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What's The Scariest Urban Legend?

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Anonymous

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So, what's your scariest urban legend ? Of course, this can concern most legends because so many areas have local urban myths that other places do not.
It's just a shame the film URBAN LEGEND was so crap, they could have done something really scary, possibly in the RING way.
 
The Legend of the Black Shuck (in my case the one at Devils Dyke in East Anglia) scared me the most when I was a kid.
 
The horrible spectre of Granny Squannit and her servant haunted the dreams of all naughty Cape Cod children when I was younger.
 
There where 3 that got me when I was a kid. First was the kids dancing around the angel grave stone in (insert local graveyard name) whemn the clock struck 12, the angel came to life and stabbed them!

The next is the classic 'don't look back' midget with axe banging husbands head on roof of the car.

Finally, the lady who stopped her car to move a branch/dead dear/whatever out of the road. Another car races up behind beeping it's horn and flashing it's lights. The lady jumps into her car and speeds off home, with the other car in hot pursuit. She arrives home, runs inside and calls the police. The car is still there when they arrive, they talk to the driver, who indicates that they check the ladies car. It turns out that as she was moving the branch/dear/whatever, an escaped lunatic had jumped in the back of her car, hence the following cars reaction.

Remember, this happened in your home town.
 
The scarey one's for me are the ones that could just be real, like the bogus social workers snatching kids, and more recently the glass found in bottles of baby food. i find them scarey because they might just happen, so much so that they do actually get reported in the news etc.:(
 
[/B]QUOTEThe scarey one's for me are the ones that could just be real, like the bogus social workers snatching kids, and more recently the glass found in bottles of baby food. i find them scarey because they might just happen, so much so that they do actually get reported in the news etc.

I agree, ask someone if it's safe to use a mobile in a petrol station! We had a piece of paper circulated on Neighbourhood watch paper saying someone has been approaching women in car parks selling perfume, but when they have it sprayed to sniff, it knocked them out. That was it! No theft, assault nufin! Hello. I gave it to a local bobby and suggested he 'had a word!'

And if one more smug git tells me bumble bees can't fly.........:rolleyes:
 
As an adolescent in the 70's, the one about the skinheads who followed a lad into some public toilets, and then castrated him with pliers always worried me. Especially that final detail about the lad screaming so loud his vocal chords gave out!

Combined adolescent worries about there being something creepy about public toilets, (living by the sea, we got very confused about UL's to do with crabs and toilet seats, I can tell you!), puberty changes, and the then very scary skinheads to great efffect.
 
The one's from 'Abroad' are always scary when you're young.
Example:
A man in australia gets his drink spiked in a bar then wakes up in a bath full of ice with his kidney missing.

But the scariest EVER are the multi-storey car-park ones:

An woman carrying a shopping in a car park asks a man for a lift home. He says yes but while driving home, notices that there is something wrong with the woman (vague details! Sorry. I think he spots she has hairy legs or something only a man has (or feminist) ) Anyway he stops the car pretending he can hear something in the boot and asks the 'woman' to open the boot for him and look in. As soon as 'she' steps out of the car the man drives off.
As he arrives home he realises what he'd done was stupid and also that the 'woman' has left all her shopping in his car. BUT THEN he opens one of her shopping bags and fines - AN AXE COVERED IN BLOOD!





Christ how lame!
It's scarier when your five. . . . .
 
Mr_Claw said:
There where 3 that got me when I was a kid. First was the kids dancing around the angel grave stone

The next is the classic 'don't look back' midget with axe banging husbands head on roof of the car.

Remember, this happened in your home town.
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It did, mate! There was the grave to circle 13 times anti-clockwise, on Hallowe'en, for The Devil to appear.

The local variant on the 'don't look back' was the husband's head banging on the roof attached to the car radio aerial.

And number 3 was the Haunted Wood. Never to be wandered through at night, lest the ghost of the wrongfully hanged, suspected witch Mary Pannal appeared and did unimaginable things to you!
Leggit....!
:D
 
Due to my lifelong fear of there being something (or someone) under by bed and my refusal to sleep with any part of my body hanging off the edge of the bed...

