Ape Sandwich story! It sounds like another desperate idea for a TV series blurted out by Alan Partridge at a pitch meeting (fans may recall his “Monkey Tennis?”), but in the Dutch language broodjeaapverhaal – literally an “ape sandwich story”, is an urban legend. The saga of how our North Sea neighbours came to know urban legends and friend-of-a-friend stories as “ape sandwich stories” is itself a tale of almost fortean strangeness.
The book Broodje aap: de folklore van de post-industriële samenleving(Ape Sandwich: the folklore of the post-industrial society) by Ethel Portnoy was published in Amsterdam in 1978. It was a bestseller – its first edition sold out in a couple of months, it went through eight editions within the next two years. There was even a now largely forgotten 1992 sequel, Broodje aap met (Ape sandwich with extras).
Oddly, this Dutch bestseller was written by an American author, writing in English, not in Dutch. Philadelphia-born writer Ethel Portnoy met and married a Dutchman, Rudy Kousbroek, while studying anthropology and archaeology in France, and settled in the Netherlands with him. She earned a living as a newspaper columnist for various Dutch-language newspapers and magazines. She felt herself to be a Dutch author, she won a prize for (Dutch) feminist literature, all 25 of her books published up to her death in 2004 were in Dutch.
But Ethel’s husband translated her work from English into Dutch for publication, continuing to do so after their divorce in the 1980s, with Ethel’s daughter Hepzibah and her colleague Tineke Davids also translating her work for her. Weirdly, the extracts from Broodje aap below are my translations back into English, there being no extant Englsih version I could find. While Broodje aap and other anthologies by Portnoy are considered important enough to be in the British Library, its catalogues list no works by her written in the English langauge.
The post-industrial urban legends in Broodje aap are, in Portnoy’s words, about “cars, motorways, motorbikes, shops, departments stores, cheques, pills, marijuana, central heating, pollution, industrial monopolies, funeral directors, customs officers, police officers, hitch hikers... In a sense, this book is not written by me but by everyone. I just wrote down what I heard.” Portnoy compares her “incomplete and random” anthology of “ape sandwich stories” to the cabinets of “rarities” of the early 19th century.
A surprised-looking Ethel Portnoy at an Amsterdam Book Week 1979 press conference. Photo: Hans van Dijk/Anefo, placed in the public domain by the Nationaal Archief, Creative Commons.
Most of the “ape sandwich stories” in the collection are a few lines long. These are along the lines of “an English couple on holiday returning by car from Spain, their grandmother dies near the French border. To save time they stick her in the boot of the car and go for lunch, the car is stolen.” Then there are tales of copper one cent coins completely dissolved by Coca Cola, or of a man man getting lost in the sewers of Paris and all that is found of him is his shoes, eaten by giant albino rats that live down there.
There is much grossness and biological implausibility – a woman gets “a million dollars” in compensation after becoming pregnant from staying at a hotel where they hadn’t properly cleaned the bathtub into which the previous male guest had mastrubatred, and so on. When Broodje aap was written, “the Pill” had recently taken hold. Portnoy observes “you could write a book on the myths of young girls on pregnancy and childbirth... or on the folklore of medical students, or that of soldiers.” Bizarre infant mortality, body parts, bad sex, unlikely accidental beheadings and unwitting cannibalism and general grossness feature heavily, as do “hippies.”
There are only two stories from the Netherlands in this Dutch-language anthology. In one of these, builders are laying paving stones in the streets of a Dutch town while a lady walking her little yappy dog stops in the street for a chat with a passing friend. When she finally moves on, her dog is missing. Dutch street pavers seem to have a legendary dislike of little yappy dogs, they had buried this one under their paving stones. In another tale, a young Dutch woman, who wants to emigrate to Australia, makes a deal with a couple of sailors in exchange for “services rendered” on the voyage. She is smuggled on board and kept below decks. Eventually she runs onto the deck and finds they’ve been repeatedly crossing the Ij Viaduct canal and never left Amsterdam.
Several of Broodje aap’s “histories” include West Coast millionaire playboy and amateur chemist Owsley, “the most recent of a series of figures in the American regional mythology.” Owlsely sagas include him visiting “hippies” in prison, convincing the wardens he was there just to read to them from the Bible. This he does for a while until the guards get distracted, then he rips out the pages and suggests to the prisioners that they taste these. The pages of the Bible are soaked in LSD! Other such sagas, with or without Owsley, feature “hippies” and police on drug busts being driven insane after accidentally taking LSD or marijuana or other unspecified “drugs” that all have vastly exaggerated, chemically impossible miraculous evil powers. (Owlsley is probably a garbled version of Owsley Stanley, the Grateful Dead's sound engineer and "chemist", Ed.)
Aap, noot, mies... every Dutch person of a certain age will recognise the "aap" (ape), the start of the first line of the Hoogeveen reading board, used to teach Dutch-language voewl sounds to primary school children from the end of the 19th century right up to the early 1960s. "Aap" includes the long vowel sound represented by a double A.
