Too Good to Be True: The Colossal Book of Urban Legends (31 page)

“‘Just to show that you’re in earnest, I’ll be celebrating holy communion at eight-thirty in the morning and I want you to be there.’ Then he went away.

“The next morning as the priest turned to administer the sacrament it was obvious that the man was not there and he wondered what he should do about it. After breakfast he decided he should see him again. He arrived at the mansion house, now still and quiet, and at his ring, the butler came. When he asked to see his master the butler told him he was dead. Mr. Gray said,

“‘It can’t be true. I was talking to him last night.’

“‘Yes, I know. I recognize you,’ the butler said. ‘He died shortly after you left.’

“Mr. Gray asked if he could see the body which he knew must still be in the house, and the butler took him up to a very spacious room. There, lying on the bed, was the dead body of the man he’d been talking to the night before. He stood for a moment thinking, trying to puzzle it out and, as he did so, he glanced around the room. His eye caught an oil painting above the bed. It was of a little old lady in a poke bonnet and shawl—the same little old lady who had come to him and had sent him to this house. He said to the butler,

“‘Who is the little old lady?’

“‘That is the master’s mother. She died many years ago.’”

From Helen Creighton’s 1957 book
Bluenose Ghosts,
pp. 185–87. This text shares the “portrait identification” motif with many versions of “The Vanishing Hitchhiker.” A variation of the “Ghost in Search of Help” legend in which the messenger is the spirit of a young girl seeking medical attention for her gravely ill mother has long been associated with Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell (1829–1914), a prominent Philadelphia physician; in fact, the evidence is convincing to suggest that Dr. Mitchell himself had told the story as a personal experience, although whether intended as a hoax or to be taken seriously is not perfectly clear. The Mitchell version has been frequently embellished and often reprinted, including in the Reverend Billy Graham’s 1975 bestseller
Angels: God’s Secret Agents.
In my 1999 book
The Truth Never Stands in the Way of a Good Story,
I devote a chapter to “The Folklorists’ Search for the Ghost in Search of Help for a Dying Person.”

“The Well to Hell”

S
cientists are afraid that they have opened the gates to hell. A geological group who drilled a hole about 14.4 kilometers deep (about 9 miles) in the crust of the earth, are saying that they heard human screams. Screams have been heard from the condemned souls from earth’s deepest hole. Terrified scientists are afraid they have let loose the evil powers of hell up to the earth’s surface.

“The information we are gathering is so surprising, that we are sincerely afraid of what we might find down there,” stated Mr. Azzacov, the manager of the project to drill a 14.4 kilometer hole in remote Siberia.

The geologists were dumbfounded. After they had drilled several kilometers through the earth’s crust, the drill bit suddenly began to rotate wildly. “There is only one explanation—that the deep center of the earth is hollow,” the surprised Azzacov explained. The second surprise was the high temperature they discovered in the earth’s center. “The calculations indicate the given temperature was about 1,100 degrees Celsius, or over 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit,” Dr. Azzacov points out. “This is far more than we expected. It seems almost like an inferno of fire is brutally going on in the center of the earth.”

“The last discovery was nevertheless the most shocking to our ears, so much so that the scientists are afraid to continue the project. We tried to listen to the earth’s movements at certain intervals with super-sensitive microphones, which were let down through the hole. What we heard, turned those logically thinking scientists into a trembling ruins. It was sometimes a weak, but high pitched sound which we thought to be coming from our own equipment,” explained Dr. Azzacov. “But after some adjustments we comprehended that indeed the sound came from the earth’s interior. We could hardly believe our own ears. We heard a human voice, screaming in pain. Even though one voice was discernible, we could hear thousands, perhaps millions, in the background, of suffering souls screaming. After this ghastly discovery, about half of the scientists quit because of fear. Hopefully, that which is down there will stay there,” Dr. Azzacov added.

Translated from
Ammenusastia,
a newspaper published in Finland.

This article was published in the February 1990 issue of
Praise the Lord,
a publication of Trinity Broadcasting Network; the odd style and punctuation of this report may in part stem from its translation from Finnish. Variations of this story were widely repeated among evangelical Christians in sermons, broadcasts, and publications. When a caller to his daily talk-radio program based in Los Angeles asked about “The Well to Hell,” host Rich Buhler tried to track it down. His search, reported in the July 16, 1990, issue of
Christianity Today,
revealed that the “respected Finnish scientific journal” mentioned in some versions was merely a newsletter published by a group of Finnish missionaries. A trail of oral and printed sources eventually led Buhler to a Norwegian schoolteacher who claimed to have fabricated the whole story. An article by Soviet geologist Y. A. Kozlovsky on “The World’s Deepest Well” in the December 1984 issue of
Scientific American
may have inspired both the idea of an ultradeep drilling operation in Siberia and possibly the name “Azzacov.” A story in the tabloid
Weekly World News
for April 7, 1992, claims that a similar incident happened in Alaska two years later, killing three oil workers and releasing a huge cloud shaped like the head of Satan. This article includes a photograph of the cloud and of “Dr. Dmitri Azzacov,” who appears remarkably cheery for a man who has had to face such terrors
—twice!

“The Ghostly Videotape”

C.G.K. [folklorist]: Tell me what you heard about
Three Men and a Baby.

