Accidents

Accident legends represent a major category of urban legends that
includes stories about perilous mishaps that are either gruesome or hilarious
(sometimes both); almost always they are bizarre. Excluding the stories
about automobile accidents discussed under that heading, there are
about 30 well-known urban legends that focus specifically on interesting
and dangerous things that supposedly happened by accident.
The gruesome-accident legends include stories about contact lenses
“welded” to the cornea, butane lighters detonating in a shirt pocket,
Pop Rocks candy exploding in the stomach, and fingers being slashed off
when a power lawnmower is misused. Another lost-finger story describes
an industrial accident in which a worker gestures to demonstrate how he
lost a finger in a factory machine—thereby cutting off another finger in a
repeat of the accident.

Hilarious-accident stories often describe equally gruesome situations—
but with a laughable angle. For example, a husband is blown off an “exploding
toilet,” surely a painful experience. But the situation causes the rescuing
paramedics to laugh so hard that they drop the stretcher he’s being carried
on. In another comical-accident story a woman has a painful skiing accident
while her pants are pulled down (see “The Ski Accident” for details), which
leads a ski instructor to have his own accident and eventually to confront the
embarrassed woman with an account of his funny-but-painful experience.
The bizarre quality of most accident legends is well illustrated in the
gruesome story of “The Scuba Diver in the Tree.” The extremely unlikely
means by which the victim ended up in such a situation are beyond belief,
although many people retold the story as the gospel truth. Perhaps the
most bizarre of all accident legends is “The Failed Suicide,” in which
multiple attempted methods of death cancel each other out in rapid succession
and the would-be victim remains alive.