Op Verhaal Komen. Moderne Sagen en Geruchten uit Vlaanderen

With his most recent book, Stefaan Top has published an impressive collection of modern legends and rumours that were collected among Flemish youngsters. This book is the sixth and last part of the author’s legend collection Op Verhaal Komen. The previous five parts dealt with traditional legends recorded in the five Flemish provinces.

Top enthusiastically reassures the reader that storytelling is still alive today. Just like their traditional counterparts, modern legends voice the fears, frustrations, and obsessions of their narrators. What distinguishes modern legends from traditional ones is primarily their contemporary setting and modern themes. The author pays attention to classical problems such as terminology and definitions associated with modern legends. Regarding terminology, Top presents an elaborate inventory of nineteen Dutch names for modern legends, forty English, eleven German, and four French ones. He also discusses the content, presentation, sources, and circulation of these legends.

Whereas the roots of collecting and recording traditional folk narratives lie in Europe, the first scientific studies of contemporary legends come from the United States of the 1940s and 1950s. Later on, Europe caught up, which the author shows by a non-exhaustive overview of publications on this subject. In 1982 Top attended the first international contemporary legend conference in Sheffield. Since then he has pursued this fascinating subject in his educational activities at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. This book presents the striking results of fieldwork during which university students questioned hundreds of pupils in youth groups and secondary schools about their knowledge of modern legends. In his foreword to this book, the Minister of Youth and Culture praises the author’s ability to render the oral discourse of adolescents with great precision.

No fewer than 450 modern legends and rumours are listed according to a slightly modified version of Brunvand’s classification of modern legends.Within this framework a large variety of disgusting, gruesome, seductive, scary, or humorous examples of youngsters’ narrative behaviour are presented to the reader. The collection mentions themes such as hitchhikers, troubles during journeys, accidents, horror stories, sabotage, crimes, alcohol, animals, food, restaurants, patrol dogs, babysitters, medical errors, satanism, UFOs, corpses, ghosts, chain letters, sex scandals, contraception, adultery, theft, abduction, burglary, technology, computers, the Internet, professors, students, examinations, and so on. For each story the author mentions the name, age, and place of residence of the narrator, together with the source of the narrative as described by the storyteller.

Top emphasises the importance of oral communication, which accounts for seventy-nine per cent of the collected modern legends and rumours. The key role of structured environments like youth organisations and schools, moreover, indicates that group culture today still enhances storytelling.

Here are some striking examples. A pregnant woman loses her child after having seen a UFO, and believes the UFO has stolen her foetus. Another woman hires an HIV-infected prostitute to contaminate her unfaithful husband. The ghost of a deceased blood donor takes revenge and keeps haunting the hospital where he died. After a forest fire, a man with a diving mask, flippers, and a wetsuit is found in a French forest, having been accidentally picked up and then dropped by a special fire-fighting airplane that scooped up water from the sea. Almost all people who are abducted by UFOs have B-negative blood. A group of youngsters decides to summon ghosts one evening by means of a plate and a glass. When the ghost is asked to prove its presence, the glass breaks and a cell phone starts to ring. A boy who suffers from a mental handicap steals a penguin from the zoo and hides the animal in his backpack. A girl has a swollen cheek after having eaten a hamburger from McDonald’s, containing a pregnant cockroach. The hamburgers from McDonald’s contain worms that come out if you hold the meat in the steam from hot milk.

A computer always switches itself on after midnight and on the screen the text “Death 13” appears. After thirteen nights the owner of the computer is found strangled by the wire of his machine. A young female student gets stuck in the elevator of her dormitory during her examination re-sits. Several days later the girl’s corpse is found with nibbled-off fingertips. The most mysterious and fascinating story from this collection is told by a mother who recounts an extremely bizarre experience her son has had during a business trip. Even the most rational reader will not make it to the end of these five pages without experiencing at least a slight sense of fear or doubt. After all, the satanic number 666 is undeniably present in this story.

One-hundred and sixty-seven pages are filled with a number of classic legends, but also a large quantity of unique and new-looking modern legends. These are followed by an explanatory chapter in which recurrent legend themes are briefly contextualised and interpreted. The author rightfully calls his book a narrative mirror of our times in which fear, danger, horror, and violence play a crucial role, next to the humour that has to soften the omnipresent feeling of threat. With this collection of modern legends and rumours, Stefaan Top has written a real page-turner that excels in originality and diversity.