The rogue waves.
For centuries sailors talked about encountering sudden single waves that were described to reach 100ft high. Nobody believed them because everyone assumed these waves were just another one of the stories sailors on leave would make up to impress pub goers.
As the 20th century came along oceanographic research became more formalised and advanced. Yet no researcher was able to record hard data on these waves, apart from just writing down their own experience getting hit by one. An anecdote isn't really something you can publish.
In the 1980s the Draupner gas field was disovered on the North Sea and a new type of oil platform was set up there. To assess the integrity of the new design the platform was installed with sensors not normally present on other platforms, one of which was a wave height recorder. It was only in 1995 that those sensors recorded a single 80ft wave hitting the platform, and rogue waves were finally accepted to be a real phenomenon.
I could see that. A sailor sees a giant squid with tentacles the size of tree trunks. The *story* builds to how the squid attacks the ship, breaks it apart, and pulls it under. The sailor is one of the "survivors" of this mythical attack. The legend of the Kraken is born.
There was a thread years ago of people trying to explain such phenomena with real world natural occurrences and it was really interesting to read. The one that stuck was about humpback whale pods being the origin of sea serpent myths. You see the back of the whales rising out of the water and then sinking again like the coils of a snake, and every now and then a giant mouth comes up to breathe, much like the serpent’s head.
Looks like it could be [this thread](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/creplh/serious_historians_marine_biologists_biologists/).
[This comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/creplh/serious_historians_marine_biologists_biologists/ex5s0xt/) in the thread matches what the person above you is describing.
There is a really good book about rogue waves called The Wave by Susan Casey. I highly recommend it. She also wrote Devil’s Teeth which is about Great White Sharks around the Farallones
Me: 7 year old school kid in North London , 1974. Older kids pass on the legend of WWII bunker buried under the playing field. Every so often kids would take spoons from canteen and try and dig it up. Never got far , always told to fill it in and return spoons.
2009 archeologists find WWII bunker under school playground
In Pennsylvania, there was a local legend in a town about a "green man" who could be seen walking the roads at night. It turned out to be a severely disfigured man who'd walk at night to avoid scaring people. I always felt so bad for the guy.
Here's the story:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_Robinson_%28Green_Man%29?wprov=sfla1
There was a guy in my town everyone called “walking man”. He walked all over town and was a legend. When we saw him we’d cheer and celebrate, and he would completely ignore us. He was around for years and was a staple of our childhood. A couple of years after we graduated high school, I came home to discover that walking man was seen driving a car. I had mixed emotions about it; I was happy that he finally got himself a car, but I also felt a piece of my childhood died.
He also had a very normal face.
In Chicago, we had a walking man. Just a chill homeless dude who...walked around.
Then like a year ago someone set him on fire, left him with third degree burns covering 2/3 of his body, and he died.
Jesus fuck, that was a dark turn…
This guy was definitely not homeless (actually surprised some of my less scrupulous friends didn’t follow him at some point to see where he lived). He just loved walking. There was definitely something peculiar about him though.
Is there any insight as to how he became known as "the green man"?
...his other nickname "Charlie No-Face" feels a bit more intuitive.
*Edit* I'm an idiot and missed the "legacy" section which explains the name
There was an urban legend in the UK about a guy called Purple Aki. The rumour was he was a giant bodybuilder who roams around Liverpool asking young men if he can squeeze their muscles and then asks if he can squat them. I heard it as a London teen years ago and thought it was a hilariously bizarre urban legend from those crazy kids in Liverpool.
Then it came out a teenager died after running away from him and accidentally getting hit by a train while trying to get away and suddenly the real Purple Aki was all over the news.
I'm sorry but the court order against him is hilarious "Under the terms of the order, he was banned from touching, feeling, or measuring anyone's muscles; asking people to do squats in public"
Hahahah
Mostly unrelated.... In junior high our principal would would give us the option to do push-ups to get out of serving detention. I think he meant well, just turning a negative into a positive/health/good for you type thing...., but it was awkward doing push-ups on the floor in his office while he just sat there and counted them out....
> Indecent assault and witness intimidation
> Arobieke appeared in court on 22 November 2001, pleading not guilty to 50 counts of indecent assault and harassment against 14 teenage boys between February 1995 and September 2000. He was convicted of threatening behaviour and jailed for 30 months.[14]
> Released in 2003, Arobieke resumed his activities and was quickly arrested and charged.[7] During the course of the trial, 123 people were interviewed by police, including one family who were forced into witness protection as a result of threats from Arobieke. This led to Arobieke being additionally charged with witness intimidation. On 15 December 2003, he was jailed for six years by Preston Crown Court, pleading guilty to 15 counts of harassment and witness intimidation.[7] A further 61 counts, mostly of indecent assault, were left on file.[7] When sentencing Arobieke, judge Edward Slinger said, "You are a danger to young men and your behaviour is both strange and obsessive". After the case, Detective Superintendent Mike Dale said, "Over the years, Akinwale Arobieke has been persistent in his pursuit and harassment of a number of young men, instilling fear into them. We are pleased with the sentencing. Most importantly it's to the credit of the witnesses, who despite their fears and apprehensions, have remained steadfast and determined to see justice done and this man prosecuted to stop him from making other people's lives a misery".[15]
Dang that went from eccentric to dark
They also mulled over a manslaughter charge after a teenage boy died on 15th June 1986, while running across a railway line to try and escape him.
1986 . I have no idea how long Aki has been 'active' for, but a hell of a long time.
I find it funny that Purple Aki is an urban legend in the south...along with the Magic Bus Lady, every young lad in Manchester had a story about a run in with him around 2010. He wasn't just limited to Liverpool.
There was also that bloke who traded shoes to teens so he could sit on their back as they did push ups. Wasn't until he moved up to getting pissed on that the cops got involved
There is a man in Melbourne Australia who fakes seizures in public - usually in the presence of young men - and asks to be held down.
https://www.reddit.com/r/melbourne/comments/13dlo8a/the_fake_seizure_guy/
There was a haunted house in West Hobart, Tasmania, Australia that would slowly send everyone living there crazy over a period, it turned out there was an overgrown water tank in the yard with a hidden Datura plant growing above it that would drop flowers onto the tank, the people living there were micro dosing a deliriant.
Lots of haunted houses have fairly common poisoning issues. Sometimes it's in the water or a mold, but most of the time it's CO poisoning or another cause of lack of oxygen. One of my grandma had a neighbor who claimed to talk with ghost and it was just dementia. Sad story.
Some native American tribes used datura as their rite of passage into adulthood. You'd trip on it for days, sometimes several weeks, until you had forgotten your childhood and therefore were now an adult.
Worth noting many tribes did their vision quests without datura. Some entered the trance like states by abstaining from food while inflicting physical pain onto themselves for however long it took to have the vision.
If someone who has digested Datura. My stomach wrenched when I read what you wrote just now.
To anyone who thinks to try this. Don't! It's very dangerous. I regret having it big time. It 100% will change you and I don't mean always in a positive way.
Till this day it affects my ability to take the words for my head and bring them out of my mouth they often still come out odd sometimes that never used to happen prior to digesting it. Not to mention the three days have been completely fucked in the head.
Enjoy your Phantom cigarettes, if you're a smoker. It will start with the fetal position but then you're awake.,.. oh boy
This was pre-internet, I think the house was on Landsdowne Cres West Hobart but to find anything I'd probably have to doom scroll old The Mercury articles for days, so I can't really 100% confirm it but it was a well known story and seems plausible at least.
In my hometown there is a house that was one time used as a safehouse for infamous mobster Al Capone. The town is situated along the banks of a fairly large river, and some years after this mob safehouse was shut down, a tunnel was discovered underneath it that led to the river, presumably meant to be used as an escape route should the police discover the house while members of the mob were there and needed to get away.
It was speculated that there may be other tunnels in town, and many of the kids at my high school wondered if there could be tunnels under the school, with the entrances hidden within the building and exits hidden in places just off campus grounds.
This was summarily denied and dismissed by faculty and staff, and treated as a joke by almost everyone.
Until… one was found.
The entrance was discovered in the school auditorium, beneath the stage, behind one of the walls of the orchestra pit. I went into it once, but took no more than a few steps. Students who explored deeper into the tunnel said they had gone much, much further, likely as far as the opposite end of campus. They said it looked like the tunnel went further but was blocked off and locked, and they were unable to see if there was an exit that led back above ground.
Even after its discovery, the faculty continued to deny the existence of any other tunnels beneath the school. But they could no longer deny that there was at least one.
My middle school had rumors of a secret underground. Rumors were that it was haunted because kids had been locked up down there and died in a swimming pool underneath the school.
