes. OK, so Chuck, take it away. Well, one of them has happened recently is that the famous Halloween when there's all manner of Halloween

ones, like we said, where someone hung themselves in their yard. Yeah, what podcast did we talk about then? I can't remember. I can't either, but we definitely did. And the story goes that someone hung themselves and people thought it was a Halloween decoration. So the body stayed there for several days

until they realized it was real. And this actually really did happen. Yeah, and then there's the one about the couple who spend the night in a hotel room. And they can't figure out where the stench is coming from. And when they finally go downstairs to ask for their money back the next morning, the hotel management investigates and finds a dead body

under the bed. Yeah, apparently that's happened a bunch of times. Yeah, Kansas City, Atlantic City. Florida, California, it's very distressing. Yeah, and the cracked blogger makes a good point that in these cases and just about all of them, what's insane is that the people spent the night in the room the whole time almost invariably.

They're so great. Tell them the best one. Cracked is awesome. They're so funny. Yeah, I agree. I love that website. I know it's one of your faves. The Fun House Mummy.

This one is the best one ever. The myth is that a prop at a carnival was, I guess, in the scary Fun House was not a prop mummy, but it was, in fact, a real dead body. So if this story couldn't get any more fantastic, you're wrong, right? It's so great. Here's how the urban legend goes.

The crew for the $6 million man was filming an episode, and they needed a Fun House. So they went down to Long Beach to the New Pike amusement park, right? And there was a dummy hanging in the shot. And the director filmed the shot, apparently, and was like, I don't like that dummy. There's somebody get rid of it.

Some guy goes to grab it. The arm comes off, and they notice a human bone inside. Right? You thought, wow, that's pretty realistic. Yeah, and so they did a little more investigating and figured out that it was a real corpse, a mummified and balmed human corpse that was actually hanging in a Fun House.

True. Being that people took is a dummy, right? $6 million man. Chuck, is this true? It is true. Isn't that crazy? And it doesn't in there, because apparently the body, the undertaker, had done such a swell job

with the embalming process that he put this body on display for a matter of years. He could pay a nickel to come see this body. And then two guys that worked for the amusement park, or no, traveling carnival, disguised themselves as what? His brothers. His brothers to come claim the body. And they actually stole the body,

and it traveled around the country, eventually ending up in Long Beach. Yes, what's even more amazing is that we know whose body this is. Yes, we do. It was a bank robbing bandit named Elmer McCurdy, who lived out his violent career at about the turn of the last century, early 20th century.

He was killed in a shootout for $46 and two jugs of whiskey. And like you said, the undertaker did such a good job embalming him. He charged people in nickel to come look at this bandit. And that was that. So when they finally laid him to rest, I think in like 2006? Really? No, it couldn't have been.

No, no way. It would have been a couple of years after the $6 million man thing in 76. Right. OK. They supposedly put cement over his casket so that nobody could dig him up. And do the same thing all over again?

Yeah. Wow. Yeah. True story. Yeah. So Cracked actually has about 11 of them over a span of a couple of articles. And then I saw other sites that said they had real ones.

But again, you can't always believe everything. I don't know if I believe Cracked. No, that's why I went and checked it out at Snopes. And they had the same story, slightly different, but all the facts were the same, same names, same everything. Friend of a friend. Yeah. Is that it?

That's it, man. I mean, this is Urban Legends. Yeah, this could be an 11 hour podcast. Sure. But let's not make it that way. No. If you want to learn more about Urban Legends, you can look it up in the handy search bar

at HowStuffWorks.com. Chuck, it's time for Listener Mail. No, it's not, Josh. What? We are not going to do Listener Mail today because we are going to plug this thing like a finger and a dike. So Chuck, go ahead then.

If you're going to do that, let's do it. Well, first of all, we want to plug that the new science podcast that we've talked about for a while, and it is called Stuff From The Science Lab with our comrades, Robert Lamb, who you might remember from doing the rendition, the reading of the Jack the Ripper letter. Yeah, dear boy.

He doesn't do that voice in the podcast, unfortunately. Yeah. And Allison, they do a great job with sciencey stuff. Halivan either. And we're going to plug Strickland's podcast, TechStuff, even though he talks smack about us. He really does, doesn't he? We are going to plug Stuff You Miss In History class

with our colleagues. Now, Katie used to be Jane and Candice. Now, it's Katie and Sarah Dowdy full-time. They do a great job. Sure. And what else do we have? High-speed stuff. Yeah, Scott and Ben.

Scott and Ben do a great auto podcast. Very funny. Ben and Matt also do stuff they don't want you to know. Our video podcast on Conspiracies, which is awesome. Yeah, Coolest Stuff on the Planet is another great travel video podcast. Yep. And what are we forgetting?

Yeah, Sminty, our Sminty gals. Yeah, how could we forget Sminty? Did you see that email we accidentally got that was intended for them today? Yeah, a good email. Stuff Mom Never Told You, of course, is some people liken it to the female version of what we do. Yeah, they have a huge cult following to it.

They do. They're great. They're really funny. Yeah. Quality stuff. Oh, of course, there's Stuff Genius and Brain Stuff, both of which feature our esteemed founder, Marshall Brain. Yeah, and Stuff of Genius is really short.

And if you're into cool Monty Python-esque graphics, you'll like it. Yeah, and of course, there's the blogs. Always. You can just type in the blogs at howstuffworks.com. Right? Plugfest is over. Plugfest is over.

We haven't done it in a while. No. If you want to send us an email, we probably will do Reader Mail again, right? Starting next week. OK. If you want to send us an email on absolutely anything, you can wrap it up and send it to Stuff Podcast

at howstuffworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. Want more HowStuffWorks? Check out our blogs on the HowStuffWorks.com homepage. Brought to you by the reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you?

You're ready to travel in 2023. And since 1981, Gate One Travel has been providing more of the world for less. Let Gate One handle the planning for you with affordable escorted tours in European River Cruises. And right now, through January 30, use promo code HEART20 to receive 20% off your tour. That's promo code HEART20 through January 30.

Visit gateonetravel.com for more information or to book your tour. That's GateTheNumberOneTravel.com. Once again, use promo code HEART20 through January 30 to receive 20% off your 2023 trip. The South Dakota Stories, Volume 2. I could see beyond the Black Hills and the way they called for exploration.

I could feel the air, the way it paints against skin and fills hungry lungs. I could hear the way the water ran for miles and the way the bison grazed. The way our boots meet the earth as we step past expected. I could imagine my time in South Dakota and I wish to go back because there's so much South Dakota, so little time.