Tag Archives: urban legend

The Come Carne Ants (flesh-eating ants)

Nationality: American
Age: 18
Occupation: College student
Residence: Denver, CO
Performance Date: 4/25/2013
Primary Language: English
Language: Spanish

“When I was… in high school, I lived in Costa Rica for six months… and… we decided to live by the beach.  And when you live by the beach for six months, you have to go to the beach every single day…  because, you’re never going to ever have the opportunity again.  Forever… So we, we go to the beach every single day, and that led to us knowing all of the secret beaches, like none of the tourists would be there.  Um, and this one day… it was a weekend, we spent the entire day at this secret beach… we’re the only ones there.  No one else… in sight, for the entire day… and being on this beach… forever… eventually, I had to go use the restroom.  Now, even though it was an abandoned beach with no one in sight except for my family, I, I felt like it would be improper to use the ocean.  And so, I ran over to this nearby bush, then again it was an abandoned beach, there was like nobody nearby, so I walk over to this bush… And I…  I really needed to go, so I started running straight there, I’ve been having a lot of fun, I’m not paying much attention, running straight in this bush to hide and then… Well, jus- just the week before… ehm… one of, one of the… one of these security guards for the apartmen we were living in had told us this story of the ‘come carne’ plant… Now, if you know Spanish, you know come carne is the stupidest  names ever, it means ‘eat meat’ in Spanish… and I guess more accurately translates to flesh-eating.  Now the plant itself doesn’t eat flesh… it’s, it’s like this rose and it has these giant thorns, but way bigger than a rose, HUGE thorns.  And… it, it’s a weird thorn because it has no tip, it just has a hole at the top instead, so it’s not pointy.  It just looks like a thorn, with no… no top, just this hole, and inside this thorn lives a colony of ants.    Now these might actually be the come carne ants, one of them’s named come carne, it’s probably the ants but I thought it was the… the plant that was named, so…  Now these ants don’t actually eat flesh, they eat the sap produced by the plant, inside of its thorn… and in return they protect the plant from any goats that try to eat it.  So the goat would come over, wanna nibble on this bush, out jump these ants that will bite craters of flesh off the goat’s nose and the goat would run off, screaming in pain because it’s one of the most painful things ever now our security guard was telling us this, and was like ‘You’ve never felt pain… until you’ve been bitten by these come carne ants!’   Now… I really had to go, so I wasn’t thinking, and I definitely wasn’t looking at this bush… as I was relieving myself on it, completely naked, you know, pants down… sw-swim trunks down… And he was right, there is no pain until you’ve, you’ve been bitten by a come carne ant… and… and so yeah, they bite off these chunks of flesh, and I actually have a scar right here on my arm, ‘cause one of them got on my arm, it’s been several years now so it’s like… so it’s almost gone, especially since I’m tan, but you can see that tiny white bit…”

[“Oh, please don’t tell me your…”]
“…Oh, it’s fine, hahaha…  they were definitely like… only one got my arm but there were a whole lot more elsewhere… so… you know your first reaction is like, when you’ve got flesh eating ants on you is to… get them off, by jumping into the ocean to get them off but I REALLY, REALLY had to go, and so I finished up and then I ran into the ocean and got them off, and then my pain tolerance level for the next… few months, was like, through the roof, I couldn’t feel like, anything… I felt like a superhero afterwards because… yeah… you don’t feel pain like that… on an everyday basis.”

My friend is an Interactive Media and Games major at the University of Southern California.  He went to high school in Colorado, but as he says in the above story, he lived in Costa Rica for a while.

The story deals with an “urban legend” of sorts, of flesh-eating ants in the Caribbean.  I tried to look up solid evidence for flesh eating ants in Costa Rica but could not find anything documented.  Because of the uncertain veracity of the come carne ants this makes my friend’s story a memorate (though he does have scars on his arms to prove that something did, in fact, rip off a piece of his flesh).