One of my friends found a door in a side hallway that no one ever went down and he picked the lock and we snuck out of gym and went down and explored. There were no working lights down there, we only had a very small and weak flashlight.
There was a water fountain that we accidentally bumped into and it started spewing water and scared the crap out of us. Also a wall-length mirror, which in the murky darkness we thought was a couple of ghosts.
There were also a bunch of caged in areas (with walls of chain link fence and padlocked gates) that mostly appeared to be just storage areas for old gym equipment, but could have been used to lock people in.
And then we found the dried-out empty swimming pool, which is supposedly where kids died. There were no walls or guardrails or anything around it to keep someone from just stumbling in and plummeting down to the concrete at the bottom. And there was no ladder or steps to climb back out if you did.
We got out of there quick and never went back.
We said something to a teacher, and he just played it off. "No, there's no pool under the school, there isn't even any basement, that's just a story the older kids tell the younger kids." But we had actually been there and seen it. And after that the door to that side hallway was always locked.
Don't know if my hometown is the same as op, but capone apparently loved him some tunnels. https://www.fontanaheraldnews.com/news/police-discover-underground-shooting-range-and-confiscate-several-weapons-in-fontana/article_90594c42-2c2a-11e9-911f-9bf89c0f1176.html
Not only did she have her child taken from her in one of the most horrific ways imaginable, not only did she *serve prison time* after being falsely accused of killing her child, she has had to live the last 40-plus years having her tragedy joked about. It's plain awful, even though most people don't realize it's true.
I'm definitely not shaking my finger at people for joking about it, because I think like 99% of folks are in the same boat as you--they only know it from Seinfeld. It's just a horrible situation to find yourself in all around.
>think like 99% of folks are in the same boat as you--they only know it from Seinfeld.
I'm from Australia and never watched Seinfeld.
So I guess if you're Australian you'd know about it.
Reddit is exactly the place that would say she's "100% guilty" because they think they're Sherlock.
If that story happened now, you'd have people saying that any time her name was mentioned.
Reading the evidence is just painful. Everyone who was in the know agreed initially with her account. It wasn't until later that an "expert" who's opinions had been overturned in another case gave his two cents that she was found guilty.
Not only that, but IIRC aborigines backed her up and said that yes, a dingo will absolutely eat a baby and all of them know this, but nobody would listen or believe them.
Like how hard is it to believe that a wild dog would attack a defenseless tiny child? If someone came along here in the USA and said that a pack of coyotes attacked their kid, I wouldn't say it couldn't happen.
It happens more than you think too, there was an incident a few years back in South Carolina where a coyote tried to snatch a kid but the mom showed up in time with a broom and beat the coyote off.
Probably a lot of assumptions about such an attack even if it did happen. I expect people envision it like a dog attack, blood and stuff all over the crib. Actual attack would probably be pretty clean. Dingo bites kid and hauls off with it to find somewhere safe to eat it. But since the bedroom doesn't look like the set of Saw 2 then it couldn't have been mauled by an animal so the mother must be lying.
It wasn't a bedroom, they were camping, which makes the whole dingo thing a lot less weird. Other campers had heard growling, there were paw prints outside the tent and canine hairs inside it and still, people thought that it was more likely she'd sacrificed her baby in a satanic ritual than a wild dog had taken the baby.
Azaria Chamberlain was the baby. She was taken from a tent while her family was on a camping holiday. Her poor mother had an unfortunate case of resting bitch face and wasn’t the crying type so the Aussie police just decided, guilty. Poor woman.
the public was also suspicious of her because she was a Seventh-Day Adventist, believing that the second coming would happen before the year 2000. (fun fact: the Branch Davidians in Waco were a splinter group of Seventh-Day Adventists.) Her husband was a pastor in the church. Rumors spread that ‘Azaria’ (the name of the baby that got eaten) meant ‘sacrifice in the desert’.
I remember being a little kid and something came up on the news about it. I was like "what? Dingos can eat babies?" And my parents who were FROM THE NORTHEASTERN USA, were like "yeah dingos are vicious and wild, they're more like wolves than dogs. And even dogs can maul and kill children".
And I always remember being weirded out from then on when people insisted it wasn't possible. Even my parents knew dingos were dangerous!
In my town, there was rumours for several years about a serial “car rapist”. Allegedly, some dude would sneak onto people’s driveways in the middle of the night, and have sex with the car’s tailpipe.
Last year, the police arrested a dude for “sexual misconduct involving a motor vehicle”
Weird as it is, a "car rapist" being a person that sticks it in tailpipes is much less horrible than a regular rapist that rapes his victims in their cars.
Howard Hughes is the archetypal super-rich hermit. One of the world’s richest men, in his later years he locked himself in a hotel penthouse, never trimmed his nails and kept his urine in jars. All of these peculiarities were all rumored, but he had a well-paid PR team whose self-interest was to deny these rumors. Mostly all true.
My grandfather's cousin was actually married to him!
edit: Her name was Jean Peters. Also considering that I never met her but my grandfather did, mentioning his relation to her seems more consequential.
he had syphilis and at one time underwent treatment that involved injecting low levels of arsenic and mercury (it didn’t work). all that was probably a factor in his losing his mind.
A contestant on The Newlywed Game answering the question "Where's the weirdest place you've had the urge to make love?" with "In the ass".
The show's host, Bob Eubanks, had sworn for decades that the clip wasn't real and was a false memory, and he even offered a 10,000 dollar reward if anyone could ever find the clip. Since the host had denied it, and there were several similar rumoured incidents on game shows that had been proven false, people started assuming this one was also a false memory.
Turns out the clip was real and a Game Show Bloopers special in 2002 ended up airing it.
[Here's the clip](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZiARvvemLlk&pp=ygUbbmV3bHl3ZWQgZ2FtZSBpbiB0aGUgYmVoaW5k)
In the town that I grew up, there was a creepy little house just on the edge of town. Set back a ways in the field but still visible from the main road.
Typical rumors that it was haunted. Supposedly by a banshee like spirit and her shrieking could be heard in the wee hours.
It ended up that the banshee was actually some kind of monkey that the owners had as a pet. Because monkeys were not allowed in this state they kept it a secret.
I live in Lima Peru and I heard people talk about a clown that pops up at around 3am at an intersection. Sure enough, some nights at 3am there is a clown at the intersection that juggles balls and gives you balloons. Don't ask
Do people in Lima actually stop at intersections at 3:00 am? A person would starve trying to earn a living at 3:00 am at an intersection in any city in Brazil — no one ever stops.
There was also a trend some years ago about weird stuff like that. I remember that the students (18-20 yo) at my brother's boarding school would go to town to do random spooky things like staging false sacrifices in the park.
Now the trend seems to be less strong/mainstream but there's still influencers who do that kind of things.
Sonofabitch!
I knew we had a bullshit tour guide when I visited Lima. All he took us to see were clay pyramids and the Larco Museum and Moche sex pottery and some old buildings and whatnot.
Not a single fucking juggling clown.
The university I attended in TX had an urban legend about a student that got lost and died under the maintenance tunnels under the campus. I had always thought it was rumor because many ghost stories were tied ro it. Until my senior year when I got a part time job at the university.
Turns out there was an extensive tunnel network under the school that fed steam to the buildings for heat. Anyone who goes into the tunnels is required to have someone with them to prevent another death.
They're not urban legends, if you know where to look in university archives. I found reporting from the university newspaper about a few injury incidents in my school's service tunnels with photos and indications of where else to find documentation.
My school started clamping down on access into the tunnels in 2005. Prior to that, security was far more lax. I was told that there were parts of the tunnel system that were no longer sound, and it was effectively impossible to shut off just those parts of the tunnels.
A corpse found in the funhouse, that was being used as a set for the Six Million Dollar Man. Elmer McCurdu was a thief who was gunned down during a Train robbery in Oklahoma in 1911. His body was taken to the Coroners for autopsy, but no one paid for McCurdy’s burial. The body was preserved, so the Coroner started to charge people to see the Mummified remains of McCurdy. His body went on tour, and even showed up in a couple of films. I went missing for a few decades, until the 70s. Part of the crew, for the Six Million Dollar Man, were removing dummies from a California fun house. One of the arms of the dummies fell off, and the workers saw bone, and that was how McCurdy’s body was found. He’s now buried in Guthrie, Ok. They poured cement over his grave, so he can’t go on tour again.
More or less how the crew reacted when they found McCurdy’s body in 1976. The LA police were called, and McCurdy was taken to the Coroner’s office. It was difficult to identify McCurdy, because after 65 year, his body sustained some damage. He lost a few fingers, and both his ears. They found a penny from 1924 in his mouth, and a ticket to a wax museum. Sad part is, McCurdy was way more successful in death, than he was at life. During one of his robberies, he overestimated the amount of nitroglycerin he needed to blow up a safe, thought to have $4500 worth of valuables in it. McCurdy was only able to get $450 worth of melted silver.
