What’s a UCGS marker?
Putting a penny on a train track will very likely derail the train.
At about eighth grade (70’s) this went the rounds.
There was a lady trucker that ate a a grill and somebody slipped drugs in her soda. She went to her truck and drove off. Her truck was found pulled over on the highway shoulder. She was found dead in her truck having masturbated on the stick shift until she bled to death. I suppose it was a don’t do drugs story told by boys wishing they knew what drug it was.
If you receive any wound from a rusty anything you must hurry home as fast as you can to clean it out before lock-jaw sets in.
There was a road near where I grew up called Buckout Road. It is the home/center of a variety of legends involving all manner of witches, albinos and homicidal whackos.
There has always been some challenge - If you drive it with the lights out at exactly midnight…If you honk three times when you pass the albinos’ house (heaven help whoever really lived in that house!). There were (and I imagine still are) stories of general hauntedness.
Not in my town but pretty nearby was (is) Rye Playland amusement park. There was a coaster there called the Mighty Mouse. It was a fantastic coaster. The long cars only had wheels at the back so the front end of the car would head out over the edge of hairpin turns at the ends. Of course this thing was at the edge of the park nearest the parking lot. * Everyone *you met would tell you that a few years ago some kids in their school where in a car that broke off, didn’t make the turn, and sailed into the parking lot. I believe there was at least one unfortunate incident, but the car didn’t disengage, and it wasn’t filled with 6 kids from each of over 40 highschools in Westchester every single year.
A marker placed by the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey.
I was a very sheltered and gullible little kid, so I fell for all the urban legends, including:
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Kentucky Fried Mice (all it took was for somebody to say “Chicken!” to me for awhile to get me seriously upset).
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There was a little abandonded/unused jail building in the local park (that part was true) that was home to a ghost called “The White Lady.” Some of the kids had me convinced that the White Lady was coming after me, even though I’d never been near the little jail.
I think this is why I’m so skeptical now–I don’t believe anything anymore unless it’s backed up by facts.
I mostly remember the one where apparently chewing gum stays in your digestive system for 7 years. (It was always 7, too, for some reason.)
Most of the “urban legends” I heard were in the form of ghost stories…as in, “this didn’t actually happen, but it’s spooky anyway.” Such as the one where the babysitter gets a call from a kidnapper/murderer, only to find that said baddie is in the house. Or almost anything involving a lover’s lane.
In grade school our building was near a doughnut shop and there was a rumor of a scary molester called “the donut man” who tried to lure you into his house with donuts. No one knew what he looked like (and which house was his varied from year to year) but if you got to be a crossing guard you were considered pretty badass because that meant you were out all alone for a half-hour every day on the corner where the DONUT MAN could drive right by and snatch you!
This is hilarious! I’m reminded of the horrifying slumber party cautionary tale that went around of the girl who was “practicing” (we didn’t know the term “masturbating” yet) with an empty Coke bottle…It created a vacuum and sucked her insides out, of course and she died.
One urban legend I actually fell for was the one that somehow the light rays when playing CDs scatter out the edge and you’ll get a crisper sound if you “contain” them by coating all your discs with green magic marker. I’m pretty sure this was thought up by the makers of green magic markers, which were nearly impossible to find. I’d spent many hours in high school painstakingly lining the edges of my CD collection (luckily I had no social obligations) and thought nothing of it until years later when I saw this very legend in a Jan Harold Brunvand book. D’OH!
The other day my seven-year-old was honestly (though mildly) surprised to see Barney the dinosaur in a preview on her little brother’s DVD, because “everybody knows that Elmo killed Barney!”
I wonder if that started by some overheard media commentary: “In the children’s education market, Elmo [figuratively] killed Barney by cutting into his Nielsen ratings.”
I grew up in a small Southern town. We had lots of supposed “devil worshipers” that even the adults took as a serious threat. It was mostly teenage boys that wore black, heavy metal themed t-shirts. I was also scared about the tales of animal sacrifice in the woods in the middle of the night and god knows what else. My first job was at a supermarket where it was rumored to be a hotbed of that sort of thing and I was really nervous when I started. Needless to say, many of them are still my friends on Facebook now.
Dogs were disappearing from the local yards at one time and it was said it was devil worshipers. After over a year of this a place was found with dead butchered dogs and it looked like it probably was teens doing sacrifices. The place was next to the property of someone I knew. I told them I didn’t need to see it. The dogs did stop disappearing after this place was found.
