An Urban legend comes to CMU
text (c) 1998 Brian P. Hudson
Halloween of 1998 saw a panic descend on some parts of CMU, as a story spread about a massacre that would befall one of the Residence Halls on campus. The massacre was anticipated because it was predicted, so the story went, on an episode of the Oprah Winfrey Show, some three weeks before Halloween, by an unnamed psychic. According to the prediction, the massacre would occur on a campus in Michigan, in a dormatory shaped like an "H" and located near railroad tracks. Here at CMU, that best described Trout/Calkins, two all-female dorms on the north end of campus. The massacre was to take place on Halloween, where twenty people were to die by midnight ...
... and, apparently, on at least a dozen other colleges across the country, as well. The source was an urban legend--a folklore that occassionally crops up as truth in newspapers, on the Internet, or just as rumor or hearsay--that actually began, locally, on the campuses of U of M and MSU, and originally had the qualifier "on a Big 10 university" as part of the legend. It has been cropping up periodically since the 1960's, when the "psychic" was Jeanie Dixon. The Oprah show seems to be a fixture of the legend; so does the date (Halloween) and the Little Bo Peep costume (what self-respecting murderer would dress as Bo Peep, anyway?). In 1998, the rumor is known to have appeared on the following campuses across the country:
Some people blamed the release of the movie URBAN LEGEND for the rumor's reappearance, but the movie's plot, while using a lot of ULs, specifically did NOT use the Bo Peep Massacre.
NO ONE massacred ANYONE that year ...
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