Urban Legend Of The Man With The Hook For The Hand

Urban legends are very complex and interesting aspects of culture. They often inspire holidays, movies, poetry, stories and more. But urban legends go far beyond how they seem on the surface. Their origins and the messages they send must be decoded to understand the true context of any urban legend. Illustrating the messages, urban legends may be benign, or malicious. In the context of this paper, an urban legend is a story or anecdote that is based on hearsay and widely circulated as true (Merriam). Additionally, the terms mythology and lore will also be used during this paper. While these terms are all different from each other, urban legends qualify as myths and lore, but this paper will mainly focus on urban legends.
When trying to understand …show more content…
The legend states that a young couple was enjoying a night alone in their car. They ear the radio come on and it says that an escaped convict with a hook for a hand had escaped a prison really close to them. Both the boy and the girl freak out and decide to cut their make-out session short and return home. When they get home, they find a bloody hook on the handle of the passenger side door. This story is eerily similar to a murder that took place outside of Texarkana on February 22nd, 1946. Two teenagers, Jimmy Hollis and Mary Jeanne Larey, were brutally attacked and sexually assaulted while they were parked in an area outside of town known as lovers’ lane. Both jimmy and Mary survived the attack, but another couple weren’t as lucky. A month later, an attack on another couple parked on lovers’ lane Richard Griffinand Polly Ann Moore. They were found with bullet wounds in the back of their head, as if they were shot execution style (Brovsun). Though there was no hook-handed maniac, it is clear to see the similarities between the reality and the fabricated story. The creation of these fabricated stories often makes it difficult to differentiate between the realities and the