Web site helps fetch the truth about LDS urban legends
While visiting the Church Office Building of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Salt Lake City, a young Latter-day Saint couple ends up riding the elevator with church president Spencer W. Kimball. After a few moments, the grandfatherly LDS leader gives the couple a measuring look and tells them, “If you knew what I know, you’d get your one year’s supply of food storage.”
Did the former leader of the worldwide church really give an exclusive tip-off of an impending global or local disaster to a young LDS couple he met by chance in an elevator? For many Latter-day Saints, there’s no way of knowing whether such stories, when they hear them, are true. And many, if not most, similar accounts may not ever be definitively verified or debunked.
Scholars and authors have written extensively about LDS folklore. Utah State University has a collection devoted to it. And now a Latter-day Saint family man has launched HolyFetch.com: The Mormon Urban Legends Web site (www.holyfetch.com) to collect information about the unverified, sometimes unverifiable, stories that Latter-day Saints tell each other.
A marketing developer who lives in Kaysville, Casey Cummings said that he’s heard the stories all his life. You almost can’t avoid them, Cummings said, if you’re a member of the church growing up in Utah (Cummings was raised in Roy). While he was an LDS proselytizing missionary in Austria, Cummings, who’s now 31 and a married father of two, started to keep track of each new story he heard.
“At the time, I thought, ‘Maybe there should be a book of this stuff,’ ” he said. The idea for a book came and went several times, over the years. Then, after learning about Web site construction for work, Cummings revisited his old hobby again, this time with an eye on cyberspace. Now HolyFetch.com offers information regarding more than 60 folktales.
Cummings’s wife, Sue, said she’s not expecting the Web site to change their lives — but it is nice to have some hard data about that story she heard from a neighbor that, following the dedication of the Bountiful Utah Temple, all seismic activity in the vicinity of the temple ceased. (Not true — more about that in a minute.)
The Web site hosts ads, and Cummings said that, since he launched the site in June, the ads have already covered the cost (about $100 altogether) of purchasing a domain name and putting the information he’s gathered online. Not that he’s planning to quit his day job, or at least not anytime soon. There are bound to only be so many Latter-day Saints, after all, with a Web browser and a casual interest in Mormon myths.
“It’s definitely more of a hobby than a business venture,” he said.
From Ronal Reagan to the stripling warriors
Choosing a name for the site was more complicated than might at first be supposed. Cummings thought about names that would incorporate phrases like “Mormon myths” or “Mormon hoaxes,” but quickly realized that he’d be attracting the wrong kind of traffic. When it comes to the Internet, words like “hoax” and “myth” are firmly in the grasp of people who aim them at LDS teachings and practices.
Cummings settled on the substitute expletive “fetch” because it has no special significance to Mormonism’s many online detractors, but is an inside-the-culture shout-out to Latter-day Saints: A friendly way of calling attention to inside-the-culture tall tales.
Mormon folktales are often devoted to events in church history, or centered around supposed (and sometimes authentic) pronouncements of former church leaders, though there are numerous stories that have a present-day setting. The stories often have a moral that legitimizes or burnishes various LDS beliefs or practices.
Sean Honea, an employee of Sprint who lives in Syracuse and took an immediate interest in HolyFetch.com, said that one of the first stories he remembers hearing is directly related to his going to the LDS Missionary Training Center in Provo while preparing to serve a proselytizing mission to California.
While at the MTC, where missionaries receive language training and make other preparations to depart to the locales where they will serve, Honea heard that a mission president had once experienced a waking vision in which he saw that the MTC buildings and grounds were being protected by angels from a concerted demonic assault. Not just any angels, either. The defenders of the MTC were none other than the spirits of “stripling warriors.”
(The stripling warriors are youthful soldiers described in several chapters of the Book of Mormon, a volume of scripture sacred to Latter-day Saints. The young fighters went to battle to protect their people despite a vow of non-violence that had been taken by their parents, and are frequently admired by Latter-day Saints for their valor and devotion to truth.)
Though he’s more skeptical now, Honea said, at the time the story caused a spike in his “spiritual adrenaline.” “You think, ‘Wow, I’m in this place’ ” where angels are guarding the doors, he said.
Other folklore concerns matters that might seem more mundane, such as the question of whether former chief exec Ronald Reagan — who did meet with LDS leaders on a handful of occasions — intended at one point to be taught about the church by LDS proselytizing missionaries. Or whether actor Steve Martin was once baptized into the church.
