E-mail Hoaxes: Old Stories in New Packaging

May 25, 2007— -- It's the campfire tale that haunts your sleep, the story that makes you peer into the back seat of your car before opening the driver's door on a dark night, or the reason you leave the kitchen while the microwave runs.

Dark, twisted, pseudoscientific and deliciously appealing, urban legends have become our version of modern day folklore, and with the aid of instant communication through e-mail and the Internet, they've taken on a life of their own.

Just ask Cpl. Jefferson Davenport at the Pennsylvania State Police Academy. An e-mail with Davenport's name attached that warned drivers not to flash their headlights at oncoming cars that didn't have their headlights on left his phone ringing off the hook and prompted an internal investigation by the Pennsylvania State Police.

Drivers might find themselves unwitting targets of a Bloods initiation game, the e-mail warned. The Bloods are a gang, and the story goes that new recruits would shoot and kill the first motorist that does them the courtesy of flashing the lights.

Unable to to keep up with the calls, Davenport ended up putting up a voice mail that told anxious callers, "If you are calling about the recent urban legend, it's not true."

Davenport had replied to someone who had e-mailed asking about the urban legend to tell the person it wasn't true, Pennsylvania State Police public information officer Linette Quinn told ABC News.

Davenport's e-mail was then altered to show only the description of the rumor and then forwarded. The rest is urban legend history.

"It's good that people are actually checking with us to see if the rumor is true," said Quinn. "But we've asked them to please delete the e-mail before forwarding it on."

No Longer Just Campfire Tales

"Most urban legends have some small basis in fact," Richard Newtson, a professor of sociology at Columbus State University told ABC News. "These stories play on our collective fears and prejudices."

The most recent version of the headlights legend follows the 1992 murder of a woman who was shot by two teenagers after flashing her lights at them. However, rumors that have connected the story to the Bloods have spread as far as Canada, the United Kingdom and Guatemala, where the gang is known by its Spanish name "La Sangre," according to Snopes.com, the leading Internet site for debunking urban legends.

"We used to tell these stories around the campfire so you could get a reaction from someone," said Newtson. "People like to see the reaction of the other people. They like to disgust or repulse. It's part of our human nature."

The difference now is the Internet, which has helped carry stories not just across campfires but across continents.

A rumor about deadly cell phone calls that started in Pakistan spread like wildfire across the country and to India, Bangladesh and Ghana. The urban legend claimed that calls that came from certain phone numbers were emitting high-pitched signals that could cause brain hemorrhaging and, in some cases, impotence in men and spontaneous pregnancies in women. Newspapers reported Pakistanis swapping stories about people they knew who'd died, and cell phone companies in Pakistan and Ghana had to issue statements discrediting the rumors, according to Snopes.com.

"The Internet has created an explosion in rumor mongering," said Dave Emery, the writer of the About.com's site on urban legends. "Many people who would never gossip over the back fence would do it in an e-mail because it is as simple as clicking a forward button."

Individuals don't feel as if the source of information is coming from them, so they don't feel responsible for spreading the rumors.

Legends to Hoaxes

While urban legends have in the past risen out of some real event and usually contain a grain of truth, technology and the Internet have ushered in a new era of urban hoaxing.

"I spend most of my time answering e-mails from readers who want help trying to figure out if something is true or not," Emery said.

Now what many people attribute to be legend is really just a downright hoax.

One of the most famous urban hoaxes of recent years involved an amber alert about Ashley Flores, a 13-year-old from Philadelphia who, it had been claimed, was missing.

Flores' friends had created a fake amber alert and posted it on her My Space page, and the alert took a life of its own.

E-mail chains about Flores are still one of the most popular Internet urban hoaxes, according to Emery.

A 2001 hoax about presidential IQs found its way onto the pages of the The Guardian in the United Kingdom, and another paper in New Zealand. The hoax claimed that the Lovenstein Institute had found that President George W. Bush had the lowest IQ of any American president. The hoax's creators went as far as to create a fake Web site for the fake Lovenstein Institute that touted the study's results.

The magic of Photoshop has also created a new trend of image hoaxes.

One of the most popular images sent around the Internet today is that of Hercules, the world's largest dog. A couple is seen walking a dog and a horse that rival each other in size.

Another famous image hoax: a shark leaping out of the water to attack a man dangling from a helicopter.

Same Stories, New Packaging

No matter where many legends arise, their goals are the same, according to Newtsome.

While technology can help create new hoaxes -- like the huge dog -- every one is a recycled version of an old theme. Doctoring images to create fantastical creatures is nothing new. The most famous picture ever taken of the Loch Ness monster was found to be a fake decades after it was published.

Davenport fell for one of the oldest urban legends/hoaxes in the book. E-mail messages like the one he received have been sent from the e-mail accounts of law enforcement agencies for years.

And that one about the cell phones … Newtson said it has been around since the early '80s, when scientists decided to investigate whether cell phone batteries could cause brain tumors.

Why do people fall for these stories again and again and again? Chalk it up to human nature.

"We think we know our world; we think we know technology, but we have an inherent distrust of it. We have faith in science, but we're just never 100 percent sure," said Newtson.

It's the idea that stranger things have happened. As long as we believe that, we've left the door open to the possibility that the strange, the fantastical or the rumor that pops up in our inbox just might be true.