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What's Your Local Urban Legend / Folklore / Myth?

The area where i'm living now has an interesting legend, and it's presence seems to hang over the town. even though talking about it is frowned upon.
This much is true:
In the late 1800's the towns most prominent family had a teenage daughter. She was very beautiful, and (according to the papers) very popular and much adored. In those days, of course, being introduced to soceity as a debutante was very important, and the girl was eagerly preparing for her debut when she suddenly became ill with typhoid. She struggled to survive for weeks but finally succumbed, just before (IIRC) her 17th birthday.
The girl, who I will call "Julia" to avoid her wrath, was mourned by the town.

The town named its high school after the teenager. The original dedication plaque said something about how Julia had never got to experience the exciting teenage social life she had so longed for. Her portrait showed a very beautiful girl wearing yards of lace and a slightly spoiled, petulant look.

The school burned to the ground repeatedly, with no apparent cause, and finally they rebuilt it out of brick. Then the brick work caught fire. Not the inside, mind you. Just the bricks...it couldn't help but be remembered how everything had to be burned during the typhoid outbreak.

The family, over several generations, named several of their daughters Julia. All of them met terrible fates.
One of the family's houses (where the second julia died) is allegedly so haunted that no one will stay in it, even though it's on a beautiful estate. They tried to give it to the church, but the church refused, for unknown reasons. A ghost-hunting television program tried to get inside once but the family wouldn't allow it.
There is a sense of despair and anger in the town that can't be explained away

It might just be superstition, but a lot of us think that Julia is a very jealous, angry ghost - or a force, at least. We try not to get on her bad side...
 
I lived most of my life in Canterbury; we had an UL regarding the bit in the Cathedral where Thomas met his end. Some of the stones on the floor of the chapel have a red stain on them and the UL goes that this is where Thomas' blood was spilt and stained the very stone itself
 
I cant remember if I posted in this thread before or not.

My home town Hastings in the UK has "The curse of Aleister Crowley".
Supposedly is you grew up in the town you culd never leave for good.
 
Hello all, first time poster here.

The area where I live (East Anglia) has a legend about a dog called Black Shuck, it's your basic black dog legend in that it is supposed to fortell a death.

Apparently if you say the name three times its supposed to summon the beast but i'm not sure if this is just a mix up of folk tales over the years. To be fair though I've never had the gall to try it!
 
Leeds Witch

Not sure where I heard this one, but being a Loiner I seem to have heard this all my life.

Apparently, Leeds Uni has the skeleton of the last hanged Witch, which it still uses to teach anatomy.
 
Mikeyp said:
Hello all, first time poster here.

The area where I live (East Anglia) has a legend about a dog called Black Shuck, it's your basic black dog legend in that it is supposed to fortell a death.
Welcome :).

We've a fair bit on Black Dogs, Shuck included, dotted around the board.There's a decent sized thread here, for a start.
 
Re: Leeds Witch

Cultjunky said:
Not sure where I heard this one, but being a Loiner I seem to have heard this all my life.

Apparently, Leeds Uni has the skeleton of the last hanged Witch, which it still uses to teach anatomy.
I'm not 100% sure but I believe this is in the Thackray Medical Museum.
 
Not really an UL then :oops: . I only ever half believed it, because the most info I ever got was that she was called Mary something
 
In my late teens (mid 1990s), there was a rumour/ urban myth that I heard at least 3 times from different people.

The story was that a guy who lived near Glasgow (Bishopbriggs was the place that was mentioned twice in relation to this) had taken some dodgy LSD and now could only walk backwards.

I always wondered how he got out of bed each morning if he could only move backwards.
 
In my late teens (mid 1990s), there was a rumour/ urban myth that I heard at least 3 times from different people.

The story was that a guy who lived near Glasgow (Bishopbriggs was the place that was mentioned twice in relation to this) had taken some dodgy LSD and now could only walk backwards.

I always wondered how he got out of bed each morning if he could only move backwards.
Michael Jackson.
 
In my late teens (mid 1990s), there was a rumour/ urban myth that I heard at least 3 times from different people.

The story was that a guy who lived near Glasgow (Bishopbriggs was the place that was mentioned twice in relation to this) had taken some dodgy LSD and now could only walk backwards.

I always wondered how he got out of bed each morning if he could only move backwards.

I certainly saw a "backwards walker" in Glasgow city centre in the 90s, wonder if it was the same guy?
 
It was common during the Eighties and into the Nineties to characterize anyone behaving or acting weird as an "acid casualty."

It was rare, however, to encounter an alleged acid casualty who'd ever used hallucinogens. Conversely, of the few hallucinogen users with whom I'd been acquainted since childhood / youth there weren't any who hadn't behaved weirdly since that earlier age.

My point is that "acid casualty" was a blanket explanation for a lot of folks back then who were more likely to have mental health issues, autism spectrum issues, ADD / ADHD, etc., etc.
 
an urban legend where i live is "Kitty bout yed" ( Kitty without her head) basically iirc it was a young lady who was murdered by decapitation and burried headless to rise on occassion trying to find her head.... again iirc this was all perpetrated as a dodgy way of getting to the familys fortune? The house she lived in really exists and is about a 1/4 of a mile from my house............ wooooo!!
 
I was just reading recently of the black pudding throwing competition in Bury and its alleged origins of the War Of The Roses. Having run out of ammunition they started throwing food at each other. That sounds like plain rubbish to me.

"Stanley, we've run out of weapons, what do we do?"

"Eeh ecky thump were in trouble now. Throw a black pudding at yon bugger."

Really.
 
