There are no kidney thieves. Your glands are safe and so are the family jewels. Mysteries of the Road Tall tales like these are grist for every traveler's mill, according to University of Florida culture critic James B. Twitchell. And so on. Twitchell says the travel business is a storehouse of so-called urban legends for a lot of reasons.
Travel is risky.
Part of it is the fear of the unknown, and part of it is that we're not anchored while we're away. I wrote a column warning travelers that the magnets used to hold the trays in place could make laptops go haywire and destroy the contents of their hard drives. I've since concluded I was suckered. Recently, I almost took the bait again. I spent the better part of two weeks calling hotels and suppliers to find out if the refrigerators were indeed annihilating hotel guests.