Not a whisper of this on Google.

***** 

Palahniuk mixes non-fiction in with his fiction quite a bit, but the 'non-fiction' often turns out to be fictional itself or distorted facts as it's often told by unreliable narrators. I think this particular story that the protagonist is telling is a bit of an urban legend. As was already pointed out there's a bit of discussion about it here on Snopes, but I found nothing else from a quick Google search: 

http://message.snopes.com/showthread.php?t=67005