It was claimed that the president of the company had gone on to a television talk show and made the admission and

It was claimed that the president of the company had gone on to a television talk show and made the admission, and had also said the company’s then logo (below) was satanic. The original report, in the Iranian daily Etemaad, said the unnamed woman in the south-eastern city of Iranshahr had produced a live, grey-coloured frog after “a bizarre labour”. The birth of the reptile was preceded by copious bleeding, and the frog itself was covered in mud.The paper claimed that one Dr Varasteh, a gynaecologist, had confirmed the event, saying the woman’s menstrual cycle had stopped for six months and a sonogram indicated the presence of a cyst in her abdomen.The detail, and learned speculation as to how the frog found its way into the woman’s womb, combined to lull even the BBC into credulity. Yet the story is not only patently false but also belongs to an ancient category of legend in which a woman gives birth to an octopus, a lizard, a fish or a snake A Californian version of the tale appeared in recent years. Earlier versions were found in the US’s Atlantic states in 1934, while a British version was reported in a book called Shattering Health Superstitions in 1930. In that version, a London factory girl swallowed something while swimming, was seized with appalling stomach pains soon afterwards, and an X-ray showed she had swallowed an octopus egg that had hatched out inside her.So deeply, weirdly gratifying is the story that it probably goes back centuries and forms the core, fascinating and disgusting at once, of the Alien films.

In a subtly different form it is also at the heart of the old nonsense song, “I know an old woman who swallowed a fly.” Equally compelling is the image – a legend in a bottle, if you like – of the baby dragon preserved in formaldehyde that the British author Alistair Mitchell concocted to get the public’s attention after publishers refused to publish his children’s book Unearthly History.But although many urban legends are merely grotesque like that one, or cute, or weird, there is a darker shadow to the subject as well. Nicholson’s pictures probably gave perverse comfort to many people, anxious to find the hand of God (or Satan) behind the terrible events of 11 September.The number of the beastSatan was also at the centre of a story that cropped up more than 20 years ago, when the legend spread in the United States that Procter & Gamble, the detergent company, was in league with the devil. The photographs were not manipulated, and were widely published, but of course the images in the smoke are as significant as the cloud seen by Hamlet which was “very like a whale”. Barbara and David Mikkelson, whose website snopes carries many urban legends, say that finding images in randomness is called “pareidol”.

Various versions of the story appeared, but in most, the food was consumed in a dark place. Lawsuits were mentioned; consumers were even said to have died. A tale that was easy to believe, since it is not uncommon to find the creatures – roughly the same size as a small chicken – near food.The devil in the smokeIn September 2001, a freelance photographer called Mark D Phillips sold two photographs to Associated Press that apparently showed a devil’s face in the smoke of the burning World Trade Center (above). Stories of old ladies and young children chomping into their chicken burgers only to discover chunks of vermin ran around the Web like wildfire. “I created it to gain attention and entertain people”, he says. The hoax fooled several British newspapers (though not The Independent).