<side note: This is a fear embedded as a child when "the boogeyman" just had to be under my bed>

The scariest one for me is the one where the girl has this faithful dog (usually a German Shepard or Retriever) that sleeps by her bed. One night she hears strange noises and reaches down for the dog. He licks her hand and she goes back to sleep. The next morning she wakes up and her dog is dead in the bathroom and written in blood on either the wall or the mirror are the words "Humans can lick, too". Inferring that the killer licked her hand, not the dog. I believe her roommate was being killed during all this.

They used that one in the movie Urban Legend 2: Final Cut.

Ok, now I'm alone in the basement of my house and I've freaked myself out. Ack! :cross eye
 
wintermute said:
As an adolescent in the 70's, the one about the skinheads who followed a lad into some public toilets, and then castrated him with pliers always worried me. Especially that final detail about the lad screaming so loud his vocal chords gave out!

Combined adolescent worries about there being something creepy about public toilets, (living by the sea, we got very confused about UL's to do with crabs and toilet seats, I can tell you!), puberty changes, and the then very scary skinheads to great efffect.
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Yup. There's the one. Except in my youth the offenders were "hippies," who crawled inside the victim's bathroom window.

There was also the kid who got his guts sucked out of the drain at the bottom of the pool. He hadn't surfaced in a while, and they found him sitting there. Wait a minute...did that happen?
 
NEIL said:
It's just a shame the film URBAN LEGEND was so crap, they could have done something really scary, possibly in the RING way.
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Yeah, so far I'm the only one on the planet who thinks this, but: RING was 98 minutes of pure watching-paint-dry boredom until THE SCENE. While that part was spooky, I was tearing my hair out waiting for SOMETHING to happen. If you want to judge a lame movie based on two minutes of brilliance, let's talk any Ken Russell flick.
 
My driving instructor told me that his granddaughter had part of her colon damaged when on holiday in a spanish pool. She had sat on it and it had sucked at her and formed a vacuum. He was a serious bloke and was quite upset at the time cos his daughter hadnt told him till they came back from holiday. I completely believed him. Am i a fool?
The scariest urban legend has to be this one:
Young girl at a busy park sees an old blind man stumbling around with his cane and dark glasses and goes up to see if he is all right. he says that is kind of her and asks if she would deliver a letter for him to a local house. She being nice, agrees and takes the letter. but as she turns to go, she notices the blind man purposefully stride off without the use of his cane. getting suspicious she instead takes the letter to the police who pay the address on the letter a visit. Once there they dont find anyone but the place is full of human remains- in the fridge, on the hob, wrapped in newspaper.
Afterwards they show the letter to the girl. It says "this is the last one i'm sending you."
brrr. And its all true!!!
Whatever. I think the scariest ones are always those which seem to punish the do-gooders. Trying to instill a sense of cynicism into everyone- thats scary
 
I don't like the one that was doing the rounds in Essex some 4 years ago...

Mother loses child in Lakeside Shopping centre (or any large out of town retail outlet). After much frantic searching child is discovered by security guard who notices couple behaving in a strange way. Child now has clothes of opposite gender on, and has had hair cut and dyed.......

The other ones I don't like is the couple hurrying out of town and leaving child in high chair knowing that baby-sitter is only a few minutes away and will be at house soon after they leave. Needless to say, baby-sitter is killed en route and couple return to find dead infant in high chair a few weeks later.......
 
Ogopogo, I totally agree about RING and the fact that nothing happened for so long. I thought the end was really spooky, I think alot more could have been done with the film.

I think the saying that, "If you stare in into a mirror with a candle and read the Lord's Prayer backwards, the Devil (or some malevolent shadow) will appear on your shoulder forever", is pretty spooky.
I also like the legend of HOOK, in the lover's lanes of the U.S.
 
Re: Re: What do you think is the scariest urban legend ?

