If you accidentally poked yourself with a pencil and the lead/graphite broke the skin, you could die of lead poisoning. Same with a ballpoint pen and “ink poisoning”.
I could believe it except I have no idea what a “ground kangaroo” is. I thought that they could all jump really far up into the air.
Not to turn this into a Great Debate but acid rain and nuclear war were up there when I was a kid. There were supposedly masses of completely innocent people becoming suddenly homeless with their families as well as widespread childhood kidnapping by strangers. The Japanese taking over America was another big one. It was hard growing up as a child in the 1980’s. Lots of teachers and other adults encouraged us but let us know in subtle ways that it was all basically hopeless. I won’t say that the danger was never there or bad things didn’t happen but both TV and people we knew scared the piss out of us about this stuff. At one point, I didn’t even know if it was worth it to try to go to college.
In my town, there was a really old psychiatric institution that looked like a creepy Gothic castle. That part is true.
The urban legend went like this…
You know the movie The Texas Chain Saw Massacre? Well, it was based on a real story, and one of the guys who went to jail? Well, when he got out of jail, he would move to a town and then they would find out who is was, and run him out of town. And this happened town after town, and he couldn’t live anywhere. So finally what they came up with was to give him an apartment at the psych center. He blends in with all the other inmates, so no one knows who he is. And during the day, he can come and go as he pleases (unlike the other inmates at the psych center), so when you are walking around, THE GUY STANDING NEXT TO YOU COULD BE THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE GUY.
The weird thing to me is that it seems a little specific, with the movie and the location and everything. As an adult, it popped into my head once and I gave it a little research and really, nothing at all like that on record. In fact, I think it thought of it when there was a “weird or interesting facts about your hometown” thread here on the SDMB, and I thought that was an interesting fact and almost posted it until I realized it sounds so fishy when you aren’t 12 years old.
FYI, I think the old Gothic castle of a psych center is now converted into condos.
There was that Rod Stewart rumor. I’m sure everyone of you heard.
I agree this is totally true, and if you don’t believe it you’re all totally invited to a slumber party at my house Saturday to prove it. Just don’t tell my parents…
Actually they won’t care. My husband will be really freakin’ pissed off though.
The spooky old silo in The Lane was occupied by a deranged woman who shot any man that set foot on her property. Or maybe it was haunted by the ghost of a little boy who’d died there trying to escape kidnappers.
A little girl had poured pop rocks down her ears and then poured soda down her ears. Her brain had exploded. Of course when we heard this one we never wondered why a kid would be pouring stuff down her ears in the first place.
In the 80’s we all knew that there was a Satanic church on 3rd Street (this was in Lexington, KY.) The Satan worshippers would hang out on the street corners downtown and hand out free drugs and porn. No one ever pinpointed the exact location of the church, nor did they display any drugs and porn that they’d received from the Satanists. Later rumors held that the church was now out on Liberty Road.
Around that time a kid at school announced that Lexington was number 50 on a list of cities that the Russians were going to nuke. Why they were targetting us or where this kid got his information in the first place were questions that were never asked, much less answered. We knew Kentucky wouldn’t be completely destroyed anyway–the people in Appalachia would just hide in caves until the bombing stopped, then come out and resume their lives. They would be just fine because even the Russians knew not to mess with angry hillbillies.
Red scare legend: When my dad was a kid in the 50’s, he and his friends knew that one of their neighbors was a commie. One night they searched his garbage for evidence. I don’t know what they were expecting to find–maybe a birthday card from Khruschev?
Nothing to add but in my elementary school we had one sub whose son was the most unfortunate kid in the world. Every thing like this he had done and suffered horrible consequences.
“Don’t run with your pencil. My son was running with a pencil and…”
“Stay off that fence. My son cut his leg and…”
“Don’t chew gum. My son swallowed his gum once and…”
“Don’t share soda cans. My son shared a soda and…”
“Don’t touch doorknobs. My son touched a doorknob and got…”
Man, what the hell was it with the '80s and satan-worship?
The movies had been doing a lot with that type of thing in the 70’s - 80’s and I think you can blame them for the popularity of Ouija Boards too.
Evil Dead 1981
Ghoulies 1985
“(The actress who played) Cindy Brady was killed in a freak accident when she was caught in the door of her schoolbus” was a big one for a while when I was in elementary school.
I heard all kinds of variants of the Space Rocks/Coke thing of course.
Does the “backwards masking” craze count as an urban legend? That was huge when I was a teenager.
Of course, there was that kid who stuck his head out the window of his school bus and a telephone pole took it clean off . . .
Oh here’s to my sweet Satan.
The one whose little path would make me sad, whose power is Satan.
He will give those with him 666.
There was a little tool shed where he made us suffer, sad Satan.
I remember Olivia Newton-John’s ode to the Dark Lord as well- “Let’s Get Physical”, which played backwards was “I’ve got demons I’ve got demons get away from me God”.
So far I have not seen the big one from my childhood, if you get a cut between your thumb and index finger you will bleed to death in 3 minutes, there is no way to stop the blood.
Some boy named Joe Phabeetz liked all of the girls in school…
My math teacher really did have a son who got his eye shot out with a BB gun and blinded in that eye.
What’s this one?
Did you grow up in Northampton, MA?
My elementary school sent out a flier warning about people handing out cartoon tattoos laced with LSD. (I’d link to the snopes page but there’s popups.) This was no later than 1987.
When I was a kid, my school had for many years leased some land on a local island and kids went there for biology excursions, staying overnight. The land had old buildings on it that everyone used to sleep in.
The old buildings were in fact a leprosarium which had closed down in the mid twentieth century (this much was actually true). But the kids late at night told stories of the Mad Leper who didn’t want to leave when the place was closed and ran off into the bush to live wild. Every time a possum ran across the tin roofs, it was claimed that this was the Mad Leper looking for ways to get back at us all (why was never clear. He was mad, I suppose.)
It was said that if all the kids spat into a glass and the glass was put outside at night, in the morning the glass would be found empty because the Mad Leper had drunk the contents. (Serious eww factor here.)
Teachers didn’t have too many disciplinary worries because the kids used to say that the teachers would punish kids who misbehaved by making them stand out in the dark by a flagpole where the Mad Leper could get them…
I now realise, of course, that all this was just part of the cruel cultural baggage heaped upon leprosy sufferers over the years. But at the time, the stories were a rivetting part of kid culture to us.