The Dead Boyfriend

A rusting old car in the woods
Owen Franken/Photographer's Choice RF/Getty Images

Here are two examples of the urban legend known as the "The Dead Boyfriend."

Example #1





Example #2

Here's a story my mom told me and my friends when I was about seven years old. You can imagine I was scared to death...



She locked the doors and sat restlessly, waiting for her boyfriend to come back. Suddenly, she sees a shadow fall across her lap. She looks up to see... not her boyfriend, but a strange, crazed-looking man. He is swinging something in his right hand.



"The Dead Boyfriend" is reminiscent of the hook-man urban legend, in which a pair of teenagers necking on Lovers' Lane race off in fright after hearing a radio alert about a murderer on the loose with a hook for a hand. On returning home they discover, to their horror, a bloody hook dangling from one of the car door handles.

Whereas the protagonists of "The Hook" escape with their lives, the present tale concludes with the boyfriend murdered and the girlfriend in fatal jeopardy (though in some variants she is ultimately rescued by passersby). Folklorists regard both narratives as examples of cautionary tales but tend to interpret their meanings differently. "The Hook" is usually read as a warning against adolescent sexual activity; "The Dead Boyfriend" has been interpreted as a more generalized warning not to stray too far from the safety of home. "On a literal level a story like 'The Boyfriend's Death' simply warns young people to avoid situations in which they may be endangered," writes folklorist Jan Harold Brunvand, "but at a more symbolic level the story reveals society's broader fears of people, especially women and the young, being alone and among strangers in the darkened world outside the security of their own home or car." (The Vanishing Hitchhiker, W.W. Norton, 1981.)

Thematically, "campfire stories" such as these have much in common with the plot lines of modern horror movies, but there is an important difference. Typically, the villains in slasher films exhibit supernatural traits such as inhuman strength and "unkillability" (e.g., Michael Myers in Halloween and Freddie in Nightmare on Elm Street), while the hook-handed madmen and crazed axe murderers of urban legendry are only slightly exaggerated versions of the real-life serial killers we read about in newspaper headlines.

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