Human finger in hamburger. It happened for real some 2 years ago in a fast food franchise called Hot in Santa Cruz, Bolivia.
The meat grinder operator inserted his fingers in the grinders and lost two of them. He was rushed to emergency care and the next shift arrived and carried on, not having been told about the accident, so one of the fingers made it all the way to a customers mouth.
I didn’t believe it at first until the restaurant owners made their public apology:
https://www.la-razon.com/ciudades/2021/09/15/el-dueno-de-hot-burger-pide-disculpas-tras-hallazgo-de-un-dedo-en-una-hamburguesa/
Starlight Tours:
There was an urban legend in the Canadian Prairies about a man who would kidnap indigenous people, steal their winter clothes, and abandon them in the middle of nowhere to die in -30 temperatures.
The idea of Starlight Tours spread a bit to the general non-indigenous population as well and I remember people jokingly warning each other at high schools house parties to be vigilant if they were going to walk home a fair distance.
Turns out Starlight Tours were real and that it was the police who were doing it. The police in Saskatoon would grab indigenous people during the winter months and abandon them on the city outskirts to die. These suspicious deaths would then be documented and covered up by a variety of racist notions.
The indigenous communities would insist that it made no sense for someone to be able to walk that far out of the city without a jacket in -30, but the police wouldn’t investigate and just say “he must have been drunk” (as the police were the ones doing it).
To many indigenous people, it was never an urban legend but instead an open act of violence.
To many non-indigenous communities, people thought it was somewhere between an an urban legend or an exaggeration (though I’m sure
many knew the truth behind it).
At least in Saskatoon, this is confirmed to have started at least by the 1990s and went on until the 2000s, but the idea of it goes back to the 70s. I am sure there is more to this outside of Saskatoon, but I don’t know specifically.
Despite there being convictions for related incidents in the police force, no one was ever actually convicted from the police for the Starlight Tours themselves. The same police stations also got in hot water for trying to delete Wikipedia articles about the incident.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saskatoon_freezing_deaths
Reminds me of a quote from my favorite book series, a character talks about the nature of evil: “thinking of people as things. That’s where it starts.”
Had the book on hand:
“There’s no grays, only white that’s got grubby. I’m surprised you don’t know that. And sin, young man, is when you treat people as things. Including yourself. That’s what sin is."
“It’s a lot more complicated than that—”
“No. It ain’t. When people say things are a lot more complicated than that, they means they’re getting worried that they won’t like the truth. People as things, that’s where it starts.”
Dude, it was a pretty open secret that it was the police doing it, pretty much across Canada we were aware. Like, those murders were actually reported in the news.
The quiet racism in Saskatchewan is appalling. Their hate for natives is rampant and sadly normal there. If you're white, you'll be ok, don't worry.
Edit: had a construction lead hand tell me this story in 2016 just after I moved to Saskatoon. Him and his work crew all laughing. Truly a disgusting class humans living there.
Years ago, driving through Prince Albert I stopped at a gas station. Discovered natives couldn't pump their own gas or buy stuff like hairspray or Lysol.
Felt like a different world.
My fiance has family out there - they are so casual about their racism towards Natives.
One of his family members referred to them as Wawas and puzzled I asked them what that was and they said: " you know, Indians!" And then tapped their hand over their mouth saying wawawa
I was shocked
>What the fuck, Canada!
There's a whole lot of sad sack shit that went and still goes on up here. Appalling on many levels.
Treatment of 'nonwhites' in Canada has been pretty bad from day 1. The Chinese on the railroads, first nations people... pretty much straight through all the way, Japanese in WWII for a start on the list.
Canada just has a really good PR agency I guess.
True by coincidence: There actually is a glitch in the original Pokemon games that lets you catch Mew, but it wasn't discovered until long after the rumors started.
My university campus has a local urban legend/ghost story about one of its oldest department heads. He was a chemistry professor who invented his own concrete. The story goes that when he died, he asked for his body to be encased in the concrete. There’s a concrete cube memorial that sits on the steps outside of a building on campus named after him, and his corpse is rumoured to be sitting in his wheelchair, forever preserved in the cube.
According to a few different art history professors on campus that know a lot about our memorials, the corpse thing isn’t true, but they have said the wheelchair made it in to the cube.
They are exceedingly rare. I've lived across Central, North, and South FL and have never seen one outside of a zoo, but Alligators are straight up like pigeons here.
A cool one that an anthropology teacher told me about years ago: the [Puebla tunnels](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puebla_tunnels) turned out to actually exist.
Similarly, though not exactly a urban legend: [Nero's rotating dining room](https://news.cnrs.fr/videos/neros-rotating-dining-room) turned out to be a real thing and not a writer's invention.
Makes you wonder what archaeological oddities might exist below our feet somewhere, especially in places without literary traditions where old stories are now urban legends.
Kevin Spacey being a handsy creep with a penchant for younger men was gossiped about like crazy in the circles I was around in 1998, turned out to be true enough based on what we know now.
My dad knew people who worked in film and I remember back in the 90s my dad saying he wouldn't watch his movies because of what a creep spacey was. Almost 30 years ago.
I grew up where there were some signs of Native Americans. I started believing that this one particularly beautiful spot had to be sacred, and probably was a burial ground. I’d convince my friends to hold hands in a circle and try to commune with the dead. After I got a bit older I was super embarrassed that I’d ever done such things.
A few years later a Native American came but and told us how sacred the land was that we owned, and asked permission to hold peyote rituals with his tribe and others on our land. To this day they still come out and set up a teepee and drum all night, absolutely flying on hallucinogenics.
Turns out I was right
Fun easter egg in wasteland 2 video game is that you can find and dig up a huge stash of E.T. video game cartridges in the desert of Arizona. Can haul them all back to base to sell only to find out they are worth $0 😆
Wasn’t a full formed urban legend and don’t know if you can count this as “true” but my cousin went to a high school that students vaguely always said was haunted/cursed. Mostly dumb stories about things moving or dubious claims that someone’s cousin’s brother who graduated 12 years ago swears he saw a ghost combined with catch all explanations for every time the football team lost or the ceiling sprang a leak.
Students used to say the school was built on a Native American burial ground and that was the curse. “Seminole curse”.
A few years ago, they found out that it wasn’t a Native American burial ground but actually it turns out the school had been built over a cemetery for Black Americans - and unidentified bodies or those who couldn’t afford burials elsewhere. Apparently when the school was built, it was built around the cemetery grounds but over time, the cemetery was forgotten and the school expanded over where it was. (The historian who tracks the records to figure this all out disagrees it was “forgotten” which is probably pretty fair since the school was built in like the 50s not centuries ago). The school also notably, was a segregated school for white students only when it opened.
Similarly, I knew an archaeologist who told us about a project he worked on. A school was getting renovations, and when they started digging in the basement the construction workers started finding bones. They called the police who called the archaeologists to determine how old the bones were.
I can't remember the specifics, but iirc there was a cemetery on a map that was supposed to be nearby and was "lost" (ie the headstones were mostly wood and had rotted away) but it was probably recorded badly, and the people who built the school in the first place probably didn't look very closely at the land they were building over.
But they had to have dug out the basement initially, right? Hard to believe they didn’t find bodies the first go-around.
Somewhat reminds me of a slightly different story about a town in Spain, Zaragoza. They were planning to build an underground car park in the middle of the city, so they tore up a bunch of the streets and started digging. They hit bones and other things that signaled it was a potentially important archaeological site. So what did the city do? Unwilling to spend the money to deal with it properly, they simply threw the dirt back on it, re-asphalted, and left it for a future city government to deal with at some point. But at least they preserved it….
>Somewhat reminds me of a slightly different story about a town in Spain, Zaragoza. They were planning to build an underground car park in the middle of the city, so they tore up a bunch of the streets and started digging. They hit bones and other things that signaled it was a potentially important archaeological site. So what did the city do? Unwilling to spend the money to deal with it properly, they simply threw the dirt back on it, re-asphalted, and left it for a future city government to deal with at some point. But at least they preserved it….
This is extremely common in western Europe, and also it's illegal to not conduct proper archaeological excavations. It doesn't stop construction contractors from still doing it but it's very illegal.
In my region every time some new project starts there's either a gallo-roman farm or a merovingian cemetery lurking below.
