Online Halloween legends, hoaxes & Richard Gere

I write this on the eve of Halloween, a holiday for kids to enjoy trick or treating. Commercial establishments, for about two weeks now, have been announcing Halloween and advertising witches, scary skeletons, demons, and other gruesome-looking products of great ingenuity.

Halloween is celebrated online, too. The Internet features the most horrible urban legends and hoaxes, which should be taken with a grain of salt and a lot of caution. The urban legends can really be scary, and the hoaxes sometimes can be credible.

One of the scariest urban legends has to do with kidney theft. For a lot of our poverty-stricken Filipinos who have sold one of their kidneys, it probably may not be as shocking.

This particular urban legend did not happen in the Philippines. It was supposed to have happened in San Francisco. While traveling, an attractive 38-year-old female executive named Sue was approached by an extremely good-looking stranger in a bar at the San Francisco Airport while waiting for her connecting flight. He introduced himself as Norman, a surgeon, on his way to a conference in London. He supposedly buys her a drink and succeeds in seducing her. The drink is drugged and the last thing Sue remembers before passing out is being in a bathtub submerged to her neck in ice.

When Sue wakes up, there is a note tacked near the tub instructing her to call 911, which she does. The 911 operator then asks her to carefully feel behind her and see if there is a tube in her back. Sue finds out there is, and an ambulance is sent to the hotel. She is taken to the hospital and finds out her kidney has been stolen. The urban legend e-mail then goes on to say that this is really happening and is not science fiction.            

Of course, the airport police and the San Francisco Police Department received an avalanche of calls to find out if this was true.

Moral of the online storyline is: even if a stranger looks like Richard Gere, do not accept a drink offered to you. Do not allow yourself, no matter how compelling this Richard Gere look-alike’s offer of a drink is; do not accept it and allow yourself to fall victim to the premeditated seduction. I read this gruesome urban legend on the Net about two weeks ago on a website that was talking about Halloween.

What about this next one, which happened in the Philippines? Two years ago, around this time of the year, this sick story came out on the Internet.

A girl named Susan meets a man nicknamed Nonoy in a chat room and they become better acquainted to the extent where they engage in cybersex. After a few weeks of exciting cybersex, they decide to meet in person and find out that they live in the same town.

The real-life tryst in a hotel is arranged. Susan arrives first in the hotel, so she prepares for the real-life sex. She removes her clothes, gets her cologne from her bag and sprays it all over herself, hops in bed, shuts off the lights, and waits with bated breath for her man.

She hears the door open and whispers, “Nonoy?” He whispers back “Susan?” both fake names they used in their cybersex days in the chat room. And then, Nonoy turns on the light. They both scream when they find out they’re father and daughter!

This teaches a lesson and serves to warn you that you never know who you’re really chatting with online. This indeed is a fitting Halloween horror story. I accessed it two years ago on the well-known urban legend and hoaxes site www.snopes.com.

Have you ever heard of The Blair Witch Project hoax or urban legend? I read about this a year ago. There was a movie called The Blair Witch Project, and before it came out, there was a website that convinced visitors that three students disappeared because of the evil witch, and that the movie was, in fact, true.

Even though the stars, producers, director and the studio itself publicly announced that the website was just a great marketing ploy, causing it later to smash box-office records for low-budget movies, people still believed that it really happened. Human nature can really be susceptible.

What do we do when we come across these e-mails and websites with these urban legends and hoaxes? If you want to verify the reality and veracity of the message, go to the website of the company, person, or organization that claims to be involved and see if anything is mentioned on their site. Nine times out of 10, there will be a disclaimer.

If you receive any of these hoaxes and urban legend messages, don’t pass them on — just delete them. You can and should get the warnings from the web pages of the organizations that put them out to ensure that the information you have is valid.

I know that on Halloween Day, if I see a really scary witch online telling me, “Tomorrow, you die!” my translation of this warning would be: “Tomorrow, you will find Richard Gere in your bedroom!”

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Thanks for your e-mails sent to jtl@pldtdsl.net