Growing up, I was always creeped out by urban legends. Reading about them kept me up at night.
Who hasn't been creeped by the story of the man in the backseat (which serves as the opening for the teen horror film Urban Legend) or the one about the babysitter and the man upstairs (which gave us the first 20 minutes of When a Stranger Calls)?
These stories tend to have horrifying, humorous, or cautionary elements—and there are many iterations of them told around the world. Ghosts and monsters feature too.
People shared some of their favorites with us after Redditor VeryDeep asked the online community:
"What's your all-time favorite urban legend?"
"This one is pretty local..."
"This one is pretty local to Loveland, OH, but I really like the Loveland Frog. Back in the 70s there were a few sightings of a weird "humanoid frog" that would scurry around on its hind legs. Eventually it was shot by police, who discovered that it was a large pet iguana with the tail cut off. Local newspapers played up the story big time."
Independent-Cicada
Creepy humanoid creature on the loose? Mothman would like a word!
"When I was in middle school..."
"The Jersey Devil. When I was in middle school my grade went on a trip to a camp in the Pine Barrens where the jersey devil presumably is. I cried when my parents said they didn't want me to go."
kiwipangolin
The Pine Barrens is a freaky place.
Don't believe me? Watch that one episode of The Sopranos.
"She's the mistress..."
"La Llorona. She's the mistress of a Spanish conquistador. When he left her to return to his wife, she went mad from grief and drowned the two children she had out of wedlock with him and killed herself."
"She arrived at the entrance to Heaven and God asked her what she did with her children. She lied and said she didn't know. So God doomed her to forever wander the Earth looking for their bodies."
RubyRogue13
This one is a classic, and there has yet to be a good movie made about her.
"He grew up in the Everglades..."
"My hometown has the Skunk Ape. A distant cousin to the Sasquatch. He grew up in the Everglades and had long matted, moss-covered fur. Stinks like a skunk. Has been seen crossing back roads in the middle of the night and disappearing into the darkness."
GRZMNKY
Not something I'd want to run into at night. I've seen enough horror films to know that the one rule is to keep driving.
"Rumors of a murderous faceless man..."
"Charlie No-Face."
"Rumors of a murderous faceless man roaming the streets at night were based on a real-life person who'd suffered an extreme accident that destroyed his face. He wasn't, as it turns out, a murderer; he walked at night because he wanted to get fresh air and be left alone."
ProfessionalTower-76
Well, that ended well. No reason to spread a rumor about the guy if all he wanted was to enjoy a walk by himself!
"Caring people..."
"I live in St. Petersburg, Florida and the urban legend here has to do with the Skyway Bridge. There have been about 200 suicides. People that cross the bridge claim to see a blonde woman standing in the middle of the road and even sitting in the backseats of their cars."
"Caring people that got out of their car to help the woman claim that she vanished into thin air. I have crossed the bridge a couple of times and have not seen any sort of thing. I guess she was one of the people that took their own lives by jumping off the 200-foot drop into the water or died when the bridge collapsed ages ago."
DitIsCool
So even more reason for me to avoid creepy bridges at night. Gotcha.
"Here in southern Wisconsin..."
"Here in southern Wisconsin, we have the Beast of Bray Road, a large canid/werewolf creature that's been sighted several times."
herculesmeowlligan
A really terrible movie was made about this one. The SyFy channel is great like that.
"Steve..."
"Steve from Blues Clues jumping off of a cliff because he kept seeing Blue everywhere."
[deleted]
I remember this one! Steve is alive and well, thank you very much.
"There was one in my hometown in Poland about Russian WWII soldiers supposedly buried somewhere in town in an unmarked grave. All the kids believed it. Who knows, maybe it was even true."
LongFeesh
Honestly, this one is not at all outside the realm of possibility.
"Sometimes it was a van..."
"Growing up in Chicago the urban legend of Homey the clown driving around in a white van and killing kids was told in hushed tones in the playground at recess. Sometimes it was a van full of clowns and someone's brother always had a run in with them and got away just in the nick of time."
Headedtothespace
A creepy murderous clown? No thanks. I've had enough of those after seeing It.
Let's face it: It's great to read and learn about most of these because it's thrilling to be creeped out. And chances are there are some excellent urban legends being told in your area. Perhaps you've heard them and if not, best get on it.
Have some legends of your own to share? Tell us more in the comments below!
Myths have been around for centuries. As soon as humans were able to tell stories, we have had mythology.
Now with technology advanced far beyond the writing on the cave wall, we can more easily spread around information as well as misinformation. Some of that information can even be harmful.