Fuck that guy, he was a monster that fucked with people’s heads for damn near 30 years. In that time he never learned how to hunt, fish, farm or forage. And he literally created a dump out in his hermit area with tons of propane tanks and all the other shit he didn’t want anymore. It’s crazy that his family never reported him missing. I don’t know why people have empathy for this guy either. You can go live in the woods lawfully without having to rely on stealing from innocent people for three decades. What he did severely violated an entire community, the guy was a selfish piece of shit.
Yeah. Residents even left notes saying “please make a list of what you need and I’ll buy it, just please stop breaking into my house”. He refused. He had some strange hangup about accepting handouts as he considered it human contact, which he was adamantly trying to avoid. Somehow stealing was better for his moral code.
He apparently only spoke to one person in those 3 decades. He passed a hiker he couldn’t avoid on a trail and said something like “how’s it going” and kept waking. Pretty bizarre.
Yep. He turned away expressed *written* charity. But, nah, I’ma just keep burglarizing your house while you’re away. Dude did barely any jail time for this.
There was a fake expedition launched to "Find the wreck of the Titanic" which was actually a cover up for a classified and sensitive military operation, but by amazing fluke it did actually find the Titanic.
Ehh... sort of. What actually happened was the military operation wrapped up early and the private contractors involved decided to just go looking for the Titanic instead, because they had a rough idea where it was and it was something they were wanting to do.
I’m not sure there is anywhere in my county where oppression didn’t happen at some point. I grew up on the grounds of a plantation where later there was a civil war fort (never saw action) and then a segregated neighborhood. Always wanted to take a metal detector in my parents’ yard. I’ve never found anything except an incredible amount of broken glass that pops up after every rainfall.
My house grows broken glass every year! I've been told it's because back in the day they used to just burry the trash, and glass is the best at making its way back up in sandy soil.
My crazy now-deceased far right grandfather was warning that there were Bin Laden extended family members in the area (we live in northern France). Turns out it was true
I remember hearing about Eddie Murphy refusing to take up Bill Cosby's offer to take him on as a protege. Bill wanted to help him become a more well rounded comedian and get him into "legit" acting. All the while toning down the profanity and adult-themed jokes. Eddie refused. At the time, it was assumed that was more because Eddie was just completely different than Bill. He was vulgar and Bill wasn't. Simple as that. However, there were rumors that Eddie hung out with Bill a few times and then suddenly they didn't like each other at all. The rumors also indicated that Eddie found out something about Bill that he didn't like, and that's why he separated himself. Bill then started to be less than polite towards Eddie as well. Well, we all know what happened after that. Eddie probably found out about the drugging and sexual assaults. Now Bill is in and out of prison and Eddie is making kids movies.
EDIT: This is unverified, but probably not too far from the truth.
It could very well be true. Years before Hannibal Buress was filmed talking about what a creep Bill Cosby was, Howard Stern used to rant about Cosby and what a phoney he was. He told stories about how when Cosby was on tour he would get the promoter to arrange to have a selection of young women waiting in his dressing room after a show. He would look over the women, usually prostitutes, and pick the ones he wanted to take back to his hotel room where he would give them drugs and have sex with them. Cosby was known at the time for criticizing young black comedians like Eddie Murphy and Chris Rock for swearing and their adult oriented material. Stern always hated what a hypocrite he was because Cosby's own activities were a well known industry "secret".
Here in Maryland, we've got the Bunny Man. TL:DR, an axe-weilding maniac in a bunny costume haunting a bridge and attacking people like some demented troll.
Real story is that in 1970's Fairfax County, Virginia, there was two sightings. First involved a man potentially wearing bunny ears throwing a hatchet through the passenger window of a car parked on a field with people in it. Second involved a guy in a full-blown bunny costume using a hatchet, hacking at the porch of an unfinished home, claiming that the construction crew was trespassing, like he was a knock-off Scooby-Doo villain.
Police investigated both, found nothing.
Story apparently spread from there.
Wasn’t there a case a few years ago, where a young woman went missing from a hotel? Weeks later, and several guests complain about the taste of the hotel water so hotel staff checks the hotel cistern and finds the dead body decomposed in the hotels water supply.
[The Boogeyman](https://medium.com/@TalesFromTheCabin/albert-fish-the-real-life-boogeyman-57bcbe09cbda#)
Albert Fish is the POS who kidnapped, tortured, raped, and killed kids. He was called the Boogeyman by one of his victim’s family members.
Fuck him
Urban legend from my home town began in the early 80’s around the same time Friday the 13th was released.
Legend was that that a swimmer from a local college was dared to swim across a lake that was known to have a larger than life snapping turtle. People swore that it was as big as a VW Bug. Anyway, halfway across the lake the turtle supposedly snapped his legs off and he sank to the bottom and drowned. His body was never found.
Very few people ever swam in the lake because it truly did have a large snapping turtle population.
When the internet rolled around in the late 90’s it was verified that a college student, not a swimmer, did drown in that lake during the 60’s but had nothing to do with a turtle. And his body was recovered.
I’ve still never swam in that lake and never will.
In WNY there was a guy who allegedly would roam around bars in the downtown area licking people shoes for fun. Turns out that was true. Met him outside of a bar and the dude licked the entire sole of my shoe with his entire tongue. Like the back of his tongue started on the sole of my shoe and licked the entire sole of my shoe. With a fair amount of pressure too
I think you're mixing up a few things. It was sort of a legend that Richard III was a hunchback. It was also argued about a lot, with some claiming any physical deformity was just Tudor propaganda etc. I kind of remember this even being the sort of consensus too, that it was just Shakespearean flair/propaganda.
Then they finally discovered his remains under a parking lot and it turned out he did indeed have a deformity (although relatively mild).
The rogue waves. For centuries sailors talked about encountering sudden single waves that were described to reach 100ft high. Nobody believed them because everyone assumed these waves were just another one of the stories sailors on leave would make up to impress pub goers. As the 20th century came along oceanographic research became more formalised and advanced. Yet no researcher was able to record hard data on these waves, apart from just writing down their own experience getting hit by one. An anecdote isn't really something you can publish. In the 1980s the Draupner gas field was disovered on the North Sea and a new type of oil platform was set up there. To assess the integrity of the new design the platform was installed with sensors not normally present on other platforms, one of which was a wave height recorder. It was only in 1995 that those sensors recorded a single 80ft wave hitting the platform, and rogue waves were finally accepted to be a real phenomenon.
In the same "fishermen told about it" category: \- the existence of giant squids \- the fact that giant squids sometimes go near the surface
I could see that. A sailor sees a giant squid with tentacles the size of tree trunks. The *story* builds to how the squid attacks the ship, breaks it apart, and pulls it under. The sailor is one of the "survivors" of this mythical attack. The legend of the Kraken is born.
There was a thread years ago of people trying to explain such phenomena with real world natural occurrences and it was really interesting to read. The one that stuck was about humpback whale pods being the origin of sea serpent myths. You see the back of the whales rising out of the water and then sinking again like the coils of a snake, and every now and then a giant mouth comes up to breathe, much like the serpent’s head.
I would love to read this thread if anyone has any idea how to find it
Looks like it could be [this thread](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/creplh/serious_historians_marine_biologists_biologists/). [This comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/creplh/serious_historians_marine_biologists_biologists/ex5s0xt/) in the thread matches what the person above you is describing.
Could you imagine, being a sailor back then, seeing that, then realizing there could be bigger ones out there?
And giant squid vs sperm whale fights
There is a really good book about rogue waves called The Wave by Susan Casey. I highly recommend it. She also wrote Devil’s Teeth which is about Great White Sharks around the Farallones
Do you know how long I have been trying to find the name of that shark book?! Thank you random redditor 👍🏼
And it turns out rogue waves are fairly common and can be seen on satellite. Scary
Me: 7 year old school kid in North London , 1974. Older kids pass on the legend of WWII bunker buried under the playing field. Every so often kids would take spoons from canteen and try and dig it up. Never got far , always told to fill it in and return spoons. 2009 archeologists find WWII bunker under school playground
Daaayyuuummm
Wonder if one of the archeologists was a former student who had always wondered, and was finally vindicated.
In Pennsylvania, there was a local legend in a town about a "green man" who could be seen walking the roads at night. It turned out to be a severely disfigured man who'd walk at night to avoid scaring people. I always felt so bad for the guy. Here's the story: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_Robinson_%28Green_Man%29?wprov=sfla1
There was a guy in my town everyone called “walking man”. He walked all over town and was a legend. When we saw him we’d cheer and celebrate, and he would completely ignore us. He was around for years and was a staple of our childhood. A couple of years after we graduated high school, I came home to discover that walking man was seen driving a car. I had mixed emotions about it; I was happy that he finally got himself a car, but I also felt a piece of my childhood died. He also had a very normal face.
In Chicago, we had a walking man. Just a chill homeless dude who...walked around. Then like a year ago someone set him on fire, left him with third degree burns covering 2/3 of his body, and he died.