Sometimes the same story may be told about more than one person. Cummings said that such “migrating” legends — both wrestler Hulk Hogan and actor Bruce Willis are said to have given interviews in which they commented on the ferocity of Mormon pickup basketball games — always make him suspicious.
Oh, say what is proof?
To determine whether or not the “urban legends” referenced on the site are true, Cummings has a variety of approaches. Sometimes finding the answer is as simple as using the search engine Google. A story attaching weighty significance to the premortal conduct of contemporary Latter-day Saint youth and erroneously attributed to LDS apostle Boyd K. Packer became so widespread that Packer directly refuted it in April 2001.
Packer’s refutation, printed in the Church News weekly newspaper, a church-authorized publication, can be easily found online: “We continue to receive reports of the distribution of a quote attributed to me which begins, ‘The youth of the church today were generals in the war in heaven,’ and ends with the statement that when they return to heaven ‘all in attendance will bow in your presence.’
“I did not make that statement. I do not believe that statement.
“The statement, on occasion, has been attributed to others of the First Presidency and the Twelve. None of the brethren made that statement.”
Sometimes Cummings will take a trip to the local library to search through books written on pertinent topics. Sometimes his research leads to scholarly papers. To debunk the Bountiful Utah Temple story, Cummings contacted seismologists at the University of Utah.
For Cummings, the question of what constitutes authoritative evidence that a story is either true or not true varies from case to case. If a story involves church doctrine or history, then Cummings will try to find multiple sources.
A large section of HolyFetch.com, on the other hand, is devoted to verifying whether certain famous people are, or have been, active Latter-day Saints. “For most celebrities,” Cummings said, “if they’ve given an interview in one magazine where they talk about being LDS, that’s enough for me.”
At the moment, some of the sourcing on HolyFetch.com is spotty at best. A post discussing the LDS background of actor Aaron Eckhart, for example, includes a quote from Eckhart himself, given in an interview with Entertainment Weekly magazine.
On the other hand, a post about actor Wilford Brimley affirms his Mormonism, but gives no attribution. (Brimley himself, who has both Facebook and MySpace pages, lists “Mormon” as his religion on MySpace.)
Cummings said that he’s been gradually addressing the discrepancy. Because he started collecting information about Mormon folklore long before he’d ever thought about devoting a Web site to it, there are some cases in which he has what he considers to be definitive information, but no longer knows exactly where he found it.
Hence, new material is definitively sourced, and Cummings said that he’s working on filling in that information wherever it’s missing.
Of course, for many of the questions he looks into, the most definitive answer is that there is no definitive answer. Latter-day Saints sometimes connect Sasquatch sightings to the Biblical character Cain, who killed his brother, Abel, and was cursed by God. Cummings said that most people who have looked into the matter think that connection stems from an old quote attributed to early LDS apostle David W. Patten.
As posted on HolyFetch.com, Patten is believed to have given the following account of allegedly meeting Cain in the flesh: “His head was about even with my shoulders as I sat in my saddle. He wore no clothing, but was covered with hair. His skin was very dark.”
(The quotation, originally from a letter written by Abraham O. Smoot, can be found, among other instances, in the book “The Miracle of Forgiveness,” by — say, where have we seen that name before? — Spencer W. Kimball.)
Does that mean that Cain is Bigfoot? Well, of course not — but you can see where people would get the idea. If you visit HolyFetch.com, you can see where some might go to disprove it.
Did you hear the one about …
1) Gladys Knight is. Alice Cooper is not. But of all the celebrities who may or may not be Latter-day Saints, the most durable rumor is the one about actor Steve Martin.
2) Did the king of rock ‘n’ roll learn about King Benjamin (and other Nephite rulers) by reading the Book of Mormon. Don’t be cruel, to a rumor that’s …
3) Everyone knows that the Michael Myers mask in “Halloween” was made from a Captain Kirk mask. But was the face of Yoda from “Star Wars” really inspired by the sagacious visage of Spencer W. Kimball?
4) True or false: The Bountiful Utah Temple imparted increased seismic stability to the hillside where it stands. After it was dedicated, all seismic activity in the area ceased.
5) Timing is everything if you’re wondering what to make of that rumor that Snoop Dogg joined the LDS Church in 2008.