Misconceptions about mental health, pregnancy, or any number of things are reinforced by social media, movies, or even word of mouth. Sometimes that can really make someone angry if they are dealing with the consequences of that falsehood.
Redditor Indieriots asked:
"What common myth p*sses you off?"
These might make you just as upset.
Mislead by TV and movies.
"That you have to wait 24 hours to report a missing person. It is a myth perpetuated TV and movies for the sake of drama, but not true in real like at all."
- tschris
"In many cases police will give missing people some kind of 'waiting period' after having checked for possible, (obvious) dangers. In many cases, because a missing person happens quite often because people make spontaneous decisions."
"But if you're sure something is really wrong and have good reasoning, they will be searching tediously even after just an hour."
- deterministic_lynx
"Yup, especially with children, the elderly, and disabled folks, those first hours are crucial. If you haven't seen/heard from a loved one when you usually would, that alone is grounds for reporting. Some cops might not take it seriously, but it's critical that you push them to listen to you."
- hayleybeth7
"Something like 1500 people go missing every day in the US. But the reason that number is so high is that most missing persons cases should probably not have even been filed in the first place. Stuff like a teenager deciding to go to a party instead of coming home at night without telling their parents."
- caninehere
An old and incorrect phrase.
"'Lightning never strikes twice in the same place.'"
"In fact, it does - and frequently."
- Back2Bach
"Lightning rods would be incredibly useless otherwise."
- gigglefarting
Gum doesn't stick around that long.
"Gum does not stay in your stomach for 7 years. Sure, swallowing a lot of gum isn't great and can cause problems in your digestive system, but it only takes a day or two to pass."
- usually-suspect
"What's funny about that is when I was kid n heard it, I took it as a challenge to only sh*t pink blobs of gum seven years after. I was quite disappointed."
- maverickmain
"Same but with the 'a watermelon will grow in your stomach if you eat the seeds!' I thought I was a genius cause I'd never go hungry again with a watermelon forever growing in my guts! I ate so many seeds lmao."
- NefariousAquarius64
Breastfeeding doesn't replace contraception.
"You can't get pregnant if you're breastfeeding. It lowers your chances but not to zero."
- Damn_Canadian
"I, a mother of two children ages 7 and 8, 100% agree with you. Doesn't matter if your baby hasn't had anything but breastmilk. Doesn't matter if you haven't a normal cycle. All of those things they say. It doesn't matter. I promise you absolutely without a doubt CAN get pregnant while breastfeeding."
"Source: my dumba** with 2 kids 12 months apart."
- Signal_Skill9761
A misconception about mental health disorders.
"That bipolar means you are 'happy one minute and sad the next minute.' It's a disorder where you have episodes of depression and episodes of mania/hypomania. These episodes last weeks/months/years. There's nothing about emotional lability at all. That's an entirely different disorder."
- 292to137
"True that! Plus manic phases aren't always happy."
- Bebe_Bleau
"Hell yeah that's for sure. I've been going to my local DBSA support group weekly for years and it seems like it's not a happy thing like for most people. Hypomania can be, but mania doesn't seem to be."
- 292to137
"Corollary: Depression does not mean you are sad all the time or can't express happiness or joy. I can bawl my eyes out for 20 minutes for no reason, and still laugh at a dumb sitcom joke before crying again."
- Forceflow15
"In my experience, Depression is more about a great feeling of emptiness than a lot of sadness, crying etc."
- Vladimir_Putting
"That OCD is liking things to be extremely neat, tidy or organized."
- clumsyumbrella
"As someone with diagnosed OCD who lives in a house that is actually a disaster, yes lol."
- wickedflowers
"This! I didn't realize I had OCD because of this and because it often overlaps with other mental illnesses."
- CapriciousSalmon
Just trying to keep the kids busy.
"'You can tell a ladybug's age by counting it's spots.' Even as a kid this didn't make sense to me. Why tell your kid this? What's the point?"
- Lvcivs2311
"Because it made kids shut up and sit still long enough to count the spots of a loving moving ladybug. 5 min to a kid, blissful peace and quiet for the parents."
- girlwhoweighted
There's no way this is true.
"We only use 10% of our brain."
- WarriorOfTheWord
"Ah, yes. The logical thing to do when you try to survive is to evolve a bigger brain, just to not use it."
- YouTube-r
Hopefully this shed some light on these important (and trivial) myths that we've continued to pass down over the years.
Thank goodness we can google the real answers.
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People Explain Which 'Heroes' Are Even Worse Than Their Story's Villains
Stories in books, movies, and TV are usually framed so that the main character is seen as the hero, but sometimes these "heroes" are a bit less heroic than they might seem at first glance.
