The Great Urban Myth in my border community -- Windsor, Ont.,across the river from Detroit, MI -- is that during Prohibition tunnels were dug under the river from the Canadian to the American side. Everyone has a grandfather or had a grandfather who knew somebody who carried booze across in one. I defy anyone to show me such a tunnel. Considering the trouble encountered when the early Victorian engineers attempted to tunnel under the Thames, how could a bunch of gangsters with farm labourers manage to do it, undetected, and without cave-ins and floods? How could it ever be cost-efficient? Would not such a tunnel be now a tourist attraction? Yet hardly a conversation about Prohibition can be had here without such a tunnel being mentioned and solemnly avowed, often by the same people who think that the Underground Railway which ended here was a real railway with tracks and locomotives. (Perhaps they used the same tunnel under the river?)

I suspect that some blind pig or roadhouse, or gangster's warehouse, might have had a short tunnel to the river, from which such an Urban Legend grew.

If I had a way with lyrics I'd write a song about The Great Phantom Booze Tunnel.