Did this really happen? Have you heard a version of the story?

April 14, 2009 8:55 PM

Help me find out more about this urban legend.

I was at a restaurant alone, and overheard someone telling this story to her friend. I want to know about other versions you may have heard, and whether it is based on a real event. Here is the story:

A group of kids goes out to the woods to find 'shrooms. They proceed to find some 'shrooms and start tripping in the woods. One of the kids disappears for a while, and the others try to find him. Eventually he leads them to a magical gnome, who talks in a weird gnome language. They all hang out with the gnome for a while, and then it is getting dark so they decide to drive back home, but they decide to take the gnome with them. As they start to sober up they realize the gnome is still there, and freak out. Eventually they realize that it is a toddler with downs syndrome, and they bring the child to the authorities, who figure out that it had been intentionally abandoned by its parents.

I heard a second variation recently, where the detail about downs syndrome was not included, and there was an added detail about the kids being celebrated as heroes. Have you heard a version of this, what variations? What part of what country? I heard the story in Portland, Oregon, USA, my friend heard the story in Olympia, Washington, USA.

posted by idiopath to society & culture (12 comments total)

Oh, and of course I checked snopes and google, no luck.
posted by idiopath at 8:57 PM on April 14

Snopes: "Gnome captured by drug-tripping teens and stashed in their closet overnight is discovered in the morning to be a lost child. "

On preview: I search for "snopes gnome syndrome" on google.
posted by niles at 9:00 PM on April 14 [1 favorite has favorites]

There's a snopes entry similar to your story. I searched for "gnome."
posted by chiababe at 9:00 PM on April 14

Here it is!

http://www.snopes.com/horrors/drugs/closet.asp

(I googled "urban legend tripping downs syndrome")

the last time I got my hair cut the girl in the chair next to me told her stylist a story that was CLEARLY an urban legend... there ought to be a word for the discomfort you feel when you hear such a story being told.... maybe the germans have one.
posted by moxiedoll at 9:01 PM on April 14 [8 favorites has favorites]

This actually happens a lot. The ending is a bit different, though: the teens looking for magic mushrooms or middle-aged gourmands looking for tasty things are inevitably mistaken about the species they find, and die on the way to the ER after stumbling out of the woods into a nearby subdivision.
posted by Inspector.Gadget at 9:15 PM on April 14 [3 favorites has favorites]

I obviously need to be more persistent with the groups of search terms I use. Thanks guys.
posted by idiopath at 9:22 PM on April 14

I heard the story two years ago in Northern California from a visiting friend who had grown up in South Carolina and went to college in Texas. I think it's a pretty far-reaching myth.
posted by easy_being_green at 9:49 PM on April 14

Thankfully, it looks like mushroom poisoning is pretty rare in the United States, though apparently statistics are hard to come by:

Accurate figures on the relative frequency of mushroom poisonings are difficult to obtain. For the 5-year period between 1976 and 1981, 16 outbreaks involving 44 cases were reported to the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta.

posted by DavidNYC at 10:11 PM on April 14

I live in Chile. Our next door neighbor told us this story a couple months ago, and it "happened to a friend of his."
(Of course, in spanish) the version was slightly different, as he thought the guy was a gnome when he had taken shrooms but then it turned out that it was just a midget. He locked the guy in the closet and gave him food and water for a few days until he either became mentally normal or reasoned with himself to let him go. at the time of the story telling he said his friend was waiting for a lawsuit to go through.

My boyfriend believed the story. I thought it was bogus but I didn't realize it was this widely spread.
posted by nzydarkxj at 10:26 PM on April 14

Wow, this is awesome. I went to the University of Kansas for undergrad from 2002 to 2005. A group of chem-E grads and undergrads went to Amsterdam over winter break at the end of 2003 and came back with this story, told as if it had happened to them.

Some differences: They called it a troll, not a gnome, they decided to put it in the hotel room closet at the end of the night and woke up straight to discover it was a child. Upon going to the police, they learned it was a missing child, something to do with a custody dispute and the child being taken by the father and then abandoned, and they did not get in trouble.

Since then, I've wanted to believe. The wild impossibility of things happening the way they were described aside, these were the kind of people who *did* have all kinds of crazy adventures, many of them involving drugs. I've repeated the story to a number of people. I know a number of people in our particular campus social group repeated the story.

Interesting that you heard this on the West Coast (hello from Eugene, by the way). There is a steady flux of KU grads to both coasts. I know that several people who now live in San Francisco know the story (hi, metafilter's hototgisu!). If I was present for the origination of what has now become a major urban myth... awesome.
posted by Derive the Hamiltonian of... at 10:38 PM on April 14 [1 favorite has favorites]

I knew I'd heard it somewhere before.

Told on bash.org as a "happened to a friend of mine" story: http://bash.org/?794379.
posted by monocultured at 2:53 AM on April 15

Holy crap. A friend of mine claimed something very similar (tripped on acid, found a gnome, turns out the gnome's a Down Syndrome kid looking for candy) happened to a friend of hers.

Her cover is blown!!! ;)
posted by divabat at 5:47 AM on April 15