I know what you're thinking––these are just silly headlines taken from my local supermarket tabloid. But that's where you'd be wrong. I got these as e-mails. Yes, they all come from that venerable source of fretful wisdom––the Internet. Urgent alerts from concerned friends, vigilant relatives––and complete strangers. Thank god for the World Wide Web!

And then there are those wonderfully gruesome things that have (supposedly) happened to other people. The man who blew himself up when he went to extinguish his cigarette after his wife squirted a can of hairspray in the toilet, the child killed by snakes in a Burger King ball pit, the beloved aunt whose life was needlessly snuffed out when the cleaning lady unplugged her respirator to run the floor waxer. How about the tourist, slipped a mickey in a Las Vegas bar by a gorgeous blonde? The poor guy woke up covered in ice in a hotel bathtub to find his kidneys had been removed by an organ harvester and sold on the black market.

There's a light side to life, too, and the Internet, bless its beeping little heart, brings us a few chuckles: Man stuck in cat door mistaken for work of art. How about the naked wife in football helmet and the meter reader? You've probably heard the one about Thurgood Marshall mowing his lawn when a woman passing by asks how much he gets paid for a job like that. "Oh, I don't get paid," says the Supreme Court Justice. "The woman I do it for just lets me sleep with her."

There's the truly sinister: the Second Coming Project (the cloning of Jesus), the alarming news that the latest version of AOL's software permits them to read stuff on your hard drive. We know this one's genuine because it was brought to our attention by a fired employee, and, look here, AOL, any denial from you will only confirm it.

And let's not forget the sexual outer limits: the perfume-sniffing scam (your girlfriend could be spritzed with the latest fragrance in a major department store––actually knockout drops––and end up in white slavery), male pregnancy websites, odd-things-inserted-into-orifices stories, and the nasty sex experiments NASA is performing in outer space––the fiends!

The Internet has become the mother of all urban legends, outrageous stories about fantastic things befalling normal folk like you or me that are so irresistible we can't wait to pass them on to the next person we meet. Wild and improbable things, sure but they could have happened. Hair-raising tales and creative gossip––the scandalous habits of one's neighbors and the bizarre goings on of people in foreign parts. Schadenfreude being a big part of these tales––the perverse pleasure we get from bemoaning someone else's misery.

Urban legends didn't, of course, start with the Internet––as folk tales, these are the oldest stories we have. The imp of the perverse that drives the dotty urban legends is the poor relation of the folk imagination that inspired The Odyssey, The Thousand and One Nights and the blues.

E-mail lore is strangely akin to folktales. Hence the disorienting mix of hard facts and florid fantasies that sit absolutely straight-faced in one's morning inbox. The Web in this way is similar to the situation in the late Middle Ages when readers gave equal credence to Marco Polo's travel tales (mostly true) and those of Sir John Mandeville, which were almost entirely invented.

Oh, by the way, did I forward you the one about the 747 pilot who locked himself out of the cockpit and had to hack his way back in with a fire ax? Wait a minute, this isn't an urban legend, it's a movie. If you think about it, most Hollywood movies are urban legends. Movies, even the most far-fetched, are based on the what-if premise. Just bring in some special effects, a few healthy girls, and Arnold Schwarzenegger––and folks'll believe anything.

On the other hand, a lot of urban legends seem to originate with movies. It's the ongoing dreamtime of pop culture cannibalizing itself. Urban legends are little one-minute mental movies––preposterous plots and drastically abbreviated storylines that run in the cinema of the mind. Folklore has its own poetic realism and emotional logic, and these alarming net-spawned dioramas carry us back to that atavistic cave of invention, a story-teller spinning yarns by the flickering light of the fire.

Coming Soon To an Inbox Near You: The Dark Side of the Internet!