Lana Whited at Roanoke.Com

Have you checked your toilet seat for spiders lately?

You might have, if you received one of the most ubiquitous e-mail hoaxes of the past year.

A "warning" which began circulating late last summer warned recipients about tiny South American Blush Spiders lurking under toilet seats. The spiders supposedly arrived in Chicago via airplane and inflicted their "extremely toxic" venom on four victims, all of whom died.

If you got the "Spider in the Toilet!" message as I did, your first reaction was probably not, "let me run right in there and lift the toilet seat," but "how would a South American spider get in MY bathroom?" And that is a perfect example of why we need to follow our instincts.

About.com's web site "Urban Legends and Folklore" lists 111 hoaxes, legends, and rumors recently or currently circulated via the Internet. Under the "Spider!" entry, we learn that none of the following exist: the researcher named in the e-mail as author of a journal article about the incident; the journal and medical association which supposedly published the work; the Chicago airport which was supposedly the spiders' point of entry; a restaurant near the nonexistent airport where three of the victims were said to have been bitten; nor the spider identified as the culprit. In fact, the given scientific name, "Arachnius gluteus" translates roughly as "butt spider."

Even if we didn't look up this hoax on About.com, common sense should make us skeptical. If four people died of the same symptoms over a five-day period, three in the same city (the fourth was allegedly a Los Angeles man who had recently visited South America), would we not hear about it from a reputable news source? The Melissa computer virus didn't even kill anyone, and we knew about it within 24 hours of its discovery.

"Better safe than sorry" is basic instinct, though, and we humans have enough doubt and fear to talk ourselves into worrying. In fact, our fear is the combustible which the spark of a hoax ignites, and in the e-mail era, the blaze spreads like wildfire. By lunch time, people on all five continents are checking under their toilet seats.

Folklorists make a distinction among hoaxes and urban legends. A hoax is a story or scenario circulated even though the sender knows it is false. In other words, a person sending a hoax is just playing a trick on us (WHY is a matter more for psychologists than folklorists). An urban legend is a story or scenario which a lot of people believe and pass along and which is almost certainly false, although it hasn't been proven false. Its origin is a mystery. For example, at slumber parties and around Girl Scout campfires, my girlfriends and I used to tell the one about the murderer with a hook for a hand who terrorizes a couple making out in a parked car. When I first began driving, stories about men hiding in the back seat were rampant. It was pretty easy to find someone who would swear that these incidents had happened, sometimes even naming towns and dates. I never read the story in the newspaper, though, and the only man with a hook for a hand that I knew about was in Peter Pan.

Sometimes an urban legend may be revealed as a hoax, but not often. It generally continues its life as an urban legend. The recent "Scream" films have perpetuated among adolescents the legends I just described. An urban legend is difficult to disprove, because the story is described in such general terms that it may bear resemblance to some actual event, somewhere. A spate of e-mail messages described the attempted abduction of women from shopping malls, via offers of pizza, fashion photography tryouts, etc. These scenarios carried enough detail about the supposed kidnappers' tactics that women might not have noted the absence of documentable facts.

A hoax, on the other hand, is very specific. The spider example names a phony medical researcher, journal, organization, airport, and restaurant, and it is largely these precise details that might lead us to believe the story. It names places and people, so it appears true.

Other recent popular hoaxes follow this pattern. In January 2000, e-mail warnings circulated about bananas from Costa Rica bearing a flesh-eating bacterium. The message named a real but rare bacterium, necrotizing fasciitis, related to streptococcus (according to the Centers for Disease Control). The Food and Drug Administration was mentioned, and the message's language imitated an actual FDA alert: "The FDA has been reluctant to issue a country wide warning because of fear of a nationwide panic. They have secretly admitted that they feel upwards of 15,000 Americans will be affected by this but that these are 'acceptable numbers.' " The message ends with the name of a source: the Manheim Research Institute.

A similar recent hoax involved a virus threat from your physical mailbox, via a large blue envelope holding a sponge supposedly saturated with the Klingerman virus. E-mail warnings also contained many specific details.