My friend noted that he’s told this story many times since the incident.  I think it’s really popular because of it’s outlandish premise.  Going to beaches everyday is an unusual circumstance, and becoming so familiar with beaches that you know where the secret beaches are is something different as well.  The fact that the security guard did warn my friend and his family about ‘come carne’ ants helps make a really good story (almost like an informant at the beginning of marchen that warns the protagonist of something that would lead to serious consequence).  The idea of flesh-eating ants that can rip off your flesh, and the image of someone falling victim to them during urination is hilarious and outlandish.  Since he’s told this to a lot of friends in the United States, I think the location of Costa Rica is far enough to be slightly exotic, which makes this story feel more true… as if these ants were an alien form of ants that exist on some tropical island, on abandoned beaches that you shouldn’t go to after you’ve learned this story.  I think my friend aims to make it seem alien too, especially when he describes the thorns of the plant in which these ants hide.

Gloomy Sunday

Nationality: Chinese
Age: 21
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: April 11, 2013
Primary Language: English
Language: Chinese

Interview Extract:

Informant: “Do you know about ‘Gloomy Sunday?’”

Me: “No, what is it?”

Informant: “It’s a song, I think by a Hungarian or a European composer. Yeah, Hungarian, because they also call it the Hungarian Suicide Song. And the composer, there’s a story about him, that after writing it, he killed himself and it goes that if you listen to the song for too long, you’ll commit suicide too because it’s like so sad.

Billie Holiday did like a jazzier version of it; it’s not so depressing, and no one obviously is scared of killing themselves from that one.”

Me: “Where’d you hear about it?”

Informant: “I heard about it in high school. Someone just like, played that song for us and a bunch of people freaked out But there’s been a lot of reports about people dying when they hear that song, or they’ll die like holding the sheet music or something like that. And I think the composer himself did jump or a building, I think because um, he had never achieved any greatness after that one hit he had with ‘Gloomy Sunday.’”

Me: “Were you ever scared of the song’s legend?”

Informant: “Not really. Like, I believed that people would maybe commit suicide after listening to it, but I think they felt like that before and they just sort of got pushed over the edge after listening to this sad song over and over again on repeat.”

Analysis:

The fact that song with Hungarian origins managed to travel all the way to a Chinese school playground proves that children love to scare each other. There is something tantalizing about hearing a legend such as this one, and it naturally creates a environment in which students would dare each other to listen to the song. Competitions could arise perhaps, to see who can withstand listening to the sad song for the longest period of time, or as was the case with my informant, students would just play “Gloomy Sunday” to others in order to frighten them.

If the background of the song was only that the composer had committed suicide, then perhaps its folklore would not be so scary. But as it spread around the world, “Gloomy Sunday” naturally accumulated urban legends that either existed before and became tied to it, or were invented along with the song. Once a person hears that many people have committed suicide directly because one eerie song, then it’s certainly terrifying. When my informant was telling me about it, she herself seemed to mystify the song, almost revering its power in a way. She may have been putting on a show to scare me, in which case it certainly worked, or she herself had some lingering fears from when she first heard about it. Either way, I became too nervous to play the song even though I had originally wanted to hear what exactly made it so depressing.

This Hungarian song isn’t the only song or object that has been claimed to have the power to make people suicidal. There have been pictures that supposedly have a influence on people similar to “Gloomy Sunday,” and even a whole forest, the Aokigahara forest inJapan, has that sort of sway. The forest is one of the most popular places for suicides, and this leads to many urban and ghost stories about the place. Yet one must wonder, does the forest, or the picture, or song actually force people to kill themselves, or are suicidal people drawn to these objects regardless? Most likely, as “Gloomy Sunday” and the Aokigahara forest draw more attention, they will be credited for more deaths, and the cycle will continue.

The way to break this seemingly endless sequence is indeed by lightening the mood. Either the song can be used as a playground game or it can be rewritten into a more cheery melody, the way my informant says Billie Holiday did. No one will link Billie Holiday’s adaptation to mysterious deaths, and that will limit the legends, and potentially, if they really are true, the suicides themselves.

Urban Legend: High School

Nationality: America- Caucasian
Age: 21
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: April 22, 2013
Primary Language: English
Language: Ancient Greek

The Nipple Nerve Story

The informant heard this story from a friend about something one of his friends did. The informant’s story is there was a gut who decides he wants to pierce his nipples. Instead of doing the smart thing about getting it down professionally he does it himself.  After week he decides that he doesn’t want them anymore. He takes out one ring and nothing happens. He takes out the other one and a white string comes out. He takes a pair of scissors and cuts the string. He passes out because the pain. When he wakes up, he’s dazed and notices a bad smell. What had happened was that when he pierced his nipple he pierced the nerve. So when he removed it he cut the nerve, passed out, and shit himself.

