Kidney Thieves Urban Legend

Losing Organs at a Party: The "Kidney Thieves" Legend and the Immigrant Experience

My family, most being first generation immigrants, has at times a slightly negative view of American culture. Because of this, many of the family dinner conversations are about the differences between American and Iranian cultures and often how the Iranian culture is better in some ways. To support this theory many urban legends are brought up that show the “dark side” of the American culture. For example, when the family was gathered together for the Iranian new year, a version of the famous legend about the traveler who was drugged and robbed of his organs in a hotel room was told by a family member. It is important to note that he told the story in Farsi, which means that I am translating and not merely re-telling the story verbatim.

The storyteller's version of the story was about an Iranian foreign exchange student who had recently come to the US. The story begins with the student, being alone in this country, going to a party he had heard of from other students. In the party, having had a few drinks, another “American thing” my family is against, he met a beautiful innocent girl who offered him a drink and asked to go to his place at the end of the night. The tone with which he described the girl was specially interesting, noting that even the innocent looking girls cannot be trusted. The story goes that the Iranian student did not remember anything from that point on until he woke up the next day in his bathtub covered with ice. There was also a note next to him telling him not to move and call 911. When the ambulance arrived at his apartment he was told that his kidney was removed and that he was not the first person this has happened to. To add to the accuracy and suspense of the story, the storyteller, a physician, mentioned how the ice was used to keep the student’s body cold to prevent excessive blood loss and inflammation, which was essentially what kept him alive. After being discharged from the hospital for a few weeks with a missing kidney, a big hospital bill, and having fallen behind his studies, the student found out that there is an organized ring of organ thieves who specialize in lonely foreign students, who are as the storyteller sees it, more susceptible to being seduced by girls.