Whether they're just generally a jerk to other characters or their whole mission was really bad from the start, these characters are not the good guys they seem to be.
Reddit user ThePuzzler13 asked:
"What “hero" is more villainous than the actual villain?"
Aladdin
Aladdin.
Steals from honest merchants. Steals a magical artifact and uses it for entirely personal gain up until the very end. When the Sultan suggests rewriting laws so that they can marry, he doesn't even consider amending the law that has children getting their hands cut off that he experienced firsthand.
Ladybug
Ladybug from Miraculous, mostly every single person on that show gets akumatized as a result of Marinette being mean to them or her just doing something plain right dumb. But then she always saves the day as Ladybug and everything is all fine and dandy, like she didn't just cause all that stuff.
Troy Bolton
Troy Bolton in High School Musical. He gets everything handed to him, and whenever he has to give even the slightest in return, he squirms and squeals and breaks promises to people who are helping him. There's a Film Theory video about it.
God
Old Testament God is usually more capricious, bloodthirsty, warmongering than Satan.
Patch Adams
Patch Adams. I'm sorry, but the way that the fictional Patch Adams acted in that movie was not only unprofessional, but stupid, unfunny, illegal, and sometimes even dangerous. The "evil" school administration trying to stop him that the movie tries to paint as stuffy and uncaring ends up looking reasonable by comparison. No wonder the real Patch Adams hated how he was portrayed.
SpongeBob
SpongeBob SquarePants. Whenever something good happens to Squidward, he and Patrick always have to go and ruin it for him.
Jedi
Jedi are a group of religious zealot megalomaniacs.
If they had just let Anakin rescue his Mom from slavery. But no.
well Qui-Gon could have just bought the kid and the mother
But no pod is worth 2 slaves. To do what you propose one of the obscenely rich characters in the story with seemingly nothing to do all day but stare out windows would have had to go ALL the way back to purchase her. That's like...3 hours in hyperspace.. WHO HAS 3 HOURS TO WASTE ON THAT?!!?!
Goku
GiphyAnyone ever talked about Goku being inefficient as a hero, like reviving the most dangerous species in the known universe just to see hOw sTrOnG tHeY BeCoMe, although he himself doesn't have a guaranteed way of winning
Punisher
I always found the Daredevil-Punisher dynamic odd. Especially the Netflix version.
The Punisher kills people who hurt others. He's usually quick about it though, allowing them a mostly painless death. But still, murderer. Villain.
Meanwhile Matt freaking Murdock breaks peoples' spines, paralyzing them and doesn't give a flying crap. He won't kill anyone, but he has no problem making sure they suffer for the rest of their life. He's kind of terrifying for a hero.
Married King
The married king in the original sleeping beauty in case you didn't know it goes a little like this.
So basic first bit she gets primed by a spinning wheel and falls asleep but she isn't rescued by a prince she gets "rescued" by a married king. He comes in sees her and does unspeakable things to her and leaves. 9 months later she awakes and gives birth to twins. She find her way to a palace which just happens to be the same king. The king sees her and falls in love with her.
The Queen sees this and is jealous of sleeping beauty so she plots to kill her and give her twins to the cook so she can cook them up and serve them to the king. The plans fall through the kids are saved by the cook and the queen is killed and sleeping beauty and the king are married, The End.
Jack
And then Jack chopped down what was the world's last beanstalk, adding murder and ecological terrorism to the theft, enticement, and trespass charges already mentioned, and all the giant's children didn't have a daddy anymore. But he got away with it and lived happily ever after, without so much as a guilty twinge about what he had done...which proves that you can be excused for just about anything if you are a hero, because no one asks inconvenient questions.
Hogfather, Sir Terry Pratchett
This is subverted by Fables too, because Jack is such an unrepentant a-hole who's backstory is full of him just doing horrible things for the sake of women, money and power.
Nick Jr.
Honestly any any protagonist from a Nick Jr cartoon. They always treat the "antagonist" like crap for doing only mildly bad things.
The Power Puff Girls were notorious for this.
Mojo Jojo would, like, be at the grocery store picking up juice and stuff and they'd fly in and kick his butt for no reason
Claire
Claire from Jurassic World. Her negligence and poor decision making is directly responsible for the injuries and deaths of many visitors and employees of the park.
Not just that, her characters response to events are supposed to be herioc but in reality she leaves the park managerless to go find her nephews that she couldn't be asked to look after earlier and finally hooks up with the park ranger in the rescue centre despite being the most seniour park manager left, who should be in charge of head counts and organising communication with the mainland extraction teams.
