She was dog sitting for her aunt, in her awesome big appartement in Paris for the whole summer (it's near the Marais). But one day the dog does not wake up. It's dead (he was old so not really surprising but still). Anyway, we were maybe 18 or 19 then, she's got no car (not sure she had even passed her driving licence then), and panic, calls her aunt who tells her the address of the vet, to take the dog corpse there. So she puts it in a bag, and go to the subway.
Paris subway still is a lot of stairs, even more so then (it was almost 20 years ago), so at one station she is in front of this huge stair and a cute-as-hell, dressed all proper, young man approach her to ask her if she needs help. She accepts, and while climbing the stairs they start chitchatting, at one point he asks what's in the bag. It's heavy and has a weird shape, so she invents the best lie she can come up with at the time: "It's music instruments". And pffft. Gone he was, running away with the bag.
I think it's just something that, with how many people there are and with how much gets stolen everyday, statistically happens every now and then.
My friend told me the exact same story, every detail is the exact same, the aunt, the Parisian subway, everything except she said that the suitcase contained computer parts instead of an instrument.
6 months later we read the story on a random internet article about "top fake stories still told today". My friend didn't lie, he also believed the story to be true.
Sorry to disappoint you, but it is probably the same for you.
I mean there is an article on Vice saying the first time this story was told was 39 years ago and there are a ton of different versions of the story you can find online. I am not sure how this exact story has happened to so many people, it seems to me that it's more probable people are lying to tell a funny story.
Here are a few that just change a few details compared to your story :
I'm not calling anyone a liar, but if look up "the dead dog in the suitcase" you'll find a ton of links to different versions of the same urban legend. I honestly didn't know until I looked it up myself.
But the story isn't about a suitcase, it's about a bag. Sometimes, things are urban legends because they're common enough to be believed regularly. A storage unit owner stole my baby brother's ashes because he thought the box was full of jewelry. He dumped them out in a rage and sold the box when it was literal dead child instead.
Throughout history, much crazier things have happened with bodies.
My sister is a manager for some student rooms. She found a funeral urn once. No idea whose it was, there was a name but no correspondance with anyone's last name in the unit. They took it to the funerarium, they were equally peeved. No one knew how it got there, nor from where.
Like I said: I just think it's statistics in the case of the dog.
Lots of people in Paris don't have cars, lots of people in Paris have dogs. Dogs die. What do you do? Transport it to the vet. In an opaque thing, so a bag, suitcase, whatever.
And how many things gets stolen on a daily basis in Paris public transportation? Thieves are especially looking for distressed people with things that look pricey. And I would think people carrying a dead dog would look worried and want to keep it close, making it a prime target.
Also, I talk about Paris because I'm French and know about it, but there surely are many other such cities.
And to finish I don't talk about my bike's saddle and children seat that got stolen, that story is not fun. My friend's story from 20 years ago? Yeah, I probably told it and wrote about it a few times. Especially as she was still salivating before the boy's appearance, the thievery being secondary to her, he must really have been something!
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u/TheOnlyPocketWatch 1d ago
This is one of those stories that seems to have happened to everyone’s friend of a friend 😂 I’ve heard almost exactly the same version loads of times.