In the ’90s, this was my absolute favorite urban legend:

A young woman was getting married and she wanted to look her very best. She decided that her expensive white dress would be attractively set off by a golden tan. Unfortunately, she waited until a week before the wedding to start her tanning sessions. Salon after salon told her that she could only tan for thirty minutes, twice a week, to start. At this rate, she would not be tan in time for her wedding. The bride then had a brilliant idea: she would tan the maximum amount of time at every tanning salon in town.

The wedding day came, and the bride was beautiful — dark, perfect tan and all. However, on the wedding night, the groom noticed that his new wife had a peculiar smell — kind of like rotting meat. As the honeymoon wore on, the smell persisted and grew worse until he could stand it no longer: he insisted that his bride go to the hospital to find out what was causing the awful stench. Doctors examined her carefully, but could not identify the source of the odor.

The bride’s health began to fail, and after a few days she died. When the autopsy was performed, the horrified coroner discovered that the woman’s internal organs were cooked! Over-exposure to tanning rays had cooked the woman from the inside out, just like a microwave oven, and in the days following the wedding, the bride had begun to “spoil.”

From Urban Legends Reference Pages, where you can reassure yourself that this isn’t possibly true.