The Poison Dress
This is actually one of the earliest urban legends which traces back to the 1930s. It consists of a girl who is wearing a new formal gown to a dance. She feels like fainting several times during the evening. Despite getting some fresh air, she becomes really ill and dies in the restroom. It is revealed that the cause of her death was her dress. It had been previously used as a funeral dress for a young girl and was taken off the corpse before burial and returned to the store. The dress had absorbed the formaldehyde which entered the pores of the girl at the formal.
Versions of the story actually name a particular store where she got the dress from. This urban legend still circulates despite the fact that formaldehyde was replaced with “embalming fluid” which is harmless in mild cases. This legend is sometimes compared with the contaminated blankets that the Colonists received from the Native Americans in American history.
(Source: Brunvand, Jan H. Encyclopedia of Urban Legends. 2001.)
