Urban legends

• Plastic-wrap rumor still clinging to its tale

By Michael Tsai
Advertiser Staff Writer

Illustration by Martha P. Hernandez, The Honolulu Advertiser

The urban legend involving a woman at the beach and spiders is reminiscent of an episode of "The Brady Bunch" shot in Hawai'i. Advertiser library photo • Sept. 16, 2002

She is somehow unaware that a large, hairy spider has made it up her back and along her shoulder. Unaware, that is, until she feels a searing pain in her neck. She screams and bats the hairy bugger away.

Over the next several days, a large, painful boil develops on the woman's neck. She visits a doctor, who decides to pop the boil to relieve the pressure. It's a simple procedure, he assures her. However, when the boil is lanced, out bursts ...

Hundreds of baby spiders!

(Pause for screaming.)

This, gentle readers, is what you call an urban legend — a sometimes humorous, often horrifying tale that appears spontaneously in a region or community, playing off persistent fears and anxieties, hopes and aspirations.

Increasingly recognized in academic circles as a dynamic representation of the nation's collective psyche, urban legends, particularly in the past few years, have come to be more narrowly defined. Though they sometimes blend, especially in Hawai'i, urban legends are usually distinct from ghost stories or spiritual folk tales, which often follow traditional cultural modes of telling.

Sometimes the urban legend is based on something real; often it isn't. Sometimes it appears as a warning against grave personal danger; other times it's an invitation to share in some top-secret skinny.

Above all, urban legends, like language, are constantly evolving, constantly integrating new cultural codes and signifiers.

Thus, a really good urban legend has more lives than John Travolta's career, reappearing over the course of decades in different locations, each time bearing an up-to-date set of particulars.

Our spider story, for example, is just the latest variation in an urban legend that has spanned 20 years, multiple time zones and several cast changes. In one version of the tale, it's a young man who gets bitten by a scorpion while trekking in a South American jungle. In another, it's a middle-aged woman, a scorpion and a cabana in the Caribbean. There's even one involving a woman, a lobster and a bathtub. We'll spare you the details.

Urban legends survive on the tenuous threads of plausibility that connect them to their receiver. As outrageous and improbable as the spider story may sound, there is enough there — enough to hook a cooperative imagination, at least — to make people want to believe in it and, more importantly, to repeat it.

Characteristic of many urban legends, the spider story combines the everyday (a day at the beach) with the grotesque (a human body incubating a brood of spiders). As noted by Floyd Matson, a University of Hawai'i professor emeritus of American studies, many such stories also come with a lesson or moral.

Depending on how much you care to read into the spider story, it could be said that the woman's inattentiveness (or, at worst, her suggested sexual promiscuity) is at the root of her eventual problem. In other versions of the story, it is an outsider's intrusion into a native space that brings about nature's poetic response.

The location of the story in Hawai'i is curious but perhaps not incredible to people outside the state. The chances of a large, hairy spider prowling Waikiki Beach is almost as unlikely as the spider's young being implanted — much less surviving — inside the woman's neck.

In fact, the image of a hairy spider crawling on a Hawai'i tourist seems reminiscent of the infamous "Brady Bunch" episode in which a tarantula menaces Peter in his hotel bed.

Yet, because Hawai'i is still perceived as "exotic" (that is, a place of untamed nature) to some outsiders, the setup could seem plausible.

In fact, Hawai'i's geographic isolation, multiethnic population and position as a contact zone between tourists and "natives" make it a prime locale for urban-legend making.

The 'local' angle

One long-lived urban legend has recently been transposed from similarly "exotic" Jamaica to Hawai'i.

In a version of the story circulated on e-mail this year, a couple of tourists staying at a local hotel are puzzled when they develop their vacation film and find a picture of two "locals" in a hotel room mooning the camera.

Somehow visible in the picture are toothbrushes placed between the buttocks of each of the men.

The tourists quickly realize that the room in the background is their own — and so are the toothbrushes.

Unlike some transposed urban legends in which the location is irrelevant to the story (the murderer disguised as an old lady who asks a woman for a ride at Ala Moana Center, for example, or the hypodermic needle filled with AIDS-infected blood hidden in the cushioned seats of the Waikiki Theaters), here the story's location in Hawai'i is central to the underlying dynamic.

The legend plays off one of the most basic traveler anxieties: The locals hate us.

Another story that has been circulating since 1999 has more than a grain of truth. It concerns a stock clerk in Maui cleaning up a storage room that is badly soiled with rat droppings. Within a few days the worker falls seriously ill and is rushed to the emergency room at Pali Momi, where he dies of organ failure. (Another version of the story has someone in Hawai'i dying in a similar fashion after drinking from a soda can contaminated by rat urine.)

