Tag Archives: urban legend

Peas in the Lungs

Nationality: Mexican- American
Age: 65
Occupation: Business Owner
Residence: Fullerton, Ca
Performance Date: 4/21/2012
Primary Language: English
Language: Spanish

“Okay so, this man was eating peas, and he accidentally inhaled one, and the pea grew in his lung because it was using the carbon dioxide and nutrients in his lung to get bigger. He went to the doctor’s and they x-rayed him and saw the plant growing. He went to the hospital and the doctor operated on him and took it out, then fed him pea soup as a joke.”

My informant heard this urban legend from his cousin. It’s a pretty blatant message that one should eat slowly and chew their food carefully. This narrative sounds remarkably like the watermelon-seed-in-the-stomach story, and my informant made it quite clear that he didn’t believe a word of the it. He said that his cousin isn’t known for being particularly believable. However, upon further research, it seems that this story is actually true!

An article from ABC news.com states that two years ago a man named Ron Sevden from Massachusetts had a pea go down the wrong pipe and lived with it for a month before going to the doctors, who had to surgically remove it. They even really fed him something with peas in it!

Reference: Blackburn, Bradley. Pea Sprout Removed From Massachusetts Man’s Lung. Aug 11, 2010.  http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/headlines/2010/08/pea-sprout-removed-from-massachusetts-mans-lung/

Hanged Man on Halloween

Nationality: Mexican
Age: 35
Occupation: Graphic Designer
Residence: Lomita, Ca
Performance Date: 4/20/2012
Primary Language: English

When my informant was younger, she was told a story by her brother that he had apparently heard in school. It was an urban legend about a young man who had hung himself a night before Halloween in a tree in a nearby neighborhood. Apparently, since it was Halloween nobody took the body seriously, believing to be just another gruesome prop. A few days later people realized it wasn’t a prop thanks to both the smell and the birds coming to eat away at his body.

This legend is fairly disconcerting to my informant, who believes this legend to be real. When she had asked her father if it was real, he had replied in the positive, citing his cousin as a source. Apparently the boy it had happened to was the son of a distant relative. This story may or may not be true.

This story seems like a warning against complacency for a holiday that has become a mockery of what it used to be and still is for some people. The fear that some props used on this night may actually be flesh and blood instead of plastic and paint is deep seated in superstition, and that is why so many people really do get a good fright from haunted houses and the like.

It could also be seen as a warning against suicide, as the boy didn’t recieve a particularly pleasant death and his body was desecrated by the local wildlife and exposed to the elements for quite some time.

This story seems to hold a particular significance for my informant, who has told me previously that her best friend attempted to commit suicide when they were much younger, and that to this day he lies in a coma as a result.

Child Spirits Still Haunt the Orphanage

Nationality: Caucasian American
Age: 23
Occupation: Student (Screenwriting)
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: 4/24/12
Primary Language: English

Informant Bio

My informant is a USC student who hails from Detroit, Michigan. He grew up in the suburbs around Detroit and attended a private Catholic school, and has great pride in his city. He has a large family with whom he is very close.

He told me this story when I asked him about childhood in Detroit. He said that though sneaking into old buildings was not a huge part of his childhood, visiting the orphanage was something that he remembers doing more than once because he and his friends wanted to see a ghost.

The Abandoned Orphanage

Near where my informant lived in Michigan he recalls a fenced off compound of brownstone buildings that as long as he could remember had never been occupied. He never gave much thought to what it was until one day when a friend of his in school asked him if he wanted to explore it with her.

They were twelve years old when my informant’s friend (I’ll call her Marie) took him into the compound. He found out from her that it had once been an orphanage, but now it was abandoned.. They slipped under the fence at a place where it had been pulled up a bit. Marie’s sixteen year old brother led the way because he had been there before.

When they got inside, Marie’s brother began to narrate their tour of the dusty, empty hallways with stories about how the place was haunted. He said that the orphanage was still haunted by the spirits of the kids who were never adopted.

My informant couldn’t remember any stories specifically, but he does remember thinking that Marie’s brother was not telling the stories well. The stories didn’t have much of a point and it soon became clear that he was only telling them to scare his younger sister.

My informant never saw a ghost in the orphanage, though he, Marie and their friends did sneak back in on other occasions without Marie’s brother. The place large and empty – and they never found anything too interesting there. Barely any furniture or other items remained. Looking back now he’s quite relieved that they never came across anyone who had decided to squat there.

Other children also had stories that they had heard about ghosts in the place, and the ghosts were always the spirits of children. However my informant claims that none of the stories told how the children died, simply that “little Susan” or “Jim Bob” was never adopted, so they haunted the empty halls, still waiting to be taken to a good home. It seems almost as if the stories imply that the children were abandoned there with the building.

Certo’s Tailor Shop

Nationality: Caucasian American
Age: 50
Occupation: Professor of Creative Writing
Residence: Monterey, CA
Performance Date: 4/8/12
Primary Language: English

Informant Bio

My informant grew up in New Jersey in the 1960s and 1970s, a classic period of Italian mafia activity in the United States. As a child he lived in Secaucus, New Jersey with his parents and three siblings. His father worked driving a cement truck for the Teamsters Local 560, the union local that was run by the mob boss Tony Provenzano.

My informant now lives in Monterey, California, and will occasionally tell stories about New Jersey when his family from Jersey comes to visit. I was able to take notes on this story during one such family gathering.

Certo’s

According to my informant, Certo’s Tailor Shop was a store in his hometown of Secaucus, New Jersey that was perhaps not-so-secretly run by or, at least used by, the mob. My informant does not know if it was ever proven, but as he put it: “It was reputed that interesting people gathered there, and that interesting things would sometimes be kept there overnight until they could be… uh, well, buried.”

My informant’s belief that Certo’s could have been used to store bodies for the mob temporarily is absolutely plausible to him. Hudson County, New Jersey, where Secaucus is located was the home of notorious Italian mob boss Tony Provenzano, and so stores that were “fronts” for mob activity were simply a fact of life. My informant explained that this was accepted and never something that caused him or his family any anxiety as a child. “This was the lore of the area,” he told me. “And it wasn’t untrue.”

The Legend of the One-Eyed Gangster

Nationality: Irish/Italian
Age: 20
Occupation: student
Residence: Los Angeles, from King of Prussia, Pennsylvania
Performance Date: 4/7/2012
Primary Language: English

So this kid lived in my neighborhood – I don’t even think this is worth telling because it’s so ludicrous – he was like, “Yeah, I’m like wanted by this gang member who lives across the train tracks from us.” And he only has one eye and he wears an eye-patch. (laughs) And when he kills people he takes their eyes and makes a stew and eats this eyeball stew. (laughs) So he’s like, “yeah, I started dating his girlfriend and then 15 of his thugs jumped me in an alley and I killed all of them, but then he like, killed my girlfriend and so I had to bring her body back and I left it on the doorstep of her parents house. But they saw me put it there so they thought I did it…so I had to watch her funeral from afar.”

 

This story is indeed ludicrous, and was probably told to my informant just to be an entertaining story that would impress listeners with the tale teller’s character: he tangled with dangerous people, was skilled in battle, and ended up dating the girlfriend of the gang leader – a bold move. They both also lived in the same town that had cultures divided by train tracks, which I’ve only heard of in films and books until this point. So, the gangster coming from the other side of the tracks evokes a sense of otherness.