Virginia: We saw it!

Kim: Oh yeah, the ghost.

Virginia: There’s a young boy standing behind the drapes.

Kim: Yeah, Ginny’s got the tape. We can show it to you.

Virginia: They say that the apartment where they filmed the movie, that that boy lived there.

Kim: The lady that rented the building out to them to make the movie, her son shot himself there.

C.G.K: Shot himself?

Virginia: They say in another part of the movie you can see the rifle that they didn’t know was there, the gun he used.

C.G.K: Did you see the gun?

Virginia: We haven’t looked yet.

Kim: The only reason I saw the boy is because somebody told me exactly where it was. I never saw it. I watched like three times before that, and I never noticed. You can see him real clear. I don’t see how I missed it.

C.G.K.: What does he look like?

Virginia: He looks like about a thirteen-year-old, fourteen-year-old boy.

AP/Wide World Photos

Kim: He was about thirteen, and he had dark hair, and he was standing there was like a window, and he was standing in the curtains—like standing in between the curtains. They interviewed Ted Danson, and they asked him what he thought about it. He said it scared the shit out of him. He said that he didn’t notice it. He didn’t see it there until they were watching the movie.

C.G.K.: How did it get past the editors?

Virginia: That’s what was weird about it. They didn’t see it when they edited it.

Kim: The mother of the little boy saw it, and she said that’s him.

Virginia: Do you think it’s a plant?

Kim: It can’t, well it might be.

Virginia: What I don’t understand is, though, why the people at the movies didn’t catch it. First run, nobody ever caught it. Nobody ever noticed it.

Kim: I didn’t catch it. I watched it a bunch of times, and I didn’t see it until somebody told me it was there. It’s just like in the background. I can see how they missed it. But he’s just staring at them. I mean I turned the movie off. I turned it off, and I came downstairs with everybody else because I was watching it up there [laughter].

C.G.K.: You can see his face?

Kim: Yeah. Clearly.

From Charles Greg Kelley, “Three Men, A Baby, and a Boy Behind the Curtain: A Tradition in the Making,”
Midwestern Folklore,
vol. 17, pp. 6–13; this is text “L” on pages 12–13, “Collected from Virginia Jamison, an art supply store manager, and her daughter Kim, a high school senior. Birmingham, Alabama. November 17, 1990.” This transcription of an interview is a fine example of the “discussion” mode of transmitting urban rumors and legends; nobody actually “tells” the story, but instead they talk it over. In the summer of 1990, shortly after the 1987 film
Three Men and a Baby
was released on videotape, people noticed a shadowy figure looking like a young boy that appears briefly in the background of one scene. Videotape allowed viewers to search for and freeze the frame with the image, options not available in a movie theater. The rumor quickly spread that it was the image of a boy who was killed or committed suicide in the apartment in which the scene was filmed. The film’s producers, the Touchstone Pictures division of the Walt Disney studios, explained that the image was a cardboard stand-up cutout of actor Ted Danson and that the New York City “apartment” was actually a sound stage in Toronto. In further versions of the story, new details emerged, including the suspicion that the “ghost” may have been planted as a publicity ploy by the film’s distributors. Some people also claimed to have seen the boy’s mother interviewed by Barbara Walters on
20/20.
Another factor to consider is that spectral images in photographs have been described in traditional legends almost since the invention of photography. In some strange way this old motif was recycled to fit a new situation.

“A Dirt-Cheap Way to Sell Real Estate”

H
e outsells his closest competitor, the Blessed Virgin, five to one at the downtown Tonini Church Supply Co. He is sought by people who can’t tell a scapular from a rosary.

He is St. Joseph, the patron saint of family and household needs—and underground real estate agent.

More and more Louisville-area home sellers and agents are burying statues of St. Joseph in yards and asking for his intercession to bring buyers. The practice—which is popular in Chicago and on the East and West coasts—is spreading locally by word of mouth.

“It’s gone crazy. We can hardly keep the statues in stock,” said Bill Tonini, vice president of the firm that calls itself the largest religious-goods supplier in the South. “A lot of real estate agents swear by it.”

Tonini said that each week he sells 250 to 300 statues of St. Joseph, who was a carpenter by trade. Tonini carries the statues in several sizes and materials, ranging in price from $1 to $8.

The saint’s popularity has even spawned a mail-order firm in Modesto, California, that sells a 3 1/2 inch plastic statue and burial instructions for $8. Karin Reenstierna, co-owner of the firm, Inner Circle Marketing, said her company has sold more than 4,000 of the statues since December.

According to Reenstierna, the practice of burying the saint’s image began centuries ago in Europe, where nuns buried their St. Joseph medals and prayed for more land for their convents….

The Roman Catholic Church has no official stance on the practice of burying saints for commerce, according to Rosemary Bisig Smith, director of communications for the Archdiocese of Louisville.

But after consulting with several priests, Smith said, “We certainly don’t mind having this personal devotion to St. Joseph, we are concerned about people using this practice for personal profit.”

Reenstierna instructs her customers to bury St. Joseph head first with his feet toward heaven and his face toward the street. He should be wrapped in plastic and placed near the “for sale” sign.

To prod St. Joseph into action, sellers are instructed to say the following words over the saint before shoveling in the dirt: