The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #65892   Message #1108318
Posted By: Nerd
03-Feb-04 - 12:30 PM
Thread Name: Folklore: graveyard dare folk motif?
Subject: RE: Folklore: graveyard dare folk motif?
I show the Twilight Zone episode to my folklore classes sometimes; they did a couple more based on Urban Legends too.

One is particularly interesting. A woman who is in the hospital after a nervous breakdown keeps seeing a nurse walk past her room in the night. When she follows the nurse down in the elevator, she winds up outside the morgue, and the nurse says "There's Room for one More, Honey!" This happens every night, and it's unclear if it's a dream or if it's real. When the woman finally gets out of the hospital, she is about to board the plane home and the stewardess turns out to be the nurse! She says, "there's room for one more, honey," and the woman runs away screaming and does not board the plane. Of course, the plane explodes.

This is an interesting episode because it's based on a legend in which a shadowy coachman keeps telling a woman "there's room for one more." In this older version of the tale, common in the 1910s and 1920s, the woman goes to a big London department store and they have a brand-new lift installed. The lift operator turns out to be the coachman, she avoids the lift, and she is saved when the lift falls down the shaft.

What I love about this is the way they've just updated the technology. In the original, the lift is the new technology, the coach is the older one. In the Zone version, the lift is the older technology, and the airplane is the newer one.

You can find the original of this tale in Briggs and Tongue's Folktales of England.