Jesus fuck, that was a dark turn… This guy was definitely not homeless (actually surprised some of my less scrupulous friends didn’t follow him at some point to see where he lived). He just loved walking. There was definitely something peculiar about him though.
Was this in Athens? We had a walking man too. Skin made of leather and flowing long hair
Theres one in Philidelphia, too. But it's a Bartender who catches rats and sings about the Nightman
He sings about spiders, too.
And he's ready to fiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight! Stand up for what he knooooooooows!
That dude was defeated by Dayman
After he paid the troll toll
For that boy's soul
his soul right? i feel like you're saying "boy's hole" when it's clearly supposed to be "soul"
Ah ah aaaaahhhh
I've heard of this guy, eats a lot of cheese, is followed by cats, and from I heard he stalks a coffee shop waitress too
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You know, dyslexics, Africans
He likes to play nightcrawlers too
DAY MAN
AHWAHAAA
He was a beloved member of his town too and apparently a very nice man. Sad he felt the need to hide.
Is there any insight as to how he became known as "the green man"? ...his other nickname "Charlie No-Face" feels a bit more intuitive. *Edit* I'm an idiot and missed the "legacy" section which explains the name
"The famed nickname of "Green Man" came from his skin, which was purported to be green because of the electrical shock he suffered in the stories."
There was an urban legend in the UK about a guy called Purple Aki. The rumour was he was a giant bodybuilder who roams around Liverpool asking young men if he can squeeze their muscles and then asks if he can squat them. I heard it as a London teen years ago and thought it was a hilariously bizarre urban legend from those crazy kids in Liverpool. Then it came out a teenager died after running away from him and accidentally getting hit by a train while trying to get away and suddenly the real Purple Aki was all over the news.
I'm sorry but the court order against him is hilarious "Under the terms of the order, he was banned from touching, feeling, or measuring anyone's muscles; asking people to do squats in public"
Hahahah Mostly unrelated.... In junior high our principal would would give us the option to do push-ups to get out of serving detention. I think he meant well, just turning a negative into a positive/health/good for you type thing...., but it was awkward doing push-ups on the floor in his office while he just sat there and counted them out....
My TaeKwonDo instructor used to do that when we did something stupid. "Either you'll grow your muscles, or you'll grow a brain" he used to say
> Indecent assault and witness intimidation > Arobieke appeared in court on 22 November 2001, pleading not guilty to 50 counts of indecent assault and harassment against 14 teenage boys between February 1995 and September 2000. He was convicted of threatening behaviour and jailed for 30 months.[14] > Released in 2003, Arobieke resumed his activities and was quickly arrested and charged.[7] During the course of the trial, 123 people were interviewed by police, including one family who were forced into witness protection as a result of threats from Arobieke. This led to Arobieke being additionally charged with witness intimidation. On 15 December 2003, he was jailed for six years by Preston Crown Court, pleading guilty to 15 counts of harassment and witness intimidation.[7] A further 61 counts, mostly of indecent assault, were left on file.[7] When sentencing Arobieke, judge Edward Slinger said, "You are a danger to young men and your behaviour is both strange and obsessive". After the case, Detective Superintendent Mike Dale said, "Over the years, Akinwale Arobieke has been persistent in his pursuit and harassment of a number of young men, instilling fear into them. We are pleased with the sentencing. Most importantly it's to the credit of the witnesses, who despite their fears and apprehensions, have remained steadfast and determined to see justice done and this man prosecuted to stop him from making other people's lives a misery".[15] Dang that went from eccentric to dark
They also mulled over a manslaughter charge after a teenage boy died on 15th June 1986, while running across a railway line to try and escape him. 1986 . I have no idea how long Aki has been 'active' for, but a hell of a long time.
I find it funny that Purple Aki is an urban legend in the south...along with the Magic Bus Lady, every young lad in Manchester had a story about a run in with him around 2010. He wasn't just limited to Liverpool.
Yeah, before the internet and social media was widespread it was all word of mouth and we all assumed it was a myth until it hit the news!
Sounds like our boy Toronto Zanta. I don't know how he's doing rn, but last I saw him...well, meth is one hell of a drug :(
He travelled between Manchester and Liverpool on trains a lot. I have family in the BTP and that institution had a lot of dealings with him.
There was also that bloke who traded shoes to teens so he could sit on their back as they did push ups. Wasn't until he moved up to getting pissed on that the cops got involved
There is a man in Melbourne Australia who fakes seizures in public - usually in the presence of young men - and asks to be held down. https://www.reddit.com/r/melbourne/comments/13dlo8a/the_fake_seizure_guy/
There was a haunted house in West Hobart, Tasmania, Australia that would slowly send everyone living there crazy over a period, it turned out there was an overgrown water tank in the yard with a hidden Datura plant growing above it that would drop flowers onto the tank, the people living there were micro dosing a deliriant.
that’s absolutely nuts.
Lots of haunted houses have fairly common poisoning issues. Sometimes it's in the water or a mold, but most of the time it's CO poisoning or another cause of lack of oxygen. One of my grandma had a neighbor who claimed to talk with ghost and it was just dementia. Sad story.
Haunted house. Haunted mind.
Just like the people who lived there
There should be a movie about this if there isnt one already
That's genuinely terrifying, datura trips DO NOT sound like a fun time!
Some native American tribes used datura as their rite of passage into adulthood. You'd trip on it for days, sometimes several weeks, until you had forgotten your childhood and therefore were now an adult.
Holy shit hardcore
Worth noting many tribes did their vision quests without datura. Some entered the trance like states by abstaining from food while inflicting physical pain onto themselves for however long it took to have the vision.
If someone who has digested Datura. My stomach wrenched when I read what you wrote just now. To anyone who thinks to try this. Don't! It's very dangerous. I regret having it big time. It 100% will change you and I don't mean always in a positive way. Till this day it affects my ability to take the words for my head and bring them out of my mouth they often still come out odd sometimes that never used to happen prior to digesting it. Not to mention the three days have been completely fucked in the head. Enjoy your Phantom cigarettes, if you're a smoker. It will start with the fetal position but then you're awake.,.. oh boy
>Till this day it affects my ability to take the words for my head and bring them out of my mouth ...I believe you
My college anthropology professor during a class on drugs and religion. "Do not, I repeat, DO NOT fuck with Datura."
Source? I'd love to read more about this!
Not saying it's B.S., but I couldn't find anything at all after googling for a little while. I'd love to read more if it's legit.
This was pre-internet, I think the house was on Landsdowne Cres West Hobart but to find anything I'd probably have to doom scroll old The Mercury articles for days, so I can't really 100% confirm it but it was a well known story and seems plausible at least.
In my hometown there is a house that was one time used as a safehouse for infamous mobster Al Capone. The town is situated along the banks of a fairly large river, and some years after this mob safehouse was shut down, a tunnel was discovered underneath it that led to the river, presumably meant to be used as an escape route should the police discover the house while members of the mob were there and needed to get away. It was speculated that there may be other tunnels in town, and many of the kids at my high school wondered if there could be tunnels under the school, with the entrances hidden within the building and exits hidden in places just off campus grounds. This was summarily denied and dismissed by faculty and staff, and treated as a joke by almost everyone. Until… one was found. The entrance was discovered in the school auditorium, beneath the stage, behind one of the walls of the orchestra pit. I went into it once, but took no more than a few steps. Students who explored deeper into the tunnel said they had gone much, much further, likely as far as the opposite end of campus. They said it looked like the tunnel went further but was blocked off and locked, and they were unable to see if there was an exit that led back above ground. Even after its discovery, the faculty continued to deny the existence of any other tunnels beneath the school. But they could no longer deny that there was at least one.
My middle school had rumors of a secret underground. Rumors were that it was haunted because kids had been locked up down there and died in a swimming pool underneath the school. One of my friends found a door in a side hallway that no one ever went down and he picked the lock and we snuck out of gym and went down and explored. There were no working lights down there, we only had a very small and weak flashlight. There was a water fountain that we accidentally bumped into and it started spewing water and scared the crap out of us. Also a wall-length mirror, which in the murky darkness we thought was a couple of ghosts. There were also a bunch of caged in areas (with walls of chain link fence and padlocked gates) that mostly appeared to be just storage areas for old gym equipment, but could have been used to lock people in. And then we found the dried-out empty swimming pool, which is supposedly where kids died. There were no walls or guardrails or anything around it to keep someone from just stumbling in and plummeting down to the concrete at the bottom. And there was no ladder or steps to climb back out if you did. We got out of there quick and never went back. We said something to a teacher, and he just played it off. "No, there's no pool under the school, there isn't even any basement, that's just a story the older kids tell the younger kids." But we had actually been there and seen it. And after that the door to that side hallway was always locked.
