Acid Lore: Chased by Giant Mars Bars!
Acid Lore: Chased by Giant Mars Bars!
One of the quirkiest and most comical pieces of Acid Lore is the story of the poor kid who was said to have dropped LSD and then hallucinated that he was being chased by giant Mars bars.
The story has several variations, but the version below is mostly based on the one I first heard as a teenager in the early 1980s.
A friend of mine called Colin took LSD and had a terrifying vision of monster Mars bars lumbering down the street towards him. Convinced the giant Mars bars wanted to eat him, Colin ran for his life.
Tripping out of his mind, he dashed madly through the fields, cutting his skin to shreds as he desperately clambered over barbed wire fences to escape the killer chocolate bars.
Colin took LSD and had a terrifying vision of monster Mars bars lumbering down the street towards him.
He somehow found his way home and ran upstairs to his bedroom. Looking out the window, he could still see the Mars bars waiting at his garden gate.
He was eventually discovered by his parents. He was a gibbering wreck hiding under his bed—the only place he could be safe. In a moment of clarity, he had been struck by the revelation that he should hide under the bed because Mars bars can’t bend down. If they did, their chocolate coating would crack, spilling their caramel guts on the ground and killing them.
Colin refused to leave the safety of his hiding place and told his parents the Mars Bars were still outside at the garden gate waiting for him. On looking outside, his parents realized the Mars bars were actually wheelie bins.
Although I didn’t realize this at the time, the story was, of course, an urban legend – it’s drug lore that reflects social anxieties about youths using drugs and, perhaps it also speaks to the fear of what surreal visions of horror our subconscious minds might conjure up during a hallucinatory psychedelic experience. Most urban legends are told as if they happened to a ‘friend of a friend’, but the giant Mars bars episode was explained to me as happening to my friend Colin. A few years later, I asked Colin about his experience with the giant Mars Bars. He didn’t know what I was talking about and had never taken LSD.
I’ve heard the story several times since then, always about a different (usually anonymous) person but the monster chocolate bar is always there, and it always seems to be a Mars bar. The legend crops up on various online forums and it’s almost always told knowingly as an amusing myth rather than a true cautionary tale about the dangers of mind-expanding substances.
Many of the LSD-related urban legends we’ve discussed in this column probably spread when they were used in local anti-drug campaigns or newspaper reports as cautionary tales. However, I’m not sure this is true with the Chased by Giant Mars Bars story. It seems too silly to be scary and too surreal to be a warning. This story appears to have spread exclusively by word of mouth.
The legend is widely known in the UK, though I couldn’t find similar stories from the US.
So what gives this myth legs, and makes it so durable – in the UK, at least? Perhaps it’s the association of drugs with getting the munchies and eating chocolate. But I think mostly it’s the comic imagery of the giant Mars bars on legs galloping after the unfortunate space cadet, and the disturbed and absurd logic of the punch line – you’re safe under the bed because Mars Bars can’t bend down.
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