Too Good to Be True: The Colossal Book of Urban Legends by Jan Harold Harold Brunvand Page A
Authors: Jan Harold Harold Brunvand
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He started the engine and gunned it, driving straight at the intruders as fast as he could make the little car move. The bikers slashed at the car with their chains and grabbed at it with their hands as it sped past, but they were shaken off by the speeding Bug.
Gaining the safety of the main highway, the couple stopped to look for possible damage to their car. They saw, either:
Version A: Four severed fingers stuck in the air vents at the back of the car, cut off by the cooling fan.
Or:
Version B: A chain with four severed fingers caught in the chrome trim on the car.
Sent to me in 1987 by a reader in Reading, England, who was careful to point out that Hell’s Angels are uncommon in England, that the air vents on a VW Beetle are too small for fingers to get through, and that other compact cars are much more common in England than VW Bugs ever were. Other readers pointed out that the Renault Dauphine model of the late 1950s and early 1960s did have wider rear ventilation slots. “The Severed Fingers” has, indeed, been documented back to 1960 in England, although usually without a specific car model mentioned. The story is also popular in Australia, where it was enacted in the 1979 film Mad Max. In 1988 Phil Twyford, an Auckland, New Zealand, journalist, gave me copies of two versions sent to him after he published an article about modern legends. One of these had the fingers caught in the door frame of the car, while the other had them stuck in a bicycle chain that was caught on the “boot handle.” The chain version seems to be better known in the United States. This legend is similar to “The Hook,” and also to “The Robber Who Was Hurt,” quoted in Chapter 15. Other severed fingers appear in “The Choking Doberman” (Chapter 2) while a severed head occurs in the next legend.
“Decapitated Drivers and Riders”
H eads, heads—take care of your heads!” cried the loquacious stranger, as they came out under the low archway, which in those days formed the entrance to the coach-yard. “Terrible place—dangerous work—other day—five children—mother—tall lady, eating sandwiches—forgot the arch—crash—knock—children look round—mother’s head off—sandwich in her hand—no mouth to put it in—head of a family off—shocking, shocking!”
Bill Tidy
A classic WTS [Whale Tumour Story] tells of an extraordinary incident on the East Lancs Road (A580) [the highway number]. Apparently, a motorcyclist was riding behind a lorry which was carrying a load of thin steel plates. He decided to overtake the lorry, but as he moved out towards the centre of the road, one of the steel sheets became dislodged and decapitated him. However, his momentum carried him alongside the lorry, the lorry-driver glanced from his window, saw the headless motorcyclist passing, had a heart-attack, ran off the road and was killed.
The first story is told by Alfred Jingle in Chapter 2 of Charles Dickens’s The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club (1836). The second, the modern automobile version of the former, is from Rodney Dale’s The Tumour in the Whale (1978), p. 148. Although Dale’s term “Whale Tumour Stories”—referring to a specific World War II British legend—never caught on as a name for such apocryphal anecdotes, his coinage “FOAF” became a standard reference in UL studies to the claimed sources of these incidents. In other versions of the decapitated motorcyclist story, the truck driver not only dies himself in the crash, but his truck plows into a crowd of people at the roadside, killing many more. In American variations on the theme of vehicular dismemberment, it may be a dog that loses its head while riding in a car with the window open, ears flapping in the breeze. The loss of Rover’s head is so quick and neat that a child sitting next to it in the back seat continues to pet the dog for several miles before the tragedy is discovered.
“The Killer in the Back
Gaining the safety of the main highway, the couple stopped to look for possible damage to their car. They saw, either:
Version A: Four severed fingers stuck in the air vents at the back of the car, cut off by the cooling fan.
Or:
Version B: A chain with four severed fingers caught in the chrome trim on the car.
Sent to me in 1987 by a reader in Reading, England, who was careful to point out that Hell’s Angels are uncommon in England, that the air vents on a VW Beetle are too small for fingers to get through, and that other compact cars are much more common in England than VW Bugs ever were. Other readers pointed out that the Renault Dauphine model of the late 1950s and early 1960s did have wider rear ventilation slots. “The Severed Fingers” has, indeed, been documented back to 1960 in England, although usually without a specific car model mentioned. The story is also popular in Australia, where it was enacted in the 1979 film Mad Max. In 1988 Phil Twyford, an Auckland, New Zealand, journalist, gave me copies of two versions sent to him after he published an article about modern legends. One of these had the fingers caught in the door frame of the car, while the other had them stuck in a bicycle chain that was caught on the “boot handle.” The chain version seems to be better known in the United States. This legend is similar to “The Hook,” and also to “The Robber Who Was Hurt,” quoted in Chapter 15. Other severed fingers appear in “The Choking Doberman” (Chapter 2) while a severed head occurs in the next legend.
“Decapitated Drivers and Riders”
H eads, heads—take care of your heads!” cried the loquacious stranger, as they came out under the low archway, which in those days formed the entrance to the coach-yard. “Terrible place—dangerous work—other day—five children—mother—tall lady, eating sandwiches—forgot the arch—crash—knock—children look round—mother’s head off—sandwich in her hand—no mouth to put it in—head of a family off—shocking, shocking!”
Bill Tidy
A classic WTS [Whale Tumour Story] tells of an extraordinary incident on the East Lancs Road (A580) [the highway number]. Apparently, a motorcyclist was riding behind a lorry which was carrying a load of thin steel plates. He decided to overtake the lorry, but as he moved out towards the centre of the road, one of the steel sheets became dislodged and decapitated him. However, his momentum carried him alongside the lorry, the lorry-driver glanced from his window, saw the headless motorcyclist passing, had a heart-attack, ran off the road and was killed.
The first story is told by Alfred Jingle in Chapter 2 of Charles Dickens’s The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club (1836). The second, the modern automobile version of the former, is from Rodney Dale’s The Tumour in the Whale (1978), p. 148. Although Dale’s term “Whale Tumour Stories”—referring to a specific World War II British legend—never caught on as a name for such apocryphal anecdotes, his coinage “FOAF” became a standard reference in UL studies to the claimed sources of these incidents. In other versions of the decapitated motorcyclist story, the truck driver not only dies himself in the crash, but his truck plows into a crowd of people at the roadside, killing many more. In American variations on the theme of vehicular dismemberment, it may be a dog that loses its head while riding in a car with the window open, ears flapping in the breeze. The loss of Rover’s head is so quick and neat that a child sitting next to it in the back seat continues to pet the dog for several miles before the tragedy is discovered.
“The Killer in the Back
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