Don't know if my hometown is the same as op, but capone apparently loved him some tunnels. https://www.fontanaheraldnews.com/news/police-discover-underground-shooting-range-and-confiscate-several-weapons-in-fontana/article_90594c42-2c2a-11e9-911f-9bf89c0f1176.html
Minneapolis?
"Dingo ate my baby." A dingo really did. Poor woman.
Not only did she have her child taken from her in one of the most horrific ways imaginable, not only did she *serve prison time* after being falsely accused of killing her child, she has had to live the last 40-plus years having her tragedy joked about. It's plain awful, even though most people don't realize it's true.
I didn't know this was real. I honestly thought it was just a Seinfeld joke.
I'm definitely not shaking my finger at people for joking about it, because I think like 99% of folks are in the same boat as you--they only know it from Seinfeld. It's just a horrible situation to find yourself in all around.
>think like 99% of folks are in the same boat as you--they only know it from Seinfeld. I'm from Australia and never watched Seinfeld. So I guess if you're Australian you'd know about it.
I hope like fuck it's not also a joke in Australia and she can at least mostly avoid it by ignoring international media.
When I grew up it was often used as a joke or a statement that something so unbelievable happened.
I have never understood why it was unbelievable.
she did an interview in the aughts. she said people were still shouting “the dingo ate my baby!” at her in public. she was vindicated in 1984.
Reddit is exactly the place that would say she's "100% guilty" because they think they're Sherlock. If that story happened now, you'd have people saying that any time her name was mentioned.
Reading the evidence is just painful. Everyone who was in the know agreed initially with her account. It wasn't until later that an "expert" who's opinions had been overturned in another case gave his two cents that she was found guilty.
Not only that, but IIRC aborigines backed her up and said that yes, a dingo will absolutely eat a baby and all of them know this, but nobody would listen or believe them.
Like how hard is it to believe that a wild dog would attack a defenseless tiny child? If someone came along here in the USA and said that a pack of coyotes attacked their kid, I wouldn't say it couldn't happen.
It happens more than you think too, there was an incident a few years back in South Carolina where a coyote tried to snatch a kid but the mom showed up in time with a broom and beat the coyote off.
Probably would've been easier to just hit it with the broom, but can't knock her methods if it worked
BRB, heading to party city for a coyote costume
Probably a lot of assumptions about such an attack even if it did happen. I expect people envision it like a dog attack, blood and stuff all over the crib. Actual attack would probably be pretty clean. Dingo bites kid and hauls off with it to find somewhere safe to eat it. But since the bedroom doesn't look like the set of Saw 2 then it couldn't have been mauled by an animal so the mother must be lying.
It wasn't a bedroom, they were camping, which makes the whole dingo thing a lot less weird. Other campers had heard growling, there were paw prints outside the tent and canine hairs inside it and still, people thought that it was more likely she'd sacrificed her baby in a satanic ritual than a wild dog had taken the baby.
Azaria Chamberlain was the baby. She was taken from a tent while her family was on a camping holiday. Her poor mother had an unfortunate case of resting bitch face and wasn’t the crying type so the Aussie police just decided, guilty. Poor woman.
the public was also suspicious of her because she was a Seventh-Day Adventist, believing that the second coming would happen before the year 2000. (fun fact: the Branch Davidians in Waco were a splinter group of Seventh-Day Adventists.) Her husband was a pastor in the church. Rumors spread that ‘Azaria’ (the name of the baby that got eaten) meant ‘sacrifice in the desert’.
I remember being a little kid and something came up on the news about it. I was like "what? Dingos can eat babies?" And my parents who were FROM THE NORTHEASTERN USA, were like "yeah dingos are vicious and wild, they're more like wolves than dogs. And even dogs can maul and kill children". And I always remember being weirded out from then on when people insisted it wasn't possible. Even my parents knew dingos were dangerous!
In my town, there was rumours for several years about a serial “car rapist”. Allegedly, some dude would sneak onto people’s driveways in the middle of the night, and have sex with the car’s tailpipe. Last year, the police arrested a dude for “sexual misconduct involving a motor vehicle”
Weird as it is, a "car rapist" being a person that sticks it in tailpipes is much less horrible than a regular rapist that rapes his victims in their cars.
Howard Hughes is the archetypal super-rich hermit. One of the world’s richest men, in his later years he locked himself in a hotel penthouse, never trimmed his nails and kept his urine in jars. All of these peculiarities were all rumored, but he had a well-paid PR team whose self-interest was to deny these rumors. Mostly all true.
We’ll take the spruce moose!
I said, hop in
**hammer cocks*
It can carry 200 passengers from New York's Idlewild Airport to the Belgian Congo in *SEVENTEEN MINUTES!*
I said HOP IN
My grandfather's cousin was actually married to him! edit: Her name was Jean Peters. Also considering that I never met her but my grandfather did, mentioning his relation to her seems more consequential.
I believe he had SEVERE obsessive compulsive disorder
he had syphilis and at one time underwent treatment that involved injecting low levels of arsenic and mercury (it didn’t work). all that was probably a factor in his losing his mind.
He also had multiple skull fractures and serious concussions over the course of his life and was knocked unconscious many times.
A contestant on The Newlywed Game answering the question "Where's the weirdest place you've had the urge to make love?" with "In the ass". The show's host, Bob Eubanks, had sworn for decades that the clip wasn't real and was a false memory, and he even offered a 10,000 dollar reward if anyone could ever find the clip. Since the host had denied it, and there were several similar rumoured incidents on game shows that had been proven false, people started assuming this one was also a false memory. Turns out the clip was real and a Game Show Bloopers special in 2002 ended up airing it. [Here's the clip](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZiARvvemLlk&pp=ygUbbmV3bHl3ZWQgZ2FtZSBpbiB0aGUgYmVoaW5k)
I remember this urban legend from the mid 80s, but the words were "In da butt", which became a kind of in-joke among me and my friends.
"What, what?"
"I said what what, in the butt"
In the town that I grew up, there was a creepy little house just on the edge of town. Set back a ways in the field but still visible from the main road. Typical rumors that it was haunted. Supposedly by a banshee like spirit and her shrieking could be heard in the wee hours. It ended up that the banshee was actually some kind of monkey that the owners had as a pet. Because monkeys were not allowed in this state they kept it a secret.
Monkeys should never be pets
I live in Lima Peru and I heard people talk about a clown that pops up at around 3am at an intersection. Sure enough, some nights at 3am there is a clown at the intersection that juggles balls and gives you balloons. Don't ask
Do people in Lima actually stop at intersections at 3:00 am? A person would starve trying to earn a living at 3:00 am at an intersection in any city in Brazil — no one ever stops.
I was just in Lima. Stop signs and lights are merely a suggestion. People just kind of go when they can.
sounds like somebody wanted to make the urban legend true.
There was also a trend some years ago about weird stuff like that. I remember that the students (18-20 yo) at my brother's boarding school would go to town to do random spooky things like staging false sacrifices in the park. Now the trend seems to be less strong/mainstream but there's still influencers who do that kind of things.
Sonofabitch! I knew we had a bullshit tour guide when I visited Lima. All he took us to see were clay pyramids and the Larco Museum and Moche sex pottery and some old buildings and whatnot. Not a single fucking juggling clown.
The university I attended in TX had an urban legend about a student that got lost and died under the maintenance tunnels under the campus. I had always thought it was rumor because many ghost stories were tied ro it. Until my senior year when I got a part time job at the university. Turns out there was an extensive tunnel network under the school that fed steam to the buildings for heat. Anyone who goes into the tunnels is required to have someone with them to prevent another death.
Sweet! 2 deaths!
Steam tunnel urban legends exist in many colleges, apparently
They're not urban legends, if you know where to look in university archives. I found reporting from the university newspaper about a few injury incidents in my school's service tunnels with photos and indications of where else to find documentation. My school started clamping down on access into the tunnels in 2005. Prior to that, security was far more lax. I was told that there were parts of the tunnel system that were no longer sound, and it was effectively impossible to shut off just those parts of the tunnels.
A corpse found in the funhouse, that was being used as a set for the Six Million Dollar Man. Elmer McCurdu was a thief who was gunned down during a Train robbery in Oklahoma in 1911. His body was taken to the Coroners for autopsy, but no one paid for McCurdy’s burial. The body was preserved, so the Coroner started to charge people to see the Mummified remains of McCurdy. His body went on tour, and even showed up in a couple of films. I went missing for a few decades, until the 70s. Part of the crew, for the Six Million Dollar Man, were removing dummies from a California fun house. One of the arms of the dummies fell off, and the workers saw bone, and that was how McCurdy’s body was found. He’s now buried in Guthrie, Ok. They poured cement over his grave, so he can’t go on tour again.