In Portnoy’s late 1970s post-Nietzschean world, “God is dead here, there are a couple of supernatural stories where a motorway replaces a haunted house as anxiety inducing decor… The absence of ghosts or spirits and such betrays a lack of belief or importance attached to the hereafter,” the occasional phantom hitchhiker notwithstanding.
To be honest the stories themselves seem to me somewhat lame – obviously impossible “man in the pub” tales with the same level of sophistication as said-to-be-true stories I myself heard from my contemporaries back in around 1978 – when I was 14 years old. Some crude racism aside, these 1970s “ape sandwich stories” now seem charmingly innocent compared to the weaponised politically-motivated bot-driven social media antivaxxer chemtrail New World Order manosphere pizzagate lizard conspiracy misinformation that rules the world today.
Among the longer entries at just over half a page is the eponymous story number 84, the original broodjeaapverhaal. In this, police in the backstreets of the Bronx get a call. A headless, skinned body is found in the street, the police pathology laboratory declares it to be not of a human but of a gorilla. It turns out there was a collision between two trucks outside a hot dog factory and the carcass rolled out of the back of one of the vehicles. The police visit the hot dog factory nearby and find fillited and headless bodies of apes and bears, bought from a zoo. So it could just have easily become “bear sandwich story.”
A broodje can be a sandwich but also a roll, patty or bap or any bread-based thing that you can wrap around a filling, including ape hot dogs as in this Bronx yarn. Aap can denote an ape or monkey, and the @ symbol in Dutch is called an apenstaartje, a monkey’s tail. But given that they have more meat on them than monkeys, the primates in the original broodjeaapverhaal were probably supposed to be apes. Later analysts speculated that the story was spread by parents in the 1970s to discourage their children from constantly clamouring for yet another then-popular Happy Meal.
Portnoy’s detailed endnotes on the sources for her “ape sandwich stories” and their numerous variants are longer than the stories themselves. The broodje aap story itself is identified as type 1286 in the Aarne-Thompson-Uther folk tale type index, while Portnoy traces this particular yarn back to the Hunter’s Point in the Bronx in the 1930s, noting that it was also in more recent circulation in the Netherlands since crossing the Atlantic in a cutting sent from New York to the Dutch Telegraaf newspaper. The endnotes also trace phantom hitchhiker stories to Korea, while a lot of the book’s entries are revealed as very old stories that turn up in 1920s French anthologies which Portnoy probably came across while studying anthropology there back in the 1950s.
How, then, did all urban legends become ape sandwich stories in Dutch? This seems partly due to the unsatisfactory translation of “urban legend” into “stadssage”(urban saga) or stadslegende “city legend”, which doesn’t adequately convey the same nuance as “urban”. The Dutch adjective stats denotes “urban” but it’s more neutral and functional than the English “urban”, which conveys a grittier and more “street”, edgy, post-industrial feel, as in English phrases like “urban guerilla” to describe the Baader Meinhoff gang or Brigado Rosso terrorist cells, also from the 1970s. The somewhat tepid-sounding alternative Dutch phrase moderne sage (“modern saga”) never really took off.
There was already another Dutch phrase to describe urban legends or friend-of-a-friend stories, but this was becoming problematic around the time Broodje aap appeared. Pulp novels about cowboys and Indians in the Western genre had long been popular in the Netherlands, particularly “romantic” stories featuring Native American characters, many of these written by German author Karl May. There was a brief immediately postwar renaissance in Western novels and subtitled Hollywood Western films. By the 1960s there was a critical backlash against the genre, and Indianenverhaal – a story about Indians – became a commonly-used phrase to describe a risibly implausible plot.
By 1982, though, Indianenverhaal was seen as a derogatory, racist term, with a letter to the Communist newspaper De Waarheid that year criticising their use of the phrase as “racist” and “backward.” Then up popped instant bestseller Broodje app, “ape sandwich story”, with a phrase that did the same job better and sounded way cooler.
The Institute for the Dutch Language were picking up examples of the use of broodjeaapverhaal or just broodje aap for short, from around 1994. Anthologies and databases of folktales were using broodjeaapverhaal in their titles by 2006, and by 2014 “ape sandwich story” was in common parlance in the Dutch-speaking Flanders region of Belgium as well as in the Netherlands, where Paul Burger became the first academic to get a PhD in “ape sandwich stories” in that year. By 2020, local news website In De Buurt could write about ape sandwich stories made up to explain how the statue of King Willem II came to be in the city of Tilburg, confident that everyone knew what they were talking about.
Do any FT readers know of any other fortean phenomena that have unusual names and backstories to their names in other languages? Do tell, via the letters page.
Broodje aap: de folklore van de post-industriële samenleving, Ethel Portnoy, Harmonie, Amsterdam, 1978
©️ Matt Salusbury 2025
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