Ogopogo said:
Yeah, so far I'm the only one on the planet who thinks this, but: RING was 98 minutes of pure watching-paint-dry boredom until THE SCENE. While that part was spooky, I was tearing my hair out waiting for SOMETHING to happen. If you want to judge a lame movie based on two minutes of brilliance, let's talk any Ken Russell flick.
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But its (I won't say boredom) rather naturalism that gives RING its power. Its conceivable that you are watching a real docudrama about Japanese journalists until it all goes a pear shaped and scary. But I was a bit wasted when I watched it som maybe my critical faculties were blunted (excuse the pun)
Has anyone seen RING 2 yet ? (BTW - my highly placed industry sources tell me an American remake of RING is on its way, which is a pretty scary thought in itself)
The UL that always stuck in my mind is about the nervous student attending the most important exam of career, but to the surprise of his fellow students he just spends the first hour sharpening two pencils, and then he sticks them, lead end first, up his nose and then slaps his face hard onto his desk.
It would have made my Frenc GCSE more interesting anway
 
Re: Re: Re: What do you think is the scariest urban legend ?

chatsubo said:
But its (I won't say boredom) rather naturalism that gives RING its power. Its conceivable that you are watching a real docudrama about Japanese journalists until it all goes a pear shaped and scary. But I was a bit wasted when I watched it som maybe my critical faculties were blunted (excuse the pun)
Has anyone seen RING 2 yet ?
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I saw it. It's about ten times more dull than the first one. RING 0: Birthday, which is a prequel, is a little better. The series just leaves me flat.
 
Pardon...

Does the movie you're discussing have anything to do with the Japanese movie "Evil Dead Trap"? It had the whole journalists checking out a possible snuff film connection for a reality based TV show, and one by one they are murdered by a guy who has his evil twin living inside him kind of schtick going for it.
I wonder, because we have the bad habit in the States of changing the names of films that are imported to us, and I have been looking for a DVD copy of RING since I first saw it advertised in Fortean Times.
 
The one that has always stuck in my mind is the one about the guy who disappears on Xmas eve leaving his family wondering where he is all through the holidays. It's only some time later when there's a strange smell / fire won't light or something that they discover him dead, jammed into the chimney with a sack of prezzies.. LOL..

Ok its not scarey but struck me as well, I have a well-developed sense of schadenfreude.. LOL...

:blah: Jules
 
i remember my dad telling me about his Work mate who was drving home and saw a baby in the road, stopped got out found it was only a doll and then got back in the car. on the way home she was followed but another car beeping etc only to find there had been an escaped criminal in the back of the car. I really belived him untill i saw an episode of Home and Away and the exact same thing happened. since then i have heard many variatins on the theme. Another one was the bloody mary appearing in the mirror story. Cant remember what you were supposed to do but the out come was to see a bloody face in the mirror. What i find funny now is that although we all KNEW it wouldnt happen all of us were to scared to ty it
 
Hmmm, the baby in the high chair story was told to me at a Christmas meal some years ago by a relation of the local coroner who of course swore it was true... This ruined my holiday to the extent that I refused ever to go out with my spouse's workmates again!

Locally there's been the razor blades mounted in the sides of the kiddies' slide story, complete with convincing accounts of tender flesh sliced to the bone and desolate screaming. All false.

Then there's the one about the drug addicts who get the munchies and rustle up a nice plump roast chicken, which next morning turns out to be their baby. Whoops.........
 
Tiny spiders crawl into your ears while you sleep and lay eggs... which then hatch :(

There's a small fish in South America/Asia/Australia that swims up your, um, urine stream, and bites :eek!!!!: (glad I'm female and not in the habit of squatting over tropical rivers!). This was actually told to me by a local guide whilst on a backpacking (ie cheap) trip to Brazil - I assumed it was meant to discourage people from polluting the water, until the contents of the latrine were dumped into the river...

Jane.
 
mejane said:
There's a small fish in South America/Asia/Australia that swims up your, um, urine stream, and bites :eek!!!!: (glad I'm female and not in the habit of squatting over tropical rivers!). This was actually told to me by a local guide whilst on a backpacking (ie cheap) trip to Brazil - I assumed it was meant to discourage people from polluting the water, until the contents of the latrine were dumped into the river...

