WiredWomen: Debunking Urban Legends

Nov. 7 -- Ironing your mail will kill the anthrax spores.*

Seven women have died from sniffing perfume samples they received in the mail.

And 4,000 Israelis didn't go to work at the World Trade Center Sept. 11 because they'd been warned in advance of the impending attack.

Believe this stuff, and I've got a bridge in Brooklyn I'd like to sell you. You and the tens of thousands of other Internet aficionados who can't keep your fingers off that "forward" button when you get yet another too-good-to-be-true tale delivered to your inboxes.

The stories are as creative as they are — OK, let's be honest about it — stupid. Osama bin Laden owns Snapple. Daisy the golden retriever rescued more than 900 people from the crumbling World Trade Towers. An Afghan man — who disappeared on Sept. 9 — warned his girlfriend not to go to the mall on Halloween.

But it's all true. Really. I'm not kidding.

Pass it on.

Spotting the Fakes

Sooner or later, somebody always passes it on to Barbara Mikkelson. She and her husband, David Mikkelson, are the Web's best-recognized debunkers of urban legends great and small. Owners of The Urban Legends Reference Pages, the couple spends most of its waking hours tracking down the truth — about Snapple, about Daisy, about all of those stories we'd love to believe. But shouldn't.

Traffic to the site — www.snopes.com — has increased tenfold since Sept. 11 — up to 2.5 million page hits a day. And Mikkelson is getting e-mails from people all over the world who want to know whether what they've heard, read, or seen is true.

Most of the time, it isn't.

Take, for example, the three biggest legends to come out of Sept. 11: Nostradamus, the Accidental Tourist, and Mall-o-ween.

Nostradamus is the 14th-century astrologer who is supposed to have predicted that World War III would begin with the fall of "two brothers," a reference to the World Trade Center towers. Problem is, the verse was written not by Nostradamus in 1654 (Nostradamus actually died in 1566, but let's not get distracted by details); it was authored by a student at Canada's Brock University in 1997. Neil Marshall offered the quatrain as an example of how a prophecy written in sweeping but vague language could be used to "predict" all sorts of events — including, as it turns out, the terror of Sept. 11.