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Hood River, OR 97031
541.386.8860
swatson@gorge.net
This was one of several feature
stories conceived, reported and written as the first and
only editorial staff member during the startup first year at
TheTrip.com. It went online Feb. 12, 1997.
OK, They May Not Be
Stealing
Kidneys, But Some People
Are Stealing Credibility
It sounded like a great story, the string of e-mails fraught with alarm over the rumored existence of a ring of thieves who drug and surgically excise kidneys from business travelers.
First of all, it's completely bogus. False, no truth, fictitious, and with no merit. Clear?
Good. Now, the story. A lone business traveler meets someone in a bar, and the other person buys the road warrior a drink, and the next thing you know, the business person wakes up in a hotel room, lying in a bathtub full of ice.
Whoa, he thinks, what's going on here? He (the traveler in this tale is usually male) looks around. There's a note taped to the wall above the tub. It tells the traveler to call 911.
Well, the people at the police department have heard of this before, and tell the guy to check his back for a shunt running out of the wound. Yep, it's there. "Hold very still while we send an ambulance."
Seems that while the person was knocked out, someone had surgically removed a kidney.
Or maybe it was both kidneys? Or maybe he wakes up on a beach with a sutured abdomen? Depends on which version of the story you heard.
We heard about it when an e-mail string arrived at TheTrip.com. It caused a buzz. Hey, these are our customers.
"Amazing!" "Horrible!" "I can't believe it's true." "If it's true, it's really frightening."
On one hand, I was horrified at the possibility. On the other, I was skeptical. Why hadn't I heard of this before? And yet, if it was true, what a great story. The newsman's pulse quickened.
The people who forwarded the message thought it was true. One wrote: "This is a sad but frightening BBoard message. Those who travel should take note."
Take note of this: It's FALSE. It's nothing more than an "urban legend."
"I've talked with the criminal investigation division, and they have no knowledge of any cases of it," said John Quigley, public information officer for the police in Atlanta, Georgia.
And they would know. According to the e-mail string, "there have been seven reported incidents there." Not true. Not even one, Quigley said.
"I called homicide, and they thought it was pretty funny," he said.
The police in Las Vegas, Nevada, had the same view. About eight people called mid-January, when the latest outbreak of kidney spam hit the Internet.
Jerry Mayfield down in Austin, Texas, apparently got smeared. Call his phone number and you get a recording on which he denies any role in posting the Internet message.
Alan Mays is a reference assistant at the Heindel Library of Pennsylvania State University at Harrisburg.
He also is "the so-called news editor" of the FOAFTale News, published by the International Society for Contemporary Legend Research.
FOAFTale?
"It stands for 'Friend Of A Friend'," Mays said.
That was more or less what Maggie Ardito at Harris Corp. in Atlanta wrote when she passed the kidney-theft tale to business consultant Julie Jacobs in Denver.
"I actually know someone who it happened to his brother in Orlando," Ardito wrote.
The last time we talked with her, she was trying to find that "friend of a friend" so we could find out which "friend of a friend" had passed the story on to that person.
Jan Harold Brunvand has developed a name as a chronicler of urban legends. Brunvand refers to "the kidney heist" in his 1993 book, "The Baby Train." He first heard the tale in 1991.
Try to debunk some bunk, and it leads you down strange paths. When I called the original number provided by directory assistance for the university where Mays works, I got Bob Lesniak.
Lesniak knows nothing of urban legends. He coordinates a master's degree program. But people keep calling him, because directory assistance late last year somehow distributed his number as the university's main number.
So people call asking for tickets to the Fiesta Bowl. Or other things. One call came from the Dutch Antilles. Another call came from South Africa. Neither of them wanted tickets.
But they didn't want Lesniak, either.
"In the beginning, it was maybe one to two calls per week," he says. "In the last week, I've been averaging four to five calls per day."
Lesniak finds himself in a weird, phantom zone -- fielding calls from strangers, who live in distant places, who end up speaking with him for reasons other than the reasons they called.
Sort of like getting a chain e-mail about a time and a place where a lone businessman goes to get a drink after a long day on the road, and wakes up with no kidneys.
Familiar, believable, but not quite true.
But then again, what is truth? After all, if Pennsylvania is only a phone call away from South Africa, then isn't kidney theft only one drink away from kidney damage?