A good laugh?! That’s horrifying! The story itself is weird/creepy/scary, but the fact that Capt. Ridley just learned that the boogeyman of his childhood was and is real pushes the whole thing over into terrifying…! ::shudder::
Capt. Ridley, why was he called “Purple” Aki?
When I was a junior in high school, a rumor started circulating that there was a “lab” in the woods where experiments used to be done on animals, and that “it was the most fucked up shit you’ll ever see.” People just called it “the lab,” and nobody knew exactly when it was built or why it was there. My friends and I, during photography class one day (which was practically a free period with very little supervision) decided to go find “the lab” and see if all the rumors about it were true. One of my friends claimed to know exactly where it was. Seven or eight of us snuck out of class, got into two trucks, and drove down the very narrow country road to see “the lab.”
Following the guy’s directions, we drove to the top of a hill off of the country road, and at the top of this hill was a house. The house appeared to be abandoned; the front door was unlocked and we let ourselves in. The house was crammed with junk and trash; there were piles of trash ceiling-high, and it was a complete pigsty.
In back of the house was “the lab.” It was down the hill a ways, through very dense vegetation; a drab, gray brick building which was in extreme disrepair. If I had to guess I would say it was probably built back in the 1960s. The interior of the lab was filthy and disgusting; there were, indeed, test tubes all over the place, beakers, and other scientific equipment. There were also animal bones everywhere, some small and some large. If I had to guess, I would say they probably came from a mixture of rats, rabbits and dogs. But there truly were animal bones all over the place.
The basement of the “lab” walked out into a small courtyard on a lower level of the hill. In the courtyard there were three round, open structures made of brick; each was about the size of a round hot tub. In these brick enclosures were more animal bones, plus some glass jars filled with the largest dead crickets I have EVER seen. Never before or since have I seen crickets so enormous. Maybe these huge crickets were food for the animals which were experimented on when the lab was in operation. From the looks of things, it seemed to have been out of commission for at least ten years.
We came back to the lab the next day with a video camera, intending to film the interior of it. We had arranged to meet a friend there. As we approached the hill in our truck, we saw his Suburban parked up by the house in front of the lab, and there was another car up there attempting to block him in. The friend, Bryce, drove his Suburban down the hill and sped away; we followed him. When we got back to town, he told us that after he had parked up by the house, a man drove up in his car, told him that the house was his property, and had tried to prevent him from leaving. (We were freaked out to know that someone apparently lived in the junk-filled house which we assumed was abandoned.)
Here is the location of the so-called “lab” on Google Maps. You can see the house on the hill just off Moore’s Creek Road and then the dilapidated “lab” behind it.
We had the “Ghost Tracks”.
Turns out back in the '50’s, a school bus had stalled out over a train crossing. Before it could move, a train came by and killed everybody in it. The driver and some twenty kids or so.
After several beers, us teens would drive over there. The deal was that the road was level, and the tracks were on a small (two foot) raised hill. You would put baby powder on your trunk and back bumper and sides of your car and then jump in and put it in neutral and the ghosts of the kids would push you along the road, gaining enough speed to crest the hill and safely over to the other side.
I never bought it when the older kids would try to trick me, but I may have pulled that trick on others in my past.
I can’t find a source, but I think this one has since been debunked. Though I’m willing to bet this joke still lives.
oops…missed the edit window.
The punch line was that there would be little kids’ handprints in the baby powder.
Kind of boring, but there was one house where this lady lived. It had bars on all of the windows. Can’t remember if there was anything else about the house to make it stand out, but the story was the lady had accidentally killed her husband in the past and was punishing herself by putting herself in “jail.” A friend of mine actually talked to her once, though, and reported that she seemed quite a nice, normal lady. Can’t remember if there was an explanation for the bars. This was in West Texas, not New York City, and that really stood out in that time and place.
This is AWESOME! For some reason this totally cracked me up.
I think this might be a YMCA camp thing.
Our local YMCA day camp’s Killer Psycho Ghost was named “Three Fingered Louie” I remember my brother telling me that one of his friends from an overnite Y camp, who’d gone to another Y day camp said that that boy said that there was a Three Fingered Whatever at his camp.
Man, them YMCA counselors are a mean bunch.