Local urban legends...? Not sure but there is a short road in one semi rural area called Reeder Road that allegedly is haunted by a ghost of a young girl...killed in a car crash I think.
Also a couple of haunted houses ...one is the old jail where John Dillinger was once jailed until he escaped...and there is an old house/inn that is allegedly haunted...both were on the original Ghost Hunters some years back.
I don't know of any 'urban legends' like 'Bloody Mary' around here.
 
I was just reading recently of the black pudding throwing competition in Bury and its alleged origins of the War Of The Roses. Having run out of ammunition they started throwing food at each other. That sounds like plain rubbish to me.

"Stanley, we've run out of weapons, what do we do?"

"Eeh ecky thump were in trouble now. Throw a black pudding at yon bugger."

Really.

I reckon it originated with Monty Python.
 
I was just reading recently of the black pudding throwing competition in Bury and its alleged origins of the War Of The Roses. Having run out of ammunition they started throwing food at each other. That sounds like plain rubbish to me.

"Stanley, we've run out of weapons, what do we do?"

"Eeh ecky thump were in trouble now. Throw a black pudding at yon bugger."

Really.

On the other hand, the excellent Mythbusters telly programme established that cheese could be fired from a ship’s cannon and shred an opponent’s sails.

maximus otter
 
On the other hand, the excellent Mythbusters telly programme established that cheese could be fired from a ship’s cannon and shred an opponent’s sails.

maximus otter

My goodness, that's jogged a memory of a comic strip where red and yellow cheese wheels were being fired from cannons at enemy ships. The context has been lost in the mists of time, I'm afraid, but interesting to find out it was based on fact.
 
The Mythbusters episode addressing the cheese cannonball story was Episode 128 ("Greased Lightning"), which originally aired in October 2009.

A block of cheese can be fired from a cannon with enough force to shred a ship's sail. Based on accounts of a 19th-century South American naval battle in which the Uruguayan commander was forced to use slabs of Dutch Edam instead of cannonballs when the ammunition ran out.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MythBusters_(2009_season)#Cheese_Cannon

The precise source of this story is difficult to pinpoint. Most citations of the story are cursory, and they vary in the few details they offer.

Here are a couple of such retellings to illustrate the ambiguities / conflicts in the various accounts:

The myth states that in 1847, Commodore Coe of the Uruguayan navy, short of ammunition, defeated the navy of Argentina by bombarding them with cheese cannon balls made of Edam.

https://housemouseoncheese.com/2010/10/16/discovery-channels-mythbusters-fire-the-cheese-cannon/

For a brief time in the 1860s, Brazil and Uruguay were in the midst of a war where much of the fighting was done between ships, because both countries have been revered throughout history for their naval might. During one such battle, a Uruguayan ship ran out of cannonballs (see "revered naval might"). However, instead of quickly shedding his uniform and diving into the ocean, the captain ordered his men to fire stale balls of cheese at the enemy, because, for some reason, they had more of those than ammunition. ...

One of the cheeses improbably shattered the main mast of the enemy ship, killing men with cheese shrapnel and shredding their sails. Wisely, the Brazilians retreated, presumably taking the long way back to port so the crew could rehearse their story about how their ship totally got attacked by a sea monster and certainly hadn't been crippled by volleys of petrified dairy.

https://web.archive.org/web/2012121...-fixes/4-battles-won-by-using-food-as-weapon/

The most consistent allusion in these disparate accounts is to Comodoro Jonas Halstead Coe - the American-born commander who supposedly ordered the use of stale Dutch cheese when his gunners ran out of cannonballs:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonas_Coe

The problem lies in the fact that Coe served in both the Argentine and Uruguayan navies at one time or another. Furthermore, there were multiple South American wars involving naval battles during the mid 19th century. Uruguay was sometimes opposed to Brazil and / or Argentina, but also sometimes allied with them.

The earliest reference to this incident I can find is a genealogical book:

Robert Coe, Puritan: His Ancestors and Descendants, 1340-1910, with Notices of Other Coe Families
by Joseph Gardner Bartlett
private circulation, 1911.

https://books.google.com/books?id=N...R juan "coe" cheese cannon OR cannons&f=false
 
That's jogged my memory further, it was a comic strip detailing bizarre true stories from history. Probably thrown out long ago, so I'm afraid I can't check what it said or what facts it might have contained.
 
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When workers demolished granite blocks near Zehden, a "black woman" jumped out of one of them. She said that if one of them had sex with her three times in an hour, she would be released from her curse. But none rose up to the challenge. #FolkloreSunday https://books.google.de/books?id=zm4AAAAAcAAJ&pg=PA45#v=onepage&q&f=false
 
Reading the statue ULs reminds me of the statue of General Redvers Buller that stands outside the local sixth form college in Exeter (much climbed!). Although the general was apparently from Tiverton, to the north of Exeter, it was the Exeter folk that erected a statue of him and his horse on the Tiverton road, but they deliberately made it so that horse and rider faced into Exeter, thus showing both their arses towards Tiverton in a ner-ner-ner-ner-ner fashion. Or so I have heard.

The council recently discussed moving the statue to a less prominent spot - partly because a student fell off the statue, hit his head and died, and partly because the whole thing smacks of colonialism - but I think the move was vetoed in the end. So we're still sticking it to Tivvy.
 
Last year I was on my way to Worcester for a weekend break. Some young people got on the train as we got near the city. An animated discussion broke out whether or not the drink Red Bull contains bull sperm. Being a gentleman, I don't deliberately try to listen to other people's conversations, but sometimes one can't just avoid them. From what I could work out, a young chap was adamant that he learnt this fact from the 'Web. One of his friends sagely point out 'you can't believe everything that you read on line'.

I have been assured that the 'bull sperm' claim is a hoax.
 
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