Jane.
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That's actually true, though only in South America. I don't think its a fish, more like a tiny crab that swims up the stream into a man's uthera and then pushes out a set of spikes.
Check out Raymond O'Hara's book about adventuring in the Amazon for a more scientific explanation
 
Here's a picture of the fish in question. Not pretty.

My legs are still crossed.
 
The dead baby in the high chair certainly freaked me the first time I heard it. I read it on snopes, so I knew it wasn't true, but just the thought of it made my blood run cold. Not just the idea of the parents' finding it, but of the poor child screaming and crying, and never understanding where Mommy and Daddy had gone and why they didn't come back....

My imagination is too good. I could picture everything that hypothetical baby would have gone through.

Nonny
 
barndad said:
My driving instructor told me that his granddaughter had part of her colon damaged when on holiday in a spanish pool. She had sat on it and it had sucked at her and formed a vacuum. He was a serious bloke and was quite upset at the time cos his daughter hadnt told him till they came back from holiday. I completely believed him. Am i a fool?
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Five or six years ago here in the States, a young girl was disembowelled by sitting on an overly powerful pool pump. It was in all the papers, and a lawsuit resulted. I'll see if I can find some information on the case.
 
Windwhistler said:
Five or six years ago here in the States, a young girl was disembowelled by sitting on an overly powerful pool pump. It was in all the papers, and a lawsuit resulted. I'll see if I can find some information on the case.
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And now I have.

http://archive.nandotimes.com/newsroom/nao/tri/120496/tri10_29525.html is the case I was thinking of, where the little girl was disembowelled by the pool pump.

http://www.lifesaving.com/articles/article21.htm has an overview of the hazards associated with pool drains, as well as one rather gruesome photo.

http://www.vac-alert.com/Archive Contents.htm is an archive of news articles on the subject of people becoming trapped or injured by the suction from pool drains.

So, on the whole, I'd have to consider the idea not an urban legend.
 
Urban Legend meets Religious Fear

I've just recalled sitting here drinking a cuppa java that there are a few legends linked to christianity (or the warning of fooling with that nasty chap 'the devil' leads to nasty things...RE: Saying Lord's Prayer backwards in a mirror)

One story is of a toddler who saw his parents literally kill each other in front of him at home. A few years later the kid saw a picture of Christ for the first time...the child exclaimed..."That's the man who hugged me after my parents hurt each other." (There are a dozen depections of Christ...none of them actual depections....plus as a christian this is the most weak,bogus and sensationalist legend I have heard)

Another 'fortune telling tail' of legend is of a young man who had his fortune told by a brutally frank lady....."You are going to die in around 16 months" Upset by the reading (naturally!) the guy works himself into an absolute state over the next year or so in fear of his life/death. He eventually hangs himself due to the intense strain. (This is a basic tail about forethought...don't live with the future folks....or indeed the past)

A subject all of it's own is basically - why are we drawn to these 'all in the punchline' stories? Is it the shock of the twist in the tale or the fear of how real some of them are?......I don't know....truth can be stranger than fiction you must agree.

Anyway...'bout time I put the kettle on for another brew.
 
The Candiru

chatsubo said:
That's actually true, though only in South America. I don't think its a fish, more like a tiny crab that swims up the stream into a man's uthera and then pushes out a set of spikes.
Check out Raymond O'Hara's book about adventuring in the Amazon for a more scientific explanation
Click to expand...


I first heard of this creature in some fiction by the late 'beat' novelist William Burrough's. The Candiru appear in 'Cities of the Red Night' and the 'Naked Lunch' which some people may be familiar with. I think Burrough's uses the nasty burrowing little fish as a metaphor for VD and that you shouldn't 'dive into murky unknown waters without knowing what's there.' Quite moral really. Burrough's himself although incredibly moral in a textbook kind of way wrote graphic books about drug addiction and homosexuality. He was deeply involved in both and based most of his work on these subjects.
 
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