Virtual Lobby Display: Urban Legends

From roasted babies to vanishing hitchhikers to housewives in football helmets, this exhaustive and highly readable encyclopedia provides descriptions of hundreds of individual legends and their variations, examines legend themes, and explains scholarly approaches to the genre.

Never Try to Teach a Pig to Sing documents the thriving folklore tradition that circulates in the workplace, constituting a testament to one of the world's most prolific authors: Anonymous. The popularity of the items featured here is apparent by their reproduction in mass or popular cultural form, reminding us of the inevitable interplay between folklore and mass culture.

The nation's foremost expert on urban legends explores the spontaneous germination of these bizarre yet plausible narratives that play on the absurdities and prey on the fears of modern life. He pins down the qualities that give urban legends their air of authenticity and make them hard to believe yet impossible to dismiss.

A remarkably complete collection of the modern myths that make the rounds in offices, college dorms, and every other place where people tell the stories that spring from our deepest fears and fascinations.

What do a tale, a joke, a fiddle tune, a quilt, a jig, a game of jacks, a country cure, and a Halloween costume all have in common? Not much, at first glance, but they create the wide, rich collection of material we call folklore.

Bill Ellis explores the relationship between ordinary life and outlandish but oft-told legends. In multiple case studies legends become part of life. Officials take action in answer to each story's weird details, and people adjust their behavior to avoid or to experience aliens and ghosts.

Spine-tingling and funny, Hoosier Folk Legends is a collection of over 300 legends gathered throughout the state of Indiana. Ronald L. Baker includes ghost stories, stories of the evil eye, and stories of bloodstopping. He relates legends of Jesse James, Al Capone, and John Dillinger and tells the sad story of the ghost of Diana of the Dunes.

The book that launched America's urban legend obsession! Jan Harold Brunvand assembles the best-known urban legends - including "The Hook" and "The Baby-Sitter and the Man Upstairs" - and provides an enlightening and entertaining analysis of their variants and evolution.

Mariamne H. Whatley and Elissa R. Henken have collected hundreds of sexually-themed stories and jokes from college students in order to tell us what they reveal about our sexual attitudes and show us how they have changed over time.

Hey, did you hear the one about the lady who had her beehive hairdo sprayed so hard that spiders started to nest in it? Of course you did, it happened to your next-door neighbor's cousin. Or was it your cousin's next-door neighbor? Folktales are alive and kicking in urban legends, those stories that are told as true, but always as happening to a friend of a friend.

This text presents a collection of nearly 200 examples of the fake memos, pseudo mottoes and folk cartoons that are transmitted by fax, email and the Internet. It treats these examples of photocopylore as cultural artefacts recording folklore and culture in the post-print era.

Campion-Vincent does not dismiss organ theft tales as just another urban legend run amok. She offers a nuanced analysis of the connections between traditional horror tales, modern trends, and real events to show how complicated it can be to know the truth of any particular story.