Little Bo Peep, a knife-wielding maniac in pigtails
In The Baby Train (W.W. Norton, 1993), folklorist Jan Harold Brunvand writes that among many other outbreaks over the past 20 years, four university campuses in the South and Midwest of the United States were hit by rumors very similar to the one that had cropped up at MSU. Certain details rung especially familiar:
At Florida State, the student paper The Flambeau reported that students were saying that a psychic, a guest on "The Oprah Winfrey Show," had predicted the following: "A knife-wielding maniac, perhaps dressed as Little Bo Peep, would slash his way through a sorority house or a dormitory."
It was also rumored that the building would be U-shaped and located near a graveyard.
At Ohio Northern University the Bo Peep motif was repeated, with the additional provisions that the ill-fated campus would have a name beginning with "O" and be surrounded by "very, very flat landscape."
The rumor at Purdue was that the killings would take place in an X-shaped building on either the highest or lowest spot on campus.
And so on.
'Nothing but a grisly rumor'
The more I read, the clearer it became that outbreaks of the urban legend on U.S. college campuses around Halloween occur so regularly and in such similar detail that it has virtually become a tradition. The same whispered scenario circulates year after year after year... yet no one at any of these colleges has ever been slaughtered on Halloween night. The panic it causes is sometimes quite real, sad to say, but there's no adequate solution to the problem. I mean, banning Little Bo Peep costumes at Halloween parties — as was done on a couple of campuses in 1988 — may seem like a "preventative measure" to some, but come on! This is just an urban legend — in Brunvand's words, "nothing but a grisly rumor."
When I responded to the MSU student who contacted me, I said these things. I tried my best to reassure him that there's nothing to be afraid of. I wondered if more frightened students might contact me, but none did.
Pat Grauer wrote again on the 26th to say that the rumor seemed to be "diffusing" a bit on the MSU campus, but that local high school students were now picking it up and passing it around. Ah, well. At that point there were only five more days to go until Halloween, after which, thankfully, the crisis would be past for another year.
Then, yesterday, a rather familiar-sounding message came in over the transom. It began:
"I am doing a story on Urban Legends because the mass-murder-on-a-college-campus-type story is going around here at the University of Michigan..."
It's going to be a looooong five days.
