I found this fair-condition paperback (different edition and cover than shown) on the book swap shelf of the Tyngsboro post office, one of my favorite local release spots. It's a collection of popular urban legends, with background and debunking - looks interesting, and the themed release possibilities are endless!

Later... This turned out to be a much more serious look at the phenomenon than I'd expected; the author has tracked down many of the themes to much older versions, suggesting that people just love certain kinds of tales and want very much for them to be true. (In some cases this is fairly amusing, especially when it features people who've done someone wrong getting their just deserts, but in other cases some fairly nasty legends seem to spring from xenophobia and the desire to find stories that "prove" that the despised race/group/whatever is in fact evil and deserves to be hated.)

The author has gone to a lot of trouble to track down the sources for stories that appeared in the press, and most of the time came up empty - apparently on a slow news day almost any paper will print a neat-sounding story without checking to see if people of that name actually live in the area. And the author does admit that just because so few accounts can be attributed doesn't mean that these things never happened, just that the accounts available so far don't prove it.

I did spot at least one case where the author seems to have missed a reference; in a discussion of stories about medical students dissecting a corpse only to discover that it's a recently-buried relative, the author mentions legends about this happening to various people over the centuries including author Laurence Stern, but does not mention a case that seems to be true: one of the victims of bodysnatchers-turned-killers Burke and Hare was a local prostitute and some of the medical students knew her well - and recognized her at once!

I was amused to find a bit about "The Miraculous Bullet," allegedly fired by a Civil War soldier, which went through the scrotum of another soldier and into the ovary of a woman on a nearby farm, after which she became pregnant with the soldier's child; cute story, which was thoroughly debunked on the entertaining TV show "Mythbusters". [I wonder how many of their other myths they've picked up from Brunvand's books?]

RELEASE NOTES:

Post office to post office: I found it at one and released it at another! Left the book propped on top of one of the posts lining the walkway into the Spring St. post office at a little after 5 - hope the finder enjoys it...