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Myths Travel Fast
The Travel Critic · September 28, 1998

In Las Vegas and New Orleans, a sophisticated crime ring is seducing visitors, drugging them and stealing their kidneys.

Meanwhile, in Los Angeles, bio-thieves are harvesting a variety of human glands from unsuspecting out-of-towners. And south of the border, they're snatching travelers' testicles.

I'm not making this up; someone else did. There are no kidney thieves. Your glands are safe and so are the family jewels. Seriously.

Tall tales like these are grist for every traveler's mill, according to University of Florida culture critic James B. Twitchell.

Along with the rumored rash of organ thefts, there's the one about the kid who crashed a plane by playing with his electronic GameBoy during takeoff and the one about the guy who gave his girlfriend a fright and knocked himself out while "flying" around a hotel room dressed as Batman.

And so on.

Twitchell says the travel business is a storehouse of so-called urban legends for a lot of reasons. "Travel is risky. It's something that we all share-we all know what it's like to travel. Part of it is the fear of the unknown, and part of it is that we're not anchored while we're away."

I fell for the old "magnets in the airplane tray tables" story that was making the rounds online. I wrote a column warning travelers that the magnets used to hold the trays in place could make laptops go haywire and destroy the contents of their hard drives. I've since concluded I was suckered. How embarrassing.

Recently, I almost took the bait again. A concerned reader contacted me with some disturbing news: he claimed minibars that use ammonia as a coolant were leaking and, in some cases, spontaneously combusting, setting hotel rooms aflame.

I spent the better part of two weeks calling hotels and suppliers to find out if the refrigerators were indeed annihilating hotel guests. No luck. I searched every available database, scoured the Web, e-mailed every lodging industry insider I knew. Nada. Finally, I concluded that this story might not be grounded in truth.

Although elements of it were accurate-apparently the ammonia units have leaked-the core of the report about explosive minibars is bogus.

Christopher McGinnis chronicles some of the best-known travel myths, including the kidney incident, in his latest book, The Unofficial Business Traveler's Pocket Guide. "Among the hyper-connected business travel set, urban myths make the rounds in a fraction of the time they used to," he says.

How do you spot a fake? It's not always easy, but Twitchell has pinpointed a couple of telltale characteristics of these myths.

First, they're scary. An enduring legend leaves you with goosebumps, like you've watched an episode of The Twilight Zone. Real tall tales must also be believable. They need "the sting of truth" even though they clearly aren't factual, says Twitchell.

Finally, viable legends must be detailed enough to seem true. The storyteller recalls names, places and events as if they were…real. The Mexican pet story, published recently in The Ottawa Sun, comes to mind. A vacationing couple dining at Tijuana restaurant adopts a flea-bitten Chihuahua begging under their table. They smuggle it home, but when they wash and groom their new pet, they discover the canine is oozing mucus.

Horrified, they rush their new friend to the veterinarian. "Where did you get that dog?" the doctor demands after examining it. When they try to cover their smuggling activities with a white lie, the vet calls their bluff. "You didn't find this animal here," he says. "This is a long-haired Mexican sewer rat."

Gross, believable-and detailed.

And there's more where that came from. Keep traveling.

Christopher Elliott is a travel commentator and author of A Bridge to Nowhere: A Year in the Florida Keys. All e-mailed questions may be edited, condensed or republished at the site's discretion.