Did you know that your school library is sinking? Or that last year, a student in the school of medicine played a practical joke using human body parts that resulted in another student's insanity? And did you know that you can leave after 20 minutes if an instructor does not show up for classes?

These are the stories that frosh are told in hushed voices during the first weeks of school and then are passed down through the years until everyone treats them as fact.

Except that they aren't true at all. They're urban legends, just like the story of the chicken franchise that had to change its name because there was no real chicken in its food. And the babysitter who gets threatening phone calls only to be told by the police that the calls are coming from with the very house in which she is babysitting! GET - OUT - OF -THE - HOUSE! (Cue scary music.)

Urban legends are our modern day folklore. They're the humorous, ironic, or even horrifying stories that you might hear as having happened to a friend of a friend. But, for the most part, they never happened at all.

These stories often stem from things that scare us or that we don't understand, says Dr. Sheldon Posen, curator of Canadian Folklife at the Canadian Museum of Civilization.

Of course, one of the biggest things an average university or college student doesn't understand is school policy.

A common myth deals with the amount of time students are supposed to wait if an instructor doesn't show up for class.

There's always the worry that if you leave too early you might be penalized for missing a pop quiz or assignment when the teacher finally does come. However, few students would be willing to sit in an empty classroom for an hour, waiting to see if the teacher is going to show up.

As a result, student lore over the years has generated the legend that the amount of time a student should wait is based on the status of the instructor, with shorter wait times for graduate assistants and longer waits for higher-ranking professors.

And while most students think that their school really does have a regulation on this common occurrence, few schools actually do.

"There is no policy on how long a student should wait for an instructor to show up," says Jim Duggleby, manager of community relations at the University of Regina. "But the general agreed-upon time is about 10 minutes, although it's never been codified."

A policy misunderstanding like this at least makes some sense. Other legends demonstrate plain old wishful thinking, as in the tale of the dead roommate.

This story claims that if your roommate dies during the school year, you automatically get straight As for the rest of the semester.

But don't start plotting the death of your poor roomate just yet.

In reality, no Canadian school has a policy about roomate death on the books, although most will grant some leniency in schoolwork to students grieving the loss of a friend or family member, but only with the proper proof.

"None of it is automatic," says Duggleby. "You would have to prove your roommate did indeed die and that you didn't just tie them up and stick them in a closet somewhere."

Another popular myth involves a library that's slowly sinking into the ground because the architects didn't take into account the weight of the books when they were building it.

This legend has been told of libraries at schools across North America, including the Robarts library at the University of Toronto.

"We have heard that myth," says Gabriela Bravo, co-ordinator of public affairs at the library. "Of course, it's not true."

Bravo says the legend got started just after the library was built in the early 1970s amidst a flurry of controversy.

"It became the first modern building in a very old-fashioned area," says Bravo. "It's a building that you either love or hate. That's why there are myths about places, because there is interest in it."

"If the myth had been true, we would be losing several centimetres a year and we would have already lost a couple of stories," she says.

Another legend that has popped up on campuses and in movies and television shows for decades involves the pranks medical students supposedly play on friends or the public at large.

Most accounts of this urban myth involve a medical student sneaking a body part out from one of their classes – often a foot or a hand – and using it to scare the bejabbers out of an unsuspecting victim.

In one version of this story, a student goes insane when she finds a human foot hidden in her bed. Other versions have the med students dropping a human finger in a grocery shopper's bag or using a hand to pay a toll fare and then leaving it behind for the horrified toll-taker.

Not exactly the kind of behaviour we'd like to see from the doctors of the future, is it? Which is why pranks like this wouldn't be tolerated in any medical school in Canada, says Dr. Jock Murray, professor of medical humanities at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia.

"We still use cadavers for dissection," he admits. "But that (legend) would be really hard to believe."

Medical students are taught above all to respect the bodies that have been donated for their education, says Murray.

"There is a great deal of attention for the respect of the body," he says. "Any teacher would throw a medical student out of university (for that kind of behavior)."

If so many of these urban legends can be easily shattered with a few phone calls to the institutions in question, why does each new generation of post-secondary students insist on telling them?

It's human nature, says Posen.

"They answer some deep-seated need," he says. "They provide a way of expressing the kinds of fears we still have in this modern day."

And what allows many urban legends to survive is the fact that they have a ring of truth to them, says Posen.

"They're always told as true and they're told about things that could happen," he says. "They change location and suddenly it happened in your town, your city."

Or your school, for that matter.

So the next time a friend tells you a story that just sounds too good, gruesome, or outrageous to be true, remember, it probably is.

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