Legend and life: "the boyfriend's death" and "the mad axeman."

Folklore, Annual, 1998 by Michael Wilson

The relationship between legend and life, narrative folklore and reality, is one that has fascinated folklorists for some time, and nowhere is this more obvious than in the field of contemporary legend. Scholars are constantly dealing with material that is presented as fact, and yet, because they have encountered widespread variants they presume it to be largely fiction. Recently it has been recognised that the relationship is a complex one; that legends often contain a blend of fact and fiction; that this is perhaps precisely why contemporary legends are so believable; and that the relationship between legend and life is a two-way process.

In his paper "From Social Regulator to Art Form: Case Study of a Modern Urban Legend," Stuart Sanderson showed how a rise in popularity of the contemporary legend known as "The Hairy-Handed Hitchhiker" coincided with the spate of murders committed by "The Yorkshire Ripper," Peter Sutcliffe, in the 1970s (Sanderson 1981). "The Hairy-Handed Hitchhiker" tells the story of a woman who offers a ride to a little old lady, becomes suspicious when she sees that her passenger has hairy hands, tricks her into leaving the car, and discovers a rope and a hatchet in her handbag. Sanderson argued that, as the level of public anxiety rose about Sutcliffe's activities, so did the popularity of this particular legend; moreover, it was being specifically told as about the Ripper. Of course, the legend of "The Hairy-Handed Hitchhiker" was around long before Sutcliffe embarked on his murders, but it seems that, at the point when folklore and reality coincide, then the public imagination is fired in such a way as to precipitate a dramatic rise in legend-telling, and legend and life begin to merge. Indeed, this may be a common occurrence.

Bill Ellis argued that a similar phenomenon was al most certainly accountable for the popularity during the 1950s and '60s of the legend "The Hook" which tells of a courting couple who hear a warning about a one-armed "maniac" and later discover a prosthesis jammed in the car door. Ellis proposed that the emerging popularity of "The Hook" at this time could be directly linked to the persistent publicity given the Caryl Chessman case during this period (Ellis 1994, 63). Chessman was a known criminal who was arrested in 1948 following a number of armed robberies upon young couples in Los Angeles by a man masquerading as a police officer. On two occasions the female victim was also forced to perform oral sex. Apparently, a wave of hysteria swept Los Angeles up to Chessman's arrest, and when he was finally executed in 1960 his popular image was still that of a perverted sadist. Most interestingly, Chessman's nickname was "Hooknose," because of a deformity he had suffered after an accident. As Ellis rightly asserted, "the `Hookman' image predates Chessman, but it seems likely that the rise in popularity of such narratives was tied to the increasing interest in his case" (Ellis, 1994, 63). In other words, the popularity of the story was enhanced by a set of widely-publicised real-life incidents which seemed to echo folklore.

In the light of these observations it is interesting to explore the extent to which the rise in popularity of another legend--the story of "The Boyfriend's Death"--may also have resulted from a similarly explosive fusion of legend and reality. The following text, which I collected from twelve-year-old Tanya Boon of Plymouth on 10 January 1992, is illustrative of a story that has been told among teenagers for over thirty years and that continues to be extemely popular to this day, remaining at the very heart of the teenage oral repertoire in the British Isles.

A man and a woman were caving over Dartmoor and they

had the radio on in the car. They heard a news bulletin

which said, "Don't stop outside Dartmoor Prison, because

an axe murderer has escaped from prison." The car broke

down just outside Dartmoor Prison and the man got out

and found the petrol tank was empty, so he went back to

ask somebody if he could use the phone. The woman

turned on the radio and a voice came on saying,

"Remember, don't stop outside Dartmoor Prison." She

turned it off and shut all the windows and locked the

doors. The next thing she knew the police pulled up and

told her to get out of the car. They said, "Whatever you

do, don't look up." She looked up and there was this man

with an axe and her husband's head on a stick, banging it on

the roof (Tanya Boon, aged c.12, Ernesettle Library,

Plymouth, 1 October 1992).

During an extensive period of research into teenage oral narrative (Wilson 1997), I collected over twenty variants of this particular story and heard very many more. I consistently found that more than half, and sometimes as many as 90%, of any school class in the 12 to 15 age range knew the story. This held true throughout Britain and Ireland, but was particularly the case in South West England.

"The Boyfriend's Death" is a semi-descriptive title imposed by folklorists and there seems to be little evidence that the story is known by this title in the wider community. In fact, my own fieldwork amongst teenagers would seem to suggest that on those occasions when storytellers endow the legend with a title, then they are most likely to call it "The Mad Axeman." Of course, there is not necessarily anything particularly surprising in this. The image of an axe-wielding psychopath is not uncommon in folklore, and Sylvia Grider, for one, uses the same motif in "The Hatchet Man," her analysis of the legend of "The Roommate's Death" (Grider 1980). However, an explanation for why "The Boyfriend's Death" should so commonly be known as "The Mad Axeman" in the UK (especially when in the vast majority of the variants I have collected there is no mention of an axe at all), I would suggest has its roots in the real-life events of 1966 known as the "Mitchell Affair."