After the big President's Day blizzard in New York a few days ago, the New York Times published a little piece of what it called Op-Art on the editorial page.

It was a cartoon by a Mr. James Stevenson, a sketch of a variety of types of footprint seen in the New York snow.

A Person Who Forgot His Briefcase started off in one direction, then circled back.

Woman in Manolo Blahniks left narrow, elegant prints, with great separation between sou-sized heel and very much larger toe.

Dog Walker Waiting at Traffic Lights showed a single pair of footprints behind a large, excitedly scuffed area.

Bichon Fris? in Booties (you're right, it is misspelled and if you detect a hint of contempt for international weaselry in that, I suspect you're right on track) took very small, very orderly steps in one direction, then veered off to the left.

Almost unnoticed down in the bottom right-hand corner was a set of large, four-toed prints entitled Alligator From the Sewer.

No one in New York really believes that myth any more - that alligators live in the sewer system - but they like to pretend they do. Remember what they used to say on TV? “There are eight million stories in the Naked City, and this has been one of them.” Sewer alligators are the stars of one of the best of the eight million.

These days, people say they got there because vacationing NY kids bought them in Florida and brought them back. When the little beasts got too big to be cute any more, their parents flushed them down the toilet.

I know a better story. Most of them would have come from a company that used to send them to you, mail order. In American comic books, there were little inch-deep ads for them, or sometimes for baby turtles with dyed shells.

Those ads were generally on the back pages, among others selling diagrams for genuine death rays, slingshots, Daisy BB guns, rings with secret compartments and courses that taught you how to develop a body like George Jowett's or Charles Atlas', so bullies on the beach would be frightened to kick sand in your face.

I sent for the alligators myself many times, but somehow, the accursed staff of the Post Office seemed always to be able to tell when you put coins in your letters (I think the going rate was 35 cents per gator, so bills were a problem), and stopped them from going overseas.

Once I was driven to the point of buying a money order, back when the Post Office was where Magistrates' Court is now, but they wouldn't sell them in dollar amounts, and I don't think the alligator people could have known what to do with my shillings and pence equivalent, so I was thwarted again.

I know this is a digression, but it was such a childhood disappointment that I'm going to tell you anyway, because I'm still hopping mad about it. In the mail-order department, about the only thing I ordered that I ever actually got was from England - a war surplus signalling lamp that required a type of battery that no one in Bermuda had ever heard of, far less was able to supply. So don't talk to me about infrastructure. I've been there. Dammit.

The alligator story might once have been true. There was a New York Times story printed in 1935 about a fully-grown one that was pulled out of the sewer, complete with names and places. Thomas Pynchon's 1963 book ‘V' is based on the legend, as is a children's book by Peter Lippman called The Great Escape, published in 1974.

In 1980, there was a horror film made about them, called Alligator, of course. Stan Lee drew two comic books about them, one of them for the Daredevil series.

Like all urban legends, if the story was once true in some narrow, one-off sense, that was an accident, and it is no longer true.

But urban legends, once passed by word of mouth, have received a real boost in the shape of the Internet, and are alive and kicking as never before. If you haven't heard of the Microwaved Baby, or the Vanishing Hitchhiker, the Snakes in the Tunnel of Love, the Spider Eggs in Bubble Yum or the Kentucky Fried Rat, trust me, you will. One of them, the Kidney Heist, had some brief currency in Bermuda a few years ago.

There are variations on this theme, but they're all related to this one: A man picks up a beautiful girl in a bar and takes her home. Oddly, he passes out. When he wakes up the next morning, he is covered in blood, and discovers one of his kidneys is missing. He's fallen victim to a gang of medically-trained organ thieves. Da dum.

A local reporter heard that it had happened to someone on the Island, and rang an organisation I once worked for to get some confirmation or comment. I managed to convince the reporter that it was a hoax, and as far as I know, the story never ran.

We had another little taste of urban legend back in the 1980s, when tales of horrific Satanic rituals sparked a kind of panic in the US. There were many stories published, purportedly by survivors of these rituals, who told fantastic tales of abuse at the hands of cultists. These stories led to charges of brainwashing and the release of suppressed memories in psychotherapy. The most awful injustice was done to many innocent people caught up in this kind of mad rumour.

One long-running saga ended only a few months ago in Britain, when two school teachers were finally exonerated of charges that they had been involved in sexually abusing primary school students in their charge. They lost years of their lives, unable to work, trapped in a slow-moving legal system.

Back in the ‘80s, when a child went missing in Bermuda, there were brief rumours that it had been kidnapped by Satanists bent on terrible full-moon rituals, and Satanists are still a favourite local scapegoat for all manner of evil things.

Longer ago, in the 1960s, another little Bermuda urban legend grew around reports of a Loch Ness-type sea critter cruising around in Hamilton Harbour. As I remember, even a couple of Roman Catholic nuns were prepared to stake their reputations on their story that they'd seen this lengthy eel (complete with Nessy coils and wakes) coming up from somewhere down near Crow Lane. I keep expecting some local wag to confess to this ridiculous, transparent hoax on his, or her, deathbed. Perhaps it's early days yet!

And in 1989, many Bermudians responded generously to the story of seven year-old child from Surrey in England. He was dying of a brain tumour, the story went, and his last wish was to appear in the Guinness Book of Records for having amassed more business cards (in one version, postcards in another, stamps in a third) than anyone else in history. Companies and individuals were invited to send any they had spare direct to Craig, then send his letter to another ten companies. It was all quite real. But then it got legend-ised.

Countless copies of this appeal circulated and circulated, taking on a life of its own. Others, similar in nature, faded. But Craig's persisted. He was taken to the US in 1991 for a successful cancer tumour operation. He has now grown up and lives a perfectly normal life. But he still gets packages every week, full of now-unwanted business cards.

Legends have long lives.

One fairly studious survey, carried out in 1995 by a man named Henrik R. Lassen (The Improved Product: A Philological Investigation of a Contemporary Legend, if you want to read it), documented that stories about a miraculous invention had been in constant circulation for almost 2,000 years.

Lassen summarised the story this way: “A fabulous technological discovery has been made from which everyone, except certain powerful individuals, would profit immensely if it were made available to the general public, but these few people, in whose interest it is to keep the discovery away from everyone else, have enough power to suppress it indefinitely.”

Originally, the invention was unbreakable glass, or sometimes flexible glass. But more recently, it has been light bulbs that never burn out, tyres that wear forever, stockings that won't run, razor blades that won't dull, magic washing balls or disks that, added to laundry, clean forever without detergent, and other things of that nature.

How about software that works perfectly?

It's been invented. It's true…I swear it! It's been invented, but that Gates man keeps suppressing it because he wants to keep on selling updates. Pass it on and let's see how long it takes to come back.