Foiled Abduction at Sam's Club

By David Emery

Another familiar urban legend hit the email circuit in 1999 as warnings appeared about the attempted abduction of a child in the restroom of a discount store called Sam's Club (a nationwide chain in the U.S. owned by Wal-Mart). At least three different versions are circulating.

Purportedly written by a witness who saw the events unfold, all three texts tell the tale of the mother of a 4-year-old who looks up from the meat counter and discovers her daughter has vanished. The management of the store is notified, at which point all exits are locked and employees search for the child. Minutes later, she is found in the restroom, unharmed except that her hair was partially shaven and some of her clothing removed in an apparent attempt to disguise her appearance. The moral of the story is bluntly stated: "Please keep an eye out for your kids when going to these shopping places."

The narrative itself is at least 20 years old and did not originate at Sam's Club. It's a staple of American folklore, with versions set in amusement parks, shopping malls, and department stores of virtually every metropolitan area in the U.S.

Jan Harold Brunvand catalogued several of these in his 1986 collection of urban legends, The Mexican Pet. This version was told by a teenager in Fairfax, Virginia:

   My mom's friend told her about a little boy around 7 years old. It seems that the boy and his mother were shopping in the "Toys R Us" store and the boy wandered a little bit away from his mother to go look at something. A few minutes later, this mother started looking for the boy. She couldn't find him. Crying, she rushed up and told a clerk, who immediately locked the doors. Everyone searched. They found the boy, with two men. Only his hair was cut and his shirt was changed so he would look different.

– The Mexican Pet, W.W. Norton & Co. (1986), p. 153

The legend became so popular in the early '80s that it turned up repeatedly in the press as hard news, only to be retracted soon afterward when no substantiation could be found. Even Ann Landers fell for it, admitting later she'd mistaken folklore for fact.

The Beloit Daily News ran a local variant of the story in 1983, correctly identifying it as apocryphal:

   A woman was shopping with her child at a Beloit (Wisconsin) department store when she turned her back for a moment. The next thing she knew, her child was gone. Store officials blocked off exits and searched the store.
   The child was found in the bathroom with two women who had cut her hair and put different clothes on her. The two women supposedly were released so the store could avoid "bad publicity."
   There's just one catch. Not a word of the story is true, according to the Beloit Police Department, which investigated the persistent rumor.

– Beloit Daily News, Dec. 1, 1983

The Internet version

As Brunvand observes, the poignant moral for parents combined with public awareness of real-life child abductions have kept the legend alive across the decades. It first appeared in email form in mid-August 1999:

A less widely circulated variant (see email #2) specifies Austin, Texas as the setting, but employees with whom I spoke at both of the Austin area Sam's Clubs told me they knew of no such incidents actually occurring.

Still another email version (see email #3) contains information about the Code Adam program alluded to in the the story. Code Adam is a special alert sent over the public address system in Wal-Mart and Sam's Club stores alerting employees of a missing child. The program has been credited with stopping at least one abduction (in a Wal-Mart in Crawfordsville, Indiana in 1993) and has inspired other retailers to institute similar measures.

While the exact incident described in this story has never been documented, it obviously contains a grain of truth. Child abductions do occur and they're every parent's worst nightmare. The legend functions as a cautionary tale.

But does a useful message justify passing along false information? People should consult their conscience before doing so, because the net effect is to generate real terror based on an incident that never happened. As one reader complained to Ann Landers after she published the story as "true" in 1985, "Reminding people to watch their kids is one thing. Scaring the pants off them is another."

Safety matters, but so does the truth.
 

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