Free Too Good to Be True: The Colossal Book of Urban Legends by Jan Harold Harold Brunvand

in the Package”
     
    I n December of 1992 a friend of mine told me about two friends of a friend of hers. They worked at the Mall of America in Bloomington [a suburb of Minneapolis, Minnesota]. They got off work at about 7 p.m., and they went to their car to share a ride home. When they started the car it didn’t seem to be running well, so they let it idle for a while, thinking it was just the cold weather. Then they noticed a bad smell coming from the engine, so they shut off the car and investigated. When they opened the hood, they discovered that a cat had climbed into the engine somehow while they were at work. The cat had gotten caught in a belt or something, and it was dead and mangled. The women found some sticks and poked the pieces of the dead cat loose.
    They didn’t want to just leave the cat there on the ground, so they put it in a shopping bag and started walking back towards the mall to throw it in the garbage. But before they got there, a woman ran by and swiped the bag, presumably thinking it was full of Christmas gifts or something. The two women thought that was pretty funny. They decided that they should report the incident to mall security, because next time the thief might steal something of value.
    As they were walking to the security office, they noticed a big hullabaloo. They stopped to see what was going on, and they saw that a familiar someone—the dead-cat thief!—had fainted and she was being loaded into an ambulance. Then a bystander saw the shopping bag and told one of the paramedics that it belonged to the sick woman. So a paramedic put the bag on the woman’s chest and secured it with a bungee cord. Of course, nobody had any firm details about what happened next, but my friend thought the thief probably had a pretty rough time of it when she woke up and the dead cat was still there.
    I know I have heard or read this story before, but when I pressed my friend for details she kind of bit my head off. She was upset that I didn’t believe the story, so I just dropped it. But it’s been driving me nuts ever since. Was this a Twilight Zone episode or something, or was it just one of those stories you collect?
     
     
    Sent to me in 1993 by Maria Westrup of Indianapolis. Many other readers, including several Midwestern newspaper columnists, confirmed that the old “dead cat” legend had found a new home at the gigantic Mall of America. And why not, since just about every other mall and department store in the United States, plus some abroad, have had the same story told about them? I’ve traced the version in which the cat-package is accidentally switched with one containing food—steaks, a ham, or the like—back to 1906, and both versions continue to pop up. It’s an especially popular legend during the Christmas shopping season. Often the victims observe the thief faint twice, once when she feels into the bag to check on her loot, and again when she returns to consciousness while on the paramedics’ stretcher and sees the dead cat staring her in the face. Ann Landers published a version in a letter signed “The Okie,” in 1987, and she merely thanked her reader for “letting the cat out of the bag,” evidently willing to believe the tale. An English music hall song, “The Body in the Bag,” retells the legend, and this musical treatment has passed into folk-song tradition. Yevgeny Yevtushenko included a Russian version, in which the cat-package is switched on a commuter train, in his 1981 novel, Wild Berries. That dead cat really gets around, and the thief always gets what he or she deserves.
    “The Runaway Grandmother”
     
    O ne of the worst (or best) horror travel stories I’ve heard is of the American family traveling by Volkswagen through Spain. The two children were in the back seat of the car with Grandmother when she died. The parents decided to phone the American Embassy for advice, but first had to find a phone.
    The children became hysterical with Grandmother