They Hurt Her
November 12th, 2007 by
rachel
The following tale is copied verbatim from a bulletin that a friend reposted on MySpace last night:
About six years ago in Indiana, Carmen Winstead was pushed down a sewer opening by five girls in her school, trying to embarrass her in front of her school during a fire drill. When she didn't submerge, the police were called. They went down and brought up 17-year-old Carmen Winstead's body, with her neck broken from hitting the ladder, then the concrete at the bottom. The girls told everyone she fell... They believed them.
FACT: About two months later, 16-year-old David Gregory read this post and didn't repost it. When he went to take a shower, he heard laughter, started freaking out, and ran to his computer to repost it. He said goodnight to his mom and went to sleep, but five hours later, his mom woke up in the middle of the night from a loud noise and David was gone. A few hours later, the police found him in the sewer, with a broken neck and the skin on his face peeled off.
Even Google her name - you'll find this to be true.
If you don't repost this saying "They hurt her," then Carmen will get you, either from a sewer, the toilet, the shower, or when you go to sleep, you'll wake up in the sewer, in the dark, then Carmen will come and kill you.
Vacationing back to reality for a moment, I'd like to make it clear that I'm a sucker for scary everything (Stephen King is a god among men in my mind and if you've ever driven by my house on Halloween, you'd think I actually lived in a cemetery), but this is a bit too far fetched, even for me. After reading Carmen's story, the first thing that occurred to me is that this murder happened six years ago, which would have made it in about 2001, but according to Wikipedia, MySpace wasn't founded until August 2003, so why would a murdered girl wait two years to start her chain letter of death?
A few other fallacies about the story wove their way through my mind, and I also wondered why my twenty-something male friend would actually be scared enough to repost, but what intrigued me the most was one particular sentence I read when I went to see what Snopes had to say about this urban legend.
"Its key difference lies in its recommended mode of transmission: rather than imploring recipients to mail (or e-mail) it to others, it requires them to post it on their MySpace pages."
Cheesy chain mail has and will always be the same, but the mode in which it's sent continues to change as technology evolves. When I was a kid, I received them via what we now call "snail mail." Then it moved to e-mail when I hit my teenage years. Now it's slowly moving to social networks.
Anyone else see a trend here? Chain mail has the tendency to move to whatever communications vehicle people are using the most frequently. So, if you're a working professional who really thinks you'll be using e-mail to get your message to others forever, just remember back to only a decade and a half ago when people thought they'd be using a pad of paper and a pen forever, and beware.
Pass it on...
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