Urban legends are popular stories alleged to be true and passed from individual to individual via oral or written (e.g., forwarded email) communication. ＿＿（46）＿＿ , said stories concern outlandish, humiliating, humorous, terrifying, or supernatural events--events which, in the telling, always seem to happen to someone other than the teller. In lieu of evidence, the conveyor of an urban legend relies on narrative flourishes and/or reference to supposedly ＿＿（47）＿＿ sources (e.g., “I heard this from a friend of a friend,” or “This really happened to my sister’s co-worker’s hairdresser”) to ＿＿（48）＿＿ its credibility. Urban legends are a type of folklore--defined as the beliefs, stories and traditions of ordinary people (“the folk”)--so one way of differentiating between urban legends and other kinds of narrative (popular fiction, for example) is by examining where they come from and how they are disseminated. Legends arise spontaneously and are rarely ＿＿（49）＿＿ to a single point of origin. Because they end up being repeated by many different people in many different places, the stories tend to change over time. Hence, no two ＿＿（50）＿＿ of an urban legend are ever exactly alike; there can be as many variants as there are tellers of the tale.