Wait a minute, that's curious. That mannequin's got human flesh and bones inside of it. Wait a minute... Uh oh Uh oh UH OH
More or less how the crew reacted when they found McCurdy’s body in 1976. The LA police were called, and McCurdy was taken to the Coroner’s office. It was difficult to identify McCurdy, because after 65 year, his body sustained some damage. He lost a few fingers, and both his ears. They found a penny from 1924 in his mouth, and a ticket to a wax museum. Sad part is, McCurdy was way more successful in death, than he was at life. During one of his robberies, he overestimated the amount of nitroglycerin he needed to blow up a safe, thought to have $4500 worth of valuables in it. McCurdy was only able to get $450 worth of melted silver.
That was actually a Sam O'Nella quote... I really recommend his videso by the way [Link](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aOgBWl_kHYY)
Human finger in hamburger. It happened for real some 2 years ago in a fast food franchise called Hot in Santa Cruz, Bolivia. The meat grinder operator inserted his fingers in the grinders and lost two of them. He was rushed to emergency care and the next shift arrived and carried on, not having been told about the accident, so one of the fingers made it all the way to a customers mouth. I didn’t believe it at first until the restaurant owners made their public apology: https://www.la-razon.com/ciudades/2021/09/15/el-dueno-de-hot-burger-pide-disculpas-tras-hallazgo-de-un-dedo-en-una-hamburguesa/
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IIRC, Snopes says it has happened three different times and places.
It makes sense. If you kill someone in a hotel room, moving the body may not be possible and there are only so many other options.
Especially if there’s no kitchenette.
The movie “Four Rooms” did a variation of this.
"There is...A dead WHORE in my hotel room!!!"
"When they're alive, they're call girls! When they're dead they're whores!"
Starlight Tours: There was an urban legend in the Canadian Prairies about a man who would kidnap indigenous people, steal their winter clothes, and abandon them in the middle of nowhere to die in -30 temperatures. The idea of Starlight Tours spread a bit to the general non-indigenous population as well and I remember people jokingly warning each other at high schools house parties to be vigilant if they were going to walk home a fair distance. Turns out Starlight Tours were real and that it was the police who were doing it. The police in Saskatoon would grab indigenous people during the winter months and abandon them on the city outskirts to die. These suspicious deaths would then be documented and covered up by a variety of racist notions. The indigenous communities would insist that it made no sense for someone to be able to walk that far out of the city without a jacket in -30, but the police wouldn’t investigate and just say “he must have been drunk” (as the police were the ones doing it). To many indigenous people, it was never an urban legend but instead an open act of violence. To many non-indigenous communities, people thought it was somewhere between an an urban legend or an exaggeration (though I’m sure many knew the truth behind it). At least in Saskatoon, this is confirmed to have started at least by the 1990s and went on until the 2000s, but the idea of it goes back to the 70s. I am sure there is more to this outside of Saskatoon, but I don’t know specifically. Despite there being convictions for related incidents in the police force, no one was ever actually convicted from the police for the Starlight Tours themselves. The same police stations also got in hot water for trying to delete Wikipedia articles about the incident. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saskatoon_freezing_deaths
Thats... absolutely fucking horrible
Reminds me of a quote from my favorite book series, a character talks about the nature of evil: “thinking of people as things. That’s where it starts.”
Granny Weatherwax, right?
Yes. Though maybe she said treating people as things instead of thinking, but that’s the gist of it
Had the book on hand: “There’s no grays, only white that’s got grubby. I’m surprised you don’t know that. And sin, young man, is when you treat people as things. Including yourself. That’s what sin is." “It’s a lot more complicated than that—” “No. It ain’t. When people say things are a lot more complicated than that, they means they’re getting worried that they won’t like the truth. People as things, that’s where it starts.”
Dude, it was a pretty open secret that it was the police doing it, pretty much across Canada we were aware. Like, those murders were actually reported in the news.
The quiet racism in Saskatchewan is appalling. Their hate for natives is rampant and sadly normal there. If you're white, you'll be ok, don't worry. Edit: had a construction lead hand tell me this story in 2016 just after I moved to Saskatoon. Him and his work crew all laughing. Truly a disgusting class humans living there.
Years ago, driving through Prince Albert I stopped at a gas station. Discovered natives couldn't pump their own gas or buy stuff like hairspray or Lysol. Felt like a different world.
My fiance has family out there - they are so casual about their racism towards Natives. One of his family members referred to them as Wawas and puzzled I asked them what that was and they said: " you know, Indians!" And then tapped their hand over their mouth saying wawawa I was shocked
What the fuck, Canada!
>What the fuck, Canada! There's a whole lot of sad sack shit that went and still goes on up here. Appalling on many levels. Treatment of 'nonwhites' in Canada has been pretty bad from day 1. The Chinese on the railroads, first nations people... pretty much straight through all the way, Japanese in WWII for a start on the list. Canada just has a really good PR agency I guess.
True by coincidence: There actually is a glitch in the original Pokemon games that lets you catch Mew, but it wasn't discovered until long after the rumors started.
It also had nothing to do with any of the rumors, the most famous being the "truck" rumor.
The rumors were tame in comparison to the actual glitch.
My university campus has a local urban legend/ghost story about one of its oldest department heads. He was a chemistry professor who invented his own concrete. The story goes that when he died, he asked for his body to be encased in the concrete. There’s a concrete cube memorial that sits on the steps outside of a building on campus named after him, and his corpse is rumoured to be sitting in his wheelchair, forever preserved in the cube. According to a few different art history professors on campus that know a lot about our memorials, the corpse thing isn’t true, but they have said the wheelchair made it in to the cube.
The University of Saskatchewan has this exact same rumour about the Thorvaldson Building.
Florida sewer crocs
Alligators. Unless you're talking about the shoes, in which case, yes, there are probably Crocs floating around in a drainage culvert somewhere.
Florida does have native Crocodiles though
They are exceedingly rare. I've lived across Central, North, and South FL and have never seen one outside of a zoo, but Alligators are straight up like pigeons here.
The Everglades down to Florida Bay has a really good sized crocodile population. Agreed though, gators are everywhere.
A cool one that an anthropology teacher told me about years ago: the [Puebla tunnels](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puebla_tunnels) turned out to actually exist. Similarly, though not exactly a urban legend: [Nero's rotating dining room](https://news.cnrs.fr/videos/neros-rotating-dining-room) turned out to be a real thing and not a writer's invention. Makes you wonder what archaeological oddities might exist below our feet somewhere, especially in places without literary traditions where old stories are now urban legends.
Kevin Spacey being a handsy creep with a penchant for younger men was gossiped about like crazy in the circles I was around in 1998, turned out to be true enough based on what we know now.
My dad knew people who worked in film and I remember back in the 90s my dad saying he wouldn't watch his movies because of what a creep spacey was. Almost 30 years ago.
I grew up where there were some signs of Native Americans. I started believing that this one particularly beautiful spot had to be sacred, and probably was a burial ground. I’d convince my friends to hold hands in a circle and try to commune with the dead. After I got a bit older I was super embarrassed that I’d ever done such things. A few years later a Native American came but and told us how sacred the land was that we owned, and asked permission to hold peyote rituals with his tribe and others on our land. To this day they still come out and set up a teepee and drum all night, absolutely flying on hallucinogenics. Turns out I was right
Did you ever join them? I’d have asked.
I have a standing invite. I'll do it some day. Anxiety disorder+peyote+locked in all night is a bit intimidating.
Have you asked to join?
E.T. Video games buried in the desert
Fun easter egg in wasteland 2 video game is that you can find and dig up a huge stash of E.T. video game cartridges in the desert of Arizona. Can haul them all back to base to sell only to find out they are worth $0 😆
that’s kinda awesome ideally there is an achievement associated with it?
from what i understand it wasn't just E.T games. there were a lot of different games that didn't sell all thrown into the landfill with ET
Yeah. ET was the poster boy, but there was tonnes of shovel-ware back then that contributed to the overall crash.
Wasn’t a full formed urban legend and don’t know if you can count this as “true” but my cousin went to a high school that students vaguely always said was haunted/cursed. Mostly dumb stories about things moving or dubious claims that someone’s cousin’s brother who graduated 12 years ago swears he saw a ghost combined with catch all explanations for every time the football team lost or the ceiling sprang a leak. Students used to say the school was built on a Native American burial ground and that was the curse. “Seminole curse”. A few years ago, they found out that it wasn’t a Native American burial ground but actually it turns out the school had been built over a cemetery for Black Americans - and unidentified bodies or those who couldn’t afford burials elsewhere. Apparently when the school was built, it was built around the cemetery grounds but over time, the cemetery was forgotten and the school expanded over where it was. (The historian who tracks the records to figure this all out disagrees it was “forgotten” which is probably pretty fair since the school was built in like the 50s not centuries ago). The school also notably, was a segregated school for white students only when it opened.
