Baby on the Car Roof and 222 Other Urban Legends: Absolutely True Stories That Happened to a Friend of a Friend of a Friend - Hardcover

Craughwell, Thomas J.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1579121470 ISBN 13: 9781579121471

Publisher: Black Dog & Leventhal, 2000

Synopsis

Baby on the Car Roof brings together 222 totally new, funny, quirky, frightening, bizarre and always entertaining urban legends. Urban legends or myths are dramatic and often humorous stories that circulate under the guise of truth and usually as having happened to "a friend of a friend" even though often they are entirely made-up. Organized by genre, each tale runs one- to two-pages long. Story variations are included in each listing. The subjects range from famous people, sex, office foibles and travel nightmares to college pranks, biological abnormalities and ghost stories.

About this title

From the Inside Flap:

Sensational but true, or are they?

The urban legends in this compilation will make you smile, giggle, groan in disgust, empathize with tragedy or flat out laugh out loud.

They are irresistibly intriguing, packed with wit, allegory and bizarre twist and turns, and they're just plausible enough to hold our fascination. While urban legends are often fiction from a twisted mind, they continue to circulate as truth; "This happened to a friend of a friend."

Perhaps you have already heard a few of the stories as truly happening to a brother of your cousin's roommate or some other combination of once removed.

Common variations and possible story basis reveal the real saga behind the legend and often poke fun at the media outlets that print them as fact.

Urban legends share an uncanny ability to travel by word of mouth - often with a few substitutions catering to the needs of whoever is telling them. It's the intriguing nature of the stories - distinctly dark, invariably humorous - on which they thrive. They play on our collective fears and anxieties, and part of their lure is that no one can be sure which stories are true, which are elaborate embellishments of fact and which are entirely made up by seasoned storytellers to fill their repertoire.

Some are famed, others are lesser known. The urban legends here are arranged by genre, from the infamous baby that was left on the car roof during a trip to John Wayne dodging the draft - plus hundreds more strange-but-not-perhaps-not-completely untrue anecdotes.

The Baby on the Car Roof offers us a glimpse of pop culture's perverse fantasy life as well as an authoritative reference of contemporary folklore with stories so seductive that they may, in the end, have happened to a friend of yours.

For more urban legends check out Alligators in the Sewer and 222 Other Urban Legends, also by Thomas J. Craughwell.

From the Back Cover:

Stories so Funny and Bizarre that You Want to Believe Them

This endlessly entertaining collection of urban legends is certain to thrill, shock and make

you laugh out loud. Tragic errors and misjudgments, wild coincidences, pranks gone awry, supernatural encounters and countless other human foibles fill these questionably true stories with the weirdest and strangest predicaments - so amusing that we want to believe them just to pass the them on.

INCLUDING:

The Rhino and the Crazy Glue and Other Animal Stories

The Hall of Tortured Souls and Other High Tech Scares

The $250 Cookie Recipe and Other Culinary Misadventures

The Final Spin Cycle and Other Strange Deaths

The Navy Pilot's Collision Course and Other On-the-Job Foibles

The Phantom Car and Other Supernatural Encounters

The Hotel Reservationist and Other Tales of Revenge

About this edition

• Publisher: Black Dog & Leventhal
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 1579121470
• ISBN 13: 9781579121471
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 240