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In his 1948 book The Affairs of Dame Rumor, Jacobson mentions this rumor flooded the Atlantic states in 1934 and notes the story had been published in the Boston Traveler a few years earlier: Fishbein's 1930 book Shattering Health Superstitions includes the text of the Traveler piece: Folklorist Jan Brunvand points out there is a traditional folk motif assigned to this type of tale: B784.1.4 — Girl swallows frog spawn; an octopus grows inside her with tentacles reaching to every part of her body. How an octopus can grow from frog spawn remains unexplained, however. There are numerous versions of the basic legend: All of these tales might be considered variations of the bosom serpent legend, described by Harold Schecter as a tale in which through some unfortunate circumstance or act of carelessness . . . a snake. . . is accidentally ingested by, or grows inside the body of, the unlucky individual, where it remains until it is expelled or in some way lured out of the victim's body. This motif remains popular in films such as Alien, which features a crew member impregnated by an alien creature; once the incubation period is complete, the alien lifeform is born by bursting out through his chest. As Schechter notes, like the traditional, oral versions that have been popular for hundreds of years, [the] only purpose [of the birth scene in Alien] is to produce emotional response: shock, revulsion, morbid fascination. In June 2004 the Iranian daily Etemaad reported that an unnamed woman from the south-eastern city of Iranshahr had given birth to a frog. According to that paper, the woman's gynaecologist confirmed that the lady in question, whose period had stopped for six months, had undergone sonography in May which showed she had a cyst in her abdomen and that following severe bleeding, she gave birth to a live grey frog accompanied with mud. Numerous news outlets subsequently carried the story, but in the manner of reporting that an Iranian paper had run the item, not as a confirmation of the facts of the account. If the photo of the frog (as initially provided by the BBC — it was later stripped from their online article and replaced by a map of Iraq) was accurate, it disproved the theory that the purported mother of Kermit came by her amphibian pregnancy through having swum in or drunk frog spawn, because the lily pad jumper so pictured was of a species not native to Iran. In any event, it was always a case of news outlets repeating a weird story that had come to them, not of vetting the tale's claims. Humans cannot give birth to frogs, or snakes, or fish, or lizards, or octopuses — our biology rules it out. Also told in: The Big Book of Urban Legends. New York: Paradox Press, 1994. ISBN 1-56389-165-4 (p. 77).
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