Welfare Cheat (cartoon) – Cremains Mistaken for Food Ingredient (1860s) – False Eyelashes Mistaken for Insect

Warren Emery (writer), Ray Billingsley (artist), “Everyday Criminals Who Never Get to Be Punished.” Crazy #53, August 1979, p. 41. “The guy who drives an expensive new car to the welfare office to pick up his check every week.”

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During the early debate over cremation in America, there was, in the mind of at least one concerned person, the idea that human ashes might be mistaken for a powdered food ingredient. The contemporary legends came later.

Stephen Prothero, Purified by Fire: A History of Cremation in America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 76. “One female critic, noting that arsenic was sometimes mistaken for baking powder, wondered what was to prevent ashes kept at home from being mixed with buckwheat flour.” [Mrs. P.T. Lamb, “Disapproves Cremation,” Detroit Commercial Advertiser.]

Prothero doesn’t provide the date for his source. The weekly Advertiser was published from 1861 to 1867; it appears that it has yet to be digitized. 

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[Proto-legend: Never go to bed still wearing your false eyelashes. I knew a woman who did and while she slept a venomous spider attacked her eyelashes, mistaking them for prey.]

https://www.theage.com.au/national/nsw/frog-tales-over-easy-20211231-p59l29.html

The Age [Melbourne], 2 January 2022

Column 8

At a recent dinner party attended by John Swanton of Coogee, one of the other guests related a cautionary tale for anyone regularly making use of false eyelashes. It started innocently enough, a 19-year-old daughter running late for work desperately searching for her false eyelashes, sure that she had left them on her bedside table when she took them off the night before, and her mum volunteering to help her look for them. “They searched high and low until Mum found them under her bed, being attacked by a large huntsman spider.” Not creepy enough? Imagine if that spider had seen them moving when still attached to the eyelids and decided to launch an attack.

[On false eyelashes mistaken for insects, see Art Linkletter, Oops! or, Life’s Awful Moments (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, 1967), 62; Jay David, ed., Sex and the Single Stewardess: The Uncensored Memoirs of Stews, Crews and Passengers (Chicago: Playboy Press, 1976), 146-7; Dave Berg, “The Lighter Side of…”, Mad magazine #267, December 1986, 27.]

Cremains Snorted (Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt)

Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt (Netflix, 2018), Season 4, Episode 1, “Kimmy Is…Little Girl, Big City!”

In this episode, Lillian Kaushtupper (played by Carol Kane) wants to scatter her late friend’s ashes where he went to summer camp as a boy, but that location is now an upscale private club whose doorman won’t let her in. She then comes up with the idea to put the ashes in two baggies, which she sells to some privileged jerks exiting the club. “Just promise me you’ll do all of it while you’re in there,” she asks her eager customers. They readily agree and go back into the club with what they think is a plentiful supply of cocaine. As Kaushtupper walks away with a handful of cash, she says to herself, “Now we’re both at peace…and I made twelve hundred bucks!”

Cremains Ingested (Waukesha, WI) – Russian Urban Legends – Exploding Shark’s Revenge

https://fox6now.com/2020/01/16/charged-couple-accused-of-running-drug-operation-from-menomonee-falls-apartment/

WITI-TV [Milwaukee, WI]

16 January 2020

2 accused of running drug operation from apartment; man says he ‘ingested’ mother’s ashes

WAUKESHA — A couple is accused of running a drug operation out of their Menomonee Falls apartment. […] Police questioned [Austin] Schroeder about the unknown powder and vegetable-like material in the apartment — and he “indicated that it was all legally owned and he mixed these substances for a variety of reasons. He indicated that his mother passed away in November 2019 and she was cremated. Schroeder indicates he took some of her ashes and mixed them with a variety of substances, some of which he ultimately ingested.” […]

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https://spokus.eu/en/urban-legends-ussr-soviet-russia/

Spokus

16 January 2020

Urban Legends in USSR – An Interview with Russian Folklorists Anna Kirziuk & Alexandra Arkhipova

by Eymeric Manzinali

Russian folklorists Anna Kirziuk and Alexandra Arkhipova are the authors of the first book about urban legends in the Soviet Union. Corpses in kvass barrels, dangerous signs hidden by the enemies of the people, black Volga kidnappings … Do these tales reflect the Soviet fears? What can we think of the most recent “Blue Whale Challenge” rumours, which started in Russia? We had the opportunity to interview these urban legends specialists about this quite unknown subject. […]

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https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83030214/1907-12-23/ed-1/seq-2/

Anon., “WHAT GOT THE HOOK? | THINK IT A ‘SQUARE DEAL’ | Deep Sea Monster Baffled Captain Johansson, F.M.” New York Daily Tribune, 23 December 1907, p. 2.

[Peter A. Johansson, captain of the Swedish barkentine Elise and holder of “the world’s record for shark killing,”] showed a varied fishing tackle, which included an adequate supply of nitro-glycerine bombs with time fuses attached, which he frequently tucks away deceptively into a fine fresh piece of porpoise meat and throws to a hungry shark that chances to follow in the wake of the Elise. “Sharks are the enemy of man,” said the captain, “and for that reason I am the enemy of the sharks. I have harpooned them and blown them up with dynamite. No, I am not afraid they will blow up under the barkentine. I have studied the ways of the shark and know that he always sheers off either to port or to starboard after he has gulped the bait. I have fed hundreds of sharks with my little explosive pill, and only one exceptionally bright fellow came under my ship to let himself explode. It did not bother me, because the Elise is built of iron.” […]

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/jul/05/shark-drunk-monsters-tale-review

The Guardian [UK]

5 July 2017

Shark Drunk and A Sea Monster’s Tale review – the lure of an astonishing fish

Philip Hoare

[…] One sailor told me of his friend who, working for the navy during the second world war, decided to see what would happen if he planted a mine on a passing shark. It swam back under the boat, detonating the device and blowing off one of the man’s legs. […]