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Recommended: Urban myths
The Backseat Murderer
A good urban legend is like a good movie. It unfolds perfectly and it appeals to the audience’s hopes, fears, and anxieties. The urban legend I am about to describe was told by a first year female biology major at the University. She is of Indian descent and both her parents work in the biotechnology field. I collected this story on a Sunday night in the dorm. The fact that it was nighttime helped create the proper mood for the story. It was told in a dimly lit dorm room. The story was told with an eerie tone of voice, with emphasis and excitement during certain parts. The final part of the story was told in a mysterious fashion, which helped with the delivery of the ending.
I heard this story a while ago from a friend. It starts out with a woman who is driving late at night in the middle of nowhere, trying to get home from a long road trip. She is exhausted and is having trouble staying awake and paying attention to the road. Next, the “low gas” light on her car comes on and the car needs gas. The woman doesn’t know where the nearest town or gas station is, but she keeps driving. Eventually she comes upon an old rundown gas station. She doesn’t want to stop there since it’s so quiet and she feels unsafe, but the car needs gas so she decides to pull in. An attendant walks out to help fill her car up with gas. He is very shady looking and creeps her out. She did not like the whole situation at all and felt very uncomfortable. As soon as he is done filling her car with gas, she pays him. Next, the attendant tells her he needs to talk to her inside. She refuses, but he keeps on insisting that it is very important. When she refuses again, he grabs her arm in an attempt to get her to come inside, but the wo...
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...er. She is unwilling to obey his requests. This shows society’s view of strangers and how they should not be trusted. However, the fact that she did not trust the stranger led to her ultimate demise. The overt moral of this story is don’t be quick in judging someone that you don’t know, they may be trying to help you.
Works Cited
Brunvand, Jan Harold. Too Good To Be True. New York: W. W. Norton, 1999. (pp. 97-100).
Joyce, Darrel A. “Modern Folklore: Cybermythology in Western Culture”. The AnthroGlove Journal. http://www.anthroglobe.ca/docs/cybermythology.htm
Mikkelsen, Barbara. “The Killer in the Backseat”. Urban Legends Reference Pages. http://www.snopes.com/horrors/madmen/backseat.htm
Smith, Paul. The Book of Nasty Legends. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983. (pp. 95-96).
Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. http://www.wikipedia.org.
Gould, Stephen Jay. The Mismeasure of Man. W.W. Norton & Company. New York, London. 1981.
Beetz, Kirk H., ed. Beacham's Encyclopedia of Popular Fiction. Vol. 5. Osprey: n.p., 1996. 5 vols.
Meyer, Michael. The Bedford Introduction to Literature. Ed. 8th ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2008. 2189.
Murphy, B. & Shirley J. The Literary Encyclopedia. [nl], August 31, 2004. Available at: http://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=2326. Access on: 22 Aug 2010.
...at if he was not revealing himself to her that there was a good reason for it. Since she knew this, she went along with his act and did not give him away. On numerous occasions she makes comments that would lead one to think that she doesn't know the identity of the beggar, but it is merely the fact that she is highly intelligent and is able to hide what she knows very well.
Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1988. 78, 89-95. pp. 89-95. Shear, Walter. A. “Peter Taylor’s Fiction:
Perkins, George B., and Barbara Perkins. "The Beast in the Jungle." The American Tradition in Literature (concise). 12th ed. Boston: McGraw-Hill Higher Education, 2009. 1148-1177. Print.
The World Book Encyclopedia. 2000 ed. : p. 78. Griswold, Rufus Wilmot. The "Scarlet Letter" The Library of Literary Criticism of English and American Authors. Ed.
After receiving a confession letter from the perpetrator of a mass murder, a retired detective decides he must solve the case himself before the murderer strikes again.
Greenblatt, Stephen, and M. H. Abrams. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. 9th ed. Vol. A. New York: W.W. Norton, 2012. Print
... sins, but she can’t take back what she did so she will forever have blood on her hands. This guilt and all of the lies she has told is giving her true trepidation and in the end she decided to end her terror by taking her life.
One of these urban legends deals with what happened to “two girls at some college.” A college student from University of Maryland, Baltimore County recites his tale about the murder of a young girl at an unnamed college. The storyteller is twenty, and currently lives in Rockville, Maryland. A Chinese-American student, he is majoring in the mechanical engineering field and “considers [himself] to be a normal guy.” Both his parents work in the restaurant industry. He told me the following story in a face-to-face interview:
10. The theme of the story is that people will do anything for their loved ones even though it means it will hurt other people that are innocent. The quote “How brave. How desperate. How insane. To keep her son from a manslaughter charge that might have turned into murder, she would scar herself and send another man to his death” (328) describes how Connie did everything she could to protect her son Neil, despite the fact that she would be hurting an innocent man. This theme is very true and applies in many situation where people are carelessly blamed from crimes that they didn’t commit.
Stump, Colleen Shea, Kevin Feldman, Joyce Armstrong Carroll, and Edward E. Wilson. "The Epic." Prentice Hall
Have you ever been scared for the safety of a complete stranger? Have you changed somebody’s outlook on life just by being a Good Samaritan? Well, I have. It was a late Thursday night and I was in a bad part of town informally known as “The Knob.” I had been at a friend's house when we decided to leave to find somewhere to eat. On the way, my friend got a call from his mom telling him he had to be home. His house wasn’t really out of the way. As I pulled down Belle Avenue, towards his house, another friend of mine shouts out “Hey, pull over that guy just knocked that girl out” I instantly questioned this absurd accusation. “What? You’re joking.” As I turned around I noticed that he certainly wasn’t as I saw a middle-aged lady facedown on the pavement. Without hesitation I parked the car and we all ran over to see what was going on. You could see in the distance a man in an orange hooded jacket fleeing the scene. My friend attempted to wake this lady up. She was out cold. At this point each one of us had no idea what we should do. Obviously, the first thing we should have done was call the police, but let me remind you this was a bad part of town and didn’t know if we would be the next. Tommy, my friend, the nearest house and knocked on the door. A trashy looking man answered the door. After being informed that there was an unconscious lady in front of his house he scurried to her aid. The man then realized it was a good friend of his. Jane was her name. You could sense his anger and concern for this lady. He began to frantically ask questions. Who, what, when, where, why, how and every other sort of interrogation question was thrown our way. We described her assailant and which way he went. Evidently it was her boyfriend. At this ...