1. Title: Poop in the Soup
2. Informant information:
Claire Votava was born on May 21, 1996, and grew up in Los Angeles, California. Her father is from Haiti and her mother is from Syria. She is studying History as a sophomore at Dartmouth College, and hopes to one day work in a museum. On campus, she is a tour guide, and her favorite spot to eat on campus is KAF, which she frequents at least twice a day.
3. Type of lore (Genre and Sub-genre): Verbal Lore, Legend, Urban Legend
4. Language: English
5. Country of Origin: Hanover, NH, USA
6. Social / Cultural Context:
YikYak is a social media site where people within a certain radius can post anonymously to a constantly updated feed, and it is very popular on college campuses. During the infamous poop-in-the-soup event, Claire was in her dorm room. Someone sent her a text message to check YikYak, which can be a useful source of campus news. She opened YikYak to find a plethora of recent posts about an alleged event that had just happened in Collis.
8. Transcript:
Last winter, this event happened at Late Night Collis that got the catchy name of “poop-in-the-soup.” According to the story I heard, a homeless man came into Collis during late night and was wandering around, and then suddenly he pooped in one of the Collis soups and ran away! Apparently the police were chasing him and arrested him in front of Psi U. The word spread like wildfire through the school, and everyone was talking about poop in the soup all the time over the next week. Once in a while, someone will post on YikYak something like “#neverforget poop in the soup” because it’s something of an urban legend around campus nowadays.
9. Informant’s comments:
I still don’t really know whether or not poop-in-the-soup is real, because I also heard a rumor that the track team made it up. Whether or not it actually happened, I love the story because it is a hilarious shared joke throughout the entire student body.
10. Collector’s comments:
Poop in the soup is a much more recent urban legend, since it was formed when I was here. I think that the fact that the story spread so fast demonstrates the closeness of the community formed by the students at Dartmouth. Stories like this serve to unite the past, present, and future students of Dartmouth.
11. Tags/Keywords: poop, soup, collis, late night, food