Urban legends are creepy, unsettling tales told late at night for nothing more than a knee-jerk sort of scare and a nervous laugh... right? Sure, some might have a cautionary moral attached to them, but they're often so implausible that there's no question as to what they are: a legend. No one actually believes them, or at least, they'll never admit that they'll be checking under the bed just to be sure.
Urban legends are creepy, unsettling tales told late at night for nothing more than a knee-jerk sort of scare and a nervous laugh... right? Sure, some might have a cautionary moral attached to them, but they're often so implausible that there's no question as to what they are: a legend. No one actually believes them, or at least, they'll never admit that they'll be checking under the bed just to be sure.
They're macabre, they're factually incorrect, and they spread faster than a rash through a dorm shower. We live in a world strange enough for most urban legends to seem completely believable, but even the most cursory research could disprove most of the nastier stories about unfortunate events. Unfortunately, many people still see email forwards, memes, and hasty Wikipedia edits as proof positive that many of these surreal and creepy stories are true. Here are a few unrealistic urban legends, modern and otherwise, that people still believe.
By /Updated: Feb. 17, 2021 5:15 pm EDT Welcome to the dark side. If you're into Halloween, or Samhain as the Celtics of Europe once called it, you …
Mankind doesn't really have a lot going for it as a species, but one thing that's incredible is our ability to tell stories. For as long as there's been campfires to tell tales around, we've been coming up with the most amazing and outlandish myths and legends to explain the world around us. And sometimes, the truth we're trying to explain is more horrifying and more heartbreaking than the stories we dream up.
Great cinema is like a magic trick: The show in front of you is so real, so convincing, that you never stop to think about what crazy stories must have happened on the other side of the camera. Because of this beautiful mystery, the history of cinema is littered with a wide array of wacky urban legends involving everything from magical curses to on-screen manslaughters to subliminal sex messages that were never there. Many of these crazy ideas have been repeated so often and are now so broadly accepted by the public, that people never stop to think about how silly they really are. Other film myths are so intensely "out there" that it's hard to imagine that anyone ever believed them (but they did).
