Becca Jane St Clair

Personal Blog

The Thin Blue Line….

I live in a relatively small village. Our village touches the next village over due to housing/businesses spreading out, and so we share a police “force”. I think there are 4 of them, and their office is a little building next to the neighbouring village’s village hall.

A few days ago, we received our village’s monthly newsletter (late, due to the snow!) and I discovered on the Police’s note that they now had a blog set up for the area where they will be posting local crimes, so I added it to my RSS reader, figuring it might be handy to know what’s happened locally.

Today, they posted a ” Persoanl [sic] Safety Warning”. The warning apparently originally came from the Northants Police, but the top of the blog post says it was emailed to the poster “by a member of my family”. The incident supposedly happened along the M3 at the Fleet Services.

I’m reading this warning, and it talks about a woman stopping for petrol and going in to pay and having the clerk tell her there is a man hiding in the backseat of her car.

It made me pause and think hang on, I’m sure I’ve seen this before. I logged into my old email account from before I was married and ran a search, and sure enough, when I still lived in PA, I had received a very similar “warning” via a forwarded email, so I went to snopes.

And, sure enough, the whole thing is made up, and the story is as old as 1967!

It bothers me that our local police force would send out a rumour like this. People will see that post and panic. Way to go, local police.

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  1. Nicky December 8th, 2010 10:10

    that story is also contained in a children’s horror story collection called Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. Lame on the police’s part.

    Also, when I read the title “the thin blue line” my immediate thought was pregnancy test! lol.

  2. Rebecca December 8th, 2010 10:42

    LOL hadn’t even thought of that!

    I remember those books. I think I had 2 or three of them at one point.

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