Then in the next film she dosent get punished and decides to push people to risk more human lives to save the assests that she never truly cared about in the first film.
Wedding Crashers
Wedding Crashers' Jeremy and John -- they lie their way into a family's wedding and eventually their home. Then John starts to peel a woman away from her fiance, even going so far as to poison him with Visine.
As a kid I thought he was the hero but now I have realised how he was awful to Tom. Tom just wanted to get laid in one episode but Jerry just kept on messing up his chances.
Odysseus
Odysseus in the Odyssey.
While the foreigners are portrayed as the bad guys, he goes around pillaging everyone and expecting tons of lavish gifts.
For us it looks pretty messed up, but for ancient Greeks, it's pretty on brand with their idea of heroism.
The Ruin
SPOILER: THE RUIN
The final girl for the The Ruin. You were supposed to root for the main characters to escape the vine infested pyramid surrounded by locals who have quarantined them because the vines are sentient, flesheating, and world-endingly dangerous. Something that the "protagonists" learn less than halfway through the film.
So essentially they know that they're going to die either way, but they don't care because forget the entire rest of KINGDOM ANIMALIA I'M A TOURIST AND I WANNA GO BACK TO MY HOTEL TO DIE.
I literally spent the last half of the movie rooting for the locals AND the vines because these a-holes were so hellbent on being "patient zero" of the apocalypse plant disease.
Bugs Bunny
Bugs Bunny, I love the show, but that rabbit screws with people and other characters just for fun. Plus, if you're going to take your friend to the beach, get your directions right so you don't end up in the Himalayas, feeding him to an abominable snowman.
Neo
Neo, and most of the redpill hackers, are more evil than the machines in the Matrix.
The machines were built by humans. When the AI began to get too smart and some machines went haywire, what was humanity's response? Eradicate them. Total AI genocide. Was it evil for the machines to value and protect their own lives?
And after the war was won, after the machines had dominated mankind and had us on the edge of extinction, did they finish us? No. They preserved humanity. I know, the movie makes it seem like they need us, but some digging into the lore of the Matrix-verse shows that's not true. Even the Architect tells Neo, "There are levels of existence we are prepared to accept."
Knowing the humans would always try to eradicate machines, the machines devised the best way they could think to preserve us - in a prison that we could never see. They built us a cage infinitely more humane than the ones we keep animals in on Earth. The first Matrix was even designed as a paradise, to give us all we could ever want, and the only reason it didn't stay that way was because the human mind wouldn't accept that reality.
The machines don't kill a human unless they have to for self-defense. Humans who reject the Matrix are a threat to the machines, but they DON'T EVEN KILL THOSE until they become a direct threat. The Oracle herself shelters many children who show signs of rejecting the Matrix. She studies them, their minds, why they make the choices they do, so that the machines can continue to make better Matrices. Indeed, the machines do not view rejection as a fault of humans, they view it as a fault in the Matrix.
Meanwhile, redpill hackers crash into the Matrix on a regular basis and kill lots of innocent people. Think of all the security guards and cops who are killed by the hackers - innocent humans living their blissfully ignorant virtual lives. Sure, Agents could infiltrate those people, and the hackers are doing what they do for the greater good of humanity (or so they think,) but they still kill far more innocents than the machines ever do.
Mario
GiphyThat goomba-murdering, mushroom-addicted, dinosaur head-bashing psychopath MARIO. Just look at what he did to the homes of the Koopalings in SMW!
Perspective is everything when it comes to storytelling.
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All rumors and grand tales spark from some form of truth, at least that is what we're led to believe, and that is the most frightening idea of all. Scary rumors, such as urban legends seep into our minds and lay dormant until the noise in the dark or that shadow lurking behind us is too close. Who hasn't found themselves playing certain moments just a little safer when you think you can avoid conjuring the dark? That's why I never played 'Bloody Mary'... just in case. Y'all should follow suit.
Redditor u/knockerball wanted everyone to huddle up and share some scary tales by asking.... What is the creepiest or scariest folklore story you have heard and what from culture/region did it originate?
Home sweet home. Home... that word has so many meanings big and small. The places we hail from and the people we share that world with are attached to significant moments of life. And the town you grew up in holds a history we each play a character in the story of. Whether it's a story of something silly and everyday or a story of infamy that is the centerpiece of the next Oscar winning documentary; we should all know and embrace our 'Hometown Glory.'
Redditor /xPoisonGirlx wanted some people of the population to let loose some of some secrets asking... What is your hometown infamously known for?