“Blood simple” legends about feared minorities torturing and murdering helpless tots as part of their religious rituals have shifted from one group to another as the balance of who was in the minority and who was in the majority changed over time. Without a doubt, the central idea underlying all versions of the restroom legends is a racist or otherwise prejudiced one: certain “other” people - members of a feared minority - are out to get “our” children.
Modern versions placing the action in American cities and usually fingering blacks as the mutilators have been amply documented since the and concluding the legend itself had likely been circulating up to a century earlier.
Versions of this tragic tale have been horrifying folks since times long past, with folklorist Bill Ellis documenting instances of it as far back as 63 B.C. In some tellings, however, the child supposedly dies of his injuries, often said to expire “in a pool of blood.” The victim is usually found still alive, leaving those who hear the tale to grimly contemplate the fate of the injured child as he grows up and attempts to live out his life as normally as possible.The attack is often explained as part of a ritual or initiation ceremony hopefuls from the minority group engaged in to be made part of a local gang.In most tellings, the child is set upon by a gang of attackers, though in a few isolated renditions only one attacker is noted.reversed the barbarity, with Jewish children being murdered by marauding Christians as part of their gruesome initiation rituals. Versions dating from the second and third centuries A.D. Medieval European versions had Jews torturing and killing a Christian child, with this form of the legend reaching back as early as the fifth century A.D. Though the aggressors in more recent tellings are usually blacks, Mexicans, Indians, homosexuals, and “hippies” have also been cast as the villains in this piece during the modern era.Occasionally, a version surfaces where the races are reversed, with a black child harmed by a white gang. By a very wide margin, these days the victim is said to be a white male child (often blonde) of between 4 and 10 years old and his attackers African American.Often the child is harmed in a department store washroom, but sometimes he comes to grief in a city park. and in England, with the mutilation supposedly taking place in a number of different cities. This legend has been widely told in the U.S.As it turned out, they had cut the little white boy’s penis off as an orientation, a method of getting into a gang that they wanted to belong to. Subsequently they found three little black boys walking through the store with a bloody penis in their pocket. He was in there an exceptionally long amount of time, and she got worried and asked some gentlemen to step in and see what the problem was, if there was a problem.Īnd they found the little boy laying in a pool of blood with his penis cut off. So, for the first time the mother decided to let him go in by himself to use the men’s washroom, rather than going into the womens with her. I heard a story, I believe about ten years ago, it would be about 1965 - I was eighteen then - about a little white boy who had gone shopping with his mother in K mart, and he had to urinate. According to an eye witness, the poor boy had been castrated by an ethnic gang of local youths. He was still alive but was in a highly critical condition.
He found him almost immediately lying in a pool of blood in one of the cubicles with a crowd around him. Seeing a policeman passing by, she explained what had happened and the officer went over to the toilet block to look for the boy. When he did not come back, his mother began to get rather worried. Out shopping one day with his mother in a neighbourhood shopping precinct, a boy of about ten years old went off to the public toilet.