I recall a story from my dad's childhood in northern Utah. His family lived on a farm in south Davis County in what is now North Salt Lake and Woods Cross, and the Bamberger train, the interurban rail line that during the first half of the Twentieth Century ran from Salt Lake to Ogden, passed right in front of their place. There was a Bamberger stop in the area known as Cleverly Crossing (as depicted in the early photograph below from the Utah State Historical Society). Dad and his brothers and sisters used to ride the Bamberger to Kaysville, where they attended Davis High, the only high school in the county at that time.
The story handed down from my father is that on a winter's morning, while waiting for the Bamberger to arrive, he licked the cold rail, probably on a dare, and his tongue stuck to the cold metal. With the train approaching, he did the only sensible thing a person in that predicament could do. He yanked his tongue away from the rail. That must have really hurt. And I doubt he ever tried that trick again.
My own really stupid story was not as life-threatening and may actually have been repeated more than once. I too grew up on a farm. We had cows and used electric fences to keep them in, except that cows, despite their being stupid beasts, always seemed to figure out how to get out anyway. It came as a shock to learn that if you pee on an electric fence, you feel it throughout the entire body. Not a pleasant sensation.
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