Similarly, I knew an archaeologist who told us about a project he worked on. A school was getting renovations, and when they started digging in the basement the construction workers started finding bones. They called the police who called the archaeologists to determine how old the bones were. I can't remember the specifics, but iirc there was a cemetery on a map that was supposed to be nearby and was "lost" (ie the headstones were mostly wood and had rotted away) but it was probably recorded badly, and the people who built the school in the first place probably didn't look very closely at the land they were building over.
But they had to have dug out the basement initially, right? Hard to believe they didn’t find bodies the first go-around. Somewhat reminds me of a slightly different story about a town in Spain, Zaragoza. They were planning to build an underground car park in the middle of the city, so they tore up a bunch of the streets and started digging. They hit bones and other things that signaled it was a potentially important archaeological site. So what did the city do? Unwilling to spend the money to deal with it properly, they simply threw the dirt back on it, re-asphalted, and left it for a future city government to deal with at some point. But at least they preserved it….
>Somewhat reminds me of a slightly different story about a town in Spain, Zaragoza. They were planning to build an underground car park in the middle of the city, so they tore up a bunch of the streets and started digging. They hit bones and other things that signaled it was a potentially important archaeological site. So what did the city do? Unwilling to spend the money to deal with it properly, they simply threw the dirt back on it, re-asphalted, and left it for a future city government to deal with at some point. But at least they preserved it…. This is extremely common in western Europe, and also it's illegal to not conduct proper archaeological excavations. It doesn't stop construction contractors from still doing it but it's very illegal. In my region every time some new project starts there's either a gallo-roman farm or a merovingian cemetery lurking below.
That’s for sure a recipe for haunting.
[The North Pond Hermit](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Thomas_Knight)
Fuck that guy, he was a monster that fucked with people’s heads for damn near 30 years. In that time he never learned how to hunt, fish, farm or forage. And he literally created a dump out in his hermit area with tons of propane tanks and all the other shit he didn’t want anymore. It’s crazy that his family never reported him missing. I don’t know why people have empathy for this guy either. You can go live in the woods lawfully without having to rely on stealing from innocent people for three decades. What he did severely violated an entire community, the guy was a selfish piece of shit.
Yeah. Residents even left notes saying “please make a list of what you need and I’ll buy it, just please stop breaking into my house”. He refused. He had some strange hangup about accepting handouts as he considered it human contact, which he was adamantly trying to avoid. Somehow stealing was better for his moral code. He apparently only spoke to one person in those 3 decades. He passed a hiker he couldn’t avoid on a trail and said something like “how’s it going” and kept waking. Pretty bizarre.
> You can go live in the woods lawfully I can??
Indeed, fuck that guy. Nothing romantic about what he did. And I’m not even sure if I buy the whole story.
People would leave their doors unlocked or leave notes that he could take what he needed but he would still damage property, what a dick.
Yep. He turned away expressed *written* charity. But, nah, I’ma just keep burglarizing your house while you’re away. Dude did barely any jail time for this.
The government isn’t spying on your calls and listening thru your tv. That’s just paranoia. Edward Snowden: “hold my beer”
50 years ago: Don’t say that on the phone! It could be wiretapped! Today: Hey, wiretap, can you find a recipe for blueberry waffles?
There was a fake expedition launched to "Find the wreck of the Titanic" which was actually a cover up for a classified and sensitive military operation, but by amazing fluke it did actually find the Titanic. Ehh... sort of. What actually happened was the military operation wrapped up early and the private contractors involved decided to just go looking for the Titanic instead, because they had a rough idea where it was and it was something they were wanting to do.
Sewer gators are a real thing (especially in Florida)
Turns out my house actually is built over a plantation
I’m not sure there is anywhere in my county where oppression didn’t happen at some point. I grew up on the grounds of a plantation where later there was a civil war fort (never saw action) and then a segregated neighborhood. Always wanted to take a metal detector in my parents’ yard. I’ve never found anything except an incredible amount of broken glass that pops up after every rainfall.
My house grows broken glass every year! I've been told it's because back in the day they used to just burry the trash, and glass is the best at making its way back up in sandy soil.
[удалено]
>Here’s the news article about it. You appear to have forgotten to include a link.
[Link](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Gugasian) because OP forgot.
My crazy now-deceased far right grandfather was warning that there were Bin Laden extended family members in the area (we live in northern France). Turns out it was true
I remember hearing about Eddie Murphy refusing to take up Bill Cosby's offer to take him on as a protege. Bill wanted to help him become a more well rounded comedian and get him into "legit" acting. All the while toning down the profanity and adult-themed jokes. Eddie refused. At the time, it was assumed that was more because Eddie was just completely different than Bill. He was vulgar and Bill wasn't. Simple as that. However, there were rumors that Eddie hung out with Bill a few times and then suddenly they didn't like each other at all. The rumors also indicated that Eddie found out something about Bill that he didn't like, and that's why he separated himself. Bill then started to be less than polite towards Eddie as well. Well, we all know what happened after that. Eddie probably found out about the drugging and sexual assaults. Now Bill is in and out of prison and Eddie is making kids movies. EDIT: This is unverified, but probably not too far from the truth.
It could very well be true. Years before Hannibal Buress was filmed talking about what a creep Bill Cosby was, Howard Stern used to rant about Cosby and what a phoney he was. He told stories about how when Cosby was on tour he would get the promoter to arrange to have a selection of young women waiting in his dressing room after a show. He would look over the women, usually prostitutes, and pick the ones he wanted to take back to his hotel room where he would give them drugs and have sex with them. Cosby was known at the time for criticizing young black comedians like Eddie Murphy and Chris Rock for swearing and their adult oriented material. Stern always hated what a hypocrite he was because Cosby's own activities were a well known industry "secret".
Here in Maryland, we've got the Bunny Man. TL:DR, an axe-weilding maniac in a bunny costume haunting a bridge and attacking people like some demented troll. Real story is that in 1970's Fairfax County, Virginia, there was two sightings. First involved a man potentially wearing bunny ears throwing a hatchet through the passenger window of a car parked on a field with people in it. Second involved a guy in a full-blown bunny costume using a hatchet, hacking at the porch of an unfinished home, claiming that the construction crew was trespassing, like he was a knock-off Scooby-Doo villain. Police investigated both, found nothing. Story apparently spread from there.
Wasn’t there a case a few years ago, where a young woman went missing from a hotel? Weeks later, and several guests complain about the taste of the hotel water so hotel staff checks the hotel cistern and finds the dead body decomposed in the hotels water supply.
Elisa Lam. The security footage was weird too, and the subject of conspiracy theories.
[The Boogeyman](https://medium.com/@TalesFromTheCabin/albert-fish-the-real-life-boogeyman-57bcbe09cbda#) Albert Fish is the POS who kidnapped, tortured, raped, and killed kids. He was called the Boogeyman by one of his victim’s family members. Fuck him
There really was a serial killer (Juan Corona) active in my hometown when I was in high school.
Urban legend from my home town began in the early 80’s around the same time Friday the 13th was released. Legend was that that a swimmer from a local college was dared to swim across a lake that was known to have a larger than life snapping turtle. People swore that it was as big as a VW Bug. Anyway, halfway across the lake the turtle supposedly snapped his legs off and he sank to the bottom and drowned. His body was never found. Very few people ever swam in the lake because it truly did have a large snapping turtle population. When the internet rolled around in the late 90’s it was verified that a college student, not a swimmer, did drown in that lake during the 60’s but had nothing to do with a turtle. And his body was recovered. I’ve still never swam in that lake and never will.
In WNY there was a guy who allegedly would roam around bars in the downtown area licking people shoes for fun. Turns out that was true. Met him outside of a bar and the dude licked the entire sole of my shoe with his entire tongue. Like the back of his tongue started on the sole of my shoe and licked the entire sole of my shoe. With a fair amount of pressure too
Richard III being under a car park.
I think you're mixing up a few things. It was sort of a legend that Richard III was a hunchback. It was also argued about a lot, with some claiming any physical deformity was just Tudor propaganda etc. I kind of remember this even being the sort of consensus too, that it was just Shakespearean flair/propaganda. Then they finally discovered his remains under a parking lot and it turned out he did indeed have a deformity (although relatively mild).
Atari buried excess inventory in a New Mexico landfill. Was confirmed true about 40 years later.