What urban legends do you remember talking about or heading when you were a kid?
I remember this one: when I was about 6 or 7 my dad brought home a ream of continuous fan-fold printer paper, which I used as a canvas for my crayon masterpiece: Spider-man climbing a skyscraper to stop the villian at the top. The villian was tossing Kleenex off the roof of the skyscraper, which would kill people when they hit bottom because they were falling so fast.
(Yeah, this post is inspired by this thread pondering the effects of dropping a basketball off the Empire State Building.)
I also had a buddy in the 3rd grade who went on and on about how the car makers had cars that got 100 miles to the gallon, but didn’t sell them because the oil companies bought them off. Since I didn’t even know what a mile per gallon or an oil company was (and, I now suspect, neither did Nathan), this really pissed me off.
There was an old cemetary in my town and one of the graves had a marker with a life size statue of a young girl. I was told by classmates that the girl had died after having her entire body painted as part of a Halloween costume.
various quasi-celebrities dying from eating Pop Rocks, possibly with Coke
fried rat found in bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken, with bite already taken!!!1
and a local one … our town had a very gothic-looking psychiatric hospital. Us kids developed our own local urban legend about a notorious murderer (often specified as the real murderer some famous horror movie was based on) who served his prison sentence, but after his release from prison, was nearly lynched in any neighborhood where he tried to live because of the heinousness of his crimes. Finally, the state decided to provide housing for him in the psychiatric hospital … he lived like a mental patient on one of the wards … BUT WALKED FREE ON THE LOCAL STREETS AT NIGHT (muahahahahaha).
I heard about the man who would hang around the schoolyard or playground, offering candy to kids, to get them to do something horrible with him. Has one documented case of this ever happened? Or was it parental paranoia and overactive imaginations?
The usual one that person X in that house right over there was really a psychopath, and that he waited for your frisbee or ball to land in his yard. Then he would shoot you when you went to retrieve it.
Far too many to count, being from a small rural town and having 2 older (and very delinquent) brothers who liked to scare my sister and me at every opportunity. (and my kids wonder why it is that I have no fear!)
The funniest/most memorable, looking back, was the one that said that putting a penny on the railroad tracks will derail an oncoming train (my sister believed this one til she was 17 and I forced her to come with me to do it and watch so as to fight one small corner of her ignorance!)
fishbicycle, sadly, this is the MO for many child molestors. I do actually know a girl who had to have years of therapy because her parents never explained that she was not to accept “candy from strangers” and when she was 8, a stranger picked her up from her playground and let her “lick his ice cream cone.” Yeh, it happens.
On a side note, one of our neighbors hanged himself in his shed. I was 5 at the time. I happened to witness the event, and told my brothers. They didn’t believe me and never told the adults – it took a couple weeks of sweltering summer heat for the stench to be such that the body was found and he was laid to rest. No details given as to why I didn’t tell the adults – suffice it to say that is part of my history that is irrelevant and discarded. There are a few urban legends about this incident that sprang up with the neighborhood kids, and I hate to admit that many of them were truer than those kids could have known.
Edited because I forgot to point out that growing up within an hour’s drive of Adams, TN – we had all kinds of Bell Witch urban legends that are just plays off the Bloody Mary ones.
Rod Stewart and an ungodly amount semen in his stomach.
Gang members driving with their lights off.
Just the other week one of my co-workers was telling me all about Lee Marvin, Captain Kangaroo & Mr. Rogers’ respective military endeavors. He’s in his mid-forties. I pointed him in the right direction.
But for my own, before Al Gore invented the Internet, urban legends often traveled by photocopier. One that I recall recounted a welder whose contacts were fused to his eyes by microwave radiation from his arc welder. He attemted to remove them, and ripped his corneas.
A maniac with a hook for a hand is on the loose. Teens are making out in their car when they hear a scratching on the door. They drive off in a panic. When they get home they find the hook attached to the door handle.
Pouring coke on a steak forces worms up out of the meat
Woman goes scuba diving. Weeks later she is having stomach pains. Goes to the doctor who delivers a baby octopus
If you force your eyes to stay open when you sneeze then your eyes will pop out of your head
Playing with yourself will make you go blind or give you hairy palms (if that was true then I’d be soaking my hands in Nair so I could get a better grip on the leash of my seeing eye dog).
When I was a Girl Scout, every year at Camp Scott we would hear, from the counselors, horrific legends about a man who lived in the woods like an animal and occasionally approached the camp to snatch girls out of their tents and murder them. In the spooky, shadowy campfire light, a tale like this was mighty believable.
In 1977, three young Girl Scouts were raped and murdered after having been snatched from their tents at the camp. A man was accused, tried, and acquitted, but no one has ever been convicted of the crime. The camp was subsequently closed forever.
Bouffant hairdos were popular when I was a teenager. Some girls would douse the do in hairspray and not wash their hair for a week or two. Did you know that spiders will nest in your hair, and you won’t know it until one day you’re sitting in class, and blood pours down your forehead because the spiders hatched and they’re eating your scalp?