According to the state Department of Health, a man on Maui did indeed die from complications of what was initially suspected to be hanta virus. However tests for that disease, and other communicable diseases, turned up negative. The man's death was ultimately attributed to "pre-existing conditions." According to the department, there has never been a confirmed case of hanta virus in Hawai'i.

Various permutations of the story have placed the worker in Mexico, East Los Angeles and various American Chinatowns. The implication, it would seem, is that such areas are "dirty" and therefore dangerous. Even the Maui version, based on a half-truth, persists in part because Mainland listeners can suspend their disbelief envisioning the story in a place remote from their everyday experience, where unlikely things may occur.

The existence of hanta virus and its possible presence in rat or mouse droppings (if the animal is infected with the disease) enhances the story's credibility. If a stock clerk could contract the disease through such an exposure, couldn't the danger then translate to the listener's immediate environment?

There's the hook. True to type, this story takes a contemporary anxiety (in this case a disease that received recent media attention), supposes a worst-case scenario and implies a link back to the listener.

This particular story, like others of a similar vein, usually comes with call to actions along the lines of: "Tell all your loved ones about this very real threat." The version about the contaminated soda can warns people to always wash their cans before drinking or pouring.

A life of their own

Some urban legends are created innocently by people passing along stories that they believe hold some sort of valuable information.

With the broad reach of the Internet, these stories can take on a life of their own as people retransmit them with flourishes designed to make them more seem urgent or credible.

"The details — the names and places — all lend an air of plausibility," Matson says.

Crime legends, in particular, tend to travel quickly.

An expansive batch of urban crime legends involve supposed gang rituals. Often, these stories substitute the exotica of distant lands with the arcana of urban gang culture. One widely circulated story says that young men seeking entry in a popular L.A. gang would drive around with their headlights off, hoping to gain the attention of well-intentioned drivers. The first driver to flash their lights as a courtesy gesture would be shot as a rite of initiation.

Another initiation legend involves kids throwing rocks and bricks at cars from freeway overpasses. According to Urban Legend Zeitgeist and other online urban legend sources, the story originated in Los Angeles in the late 1980s and has been transposed to cities nationwide ever since.

In some rare instances, the line between urban legend and reality is rubbed completely away. Five years ago, the rock-throwing story made its way to O'ahu via an e-mail warning. Shortly after, a number of incidents involving rocks and bricks thrown from overpasses in Kalihi and Waipahu were reported.

Ultimately, Matson says, crime stories and other urban legends tend to reflect popular perceptions of what is happening in society.

"The general culture is represented in popular culture, and these types of urban legends and stories would seem to reflect a new interest in violence and a kind of cruel indifference, a kind of meanness, that is prevalent these days," Matson said.

Plastic-wrap rumor still clinging to its tale

You could call Edward Fujimoto an urban-legend legend.

In January 2002, Fujimoto, then director of Castle Medical Center's Wellness and Lifestyle Medicine Department, appeared on a local news broadcast to talk about the potential dangers of "persistent organic pollutants" in plastics.

Fujimoto also mentioned, briefly, the possibility that plastic wraps could emit a small amount of harmful gas under certain extreme heating conditions.

That part of Fujimoto's discussion apparently caught the attention of someone in Hawai'i who felt compelled to share the information — via e-mail.

The e-mail, containing a rough summary of Fujimoto's comments, went out into the ether.

Once in circulation, it was copied and retransmitted, over and over again.

As the e-mail was passed along, it was also liberally edited and embellished, until it seemed Fujimoto was on a crusade against the dioxin content of plastic wrap.

"By my estimation, this message circled the world 20 times," said Fujimoto, now a professor of public health at Loma Linda University and coordinator of its preventive care program.

And it's still circulating.

About a dozen urban legend Web sites list some version of Fujimoto's supposed "warning" about deadly consequences of using plastic containers or plastic wrap in the microwave.

Fujimoto admits he's a little irritated that such a broad, complex issue has become, through dozens of generations of pass-it-on e-mails, disturbingly oversimplified and distorted.

"One message has me saying that it's dangerous to freeze plastic," Fujimoto said. "I've never said anything like that, ever."

Nevertheless, it is Fujimoto who has come under fire for these spurious claims.

In January, Fujimoto participated in a high-profile conference on dioxin and other persistent organic pollutants, hoping to stanch the flow of misinformation attributed to him. (Fujimoto does maintain that people should be aware and wary of the "leaching out" of these persistent organic pollutants from plastics.)

But still the erroneous e-mails keep flying.

"I don't let it bother me," he says. "It's amazing, really. Once it's out there, there's just nothing you can do."