Top 10 Urban Legends About Kids

Amy S.F. Lutz — Tue, 13 May 2008 18:28:00 GMT

Urban legends are a lot less scary now, thanks to websites like Snopes, MythBusters, and Urban Legends & Superstition. It takes only a few seconds to find out whether forwarding emails will raise money for the Red Cross (it did, but not anymore), or whether kids ever died from falling on knives sticking out of open dishwasher doors (they have), or whether a serial killer ever lured female victims from their homes by playing a recording of a crying baby (nope).

But I'm sure many of us remember urban legends about kids that we found completely believable and utterly terrifying. Here are my top 10:

10. A drawbridge keeper had to choose between saving his young son or a train full of passengers.

False. OK, I'm guessing not too many people have ever found this Jesus parable - which has been circulating since the late 1960s - completely believable. In it, a man decides to let a train run over his son rather than derail the train and save his son by sacrificing all the passengers - just like God sacrificed his son to save mankind. Still, it gets credit for the gut-wrenching way it asks us to imagine the absolutely worst thing that could ever happen.

9. Parents late for a vacation left their baby in the crib knowing the babysitter was only a few minutes away; the baby starved to death when the sitter was in a car accident rushing over to the house and no one ever came to care for the baby.

False. I half-suspect this legend is responsible for the backlash against parents who leave their kids in the car for a few minutes while they pick up a prescription or drop off their dry-cleaning. Still, according to the website Urban Legends & Superstitions, this sad story is a complete hoax.

8. Webkinz are being murdered online.

False. I included this one because even in our enlightened, post-Snopes era, young kids are still vulnerable to the power of urban legends, and this was the first time I experienced that for myself. My first grader, Erika, reported that Webkinz were getting "their heads cut off" and refused to believe any arguments to the contrary, even when I assured her that I checked online for myself, and it just wasn't true.

7. Pokemon episode gave Japanese kids seizures.

True, but only a "handful." Although over 600 Japanese kids were reportedly rushed to the hospital with epileptic seizures induced from watching a particular 1997 Pokemon episode, only a few were actually diagnosed with photosensitive epilepsy. But even if you're one of those over-protective parents who think a few seizures from watching TV is a few seizures too many, Americans have nothing to worry about. According to Snopes, the offending scenes were removed from the episode, which anyway was never translated into English and will never air on American TV.

6. Saboteurs tamper with Halloween candy.

True, but rarely. Although I don't know a single parent who lets their kids eat the fruit or loose candy that inevitably finds its way into kids' loot bags every Halloween, the risk of actual tampering is very low. Snopes says there's never been a documented case of an actual razor blade being pushed into an apple, although several pins and needles have been found - most pranks perpetrated by friends or siblings of the victims. The worst injury reported was a few stitches.

5. Fake "tattoos" and stamps for kids are laced with LSD.

False. Although parents today are just as afraid as our parents were about kids falling under the prey of drug dealers, this famous tale from the 1970s has yet to be supplanted by a more modern version.

4. Drug dealers smuggle cocaine into the U.S. stuffed into the bodies of dead babies.

False. This gruesome story has been around for more than 20 years, and has been reported as fact in respected publications such as The Washington Post and The New Republic, but there is no record of this ever having occurred. Versions keep popping up with each shift in the war on drugs, with dead children allegedly being used to smuggle narcotics into the Middle East or over the Mexican-American border.

3. Kidnappers snatch young kids and disguise them to get past security.

False. No urban legend has ever gotten hold of my imagination like this one. According to Urban Legends and Superstitions, most versions of the tale take place in amusement parks or supermarkets, and they all involve a panicked parent who, desperately searching for his or her baby, happens to notice that the shoes on a sleeping child are the same shoes the missing child was wearing! It turns out that the clever kidnapper dyed the child's hair, changed the clothes, and drugged the child so s/he couldn't cry, but forgot to change the shoes.

As a teen, I just couldn't get over how fortunate it was that the mom noticed the shoes, and how narrowly disaster was averted. I vowed to always remember what shoes my kids were wearing, just in case.

2. Poor orphans are being adopted for use as organ donors.

False. This is a really new urban legend, dating to the beginning of this year. It spread so quickly because it was promoted by an actual website, medicaladoptions.com, which claims to offer thousands of orphans that can be adopted for "non-essential" organ transplants - complete with testimonials from satisfied customers. But the site is just a hoax, capitalizing on very modern fears about the current shortage of organ donors and the plight of children in some poverty-stricken areas of the world.

1. Mikey died from eating pop rocks and Coke.

False. This story defined the urban legend for most of us. We all heard it growing up, and we all believed it. But John Gilchrist, the actor who played Mikey in the ubiquitous Life commercials, is alive and well and working as an advertising-account manager for a radio station in New York. Too bad he can't collect a nickel for every time this legend was repeated, or he wouldn't have to work at all!

Strollerderby : mikey

Top 10 Urban Legends About Kids