We’ve got to talk about something, so buckle up. There’s a dark side to folklore, and it’s in the news right now.

A fellow folklorist friend and colleague, Shelley Ingram, posted this on Facebook last night after the debate –

“Why is no one talking about the urban legend of it all? It seems like now would be a really good time for us to come to the rescue. Put a folklorist on CNN!”

And we were like “UGH, finally, someone said it!” And then realized that WE needed to say it too, because THIS NEEDS TO BE SAID. AND OFTEN.

Our colleague is talking about the whole “Haitians in Springfield, Ohio are eating pets” lie that the Republican nominee for president (we’re not writing his name here) repeated last night in the nationally televised presidential debate. As David Muir, one of the moderators noted, this is an easily disprovable lie that has been gaining traction in MAGA channels over the past couple of days – as journalists should do, Muir spoke directly with the people of the town to get the facts, and there is no evidence that these kinds of horrific acts are happening.  

But he “saw it on TV,” the nominee responded, after being corrected. But Republican senators are sharing memes with adorable little kittens saying they don’t want to be eaten. But the GOP VP nominee said it too, saying that the information was coming from “reports.”

Guys. This is, sadly, folklore in action. This is how it can work.

Folklore is powerful, and it’s not always a force for good. Folklore is just the transmission of culture, which is value-neutral. As you may have noticed, culture is complicated. It’s not inherently good or bad. Sometimes, it’s beautiful and uplifting. And sometimes, as in today’s episode, it’s vile. In fact, urban/contemporary legends, a huge part of verbal folklore, are often key to spreading vicious lies. What’s more, this whole “immigrants are eating your pets” thing isn’t even a new urban legend. Does this sound familiar?

“In the Remount Drive and Dinn Drive area, not far from Windsor Park Mall, strange cooking odors have led to a great deal of conscientious sniffing of late on the part of animal lovers.

‘It’s the smell of roasted or boiled puppy dog. Friends of mine living the neighborhood near all those homes of newly arrived Vietnamese swear to it, and I agree,’ says Kathleen Hastings of 358 Savannah Drive, who elaborates:

‘Puppies in the same residential blocks are seen for a few weeks, frisking and fattening up in their yards. Then, poof, they’re gone, never to be seen again, replaced by the aforementioned cooking odors.’”

Sigh. That story is quoted from Jan Harold Brunvand’s Too Good To Be True: The Colossal Book of Urban Legends, and the oldest version he collected was from 1988. For a more personal example, when Brittany was little (so early 1990s?), she remembers hearing that a local Chinese restaurant closed because they were caught trying to pass cooked stray cats off as pepper steak. Yeah.

We’re excited to be currently working on our second video series for The Great Courses, and the topic is urban legends. This means that we’ve been reading and writing a LOT about this stuff. As we note in our episode about food legends, “conventions, politeness, traditions, and ethics all combine in the way we eat and don’t eat” – this means that the stories we tell about what people eat and don’t eat are wildly influential culturally. Food is personal and visceral – which is why this kind of folklore, foodways, can get so contentious. 

Now, different cultures around the world do have different eating traditions – some of them even do eat animals that we consider pets in the Western world. People eating animals in general doesn’t spark joy for us (we mean, we’re both vegetarians!) But it’s often imagined conventions around food that lead to the idea that the “scary” immigrants to Western countries will do the same thing here. This story becomes even more horrifying when the additional lie of immigrants stealing beloved pets ups the ante.

And people who have reason to encourage anti-immigrant sentiment? They know that. As folklorist Andrea Kitta notes in her fantastic book The Kiss of Death: Contagion, Contamination, and Folklore, these kinds of stories can serve “as a simple, shorthand way to stigmatize outsiders.” As fellow folklorist Diane Goldstein adds, they strengthen the “growing sentiment that the world is divided into ‘them’ and ‘us.’” It’s a snappy way of saying, “they don’t eat like us, so they aren’t us, they’re different from us” that spirals out of control.

And urban legends are designed to be adapted to the current moment. As another folklorist, Gary Alan Fine, puts it: “[w]hat makes contemporary legends particularly worthy of notice is that to be effective narratives they are expected and understood by narrators and audiences to be responsive to the immediate socio-political context, and narrators rapidly alter details, consciously or not, to make them fit. They rely upon the worldview and folk ideas of a community.”

We’re seeing this in real time – it’s the old lie of immigrants/outsiders doing something we consider horrifying in the West, just altered to fit the current moment. Local places and specific names are added in to help make it seem more believable. The pets angle is being pushed because Republicans got a lot of bad press from Vance’s “cat ladies” comment. It’s allegedly happening in Ohio because Ohio is a swing state.

We already know the story. Some people already expect the story to be true. People in power use that.

As folklorists, we believe that it is part of our job to call this out when we see it.

P.S. Register to vote here!

P.P.S. Works Cited and Further Reading – 

“‘Give Me… your huddled masses’: Anti-Vietnamese Refugee Lore and the ‘Image of Limited Good'” by Florence E. Baer in Western Folklore 41.4 (1982)

Too Good To Be True: The Colossal Book of Urban Legends by Jan Harold Brunvand (1999)

“Catfish in Mexican Food: Meaning in a Contamination Rumor” by William M. Clements in Studies in Popular Culture 14.1 (1991)

“Rumors of Apartheid: The Ecotypification of Contemporary Legends in the New South Africa” by Gary Alan Fine in Journal of Folklore Research 29.1 (1992)

“Panic(s) in Our Plates: Contemporary Legends and Conspiracy Theories on Food” by Julien Giry in Contemporary Legend 4.1 (2023)

Once Upon a Virus: AIDS Legends and Vernacular Risk Perception by Diane E. Goldstein (2004)

The Kiss of Death: Contagion, Contamination, and Folklore by Andrea Kitta (2019)

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