The informant says he believes that this actually happened because he believed his friends friend’s were stupid enough to try that. He loves telling this story because it gets a great reaction out of people.

This story was one of the only friend of a friend tales I found. Its one of those urban legends that its hard to tell whether it really happened because it sounds kind of plausible. Whether it real or not is not really important but the plausibility makes the story really effective. An effective story just makes it more fun to repeatedly tell people.

Kuchisake Onna

Nationality: USA
Age: 21
Occupation: Student
Residence: USC
Performance Date: 3/04/12
Primary Language: English
Language: Japanese

Informant: In Japan, there’s this… I have to think about this. There’s a women who got her face slitted. Kuchisake Onna, that’s her name! It’s a Japanese urban legend. Apparently she was mutilated by her jealous husband and she returned as a vengeful spirit. She caused a lot of panic, like teachers would even take students home and police would patrol the area.

Informant: Children walking home at night would encounter a women with a mask, you know like those sick masks people wear to prevent germs… anyways she would ask the child “am I pretty” and if the child said no, she would cut the child in half. And if the child said “yes” she would rip off her mask and her face was slitted or scarred from ear to ear. “how about now?” and if the child said “no” she would cut the child in half and if the child said “yes” she would cut the child’s face like hers.

Me: Could you run?

Informant: There is no way to escape because if you tried to run she would just reappear in front of you. But you could confuse her by asking her “am I pretty?” and she would be confused. Or you could say, “You are average” when she asked you and she would also be confused. Then you could run.

Me: When did you hear about this?

Informant: When I was in Japan! People would just warn people against her.

Me: Are you scared of her?

Informant: Not really… but I think if I walked alone at night I’d be scared.

Analysis: It is interesting how while the general consensus is that this story is merely another ghost tale, the stir that the caused in Japan was huge. Especially in 1979, there were reports of extra police around schools at night, and children being sent home because the streets were thought to be unsafe with this story around.

This is relatable to the story of the boogieman in Western culture, in the way that both entities seem to target children. However while the boogieman targets naughty children, research did not show whether Kuchisake-onna had a preference for how well-behaved her victims were. Perhaps the most terrifying part of the story is that the woman looks like a normal person, for many people in Japan wear sick masks.

Annotation: This story was a made into a Japanese horror film in 1996. Kuchisake-onna (Video,1996)

World of Warcraft Legends – SuperAIDS

Nationality: American
Age: 20
Occupation: Barista - Starbucks
Residence: Lake Forest, Illinois
Performance Date: 3/16/2013
Primary Language: English

My informant used to play World of Warcraft for a period of about 5 years, and during his time with the game, he has come across several stories.  The two stories he told me about were the SuperAIDS story and the Leeroy Jenkins story.  This story is about SuperAIDS.

According to my informant, SuperAIDS was the player given nickname of a debuff [essentially a curse] that a particular boss character would inflict upon the players.  This debuff would deal damage to the inflicted player and would spread to any nearby allied units.  The debuff could be cleansed by a particular class and be stopped.  However, this debuff would sometimes get on a player’s pet, and one of the ways to deal with this was simply dismiss the pet rather than wait for someone to cleanse it off, because it’s really hard to see if it’s on someone’s pet and just as hard to target the pet.  So players with pets would simply dismiss them and be done with it.  Unfortunately, the debuff didn’t go away, so when they went back to major cities, and summoned their pet, the debuff would still be there.  Once players figured out this was happening, they got their pets infected and brought them into the major cities and started spreading the disease intentionally.  The disease would spread rapidly between players and would kill almost anyone who wasn’t highest level.  Normally this would just be considered a prank but the disease would also spread to NPC’s [non-player characters].  The major problem with this was that NPC’s regenerate their health when out of combat and this regeneration outpaced the rate of damage from the disease.  So the disease would kill almost any player who came into contact with it, but it would never get off the NPC’s.  This is perhaps how the name SuperAIDS came about, because it didn’t go away.  Anyway, this meant that, as the disease was spread, more and more areas of the game became essentially uninhabitable because your character would just get infected and die over and over.  This persisted for about a week until the devs were able to patch the game, eliminating the disease from the NPC’s and preventing the disease from leaving the raid encounter.  And even though the game of WoW is played in several different servers, because the players all communicate online, nearly every server experienced this in some way.