Urban Legends - Accidents

Accident legends represent a major category of urban legends that includes stories about perilous mishaps that are either gruesome or hilarious (sometimes both); almost always they are bizarre. Excluding the stories about automobile accidents discussed under that heading, there are about 30 well-known urban legends that focus specifically on interesting and dangerous things that supposedly happened by accident. The gruesome-accident legends include stories about contact lenses “welded” to the cornea, butane lighters detonating in a shirt pocket,

Pop Rocks candy exploding in the stomach, and fingers being slashed off when a power lawnmower is misused. Another lost-finger story describes an industrial accident in which a worker gestures to demonstrate how he lost a finger in a factory machine—thereby cutting off another finger in a repeat of the accident.

Hilarious-accident stories often describe equally gruesome situations—but with a laughable angle. For example, a husband is blown off an “exploding toilet,” surely a painful experience. But the situation causes the rescuing paramedics to laugh so hard that they drop the stretcher he’s being carried on. In another comical-accident story a woman has a painful skiing accident while her pants are pulled down (see “The Ski Accident” for details), which leads a ski instructor to have his own accident and eventually to confront the embarrassed woman with an account of his funny-but-painful experience.

The bizarre quality of most accident legends is well illustrated in the gruesome story of “The Scuba Diver in the Tree.” The extremely unlikely means by which the victim ended up in such a situation are beyond belief, although many people retold the story as the gospel truth. Perhaps the most bizarre of all accident legends is “The Failed Suicide,” in which multiple attempted methods of death cancel each other out in rapid succession and the would-be victim remains alive.

See also Automobiles; “The Barrel of Bricks”; Bogus Warnings; “The Last Kiss”; “Mobile Phone Sparks Explosion”; “The Mole Hill and the Jaguar”