Read Too Good to Be True: The Colossal Book of Urban Legends for Free Online

check hotel room,” Milwaukee Sentinel, March 19, 1990. The hotel clerk’s mangled English is typical of such travelers’ tales. The Cold War version of the above glasnost- era legend was told in Dick Beddoes’s Pal Hal (1989), p. 190, a book about Canadian hockey-team owner Harold Ballard. This time it’s told about hockey star Frank Mahovlich and his wife staying in a Moscow hotel during a 1972 series of games played against the Soviets. All very well, except that the Little, Brown Book of Anecdotes (1985), edited by Clifton Fadiman, attributes the incident to Canadian-born hockey player Phil Esposito “in the early 1970s.” Mahovlich and Esposito did play together on Canadian teams that competed in Russia. Probably earlier than any of these versions set in the Soviet Union is one in which the fearful couple are honeymooners who think their friends may have bugged their room as a wedding-night prank.

Classic Dog Tales
     
     

Most traditional dog stories are of the overblown super-heroic genre, and excruciatingly sentimental, as well. It’s the “man’s best friend” pattern: Rin Tin Tin once again saves the day or Lassie rescues little Timmy for the umpteenth time. (At least Wishbone, the dog hero of PBS, has a sense of humor— and wears cute costumes—while he’s fighting alongside the Three Musketeers or playing the title role in Robin Hood. )
    Here’s a typical tear-jerker dog legend from Wales. The story is inscribed thus on a stone erected at the supposed site of the incident near Mount Snowdon:
    G ELERT’S G RAVE
    In the 13th Century, Llewelyn, Prince of North Wales, had a palace at Beddgelert. One day he went hunting without Gelert
     
    “T HE F AITHFUL H OUND ”
    who was unaccountably absent. On Llewelyn’s return, the truant stained and smeared with blood, joyfully sprang to meet his master. The prince alarmed hastened to find his son, and saw the infant’s cot empty, the bedclothes and floor covered with blood. The frantic father plunged his sword into the hound’s side thinking it had killed his heir. The dog’s dying yell was answered by a child’s cry. Llewelyn searched and discovered his boy unharmed. But near by lay the body of a mighty wolf which Gelert had slain. The prince filled with remorse is said never to have smiled again. He buried Gelert here. The spot is called
    B EDDGELERT
     
    I wouldn’t want to argue with a proud Welshman about the truth of this touching tale, which has been often repeated in books and articles and is told to every tourist. But, unfortunately, there’s no proof that such an event ever happened, and prototypical stories about a variety of misunderstood helpful animals go back before the Middle Ages and were recorded first in the Middle East. One nineteenth-century English folklorist called Gelert “a mythical dog” and referred to the story as being “primeval [and] told with many variations.” Recently, a brave Welsh historian dubbed the Gelert story “moonshine, or more exactly, a clever adaptation of a well-known international folktale.”
    The Llewelyn and Gelert legend was retold in the New World, where it evolved into “The Trapper and His Dog,” a Northwoods variation of the same plot, much reprinted. As late as 1989 the legend re-emerged in a court of law as what we might call “the Gelert defense.” In The People of the State of Illinois v. Robert Gene Turner, according to the case summary of Turner’s appeal of his murder conviction, the defense lawyer had, in the original trial,
    told the jury about [the lawyer’s] great-great-grandparents who lived long ago in rural Iowa. During an especially cold winter, the husband became ill and the wife had to take him 20 miles to the nearest doctor. She left her baby at home, under the protection of their faithful dog. When she returned, the home was a shambles and the dog lay bloody and near death. Because she could not find the baby, she assumed the dog had killed it and in a fit of anger