What Are Seattle's Urban Legends (And Are They True?)

Do Seattleites buy more sunglasses than residents of other cities? Was there really a dead horse in Ballard’s water supply in the early 1900s? And did prostitutes start the Seattle School District? Listener Kristie Fisher of Belltown asked about Seattle’s urban myths as part of our Local Wonder project. So we asked our Facebook friends to share their favorites and chose a few for KUOW’s Jeannie Yandel to investigate. 50 Shades Of Myth On a cloudy weekday morning at the University Village in Seattle, I see only one guy wearing sunglasses. His name is Michael Diego, and he’s heard the myth that Seattleites buy lots of sunglasses.

He’s with a friend, William Mee, who has a theory for why Seattleites might buy more sunglasses than anyone else. “Because usually when people are driving, and they don’t have their sunglasses with them, they’ll stop at an AM-PM or a 7-Eleven and just buy off the rack. And those are cheap! That’s why we buy a lot!” That’s the urban myth of course. But is it true? There’s an organization that tracks sales regionally – it’s a membership and lobbying organization for eye doctors and people who sell glasses. It’s called the Vision Council. They say the South buys the most sunglasses, beating the West by more than 15 percentage points. Which makes sense, because the closer you get to the equator, the stronger the ultra-violet rays. Dead Horse Myth

On Facebook, Sebastian Rataezyk asked: Did someone put a dead horse into Ballard’s water supply so Ballard would vote to join Seattle? I headed for the Nordic Heritage Museum to pore over issues of Ballard News from 1906 to see if there were reports of a dead horse in the water supply. That was the year when the annexation vote took place. Kerri Keil, an archivist at the Nordic Heritage Museum in Ballard, helped me sort through the crumbling books of old newspapers. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, Ballard was a separate city from Seattle. And the city of Ballard’s population was growing so fast, the water supply couldn’t keep up. Just across city limits, Seattle had plenty of water, which Ballard could have if its residents voted for annexation. But many Ballardites, surprise surprise, were fiercely independent.

The thinking goes that if someone were to have contaminated the water, say with a dead horse, that might have inspired some Ballard residents to question whether independence was worth forgoing clean water. In 1906, the Ballard News covered the heck out of the Ballard water supply story. But they never reported anything about a dead horse in the city of Ballard’s sole reservoir. So I turned to the other side of this urban legend – the city of Seattle. Scott Cline, the municipal archivist for Seattle, heard the dead horse story soon after he arrived in Seattle 30 years ago. The municipal archives house all the records from the city of Ballard up through annexation.

I leafed through council minutes, and at least for 1906-1907, there is no mention of a dead horse in water. Looking at the clerk’s records, I read reports from the superintendent of Light and Water, and the health officer, and again, there is no mention of a dead horse in the reservoir. Now about that reservoir. Cline found plans for one but nothing showing that it got built. And maps from the time don’t indicate there was a reservoir in Ballard. That means there was probably no reservoir. And probably no dead horse. So who perpetuated the dead horse story? Well, several people mentioned the same name off the record, but we won’t say it here. We wouldn’t want to start any rumors. As I tracked down these myths, I wondered why it’s so hard to say whether these urban myths are true.