Quote Originally Posted by gRomoZeka
"На воре и шапка горит" ... Once a thief stole something at the market place. People tried to find him, but without any success. At last some old man shouted: "The thief's hat is on fire!". The thief touched his hat to check it, and that's how he was caught.
That reminds me of a piece of "folk wisdom" about the Chicken Polygraph -- a farmer sprinkles soot on the feathers of a black chicken as a homemade lie-detector, to help find the thief who stole the rooster:



Click here to see the entire full-page cartoon.

The cartoon, by the way, is scanned from The Big Book of Urban Legends, which I strongly recommend for advanced English learners -- it has about 200 examples of "modern folklore" (some of which, like this one about the chicken, are much older) illustrated in comic-book form.