Starting a rumor

A few years back a rumor started going around that an attempted kidnapping was narrowly thwarted at one of our local shopping malls. The details varied depending on the storyteller. It was always one local mall or another, but exactly which one changed from teller to teller. The age of the victim hovered somewhere between eight and 15 or so. But the key elements were always the same.

At one of the large anchor stores – Dillard’s, Ward’s, it didn’t especially matter where – a young person was cornered in the bathroom and drugged by an evildoer. Once the kid was out cold, he or she was disguised – methods included changes into ragged clothes, impromptu haircuts, even dye jobs – by the kidnappers. Fortunately another store patron or employee happened onto the scene in mid-conversion and foiled the dastardly plot.

Never happened. If you’ve ever heard of an urban legend, you already know that this is a classic example of the genre. Somehow or another, parental nervousness about leaving offspring on their own in shopping malls – or even leaving them unattended for short periods of time – transforms itself into a horror story about an unfortunate tyke, an inattentive parent, a monster and a miraculous happy ending.

I want to get this story going again, but I want to give it a new twist. Here’s the script you can use around the water cooler at work, at your next church social, or anywhere else you get the chance:

“The other day I heard a story from a neighbor that said a friend of his nearly lost one of her kids to a kidnapper. The kid was 14 years old, so she figured it would be okay to drop him and some of his friends off by themselves at (pick your favorite local movie theater). They were supposed to go see (pick a PG-rated movie in current release), but after they bought tickets they snuck into a different theater that was showing (pick an R-rated horror movie in current release).

“There were only two or three other people in the theater, and it turned out that one of them was a child molester. When he saw that the kids came in with no adult supervision, he decided to try to drug them and then kidnap my neighbor’s friend’s kid.”

Feel free to modify the story as needed. Borrow hair dye or barber’s scissors from the original legend. Throw in a heroic theater employee who saves the day. Invent your own details. Do whatever it takes to make the story convincing. Do whatever it takes to strike terror into the hearts of any and all parents within earshot.

Why would I ask you to help me spread such a malicious lie? Because I want parents everywhere to be afraid to drop kids off unsupervised at movie theaters. If we can nip this practice in the bud, maybe the rest of us will finally get the chance to enjoy a movie in peace without sharing the experience with a gaggle of squirming, nattering, seat-kicking, candy-wrapper-rattling brats.

I first hatched this plot several years back after going to an afternoon show of the third “Lord of the Rings” movie. Normally weekday matinees are safe from packs of feral crib lizards, but I guess school had already dismissed for the holiday break.

In all fairness to the kids, the movie did have its share of slow spots. Most three and a half hour long movies do. I probably would have gotten restless if hundreds of hours of Sponge Bob had left me with the attention span of a gnat.

In fairness to the movie theater staff, they’re entitled to make a buck. The fidgeting, yammering horde spent more to get in than I did, though if you combined the admission paid by all the adults turning around and giving them dirty looks I’d bet we had the kids outnumbered.

I’m not even blaming the parents. If I had kids that bad I’d treasure every opportunity to get rid of them, at least for a few hours. Of course, maybe the kids aren’t that bad when their parents are around. Certainly at the “Lord of the Rings” the curtain climbers behind me were a sharp contrast to the two well-behaved kids in front of me who came with their dad.

So let’s at least give this a try. If you’re squeamish about telling a tale so scary that your audience never drops kids at the movies ever again, that’s okay. But please try to at least make it frightening enough that folks will either go to the movies with their children or at least try to get the theater to keep unescorted kids out of grown-ups’ movies. Remember, if we’re going to prevent imaginary kidnappings everyone has to lend a hand.

Most of this entry was originally printed as a column in the Kansas City Kansan.