In 1994, the Las Vegas police reported that a man had met an attractive woman at a local bar and then blacked out. When he awoke he was lying in a hotel bathtub, covered in ice. He called an ambulance and was rushed to the hospital, where the doctors told him that he had undergone massive surgery in which one of his kidneys had been removed, most likely by a gang selling human organs on the black market. (1) . This story is an urban legend, an incredible tale passed from one person to another as truth. Generally speaking, an urban legend is any modem, fictional story, told as truth that reaches a wide audience by being passed from person to person. Urban legends are often false, but not always. (2) . Folklorists have come up with a number of definitions for urban legend. To most it should be a story with characters and a plot. Others also call widely dispersed misinformation, or facts, urban legend. For example, the belief that you will automatically pass all of your college courses in a semester if your roommate kills himself is generally considered to be an urban legend. (3) . Thematically, there is great variety in urban legends, but several elements show up again and again. Typically, urban legends are characterized by some combination of humor, horror, warning, embarrassment, morality or appeal to empathy. They often have some unexpected twist that is crazy, but just plausible enough to be taken as truth. (4) . The story also includes a moral lesson, in that the businessman ended up in the mess only after flirting with a mysterious woman at a bar. (5) . Another is of temporary tattoos coated with drugs being given to children so that they will become addicted, new customers for evil dealers. Despite announcements that this is not true, concerned people continue to spread the word cautioning others about drug-laced tattoos. So regardless of the truth, urban legends will continue. It is human nature to tell bizarre stories, and there will always be an audience waiting to believe them. The urban legend is part of our make-up. A. While these "facts" don’t always have the elements of a story, they are passed from person to person and have the elements of caution, horror or humor found in legends. Urban legends may therefore be a fact or a story. For example, someone could tell you that there are giant alligators in New York’s sewers, and then tell a riveting story about a group of kids who stumbled upon such an animal. B. Where history is obsessed with accurately writing down the details of events, traditional folklore is characterized by the "oral tradition", the passing of stories by word of mouth. C. The warning and moral lesson of this story are clear: Don’t go off by yourself, and don’t engage in premarital intimacy! If you do, something horrific could happen. D. In the story of the organ harvesters, you can see how these elements come together. The most outstanding feature is its sense of horror: The image of a man waking up in a bathtub, with one less kidney, is a lurid one indeed. But the real hook is the cautionary element. Most people travel to unfamiliar cities from time to time, and Las Vegas is one of the most popular destinations in the world. E. There’s a good chance you’ve heard this story, because it has been relayed by word of mouth, e-mail and even printed fliers. But there is no evidence that it ever occurred, in Las Vegas or anywhere else. F. A few turn out to be largely true, and a lot were inspired by an actual event but evolved into something different in their passage from person to person. More often than not, it isn’t possible to trace an urban legend back to its original source—they seem to come from nowhere. G. This is what’s called a cautionary tale. A variation of the cautionary tale is the contamination story which has played out recently in reports about human body fluids being found in restaurant food. One of the most widespread contamination stories is the long-standing rumor of rats and mice showing up in soda bottles or other prepackaged food.