ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Saturday, March 8, 1997 TAG: 9703100032
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-1 EDITION: METRO
COLUMN: JOE KENNEDY
SOURCE: JOE KENNEDY
Jim Collette of Roanoke sent me a copy of a terrifying fax he'd received from his boss in Atlanta.
It described a sophisticated ring of criminals who drug and abduct people from hotel bars, then remove their kidneys and sell them on the black market.
It sounded ludicrous, but it "really rattled my cage," said Collette, a salesman for U.S. Gypsum who travels a lot (but does not patronize hotel bars).
When his wife read it, she burst into tears.
He wanted to know if it was true.
This is the essence of the tale: Someone approaches a business traveler in a bar and offers to buy him a drink. The next thing the traveler knows, he wakes up in a hotel bath tub, submerged in ice up to his neck. A note taped to the wall cautions the victim against moving. Using a telephone placed beside the tub, he calls 911. The operator tells him to feel behind himself for a tube protruding from his lower back.
When the caller says there is one, the operator knows the victim has lost a kidney - or two.
Nothing more than a hoax
Using the Internet, I found a home page (www.snopes.com) dedicated to debunking "urban legends" - the often horrifying, just-barely-believable tales that often take the country by storm. This one included a report on just this subject, titled, "You've Got to Be Kidney'ing," written by Barbara Mikkelson, a California homemaker and amateur sleuth.
"Breathtakingly frightening," she called it. "And not a word of truth to it."
The tale roared through the Net in January, but it's been around for at least six years, Mikkelson said. Folklorist Jan Harold Brunvand heard it in 1991 and included it in his book, "Baby Train," in 1993. Businessmen seeking hanky-panky in Las Vegas were the first alleged victims, later tired businessmen in big cities.
The Reader's Digest wrote about it last summer.
Mikkelson theorizes that the story started in 1989, when a Turkish man claimed that he'd been lured to Britain with a promised job, and that during a supposed health check, doctors removed his kidney and put it in someone else.
An investigation revealed the man had offered to sell a kidney in a Turkish newspaper ad. He was one of four Turks who sold kidneys that day.
In 1991, "Law and Order," on American TV, featured a kidney-theft story. The program claims its scripts come from real life, but the writer said he'd heard this story from a friend. He could not give a printed source. Currently, the tale is popular in the New River Valley, according to my colleague, Lisa Garcia. In that version, the victim was a Tech student at the Sugar Bowl in 1995.
File this with famous legends
Mikkelson calls it an example of "scarelore."
"There's always this baseline of belief that that kind of thing happens," she told me. "Everybody knows there aren't enough kidneys to match with donors."
Organ procurement officials cringe when they hear it.
"Anything that undermines people's confidence is absolutely not harmless," said Tom Reed of the Virginia Organ Procurement Agency in Richmond.
Skeptical from the start, Collette nonetheless was relieved to confirm the hoax. Laughing, he said that when he read the fax, he immediately decided, "I'm not staying in downtown Charlotte anymore."
We can file it with other famous legends - the body under the bed, the $100 Corvette, the Nieman Marcus cookies and the child murdered and stuffed with cocaine at the U.S.-Mexican border - and get on with our lives.
First item on my list: Canceling that baseball trip to Baltimore.
What's your story? Call me at 981-3256, send e-mail to joek@roanoke.com, or write to me at P.O. Box 2491, Roanoke 24010.
LENGTH: Medium: 77 linesby CNB