Hooking The Hook

Having just on the spur of the moment written up "The Hook" for GURPS Horror 4e (both as psycho killer and as tulpa, of course), I should probably get this out of my system so I can dive back in and write up the lilitu.

So, it seems to me that Snopes.com is on to something when they suggest a connection between the Hook urban legend and the Texarkana Phantom killings in 1946, despite the inconvenient fact that the Phantom used a .32, not a hook hand.

But 1946 is right at the beginning of the AM revolution in American pop radio, and Texarkana is right in the middle of the zone where Brunvand traces the Hook story to before it goes national. (The Hook debuted in a "Dear Abby" column on November 8, 1960 -- talk about your prime-time position for an ambitious young tulpa!)

My extremely tentative reconstruction is that some AM night-time DJ (maybe on a religious station; maybe in between "border" records) mentions the Texarkana "Lover's Lane" killings, spreading the "Lover's Lane Killer" meme out across the central U.S. Maybe it's a "border blaster" station, or maybe it's some now-forgotten syndicated show. The meme connects up with the general "sex killers use knives" motif that English-speakers get from Jack the Ripper (Francophone sex-killers, from what I understand, come from Landru, and strangle their victims, so take that, Dr. Freud) and perhaps some now-forgotten paperback, true-crime pulp, or B-movie about a hook-handed killer.

Some time in 1955, all that came together: Some kid is about to go necking, and his cool older brother (a true-crime maven -- or just someone who went to a lot of drive-in movies -- and an "underground radio" fan) tells him, "Hey, you might want to watch out for the hook killer. He kills kids alone at night on Lover's Lane." And the rest is history, and Dear Abby.

What I'd really like to do is sit down with the Paperback King lemuriapress, and the Midwest's Horror Goddess chebutykin and see if we could maybe get another magnitude of resolution on this, but I shall have to settle for LJ posting it.