It’s no secret that urban legends are continuously passed around via email. I still get a few here and there, but it seems that it was much worse back in the late 90’s. I got as many urban legends by email as I did legitimate email messages for a while - sometimes more. I actually had a couple of friends who seemed to have taken it upon themselves to pass on every urban legend that existed. Unfortunately, they seemed to believe they were all real.

Fortunately, there were sites that exposed these falsehoods (my favorite being Snopes) which we could use to inform those passing them along. I always enjoyed replying back to let people know that it was false and providing a link to the Snopes page that explained it. Not that I was trying to make them feel bad, but rather to let everyone know the truth so they would stop passing it on. And, to let them know about Snopes and other sites so that they could check for themselves in the future (although one friend ignored such information and continued to send nonsense at every opportunity.)

No, Bill Gates is not giving out money to those using an email tracking system. No, Jessica Mydek is not dying of cancer. No, Madalyn Murray O’Hair and other atheists are not attempting to outlaw religious television. And no, “Mikey” didn’t die from mixing Pop Rocks and Coke.

In 1999, a friend of mine had the idea of creating an urban legend to see how far it would go. We thought we could create an email, send to a lot of people - especially those known to forward nonsense on a regular basis - and see if we could make the urban legend websites. So, we did.

With the recent death of popular movie critic Gene Siskel still on our minds, we came up with an idea: Gene Siskel’s will had specified that he be buried with his thumb up. My friend typed up an email containing the faux news story that made this public, and it was sent to a long list of people. Here is part of the original email:

UPI (Chicago, IL) — The execution of the will of Gene Siskel, nationally known movie critic, was cleared through probate court yesterday and had a few surprising requests. Siskel died of complications resulting from his May 1998 brain surgery. The bulk of his estate was, as expected, left to his wife and children; Marlene Siskel, Kate (15), Callie (13) and Will (3). According to public records filed by in chancery court in Chicago, Gene Siskel asked that he be buried with his thumb pointing upward. The “Thumbs Up” was the Siskel-Ebert trademark.

“Gene wanted to be remembered as a Thumbs-Up kind of guy”, said Siskel’s lawyer. “It wasn’t surprising to me that he’d ask for that. I informed his family after his death, but he didn’t want it made public until after his will had been read.”

My friend has the original email he sent, and later we discovered that it had made it to Snopes and other sites. And the text was, word-for-word, what he had typed. We got a big laugh out of it. You can see the full text at the Snopes page for this legend.

I haven’t thought about it in a long time, but this past weekend, my friend sent me this link. Apparently, the Siskel legend received a “best urban legend” award from a Chicago magazine in 2000. From the article:

No doubt written by someone on the media inside, the story talks the talk of journalism well enough to fool those undazed by famous people’s bizarre demands, burial or otherwise.

And we were only shooting for the urban legend pages…