Unfortunately, many hoaxes involve health issues. Two notable examples are a warning that antiperspirant contributes to breast cancer (unsubstantiated in medical research) and that aspartame (a major artificial sweetener) has caused neurological diseases such as multiple sclerosis. I confess that I stopped consuming aspartame for a while based on this one.

Another hoax prominent enough to draw coverage in the mainstream news was the rumored "gas out" in early April. Americans were urged, by e-mail, not to buy gas for three days, with the goal of driving down oil prices. Messages cited previous "successful" attempts and actual industry organizations, such as OPEC. I was very impressed when our student newspaper's news editor looked this one up on the Internet before printing it and found it to be a hoax. (I wonder how many Americans avoided the pumps the first weekend in April.)

The easy circulation of hoaxes is one of the worst abuses of e-mail. But before we conclude that mass-forwarded messages are all bad or frivolous (such as circulated jokes), consider these examples.

On Valentine's Day, 9-year-old Asha Degree disappeared from her Shelby, N.C., home. She was last seen walking down a local highway at 4:30 that morning. (One motorist who spotted Asha did not call police, and the other went back, couldn't find her, and also did not call police. Both reactions are appalling.) Within a few days, Asha's cousin Shomari circulated an e-mail message which was widely distributed, describing Asha and her disappearance. Shomari mentioned in her message that Charlotte television station WBTV had run a story, a fact easily confirmable. About.com lists several other places where the story can be confirmed: the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children web site, and a Charlotte Observer story. Links to these sources are conveniently provided. Anyone receiving Shomari's message could know, after a five-minute check on About.com, that it should be distributed broadly.

Of course, immediate verification of such messages may not be possible, as web sites take time to update. And while it's still possible to pick up the phone and call authorities where the event is rumored to have happened, that isn't as convenient for you or the authorities. So I would recommend, as a general policy, that anyone receiving a "missing child" e-mail forward it, with some discretion (keeping in mind that if you manage a 100,000-name e-mail list, you may shut down your server). Missing child e-mail hoaxes are among the most common, but it's better to send a needless warning than to trash a message that might save a child's life. Time is critical when children are abducted. The NCMEC says that within three hours, three-fourths of children abducted by strangers are dead.

Conversely, if you need to circulate your own warning, be sure to provide a means of verification, as Asha Degree's cousin did. Refer to a newspaper story or list a phone number. By all means, provide contact information.

For other kinds of "warning" e-mails, proceed cautiously. About.com is searchable. Using the terms "spider," "banana," "gas out," and "mailbox," I found information to debunk each warning in just a few minutes. Other such web sites are HoaxKill (www.hoaxkill.com),the alt.folklore.urban group's Urban Legends Archive (www.urbanlegends.com), and The San Fernando Valley Folklore Society's hoax and urban legend page (www.snopes.com),. (The SFVFS site plays the hoax theme song: "I Heard It Through the Grapevine.") For viruses that plague your computer rather than you, check out former systems security analyst Rob Rosenberg's web site (kumite.com/myths). Rosenberg is quick to point out that he doesn't accept ads from makers of antivirus software; he's trustworthy enough to be a consultant to PC Magazine.

A few minutes spent checking out a warning can keep you from sending a hoax to a lot of friends. Perhaps you read e-mail only at work and don't have time to verify warnings; in that case, you probably don't have time to get personal e-mail at work.

Finally, don't feel overly gullible if you do get bitten by a hoax spider. We're naturally fearful creatures. In 1997, 14-year-old Nathan Zohner won an Iowa science fair with a project studying reactions to warnings about the dangers of dihydrogen monoxide, a substance described as "colorless, odorless, and tasteless." Nathan described a long list of negative effects that hit a nerve of current concerns. He said the substance had been found in cancerous tumors and contributed to the greenhouse effect, acid rain, and erosion. The substance kills thousands of people every year, he said. Zohner presented his evidence to his ninth-grade classmates, and almost ninety percent of them said it should be banned -- although he was talking about water.

The story of Nathan Zohner's project is not a hoax. You know how to check that out.

Watch out for those butt spiders!