Contemporary Folklore - Contemporary Urban Legends

Author: (American) Brinkhoff
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-01-01
Features: On April 20, 1982, the magazine Women's World published the following strange story: A strange incident happened to a working woman. One afternoon, she returned home and found her German shepherd having severe convulsions. She quickly took the dog to a veterinarian and then rushed home to prepare for a date. Just as she arrived home, the phone rang. It was the veterinarian, telling her that two fingers were stuck in her dog's throat. The police arrived, following the trail of blood marks to the front of her bedroom cabinet, where they found a young thief curled up in a ball—crying over the loss of his thumb and index finger. Jane Harold Brown Vance decided to investigate the story she called "the choked dog" and chronicled an exciting history of where and when this urban legend spread. He traced the story back to June 24, 1981, when the Phoenix New Times in Arizona published it. Columnist Ron Herzberg reported on it in the Atlanta Constitution on June 25, 1981. On July 4, 1981, the story reappeared in the Lincoln Daily News in Lincoln, Nebraska. AP reporter Jim Cronin investigated the story and reported it in the Oregonian in Portland on July 19, calling it nothing more than "a rumor that crossed the continent." Next, the "choked dog" story appeared in the St. Petersburg Times on August 19 and was reported in the Hamilton Spectator in Ontario, Canada, on December 1 under the headline "A Reporter's Tenacious Pursuit Reveals Some Reliable Facts." On December 31, 1981, it reappeared in the Paducah Sun and St. Joseph News-Press in Missouri. On February 3, 1982, in the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, Digby Dell recorded a slightly different version of the "choked dog" story and wrote a column about how he heard a friend tell this version at a party in Santa Barbara, who sounded as if the story had happened to a real person she knew. The story continued to spread from Palos Verdes to Long Island, and finally to San Francisco. P11-13