Legend: An old lady begging a ride at a shopping mall turns out to be a crazed killer in disguise.
Examples: [Brunvand, 1987]
This lady had finished her shopping, and she went back to her car with her packages. When she got to the car, there was someone sitting in the back seat. As she approached, she saw it was an old woman.
She asked the woman what she was doing in her car, and the woman said that she had gotten lost looking for the bus and got so tired that she just had to sit somewhere to rest, and asked if she could possibly see her way to driving her home or just to the nearest bus stop.
Well, this lady was suspicious, so she said that she would be right back, and she returned to the mall and asked security if they could do something about the old woman. When a security guard got to the car, they found out she wasn't an old woman at all, but a man; and in her purse was a small hatchet.
[Collected on the Internet, 1998]
A woman was shopping at the Tuttle Mall in Columbus. She came out to her car and saw she had a flat. She got her jack, spare out of the trunk. A man in a business suit came up and started to help her. When the tire had been replaced, he asked for a ride to his car on the opposite side of the Mall. Feeling uncomfortable about doing this, she stalled for awhile, but he kept pressing her. She finally asked why he was on this side of the Mall if his car was on the other.
He claimed he had been talking to friends. Still uncomfortable, she told him that she had just remembered something she had forgotten to pick up at the mall and she left him and went back inside the mall. She reported the incident to the mall security and they went out to her car. The man was nowhere in sight. Opening her trunk, she discovered a brief case the man had set inside her trunk while helping her with the tire. Inside was rope and a butcher knife! When she took the tire to be fixed, the mechanic informed her that there was nothing wrong with her tire, that it was flat because the air had been let out of it!
[Collected by Smith, 1983]
Driving home alone one evening, a young woman notices an old lady with a large shopping bag trying to hitch a lift in her direction. Feeling charitable, and in spite of her vow never to pick up hitch-hikers when alone, the girl stops and offers the hitch-hiker a ride. With much gratitude the old lady accepts and gets into the car. The young woman is about to drive away when she notices that her "female" passenger has large hairy arms and wrists.
Guessing instantly that the old lady is in fact a man, she pretends to be having trouble with the car and asks him to get out and check if the rear lights are working. As soon as the "old lady" is round the back of the car, the young woman immediately locks the doors and drives away.
In fear she goes straight to the police station where she is questioned and the car is searched. In the shopping bag the hairy-handed hitch-hiker has left behind, the police find a large and very sharp blood-stained axe -- all ready for the next victim.
Variations:
Origins: Fear not that this is going on at a shopping mall near you -- there's no evidence it happened anywhere. (Especially not at the Tuttle Mall in Columbus, Ohio -- that institution has been deviled by this rumor ever since the specious bit of faxlore quoted above (second in the "Examples" section) hit the Internet. "It's an Internet rumor," said David Casper, the mall's marketing director. "We checked all of the reports our security had. We checked the videotapes on the day it was supposed to have happened. Then we checked the police reports in all the districts.")
Though told as a recent crime, this legend's roots reach back into the previous century.
The driver is a gentleman in his gig, who on opening the supposed female's reticule finds to his horror a brace of loaded pistols inside.
The above snippet comes from the 11 April 1834 Stamford Mercury. 1834. As in, before the American Civil War.
The legend shows up again in the 1956 book Negro Folktales in Michigan, where a young buggy driver spots five o'clock shadow under a lady passenger's bonnet. The lad contrives to lose his hat and asks the woman to recover it while he controls the skittish horses. Once she's out of the rig, he drives off. Later, "he picks up the basket and looks in it, to give to his wife, and there's two Colt .44's in there, and eight hundred dollars in cash money."
In the late 1970s, the "hairy armed hitchhiker" myth was all the rage in the UK; everyone was telling it as a close call that had befallen a friend of a friend. Why that sudden outbreak of an old legend in that particular place and time? That was the era of the Yorkshire Ripper. People feared for their lives, and part of that fear was expressed through the telling of (and believing!) of this legend.
During that period, reports of this tale were received in at least 17 police stations. (No telling how often each station heard it either!)
These days the "shopping mall" version has come to eclipse the earlier "hitchhiker" form of the story. This is likely the result of two changes in our culture: the growing fear of hitchhikers, and the ascendency of the shopping mall as a place to congregate.
Though frowned upon, hitchhiking in the 1960s and up to the mid-1970s was seen as a normal, almost reasonable activity (albeit a bit on the risque or defiant of society's customs side). Ordinary folks stopped to pick up hitchhikers, barely giving their personal safety a second thought, and those hitching a ride happily took the same chance with about as much forethought. It was then common for teens and twenty-somethings to use the thumb to get from here to there and for even older people to explore the country by way of this mode of transportation.
These days you don't see many hitchhikers. There's too much fear of the murdering stranger, both on the part of those who would otherwise offer a ride and those would stick out a thumb to seek one.
With the decline in popularity of hitchhiking came a decline in the popularity of the hitchhiker version of this dead catter. Urban legends are expressions of current culture; if hitchhiking is no longer a popular activity, then expect to see that element dropped from the legend as the tale is re-cast to place it in a current culture setting.
The growing importance of the shopping mall to our culture also played its part. What started out as mere collections of varied stores under one roof quickly came to evolve into social gathering places. The mall is somewhere to await friends or, once met, to pass the time with them. Though their mercantile function is still important, the mall's social and societal role is growing all the time.
As for shopping centres and their place in this legend, folklorist Jan Harold Brunvand had this to say:
The mall is our society's center of consumer passion, of all items both wonderful and mundane, and yet something inside us seems to be saying that even the mall is not safe from the evil forces of the world.
True enough. Brightly lit and well patroled, malls are seen as safe havens. Their darkened parking lots exist in a netherworld, close enough to the mall for help to be summoned from, but far enough away to be outside of the mall's protection.
Coming at it from a less folkloric, more pragmatic angle, a mall parking lot would be the obvious locale to place a mythical crazed killer looking for victims, hence the legend's shift in locale. Found there would be many women, a goodly number of them alone, each of them isolated once they leave the safety of the building to head for their cars. A murdering madman looking to pick and choose his victims could find no better venue. It would be like handing him a menu.
Though it's never clearly stated, it is understood by all who hear the legend the bad guy's intent is to murder the woman, not merely rob her. His weapon is invariably a sharp object, something that will serve to splash copious amounts of blood everywhere (as opposed to a polite strangling or restrained bludgeoning) because the mental picture of what could have happened is key to this tale's horror element. Dead isn't good enough; the averted murder has to be perceived as unspeakably brutal and gory.
In common with all "murdering madmen" legends, almost without exception the prey is female and the stalker male. This probably has less to do with out and out sexism than it does with employing a folkloric shorthand to communicate the victim's vulnerability in contrast to the killer's omnipotence.
Why the shorthand, the exaggeration of the imbalance? Upon hearing any of these legends, we mentally cast ourselves in the role of the person it happened to. By making the mythical victim appear both especially at risk and not all that capable of protecting herself, we more clearly express our own fears of the world around us and our personal sense of being vulnerable to attack.