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An urban legend, myth, or tale is a modern genre of folklore. It often consists of fictional stories associated with the macabre , superstitions , ghosts , demons , cryptids , extraterrestrials , creepypasta , and other fear generating narrative elements.
Nov 17, 2022 · Learn about the scary stories that have been told and retold for decades, from haunted houses to serial killers. Discover how urban legends have influenced movies, TV shows, games, and fiction tropes.
- Rats in The Toilet Bowl
- Cropsey
- The Leaping Lawyer
- The Body Under The Bed
- The Maine Hermit
- Candyman
- The Fake Cop Trick
- The Legend of The Bunny Man
- The Legend of polybius
- Charlie No-Face
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You stagger into the bathroom at 3 a.m. to relieve yourself. Groggy with sleep, you lift the lid and position yourself over the toilet. You hear splashing. Turning on the light, you see a rat looking back at you from the bowl. You’re never the same again. Urban legends about animals in sewers have been a staple of scary stories, particularly the on...
For years, kids living in and around Staten Island raised goosebumps by relatingthe tale of “Cropsey,” a boogeyman who lived in the woods and made a nocturnal habit of disemboweling children. Parents no doubt eased their kids’ fears by telling them no such monster existed. But he did. In 1987, Andre Rand was put on trialand convicted for a child ab...
Sooner or later, Toronto residents hear the tale of a lawyer who had a peculiar fondness for running full-bore into his office windows to demonstrate how strong they were. This practice caught up with him eventually, as he crashed into a window and went sailing to his death. This hobby was actually practiced by Garry Hoy, a senior partner in an are...
Vacationing couples. Newlyweds. Disneyland guests. All have been the subject of an urban legend involving hotel occupants who fall blissfully to sleep, only to wake up to an awful stench coming from either under the bed or inside the mattress. Closer inspection reveals that a dead body has been stashed away. Presumably, not anyone who has died of n...
For decades, people who vacationed in central Maine’s North Pond area were puzzled by items that would go missing. Batteries and food from cabins, flashlights from camping tents. Rumors spread that a permanent fixture of the area would forage for sustenance and supplies. They were right. For 27 years, Christopher Knight lived alonein the woods, kee...
Released in 1992 (and reimagined in 2021), Candyman—based on a short story by Clive Barker—remains a potent horror tale of the revenge undertaken by a Black artist (Tony Todd) murdered in the 1890s for having a relationship with a white woman. While it’s not likely you’ll be able to invoke him by saying his name several times in a mirror, the pants...
You may have had an overly concerned parent or friend warn you of people impersonating police officers, using that veneer of authority to attack victims who have let their guard down. While there aren’t many who are in full patrol uniform or traveling in marked vehicles, there have been many documented cases of assailants posing as law enforcement....
If you lived in or around Virginia in the 1970s, you were probably exposed to the story of the Bunny Man. In the tale, an escaped mental patient takes to gutting bunnies and hanging them from a bridge underpass. Later, the man is said to have graduated to gutting and hanging teens in a similar manner. Locals were cautioned to never be caught near t...
Vintage video gamers have long traded stories about a coin-operated arcade game circa early 1980s Portland that had strange effects on its players. The game, titled Polybius, was allegedto have prompted feelings of disorientation, amnesia, game addiction, and even suicide. The machine’s cabinet was said to be painted entirely black, and it was rumo...
Imagine finding yourself outside and alone in the dark on a residential street. You hear footsteps approaching. Suddenly, a man with a misshapen face appears. You run, terrified beyond words. You spread the story of the man with no face throughout Pennsylvania. “Charlie No-Face” (also called the Green Man) was actually a man named Ray Robinson, and...
Do you believe in rats in the toilet bowl, Cropsey, or the Maine Hermit? These and other terrifying tales are based on real events that happened to people. Learn the facts behind these urban legends and how they became popular.
- A Haunted Doll. If you watch enough horror movies, you would have come across a couple of spooky dolls like Chucky or Annabelle. The creepy legend of a beloved toy becoming possessed is enough to give you nightmares.
- A Real Corpse as a Halloween Decoration. A very dark urban legend, used repeatedly as the plot for murder mysteries in film and television, is the dead body in a Halloween display that ends up being a genuine corpse.
- Premature Burial. You may have heard of a few cases where people, being mistaken for dead, were accidentally buried alive. Stories of supposed corpses heard screaming from underground and excavations that revealed scratch marks on the inside of coffins had haunted us for centuries.
- Real-Life Beauty and the Beast. What Inspired ‘Beauty & the Beast’ Was Too Grim For Disney. Many tales describe mythical hybrids from centaurs to mermaids.
The definitive Internet reference source for researching urban legends, folklore, myths, rumors, and misinformation.
Urban legends (sometimes modern legend, urban myth, or simply legend) is a genre of folklore concerning stories about an unusual (usually scary) or humorous event that many people believe to be true but largely are not.
Sep 28, 2020 · With that in mind, we've rounded up some of the country's most curious myths that can be pinned down to factual events—from tales of the bogeymen and subterranean cities to the story of the word the dictionary got wrong.
